How did NPR News make such a huge and serious error in misreporting that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been killed during the Jan. 8 shooting in Tucson? NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard reports that information fed to the newscast unit by KJZZ News Director Mark Moran and NPR Correspondent Audie Cornish was from anonymous sources and and neither provided accurate, first-hand accounts. “Typically, in a big, fast-breaking news story like this, senior editors should have been consulted before going on air with devastating news based on sources NPR would not name,” Shepard writes. “But that didn’t happen.” Andy Carvin, NPR senior social media strategist, posted the erroneous news on two NPR twitter accounts, but opted not to delete the tweets.

CPB announced at the NETA conference that within the next two weeks, it will issue a request for proposals for its $12 million Public Media Project 12: Operation Graduation. Nine Network of Public Media in St. Louis and WNET/Thirteen in New York City are partners in the project, which aims to raise awareness nationwide of the high-school dropout crisis and develop innovative local solutions. Twelve stations will be selected as community hubs, based on the severity of the dropout rate in its market, existing educational partner relationships, and station capacity to sustain the initiative for at least 18 months. Also, the National Center for Community Engagement will provide grants to any CPB-funded licensee to participate in the work.

Think the DTV transition complicated life at your station? Just wait for the FCC’s spectrum repacking and stacking. In a crowded session at the NETA conference today (Jan. 12), CPB, APTS and PBS reps detailed the challenges that await pubcasters. “All stations will be impacted,” even those that don’t participate in an anticipated spectrum auction (Current, Feb. 8, 2010), said Mark Erstling, CPB’s v.p. for system development and media strategy. The shift in channels “will have a cascading effect” on channels nationwide, he said. As John McCoskey, head of PBS technology, added, “It’ll be a big turn of the crank that will shuffle stations across country.”

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) has proposed the first series of spending cuts in this year’s newly GOP-controlled House – and eliminating CPB funding on the list. As the Washington Post’s Federal Eye blog points out, “Brady chairs the Joint Economic Committee and is a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee – perches likely to put him at the center of the Congress’s forthcoming debate on government spending and deficits.” Brady calls his bill the Cut Unsustainable and Top-heavy Spending, or the CUTS Act.

There were more questions than answers in today’s (Jan. 11) NETA session on the Editorial Integrity for Public Media project. Ted Krichels, director of Penn State Public Broadcasting, and Tom Thomas, co-c.e.o. of the Station Resource Group, updated attendees in Nashville on the public TV and radio work to develop a framework of principles, policies and practices for a pubcasting system facing increasingly complex ethical challenges. What are appropriate boundaries between funders and subject matter? Is it acceptable for a funder to be an editorial partner? Do funding standards differ between news and non-news programming? How can a station ensure that a collaborative, multiplatform project is handled ethically when it is just one partner in the work?

The exit of Ellen Weiss as NPR’s top news exec — a departure linked to the hasty and controversial firing of long-time news analyst Juan Williams — stirred up lots of opinion last week. Here’s a sampling: NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard: “Any damage that Williams may have caused NPR with his occasional intemperate remarks on Fox — which was definitely a problem for NPR —was infinitesimal to the damage NPR management did to the company with its ungracious firing.” David Carr of the New York Times: The entire incident leaves NPR President Vivian Schiller “leading a divided organization into a critical budget battle.”

Ken Ikeda, executive director of the Bay Area Video Coalition, is departing after four years. “I was presented with an opportunity to help build a new organization and considering its objectives, it was something I couldn’t walk away from,” he said in an online exit interview. “I wish I could share more but I can’t right now. It’ll be public shortly, and in the end what I’ll be doing is not far from the work we do at BAVC.” The coalition is a pubmedia pioneer; it’s going strong after 35 years.

TRAC Media Service’s primer on “Everything You Should Know About Your Members” was first up today (Jan. 11) in its pre-NETA development workshop in Nashville. Kristen Keubler, director of station research for TRAC, fleshed out its continually updated 2001-03 survey of lapsed pubTV members and talked about the good news (many are longtime, enthusiastic viewers and have “formed a quasi-human relationship” with their station) and bad news (there are “practically no new adult viewers. Everybody has sooner or later sampled the station’s programming and decided to view or not to view”). Fear not: There are strategies that work to better connect with local viewers, and bring them along as members. 

Greetings from chilly Nashville, where even the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel lions need coats. Current is here to cover the annual NETA conference, and will be blogging (and photographing) the action through Thursday (Jan. 13). If you’re here, stop by Current’s Lucky No. 13 table to say hi and pick up a homemade brownie – and find out why they’re called “Darwinians.”

Well, that is certainly not a headline you see every day.

The author is president of Western Reserve Public Media (WNEO/ WEAO), which serves Akron, Youngstown and Kent in northeast Ohio. Right after I finished reading Barbara Cochran’s paper for the Knight Commission, “Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive,” the phone rang. The 1990s called, and they want their White Paper back. Public television has been local, inclusive and interactive since its inception. No doubt there is always room to be “more,” but getting there by building up staff and tinkering with governance structure is a repeat of the past and will lead to more reliance on taxpayer support from state and federal sources that cannot or will not provide it.

Low-power FM advocates are celebrating a hard-won victory with enactment of the Local Community Radio Act, approved in the last days of the 111th Congress and signed Jan. 4 by President Obama. The law clears the way for expansion of low-power FM stations, a noncommercial licensing category established by the FCC a decade ago but confined to small markets and rural communities by interference-protection rules demanded by full-power broadcasters. Their transmitter power is limited to 100 watts, reaching from three to five miles. Approved with bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, the law gives the FCC more flexibility in assigning channels to LPFMs and resolving interference problems with full-power FMs and their translators.

No, PBS didn’t give each writer at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour a mini-pie like HBO did. But at least one critic was more impressed with the network’s actual programming. Todd VanDerWerff writes in today’s (Jan. 10) AV Club that “the kind of arts, news, and science programming PBS offers just doesn’t pop up anywhere else. What other network would air Frontline? Or Great Performances? Or Nova?” PBS also featured “fascinating people” on its panels. “Some biologists let us know why it was totally cool for them to get within a few feet of grizzly bears,” he writes, “and tried to help a TCA member figure out how to deal with the bear that makes trouble in her backyard.”

In an editor’s note on NPR.org, Dick Meyer, executive editor of NPR News, said the network committed a “serious and grave error” when it reported that U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been shot to death in Tucson, Ariz. In its 2:01 p.m. Eastern broadcast on Saturday (Jan. 8), NPR informed listeners that Giffords was dead. That erroneous news also was posted on NPR.org, and sent as an e-mail news alert to subscribers. But Giffords had survived the shooting, which happened at a mall during a public appearance, and remained hospitalized Sunday night in critical condition after neurosurgery. “The information we reported came from two different governmental sources, including a source in the Pima County Sheriff’s Department,” Meyer said.

Emphasizing its non-ideological news coverage, PBS Newshour tried out a new catch phrase Jan. 9 during the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena: “Brave enough not to take sides, strong enough not to shout.” “We haven’t actually used it before today and we thought it might be a good opportunity to kind of roll that out,” said Simon Marks, president of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. Marks said that slogan survived scrutiny while others didn’t. “At one point, we were looking at ‘The original no-spin zone,’ but we decided not to go there.” The new phrase is intended to emphasize the difference between PBS news values and those of other news operations.