Two foundation grants will back capacity-building for Koahnic Broadcasting Corporation, the public media nonprofit that operates KNBA in Anchorage, Alaska, and produces the nationally distributed broadcasts Native America Calling and National Native News. The grants, totaling $375,000, support a three-year effort to strengthen KBC’s Native radio programming and distribution services. Ford Foundation committed $300,000 to the initiative and the Nathan Cummings Foundation provided the balance. KBC distributes news, public affairs and cultural programs through Native Voice One, a service that has gained 11 new affiliates this past year and anticipates serving new tribal stations in Louisiana, Idaho and New York State, according to a news release announcing the grants.

Having witnessed the damaging one-round knockout of NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller in March, public radio’s development pros are working to adapt the lessons they’ve learned about ethics and prudence into a set of best-practices guidelines for use throughout the field. But they’re already tiptoeing around a clear discrepancy between the major ethical code of professional fundraisers and a common practice in public broadcasting — paid commissions on underwriting sales. DEI, the national agency for pubradio fundraising that convenes its annual Public Media Development and Marketing Conference in Pittsburgh later this week, has assembled a group to draft ethical standards for fundraising in nonprofit public media.

Public broadcasting “has proved helpful to a growing list of advertisers across multiple categories,” according to a story today (July 11) on NPR and PBS corporate sponsorship in Advertising Age magazine. Fox Searchlight gave NPR the entire broadcast marketing budget for the highly anticipated May release of director Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life.” Dan Pittman, senior v.p.-media at Fox Searchlight, told the magazine, “NPR’s audience dovetails well with the campaigns for many of our films, which tend to appeal to educated, sophisticated audiences.” PBS is also desirable, because being on it “means being associated with someone committed to the arts, quality TV and preserving PBS’s desire to infiltrate knowledge and education, not just pure entertainment,” said Darcy Bowe of Starcom USA, which assists corporate and brand-level clients on PBS buys.

Two longtime top newsroom managers are gone from Nightly Business Report in Miami. Managing Editor Wendie Feinberg and Rodney Ward, executive vice president of special projects, are no longer with the show, according to a July 8 statement. Co-anchor Tom Hudson is assuming Feinberg’s responsibilities. Feinberg joined the show in April 1995. Ward has been with NBR since its debut in 1979. In 1991 he was appointed Washington bureau chief. He became managing editor in 1995 and executive editor in 2006. His title shifted to executive vice president special projects in November 2010, after the program was sold to former educational video salesman Mykalai Kontilai’s NBR Worldwide (Current, Aug.

The seven Local Journalism Centers that launched with major support from CPB have suddenly found themselves on a short timeline to find ways to earn more of their keep. So far, CPB has committed only the two-year sums announced at the initiative’s launch last year and has told some grantees to expect smaller amounts for 2012. Uncertainties over future CPB aid — as well as problems with the diffuse management structures that cloud decision-making and fiscal accountability for at least one LJC — have complicated plans to keep the regional news collaborations going, according to news directors who participated in a June 24 panel at the Public Radio News Directors conference in Arlington, Va.

With a nod to mission — and a bid for more major donors — PBS is spotlighting the arts for nine weeks this fall, hoping to bring them back as a regular feature of Friday nights. Productions in the first PBS Arts Fall Festival range from the Los Angeles Opera’s Il Postino to the broadcast premiere of Cameron Crowe’s documentary on grunge-rock pioneers Pearl Jam. The network pulled together some $2 million in funding for the shows, each paired with a different locale and station. The festival will culminate with a yet-to-be-announced fundraising special during December pledge drives. Ratings-wise, it’s a risky move.

Pubcasters in three states have started airing reports and posting stories online as the first participants in StateImpact, a large-scale project spearheaded by NPR that could unite the member stations and the network for an unprecedented level of collaborative newsgathering. The objective: to strengthen coverage of state government in all 50 states in coming years. Visit stateimpact. npr.org and you’ll see a map of the United States with three states highlighted in green — Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania. Stations in these states have gone live with their own StateImpact sites, with links from the national site. Five more state sites are expected to launch by September: Florida, Idaho, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Texas.

