The debate over federal funding to public radio isn’t really about how the money is distributed, and how much local stations depend on it, as so many of public radio’s own reporters have recently explained, according to this unsigned editorial by the Economist. It’s a targeted partisan attack that capitalizes on conservatives’ long running campaign to discredit mainstream media.

How’d pubcasting fave Red Green come up with that name, anyway? “I was making fun of a guy who had a TV show in Canada, Red Fisher,” Green’s creator Steve Smith tells the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “Green seemed like the dumbest last name to go with Red. Now they tell me I’m a genius because every stoplight’s a promo.” Green is still selling out stops on his latest tour, promoting his book, How to Do Everything. And when he’s not touring, he’s tinkering. His most recent project: “I put in an outside electrical outlet,” he said. “It’s functional, it’s crooked and it’s on the side of the house my wife never walks by, so everybody’s happy.”

Limor Tomer, executive producer for music at New York Public Radio’s classical station WQXR, is leaving to head up the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Concerts & Lectures series, the Met announced Tuesday (March 29). In addition to her work at WQXR, Tomer also serves as adjunct curator for performing arts at the Whitney Museum. She takes up her new duties on May 1. During her time at the public radio station, she oversaw the transition to fully digital music broadcasting and the launch of Q2, an all-digital radio stream devoted to the music of living composers. She also served on the transition team during the acquisition of WQXR by WNYC (now operated jointly as New York Public Radio).

Robert MacNeil, co-founder of PBS NewsHour, is returning to the show to present Autism Today, a six-part series on the disorder that affects 1 in 110 children. MacNeil’s 6-year-old grandson, Nick, has been diagnosed with autism. “I’ve been a reporter on and off for 50 years, but I’ve never brought my family into a story — until Nick, because he moves me deeply,” MacNeil said in a statement today (March 29). MacNeil and producer Caren Zucker, who has a 16-year-old son with the disorder, introduce the series on April 18. In the first episode, MacNeil brings viewers to meet his daughter and grandson in Cambridge, Mass.,

OK, so your station has some cool videos online. Now what? Get ideas for using them to pull in more eyeballs during a National Center for Media Engagement webinar at 1 p.m. Eastern Wednesday (March 30). Your electronic hosts will be Kevin Dando, PBS’s head of digital and education communications and YouTube channel guru, and Greg Jarboe, president of SEO-PR, an expert in search engine optimization. Register online here.

NPR is suspending its search for a senior vice president for news until it hires a permanent c.e.o., according to an email obtained by The Hill newspaper Monday (March 28). In the memo, NPR interim chief exec Joyce Slocum told staff that the decision was made to stop the search for Ellen Weiss’s replacement after consulting with members of the search advisory committee. Weiss was forced to resign in January over her role in the firing of senior correspondent Juan Williams (Current, March 9). NPR President Vivian Schiller resigned after conservative activist James O’Keefe’s undercover video sting of network fundraiser Ron Schiller (Current, March 21).

Frontline today (March 29) provided NPR’s Morning Edition portions of its reporting on the private life of Army Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the soldier who stands accused of leaking the largest cache of classified documents in U.S. history to the WikiLeaks website. It’s part of the newsmag’s ongoing collaborative efforts to provide breaking news to a wider audience through pubmedia partners. Portions of Frontline correspondent Martin Smith’s exclusive interview with Manning’s father that ran on PBS NewsHour on March 10 sparked national headlines, when the elder Manning alleged his son was being mistreated in detention. “That strategic public media partnership allowed both Frontline and PBS NewsHour to benefit from the immediate release of breaking news,” Frontline senior series producer Raney Aronson-Rath told Current in a statement.

PBS today (March 28) announced that documentarians Ken Burns and Lynn Novick will produce and direct a 10- to 12-hour series about the Vietnam War, to be aired on PBS in 2016. Burns said the series “will shed light both on the history of the war, and on our inability to find common ground about it.” The project will also include a website, a  multi-platform educational initiative, community engagement grants for station outreach and a companion book to be published by Alfred A. Knopf. In an interview with Current in October 2009, when Burns was just beginning research on the project, he termed it “a major, major history” of the conflict in Southeast Asia.

New South Carolina ETV President Linda O’Bryon (formerly of KQED and Nightly Business Report) tells the Anderson Independent Mail that she’s simultaneously working to develop ETV’s revenue base and content initiatives as well as educate the state’s entirely new public broadcasting commission on the value of the network. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley recently announced the replacement of every member of the ETV Commission. The move came after her State of the State speech, during which she also urged lawmakers to cut all funding to the network, about $9.6 million. The paper notes that the network has earned $10 million for the state from a 30-year, $142 million spectrum lease to two national companies inked in 2009.

Bloomberg Businessweek is reporting that Southern California Public Radio executives are using business tactics “rarely employed in the tame world of local public radio to create a megastation they hope will one day beam its signal from Santa Barbara to San Diego.” SCPR’s stations currently reach 14 million listeners, but its board hopes to nearly double that to 25 million. “If we can buy a station, we will,” says Gordon Crawford, chairman of SCPR’s board of directors. “Where we can’t, we’ll build translators to boost our signal. This is a new business model for public radio.” KPCC was a struggling Pasadena City College station a decade ago, the story notes; now, its 24 directors include “such media heavy hitters” as Jarl Mohn, former chief executive officer of E!

The International Women’s Media Foundation has posted its exclusive interview with former NPR President Vivian Schiller, reportedly her first in-depth public discussion of her recent resignation (Current, March 9, 2011). As for her career, “I’m not done,” she said. “I certainly plan to stay in journalism. I feel passionate about it.” She added: “I will be back in some position at some point in the not too distant future.”

CPB is looking for a governance expert for the collaboration/merger work taking place among Los Angeles-area stations PBS SoCal/KOCE, KVCR and KLCS (Current, Aug. 9, 2010). The market underwent a major shift when longtime primary PBS affiliate KCET dropped its membership and became independent on Jan. 1 (Current, Oct. 18, 2010).

Heidi Tauber Esping, 52, an Oregon Public Broadcasting announcer, died in a head-on collision on Wednesday (March 23) night on Interstate 405, according to the Oregonian. Lynne Clendenin, OPB’s v.p. of radio programming, told the paper she hired Esping in 2009 because of her warm tone and news savvy. “The two combined made for a very nice OPB announcer, and I thought she was wonderful on the air,” Clendenin said. “She was welcoming always in her manner. You could hear her smiling.” Esping worked in local radio for several decades, including stints at KPAM, KINK, KEX and KPOJ.

Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University, has good news for NPR in Wednesday’s (March 23) The Hill. The fact that all 185 voting Democrats last week rejected H.R. 1076, which would have banned federal funding to NPR, sends “a very powerful signal to the Senate and the White House,” he says. “Anything that brings together Heath Shuler and Maxine Waters,” Baker says, will gain notice from other Democratic leaders. Baker is referring to the centrist North Carolinian and liberal from California, respectively. The Hill said Republicans may take another stab at defunding pubcasting in an amendment to other measures, and similar language is included in a bill the House passed that would fund the government through September — a proposal Republican leaders want reconsidered when Congress returns next week, the paper noted.

“A generation ago,” notes Los Angeles Times media columnist James Rainey, “journalists wrote their stories and moved on to the next thing, with someone else worrying about delivery of the end product. In today’s digital world, journalists must not only create the stories but make sure they get to readers.” The Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism’s Neon Tommy is a laboratory for those practices. Its reports by USC student journos focus on everything from the Egyptian revolution to a standing feature on food called Neon Tummy. Reporters collaborate with other news entities, and each makes sure that content is electronically disseminated as widely as possible.