Two acclaimed filmmakers whose work has been featured on the documentary showcase  POV on PBS were among the 2012 “Genius Grant” recipients, announced Monday by the  John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Natalia Almada and Laura Poitras, along with the 21 other grantees, will each receive $500,000 paid over five years. Almada, based in Brooklyn and Mexico City, produces works that spotlight the conflict and turmoil of individual lives in Mexico, as well as the complex realities of immigration. Three of her films have been featured on POV, including 2005’s Al Otro Lado and 2009’s El General.

Video of the fourth in a series of Public Media Futures forums, held Sept. 20 in San Francisco, is now online at the website of one of the sponsoring organizations, the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy. This forum highlighted news content innovation and social media integration within the pubcasting system. Here’s background on the forums in Current (Jan. 30). More than 30 participants at the event included Kinsey Wilson, chief content officer, NPR; Carol Varney, managing director, Bay Area Video Coalition; Olivia Ma, news and politics manager, YouTube; Chris Satullo, news director, WHYY; Brant Houston, chair, Investigative News Network; Linda Fantin, director of network journalism, American Public Media; and Stephen Engleberg, managing editor, ProPublica.

The FCC has released a 205-page Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on the upcoming spectrum auctions to clear bandwidth for mobile devices, and is requesting comments. In the notice, the FCC says that it anticipates participation in the auction by noncommercial educational licensees “will promote the overall goals of the broadcast television spectrum incentive auction and serve the public interest by providing NCE licensees with opportunities to strengthen their financial positions and improve their service to the public.” The FCC also notes that channel sharing by commercial stations and NCE stations operating on reserved channels, one option for broadcasters in the auction, “raises special concerns.”

WTVI in Charlotte, N.C., will return to carrying first-run PBS programming for the first time since 2004, reports the Charlotte Observer. The move will cost the station about $200,000 annually, according to the newspaper. The struggling pubcaster was taken over by Central Piedmont Community College in March. The station had dropped the primary PBS schedule eight years ago because it duplicated programming on overlap stations UNC-TV in Chapel Hill and SCETV in Columbia. At first the station’s plan to focus on local shows worked, but over time viewership and donations declined. WTVI memberships fell from 20,000 a decade ago to about 7,000 last year, said Elsie Garner, the station’s executive director.

Legendary comedian Jerry Lewis will do a rare television special for PBS premiering in March 2013, the month of the entertainer’s 86th birthday. The program will be available to member stations as a pledge special. “We have been thinking about doing something with or about Jerry Lewis for some time,”  Joe Campbell, PBS v.p., fundraising programming, told Current. “Jimmy Osmond pitched this specific show in early August. The Osmond family has a long relationship with Jerry and convinced him to do the show.” An Evening with Jerry Lewis – Live from Las Vegas! will feature Lewis in performance as well as reminiscing about his long career.

The Sunday night premiere of Call the Midwife, PBS’s eagerly anticipated limited-run drama series from the BBC, earned a 1.5 rating in Nielsen overnights, according to PBS. That’s 50 percent above the usual 1.0 PBS overnights for 8 p.m. Sundays last season, but far less than Downton Abbey’s Season 2 premiere of 2.7. A PBS spokesperson said the Midwife’s 1.5 figure is expected to be higher in full national ratings, which also count DVR hits and within-week repeats. In Britain, Call the Midwife earned bigger ratings than even Downton Abbey, which is now a mega-hit for Masterpiece.

The “Swing State Radio Network” launched by New York’s WNYC is returning for the upcoming presidential and vice-presidential debates. WNYC public affairs host Brian Lehrer will anchor pre-debate call-in shows that will air in New York as well as on WUSF in Tampa, Fla.; WMFE in Orlando, Fla.; WDET in Detroit; WFAE in Charlotte, N.C.; WOSU in Columbus, Ohio; WCPN in Cleveland; Wisconsin Public Radio; and New Hampshire Public Radio. The coverage will also feature a live chat with a video feed hosted on WNYC’s political site, ItsAFreeCountry.org. WNYC political reporter Anna Sale will participate in the chats. The impromptu Swing State network began with coverage of the party conventions.

