What will become of Pacifica’s KPFK, wracked as it is by infighting over its programming, fundraising tactics and the process of selecting a new general manager? The Los Angeles Times reports that recent program changes have helped to bolster KPFK’s audience, yet the station’s latest funddrive was extreme “for its great length and its embrace of the conspiracy-addled fringe.” Critics of the format changes are targeting Ian Masters, a longtime host who brings a deep knowledge of foreign affairs to KPFK’s airwaves on weekday evenings. Meanwhile, meetings of its Local Station Board, which must appoint a committee to lead the search for a new general manager, dissolve into shouting matches.

WNIT in Elkhart, Ind., soon will double its space in a new location in South Bend. When it moves May 3 it’ll be the first time its offices and studio are in the same building, reports the local Tribune Business Weekly. The building had been home to CBS affiliate WSBT. “Since it was an existing television station, remodeling it to become a new television station made the best use of our financial and ecological resources,” said WNIT Board Chairman Glenn Killoren. A major gift and $1 million in TIF (Tax Incremental Financing) helped with the $6.5 million renovation cost.

Pat Aufderheide, advocate for Public Media 2.0 at American University, says in a blog that she loved every minute of CPB’s Local Journalism Centers announcement at the Newseum in D.C. yesterday. For instance, she quotes PBS President Paula Kerger: “News has become a social experience . . . Journalism must rebuild itself from the bottom up, beginning with the citizen journalist.” “Wow,” Aufderheide responds, continuing: “NPR’s Kinsey Wilson, digital media guru at NPR, said, ‘This is about reinventing the news business,’ and ‘This is about connecting the audience with each other.'” Though Aufderheide is eager to see these developments, she’s not under any illusion that they’re easy to pull off.

WGBH is going where no station has gone before: This week it launched the first mobile DTV service in the system. The station is simulcasting its main HD channel along with its ‘GBH Kids Channel and two audio program streams. It’s the first of nine stations that announced in February 2009 their plans to begin using the technology (Current, Feb. 2, 2009). “We’re very excited to be the first in our market to offer Mobile DTV services to our audience,” WGBH’s Chief Technology Officer Joe Igoe said in a statement. “We see Mobile DTV as a way to expand our ability to deliver services to a broader geographic area on a wider range of devices.”

Will a grant from a large but little-known foundation help PBS in a big way within the next year? PBS President Paula Kerger, speaking to the PBS Board at its meeting today at headquarters in Arlington, hinted at a possible “very large grant” from the Anne Ray Charitable Trust, one of three entities under the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies. It’s named for the granddaughter of the founder of agricultural products giant. MinnPost reports that Margaret Cargill was known as the “silent philanthropist,” because she made more than $200 million in anonymous donations to charities before her death in 2006.

NPR has added ingest capabilities to its open Application Programming Interface, the technical system for distributing NPR content on the web that first launched in 2008. “Until today, the NPR API has been a one-way fire hose of content, pushing hundreds of thousands of stories from NPR and the twelve NPR Music partner stations out to the world,” blogs NPR’s Daniel Jacobson, director of application development. “Now the API is read-write, allowing authorized external parties to post stories to the NPR API.” For the first phase of API Ingest Project, released on March 24, Oregon Public Broadcasting and the Northwest News Network are posting stories to the API.

On March 14, Larry Sidman, president of APTS, announced his departure. On March 24, John Lawson, former president of APTS, announced his departure from ION Media Networks. The timing has some in the system wondering — could Lawson be returning to the APTS helm? Not so, Lawson tells Current: “I can confirm that I will not be a candidate for the CEO position at APTS.”

Michael Rosenblum, former WNET worker and now “on the cutting edge of the digital videojournalist revolution” (he’s worked for BBC, Voice of America, New York Times television) is vehemently proclaiming that he no longer contributes to PBS. He’s particularly annoyed — well, far past annoyed — by Thirteen’s forthcoming Need to Know pubaffairs show (Current, March 22, 2010). One problem, he writes: “Three years! The show has been in the planning phase for three years! . . . Please note that it took Marc Zuckerman two months to conceive of, build and launch Facebook.”

At the Movies, the latest incarnation of WTTW’s PBS show Sneak Previews, is ending due to low ratings. Disney-ABC Domestic Television and ABC Media Productions made the announcement today. The show lasted 24 seasons, according to the Chicago Tribune’s media writer Phil Rosenthal. WTTW first paired Gene Siskel, who was reviewing films for the Tribune and the local CBS affiliate, with Pulitzer Prize-winner Roger Ebert, for Opening Soon … at a Theater Near You in 1975; about three years later it went nationwide on PBS as Sneak Previews. “It was one of the most popular shows in PBS history,” Rosenthal noted.

After more than three years of task force analysis, a PBS Board Nominating and Corporate Governance committee will recommend to the full board that it continue “one station, one vote” representation. The alternative would be giving large stations more votes on the PBS Board. Chair Jennifer Lawson told the panel today at headquarters in Arlington, Va., that data from professional director elections was tracked to see if there would have been different results with weighted voting, and how that would have affected composition of the board. Research showed that votes weighted by station size would not have had significant impact on the board composition; 3 percent of elections would have been affected.

WLIU 88.3FM is now ensconced in new Southampton, NY, studios, with only three hours of dead air while transmitting equipment was move, reports the Southampton Press. The station moved from the Stony Brook Southampton college campus, its home for the last 20 years. The university agreed in October to sell the station to Peconic Public Broadcasting (Current, Oct. 13, 2009) but Peconic has run into challenges along the way (Current, Aug. 24, 2009; Feb. 17, 2010).

CPB is about to announce funding for five new media start-ups to be operated by public broadcasting stations and for an NPR-led project to begin planning a shared web platform for public media’s digital content. The projects, to be unveiled at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. this morning, aim to build pubcasting’s newsgathering capacity and create a more efficient and flexible technical system for distributing content. Twenty-seven different pubcasting stations will collaborate in creating the five local journalism centers; CPB is seeking proposals to establish two additional LJCs in coming months. At each center, multimedia teams of journalists will produce reporting on topics of particular interest to that region.

In a message on its website, Louisiana Public Broadcasting tells visitors it may have to cut local programming, lay off 20 percent of its staff and possibly even “go off the air one or two days a week,” possibly Monday and Friday, as it comes up against state funding cuts. The pubcaster is facing a $656,000 reduction before the end of June and a potential $2 million cut beginning in July. “It’s not anything we want to do. It’s not our choice,” Joe Traigle, LPB Foundation chairman, told the Advocate newspaper on Tuesday. The reporter got readers’ attention by pointing out that no programming on Mondays and Fridays would mean — gasp!

CPB’s announcement of a “major journalism initiative” on Thursday, March 25 will be streamed live from the Newseum in Washington, D.C., beginning at 10 a.m. ET. CPB President Patricia Harrison will be joined by top execs from PBS and NPR. After the announcement, a panel of pubcasting journalists will discuss public media’s role in newsgathering. CPB’s funding of five “local journalism centers,” expected for months, will support more in-depth reporting by public radio stations on a regional basis.

All-classical KING-FM in Seattle, one of the few remaining commercial classical stations in the country, plans to convert into a noncommercial, listener-supported public radio operation by July 2011. The station cited changes in media technology and declining ad revenues yesterday in announcing the change, which first must be approved by the IRS and the FCC. The station has suffered under Arbitron’s new Portable People Meter ratings methodology, according to the Seattle Times. KING-FM is operated by Beethoven, a nonprofit owned by three Seattle arts organizations; over the years its revenues have been converted into dividends for the Seattle Opera, the Seattle Symphony and the Arts Fund.