WNED is paying the University of Buffalo $4 million to operate WBFO-FM 88.7 and two other New York stations, the parties announced today (July 28). Talks have been ongoing for more than a year (Current, March 1, 2010). The stations, which also include WUBJ-FM 88.1 in Jamestown and WOLN-FM 91.3 in Olean, will retain their call letters and frequencies. Their signals reach large portions of western New York and southern Ontario, serving approximately 90,000 listeners weekly. The university will use the proceeds of the sale to provide student scholarships and support for faculty research, it said.

In the first of an ongoing series of discussions on the future public broadcasting, the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy (CCLP) convened executives, journalists, policymakers and others in Washington, D.C., this week, to focus on funding threats to the system. The wide-ranging conversation at the gathering, presented with participation of Current, touched on topics ranging from new ideas for centralized fundraising, to financial stress on local news coverage, to diversifying audiences. CCLP will organize future meetings “on public broadcasting, its mission, and its financial and public support,” it said. More than 35 participants included Pat Butler, c.e.o.

Station leaders of the new Essential Public Media believe they can top the former WDUQ’s best audience numbers — in fact, by quite a bit, they told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “We think the potential is there, if not to double the listenership, then to go over 200,000 to 225,000 listeners per week,” Lee Ferraro, general manager of new owner WYEP, said on Wednesday (July 27) during a meeting with newspaper reporters and editors. “It’s not going to happen overnight. We hope to be there by fall.” WDUQ averaged about 145,000 listeners per week over the past  months; its record was 180,000 listeners per week in 2009.

NPR’s Tweeter extraordinaire Andy Carvin has won a Knight-Batten Award for having “pioneered a new form of journalism” during the recent Arab Spring uprising. “By using his Twitter account as a newsgathering operation, he has demonstrated how reporting can be done remotely and created a highly engaged community of more than 50,000 Twitter followers,” said a release from J-Lab, which administers the honors funded by the Knight Foundation. (J-Lab and Current are both journalism centers at American University’s School of Communication.) The Knight-Batten Awards recognize creative uses of technology to engage citizens in public issues and showcase compelling models for future newsgathering.

A proposed auction of television spectrum has now become tangled up in the onerous ongoing debate over raising the debt ceiling, Broadcasting & Cable reports. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took to the Senate floor Wednesday (July 27) to criticize the debt-ceiling plan of Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) for including payments to broadcasters as part of incentive auctions that could run into billions of dollars. “Television broadcasters got the spectrum for free,” he said. “Now we’re supposed to ask the taxpayers to give them a billion dollars to give back spectrum that they owe?” Although he corrected that word to own, “his original seemed to better capture the tenor of his criticisms,” B&C notes.

Public TV ratings fave Antiques Roadshow recorded its highest-value appraisal ever on July 23 in Tulsa, Okla. Asian arts expert Lark Mason estimated that a collection of five late 17th-century/early 18th-century Chinese carved rhinoceros horn cups was worth between $1 million and $1.5 million. The owner (above, facing camera), who wants to remain anonymous, was one of 6,000 ticket holders who brought items to the Tulsa Convention Center. He told Mason he began collecting the cups (below right) in the 1970s and had no idea of their value. The second highest-value appraisal recorded by Roadshow was also Chinese: A collection of carved jade bowls, estimated to be worth as much as $1.07 million, was discovered at an appraisal event in 2009 in Raleigh, N.C.

Though it now does without PBS programs, KCET briefly recovered its role as the most-watched public TV station in Los Angeles in June. By last week, however, it was trailing PBS’s new primary outlet, Orange County’s KOCE. Now rebranded as PBS SoCal, KOCE began winning the area’s largest public TV primetime viewership in January, and continued winning through May, measured in gross rating points, according to TRAC Media Services. It was PBS SoCal’s June pledge drive — 19 days long — that brought it down, says TRAC analyst Craig Reed. Among the four pubTV stations in the market, KCET took 38 percent of the gross rating points and second-ranking PBS SoCal had 32 percent.