CPB’s business plan and operating budget for 2013, approved by the board at its September meeting, are now available online. The business plan assumes that CPB will be federally funded at the current level of $445 million. It also notes that the system is still struggling financially. “While we are seeing some reports of modest improvement in membership fundraising,” the plan notes, “the $250 million in state support that has been lost across the system over the last few years has not been restored. On the contrary, proposals at the state level to defund or reduce public broadcasting continue.” The plan contains fewer projects than in previous years, reflecting the loss of CPB’s digital funds.

“Those of us working in public media have the potential as never before to expand and deepen understanding, tolerance, and common purpose among a broadly diverse citizenry,” writes Sue Schardt, executive director of the Association of Independents in Radio on MediaShift. How? Storytelling. “Storytelling has emerged as a safe zone that allows media practitioners to circumvent, or at least loosen up, some of the traditional boundaries that may be confining the industry during a time of great change,” she writes. “It is, in part, a way for us to flex and experiment on the edges of the often strict parameters of journalistic practice and the fixed broadcast medium that defines much of what we do — sort of like the Casual Friday versus Monday to Thursday in a workweek.”

The five-member FCC today voted unanimously to begin the process of reclaiming broadcast spectrum to auction for wireless broadband use, reports Broadcasting & Cable. Commissioners adopted the Incentive Auction Notice of Proposed Rule-Making, and now seek comment from stakeholders and the public on its recommendation for handling the massive undertaking. The auction, to open up bandwidth for mobile devices, will happen in three phases: TV broadcasters will offer spectrum for the lowest price, the FCC will repack remaining stations into a smaller section of the spectrum, and the freed-up spectrum will go to the highest bidder. The FCC is seeking comment on issues including auction design, repacking, unlicensed use of spectrum and transition deadlines.

The State We’re In, an English-language public radio series produced by Radio Netherlands Worldwide in partnership with WAMU in Washington, D.C., will shut down production next month, according to its producers. The show, which relates first-person accounts of life-changing experiences, has an audience reach of 12 million people, but it fell victim to domestic austerity measures imposed by the Dutch government in 2011. When Radio Netherlands’ government funding was cut by 70 percent, The State We’re In was reported to be one of the few programs to survive the transition. “We were assured at that time by Radio Netherlands’ outgoing management that the show was still going to be an integral part of Radio Netherlands, but those assurances didn’t hold,” Greg Kelly, the program’s editor, wrote in an announcement posted Sept.

A consultant’s report released Thursday afternoon recommends that the Salisbury University Foundation negotiate a deal with another public broadcaster to operate both of its Delmarva Public Radio stations as music stations, dropping the NPR News format now airing on WSDL 90.7 FM in Ocean City, Md. The foundation, licensee of WSDL and WSCL 89.5FM in Salisbury, Md., has been covering financial losses at the stations for three of the last four fiscal years — most notably covering a loss of more than $150,000  in 2008 — and faces increased capital expenses in relocating the stations’ studios from a university building that’s  set to be demolished. 

A new report from Walrus Research shows that NPR’s Car Talk continued its streak as NPR’s most popular weekend program in Spring 2012, with Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! coming in second and Weekend Edition Saturday a more distant third. The report says airing the three shows in sequence is the “ideal scheduling to benefit all three programs.” Car Talk goes into repeats starting next month.

Nebraska Educational Television’s Backyard Farmer — the longest-running local television program in the country — is celebrating its 60th season with a special, Backyard Farmer: 60 Years and Still Growing, and an event tonight on the campus of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. For the 60th anniversary special, producers went into the archives of the live call-in program, pulling interviews with panel members who tackled questions such as, “How fresh can manure be before you use it in your garden?” Panelists will be on hand at tonight’s event to answer questions, and NET will screen a blooper reel. The program airs Thursdays on NET during the growing season, mid-April through mid-September.

Two African-American Public Radio Consortium stations at historically black colleges and universities are offering jazz programs for national broadcast. Return to the Source with Douglas Turner is a traditional-jazz offering from WJAB-FM at Alabama A&M University, and The Soul of Jazz with Jamal Ahmad from WCLK at Clark Atlanta University combines classic and contemporary soul, jazz and world music. Each runs two hours weekly, and is available on Content Depot.