WYES in New Orleans finally broke ground for a new headquarters Wednesday (June 22), nearly 20 years after General Manager Randy Feldman had first hoped to do so. “WYES staffers aren’t likely to miss the old building, an unheated cave with shaky air conditioning and lots of exposed wiring,” the Times-Picayune notes. Phase one is a new 20,000-square-foot, $7 million new building right behind the old; that should be done by March 2012. Phase two, to raze the original building, doesn’t yet have a start date.

The former NPR chief reflects on her two years at the helm of public radio’s top news organization, including the stormy final months of her presidency, in the latest edition of American Journalism Review. Leading NPR through the political crises that began with the Juan Williams dismissal strengthened her as a chief executive, Schiller says: “You develop a certain toughness and clarity of thinking about what matters and what is just a lot of noise. It would have been easy for me to get distracted, but too many people were depending on me for leadership. And so I discovered a strength I didn’t even know I had.”

The 2011 class of Knight News Challenge winners were announced today (June 22) — the last recipients of the initial five-year program that the Knight Foundation Board committed to in 2006, points out Jeff Sonderman, digital media fellow at the Poynter Institute. He examined the four ways the initiative is shaping the future of news through its 63 projects funded by $22 million. Ideas popular with the Knight Foundation funders include crowdfunding, the “hacker-journalist,” data as news and citizen journalism. But fear not, thought leaders. “We won’t officially announce the next iteration of the News Challenge anytime soon … [but] we are thinking critically about how to continue to do this and do it better,” John Bracken, Knight’s director of digital media, told Sonderman.

Retiring PBS newsman Jim Lehrer received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the CPB Board of Directors during its meeting today in Austin, Texas. The award, only the sixth to be presented by CPB, honors outstanding individual contributions to public broadcasting and public media. “Through his straight-forward and honest reporting on PBS NewsHour, Jim has helped public media earn its reputation as one of the most trusted organizations in the nation,” said Bruce Ramer, CPB chair. “He has become the face of PBS journalism.” Lehrer, who started his public broadcasting career directing news at KERA in Dallas, recently stepped down as lead anchor of the PBS NewsHour.

Vanderbilt University students organized a silent protest of WLPN’s pending purchase of Nashville’s WRVU, the latest college radio station to be converted into a pubradio classical outlet. The students dressed in black, covered their mouths with black tape, and carried “Save WRVU 91.1 FM” signs during yesterday’s meeting of the WPLN board of directors. Rob Gordon, WLPN g.m., and board Chair Mike Koban offered to meet with WRVU deejays. “Maybe there are changes that can be made to somewhat bridge the gap,” Koban told the Tennessean. “I mean that sincerely.” The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the quickening pace of change on the left end of the FM dial, where free-form college stations like WRVU are being sold and converted to public radio ownership, despite spirited protests by student broadcasters.

The equivalent of nine full-time positions at Penn State Public Broadcasting are being eliminated in a realignment due to larger university cutbacks. WPSU General Manager Ted Krichels told the Centre Daily Times in a story today (June 22) that the $2 million budget reduction to the school’s Outreach unit means a drop in the station’s budget of about $500,000. “Having to eliminate their jobs is painful,” Krichels said. “It’s painful for our organization. … At the same time, we have a very strong staff and a lot of ambitions about creating more content and programming.” In a press release, the station said the staff reductions affected about 10 percent of total employees.

Two New Jersey lawmakers have have introduced resolutions to void WNET’s deal to manage the New Jersey Network, the Star-Ledger reported Tuesday (June 21). Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan (D-South Plainfield) and Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen) introduced concurrent resolutions disapproving of the contract, which turns over the state’s public TV operation to a nonprofit subsidiary of New York City’s WNET/Thirteen. “It is a total give-away of a very valuable asset,” Diegnan said. The contract, responses and related documents are here.