CPB is backing development of Essential Public Media, the nonprofit whose purchase of Pittsburgh’s WDUQ is pending before the FCC. At the Public Media Development and Marketing Conference July 14, CPB President Patricia Harrison announced a $250,000 grant to help Essential establish its digital journalism newsroom. “We are confident this will be a model for public media news operations across the country,” she said. Essential began managing day-to-day operations of WDUQ July 1, adopting an all-news format and reducing jazz programming to a six-hour weekend slot on its FM channel while it plays its syndicated service JazzWorks full-time on the Web and on an HD Radio digital multicast channel.

The latest station to leave PBS is a production powerhouse, but one not fully integrated into the nation’s English-dominated public TV system. Puerto Rico TV — WIPR, licensed to Puerto Rico Public Broadcasting Corp., which is controlled by the commonwealth government — dropped its PBS membership July 1. The station in San Juan sometimes produces up to nine hours of content a day, including public affairs, culture, sports, music, talk and food shows, as well as the island’s only 24/7 news channel, all in Spanish. It aired only the children’s shows from the PBS lineup, including the limited number with a Spanish SAP (secondary audio program) soundtrack.

Fox News analyst Juan Williams is back in the news — promoting his new book Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate, which tells his version of events that led to his abrupt dismissal as an NPR analyst last October. Former NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard, whose tenure of as the listeners’ representative at NPR coincided with a heavy volume of complaints about Williams’s dual news analyst roles at Fox News and NPR, has written two pieces reacting to Muzzled, which hit booksellers’ stands on July 26. On Poynter.org, Shepard fact-checks Williams’s one-sided account of his increasingly tenuous relationship with NPR brass.

A preview version of the upcoming PBS Food website went online today (July 25), according to the PBS Station Products and Innovation blog. The site is aiming to “unite cooking shows, blogs and recipes from PBS and local stations across the country.” First up are its two Fresh Tastes bloggers. Jenna Weber graduated from Le Cordon Bleu in 2008 and has worked as a pastry chef, bread baker and freelance food editor; she also blogs at EatLiveRun.com. Marc Matsumoto is a food blogger and photographer at websites NoRecipes.com and WanderingCook.com, whose worked has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

The vast majority of stations responding to the University Station Alliance’s most recent economic survey reported that they’re not likely to be sold or make changes in their governance structure this year. Of 141 stations responding to USA’s fourth annual survey, 88.4 percent indicated that station sales or other ownership changes were not under consideration. Only a handful of stations indicated that talks of consolidation (4 percent), local management agreements (4 percent) or frequency sales (5 percent) were in the works, according to the survey. It was conducted among public radio licensees earlier this summer; a few respondents also operate public TV stations.

“Outreach is about changing somebody else. Engagement is when you have been changed,” says Mikel Ellcessor, g.m. of WDET in Detroit. “And we have to be open to being changed as a result of these activities.” “If you’re truly listening to the community,” he continues, “you’ll learn something you didn’t expect, and you’ll have to rethink your position or approach. We still retain the editorial decision-making and control, but we’re opening our minds to consider that there are things that matter to people that we may not know about. If we’re really listening and willing to get new information and be challenged, that’s both good reporting and true engagement.”

No hard feelings in evidence, the New Jersey Network’s nonprofit fundraising group said last week it will help raise production money for NJTV, NJN’s successor operated by an affiliate of New York’s WNET. “They will take the lead with underwriting — I’m happy to let them keep doing that,” says Neal Shapiro, president of WNET and chair of NJTV, who adds that there may be occasions when NJTV and WNET’s New York stations might sell underwriting together. Meanwhile, NJTV’s new staff, with help from WNET’s, will handle member/viewer fundraising. Indeed, WNET’s staff will provide many services to the new operation, enabling NJTV to operate with about 20 staffers in New Jersey, compared with NJN’s staff of about 130.

Thirteen current staff positions and eight vacant positions are being eliminated at PBS headquarters in Arlington, Va., and six “new or restructured” positions will be added, PBS President Paula Kerger said in a letter to the system July 13. Kerger blamed the “ongoing economic challenges faced by our system” and said PBS made the changes “to focus efforts in areas with the greatest value to the public media system in a time of budgetary constraints.” PBS declined to verify individual departures or say what departments are affected. Several changes center on programming, which is “a key priority of the FY12 Strategic Plan,” Kerger’s letter said, “and part of a multiyear effort to transform PBS’ primetime lineup in order to grow audience and increase the amount of time viewers watch PBS programs.”