CPB President Pat Harrison was recently selected as “People’s Hero of the Week” by the Broadband and Social Justice Blog from the Minority Media and Telecom Council. Harrison was praised for leading CPB’s strategic focus on the three D’s: digital (investments in innovation and technology), dialogue (investments in local community engagement, partnerships and service) and diversity (investments and commitment to diversity of content, talent, and service), and its creation of the Diversity and Innovation Fund for public media.

Applications are now being accepted for the latest round of the New U: News Entrepreneurs Working Through UNITY fellowship, a competitive program funded by the Ford Foundation for journalists of color who want to become entrepreneurs. Participants will attend a “startup camp” in October in Las Vegas, get one-on-one mentoring, and compete to win $10,000 in start-up funding. Fellowship winners will be announced in September.

Nightly Business Report has opened a Phoenix bureau in partnership with Eight, Arizona PBS. Ted Simons, host of the station’s Horizon current-events show, will lead the coverage. NBR now has bureaus in Silicon Valley and Denver, and in May launched a weeknight broadcast on SiriusXM satellite radio. The show was acquired in August 2010 by former educational video salesman Mykalai Kontilai.

Sprout, the children’s TV partnership of Sesame Workshop, PBS, NBC Universal and HIT Entertainment, is launching a multiplatform initiative in August, “Kindness Counts,” to “support the development of empathy in preschoolers,” the channel said in a press release Thursday (July 7). The campaign will include public service announcements, digital and social media components, programming tie-ins and local extensions targeting parents and caregivers of preschoolers on the subject of bullying. Sprout said 83 of parents it surveyed are concerned about their preschoolers potentially being bullied or bullying others.

KEET-TV in Eureka, Calif., one of the smallest stations in the pubTV system, has received two grants for its documentary, J.A. JIVE: Jazz Music in the Japanese American Internment Camps (w.t.), which uses Japanese woodblock animation. The National Park Service selected it as one of 24 projects to get $2.9 million to “preserve and interpret sites where Japanese Americans were confined during World War II.” The hourlong work by local artist Amy Uyeki won $96,465 and was one of three projects cited in a press release from the U.S. Department of the Interior. The documentary also received $22,000 from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program.

Lawrence Grossman, PBS president from 1976 to 1984, tells the Columbia Journalism Review that the educational roots of public TV stations, as extensions of universities and boards of education, may still hold it back from taking on local news coverage responsibilities. “The idea was to avoid issues that would fragment, or raise hackles,” Grossman says in a cover story. “It had a lot to do, I think, with the educational culture that says our job is not to antagonize anybody or to raise tough issues as part of education. Our job is to make everybody happy.” Only a few public TV stations are experimenting with news, the magazine says.

KCET-TV just received a $206,300, two-year grant from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for a new arts series titled ARC, reports the Los Angeles Times. The show will run both on the air and online, where new content will be updated daily. Plans call for 24 episodes a year on TV, fed by four different production units, the paper says, “each assigned to explore a single theme in the arts and produce a five-minute segment for each show.” Juan Devis, KCET’s director of production and program development, will select a collaborator to cover each beat — arts and cultural history, portraits of contemporary voices in the arts, the arts and education, and the politics of the arts.

NPR and the Association of Public Television Stations haven’t yet given up on the Public Telecommunication Facilities Program, which was shut down in April after the federal budget battle (Current, April 18). According to a story on the Radio World website, lobbying efforts to restore PTFP funds are already under way. NPR is asking Congress to approve $20 million for PTFP for fiscal 2012, said Mike Riksen, NPR’s vice president of policy and representation.”Even though the fund is relatively small, it is heavily relied upon by public radio stations to replace equipment that is worn out or antiquated,” he told Radio World.