This annual list, now incorporating its Dec. 22 addendum, includes about 180 noninstructional projects one hour or longer in various stages of planning, fundraising and production that will debut nationally in January 2009 and beyond. ¶ Children’s programs don’t appear in this list. We’ll report on them in Current next year. ¶ Responding to Current’s annual Pipeline survey, producers and their distributors supplied most information for this list. Thanks to those who responded to the survey.   Winter/spring09 All About Prints Producing organization: Stereopticon Pictures. Distributor: APT. Episodes: 1 x 60 (HD). Status: postproduction. Major funder: Print Research Foundation. Executive producer: Christopher Noey.

After far-flung listeners and pubradio stations pitched in to aid WWOZ’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, donations to the New Orleans community station have plummeted, according to New Orleans CityBusiness. The station has been relying promotions of Brass Passes–premium memberships that begin at $375 and provide special access to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage festival–to stay afloat. David Freedman, WWOZ g.m., tells the business journal that Jazz Fest itself is at risk because “we are having trouble finding the underwriting to support it.”

Surveying the wreckage of canceled public radio shows, research and marketing consultant John Sutton outlines the lessons learned from NPR’s Day to Day and APM’s Weekend America, two shows that received millions in CPB aid toward their goals to attract new audiences and funding.

The Independent Television Service has announced contracts with five projects from its International Call 2008. The films selected to receive production funding were chosen from 385 submissions in 74 countries. The winners will be broadcast on PBS, including prime-time slots on Independent Lens and the new PBS World series Global Voices. The programs also will be distributed on commercial outlets including the Sundance Channel, the National Geographic Channel and HBO, and on online video sites such as Caachi, Jaman and SnagFilms. Winners originated in Serbia, Indonesia, Armenia, China and Kurdistan. Two more projects will be selected soon.

New York’s public broadcasters were shocked by Gov. David Paterson’s proposed 50 percent cut in state funding, a move they say may force staff and programming reductions, according to the Times-Union in Albany. The budget, presented last week, reduces the state’s subsidy for public broadcasting to $9.4 million divided among nine pubTV stations and 17 pubradio stations. Peter Repas, executive director of the Association of Public Broadcasting Stations of New York, says his group will lobby hard against the cuts. “If implemented, this cut will change the face of public broadcasting in New York,” he says.

A new Electric Company, based on that 1970s PBS hit, premieres Jan. 19.

Boston’s WGBH added to the host of recent announcements of station layoffs today with the news that it will lay off 12 employees. The station has also frozen salaries for management and filling of vacant positions and reduced capital purchases. Membership revenue has held steady for the broadcaster, but corporate sponsorship has declined, said a spokeswoman. The Associated Employees of the Educational Foundation, WGBH’s in-house union, agreed to a restructuring of the network’s design department and to accept smaller wage increases next fiscal year. More in the Boston Herald.

American Public Media announced today that it will cease production of Weekend America, its two-hour weekly digest, as of Jan. 31. The cancellation will affect 13 full- and part-time jobs related to the show, but a spokeswoman for APM could not confirm how many of those employees would be laid off. The show airs on 134 stations. APM and its sister regional network, Minnesota Public Radio, face a deficit of upwards of $2 million as income from all sources declines. A blogger for MinnPost.com shares the press release.

The new manager of Utah’s KPCW-FM is retired television executive Jonathan Klein, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. Klein managed Baltimore CBS affiliate WJZ-TV and later became a CBS president in charge of 14 stations. Klein’s radio experience includes managing KDKA in Pittsburgh and serving on the board of Baltimore’s WJHU-FM, the NPR station sold by Johns Hopkins University in 2001. He succeeds Blair Feulner, a KPCW founder and longtime manager who announced his departure to listeners in July. KPCW also is accepting applications for program director and development director.

Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street by former TV Guide editor Michael Davis hits bookstores Dec. 26. The book “also covers early public television (then as ever an unwieldy, perplexing contraption). And it invokes the 1960s idealism that ignited Sesame Street and remains a fundamental part,” writes Frazier Moore of the Associated Press.

NPR is maintaining a generally steady listenership among Americans for their daily news, Gallup polling shows. Some 18 percent of Americans listen to the pubradio network daily, which is the same figure as in 1995 — but down slightly from 19 percent in December 2006. PubTV daily news viewership remains at 28 percent, same as in December 2006. Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,009 Americans ages 18 and older; polling was conducted Dec 4-7.

Cutbacks in state and federal funding have prompted changes at Maine Public Broadcasting Network, President Jim Dowe announced to staff on Dec. 18. Six jobs will be cut from a full-time staff of 86. There will be a hiring freeze on three additional open positions, temporary wage reductions of 5 percent to 20 percent through the end of the fiscal year next June, temporary suspension of the company’s contributions to employees’ 403(b) retirement plans and the shutting down of transmitters for WMED-DTV in Calais, WMEF-FM in Fort Kent and WMED-FM in Calais.

The worst of the “Econolypse” is yet to come and public broadcasters need a plan of action, writes Robert Paterson, a consultant on NPR’s New Realities project who also advises stations. Paterson plays out a grim scenario for the field in 2009 — continued cost reductions that put NPR on “the newspaper death spiral” and force stations to scale back until they become network repeaters. His solution? “In short there has to be a drive to create a true PUBLIC MEDIA NETWORK — to set up a network that can offer all the members the full value of the network effect,” he writes.

Alec Ross of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team met with pubmedia reps Dec. 16 in Washington at a forum organized by the Media and Democracy Coalition, reports Gigi Sohn, a communications attorney who blogs at the site of her group Public Knowledge. Ross, a member of the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform Policy Working Group, spoke with independent media and technology producers and distributors including ITVS, Public Radio Exchange and the National Public Lightpath Initiative. The pubcasters, Sohn reports, “urged the transition to think of public media as more than PBS and NPR, and to provide opportunities for more grassroots oriented public media.”

American Public Media and Minnesota Public Radio are running between $1.5 million and $2 million under budget for the fiscal year that began in July, reports MinnPost.com blogger David Brauer. That’s just under 3 percent of APM/MPR’s $70 million budget. Brauer says he hears cuts may be coming, “just before or after the holidays.”