Marc Vogl begins July 11 as the new executive director of the Bay Area Video Coalition, a leading video access and training unit based in San Francisco. Vogl is an arts grantmaker at the Hewlett Foundation, former arts group manager, and onetime sketch comedy actor. He succeeds Ken Ikeda, who has joined Public Radio Capital’s offshoot, the Public Media Company. Vogl co-founded the the Hi/Lo Film Festival (“a celebration of high concept/low budget films”) and the sketch comedy group Killing My Lobster, and became executive director of its Lobster Theater Project. He remains active in local nonprofits serving arts and the young homeless.

In a new white paper, the American Enterprise Institute is recommending resurrecting the idea for PBS’s Public Square channel (Current, Jan. 19, 2004) as a home for public-affairs content. Norman Ornstein, lead author of “Creating a Public Square in a Challenging Media Age” — and a former member of the PBS Board — lays out four strategies to increase civic participation via media. It suggests working to keep newspapers alive, establish universal broadband access, get quality information to citizens, and develop a public-square channel, “the likes of which public television envisioned back in the mid-1990s.” Ornstein served while PBS President Pat Mitchell was pushing for the Public Square project.

Steve Waldman, who spearheaded work on the FCC’s recent 365-page report, “The Information Needs of Communities,” sat down with Columbia Journalism Review to defend the project, which has been widely viewed as disappointing (even by FCC Commissioner Michael Copps) for its lack of specific, feasible recommendations. Waldman said his researchers “made a lot of effort to try to come up with some ideas that were innovative, pragmatic, and practical, and that would actually be effective and not just push people’s buttons.” One aspect of the report Waldman feels has been overlooked by the press is the role of the nonprofit sector in future news coverage.

As the Federal Communications Commission seeks comments on maximizing spectrum usage to Native American lands, “it is critical the commission does not divest current spectrum being utilized by public television and radio interrupting current services already allocated to tribes and rural communities,” according to comments filed with the FCC by APTS, CPB and PBS on Monday (June 20). The orgs used an example of TV and radio translators in Utah. That state “possesses a complex and unique geographical make up,” and rural communities and Native American tribes have relied on translators for decades, they said. Utah currently operates and maintains 688 translators — 35 percent of all translators in the country.

Big changes continue at KCET in Los Angeles, which went independent from PBS on Jan. 1. Station execs told staff on Monday (June 21) that they’ll be moving next year from their longtime Sunset Boulevard home to a new 14-story office tower on Studio Row in Burbank, according to the Los Angeles Times. KCET sold its historic 4.5-acre studio lot to the Church of Scientology in April for $42 million (the paper reported in March that the property had been assessed at $14 million). KCET’s new home will be at the Pointe, completed in 2009 as part of the NBC campus.

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) has sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (PDF) requesting clarification on several points of upcoming spectrum auctions. A few of the specifics he’d like to know: How many stations will share a channel or go off the air? How many stations will need to move to a new channel or be repacked? How many viewers will lose or gain service? Dingell is requesting answers by June 27.

Indie pubcaster KCET-TV in Los Angeles is having success with Al Jazeera English on its main channel, according to the New York Times. The news programming runs four times each weekday. In its main 4 p.m. slot, ratings jumped 135 percent from February through May, as the “Arab spring” uprisings continued. KCET says the newscasts are drawing more than 285,000 viewers per week. KCET Chief Content Officer Bret Marcus said he had been braced for viewer criticism about Qatar-based Al Jazeera English’s point of view, but “most people think it’s been very even-handed.”

Dan Rodricks, a Baltimore Sun columnist who also hosts the Midday talk show on NPR’s WYPR-FM, is weighing in on controversy surrounding a documentary set to air on several pubTV stations, including Maryland Public Television. At least one, WGBH, has dropped the program over content concerns. Under Our Skin: A Healthcare Nightmare, is distributed by NETA from producer Andy Abrahams Wilson. Rodricks calls it a “polemical film about Lyme disease that is built on fear-provoking speculations and assertions while advancing a central message that has been discredited by experts in infectious diseases.” The program suggests that tick-borne Lyme disease is an epidemic; the Infectious Diseases Society of America, its main target, disagrees, saying that long-term antibiotic treatment is unproven and unwarranted.