DTV, the only satellite provider offering PBS in high definition, has added 14 more markets for local pubTV, reports Multichannel News. More are planned for 2009. The new markets include Burlington-Vt.-Plattsburgh, N.Y.; Toledo, Ohio; Youngstown, Ohio; Flint-Saginaw-Bay City, Mich.; Indianapolis; Knoxville, Tenn.; San Diego; San Francisco; Springfield-Holyoke, Mass.; and Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.

A roundup of reports on the downsizing at NPR: The decision to cancel Day to Day and News & Notes, two mid-day shows that originate from studios in Culver City, Calif., “seemed to have the least impact on our audience” and allowed NPR to avoid making “a thousand cuts in everything,” Interim President Dennis Haarsager says in the New York Times. The LA Times describes the role of Day to Day in covering stories from the West coast and quotes Haarsager describing “a la carte ways” that the network can distribute its stories. “Not everything has to have a brand, a title.

Neither Day to Day nor News & Notes were attracting large enough audiences or underwriting revenues to stay on the air given the revenue losses that NPR has taken since July, according to a memo sent to NPR staff this afternoon. “[W]e concluded that it was necessary to eliminate some activities completely to achieve the long term savings we require while protecting our core mission,” wrote Dennis Haarsager, interim president, in the memo. Of the $23 million projected budget deficit announced today, $14 million is attributable to expected shortfalls in corporate underwriting, said Dana Davis Rehm, senior v.p. The 64 employees being laid off include 29 who work on the two canceled shows, Rehm said.

NPR is eliminating 64 jobs to address a projected budget deficit of $23 million and confirming that Day to Day and News & Notes will go off the air on March 20, 2009. Many of the personnel cuts come from laying off staff of the two canceled series, NPR announced in a news release, but job and spending cuts extend across the company to reporting and production, station services, digital media, research, communications and administration. Twenty-one open positions will not be filled. “With all of NPR’s revenue sources under pressure, these actions were necessary to responsibly stabilize our finances and put NPR on a realistic path,” said Dennis Haarsager, interim president.

Staff members of NPR’s Day to Day and News and Notes, based at the network’s western production center in Culver City, Calif., are meeting today with NPR News chief Ellen Weiss about cancellation of their programs and pending layoffs, according to three pubradio sources. An NPR West staffer says word inside the building is that more than 60 people will lose their jobs. It is unclear whether the production center, established in late 2002 in a major expansion of NPR’s news operations, will remain open.

The kind of leaders needed to drive this transformation are not just media organization managers but also community leaders.

"Being in Baghdad is a narrow escape every day,” says Loren Jenkins, NPR foreign editor, reflecting on the dangers surrounding the network’s team of reporters and Iraqi employees who have covered the Iraq War and occupation for five years.

Cheryl Halpern, CPB board member and former chair, has been nominated by President George Bush to be an alternate United Nations representative, according to JTA, a global Jewish news agency. UN alternates represent the United States at committee meetings and other smaller forums.

Five positions have been eliminated and several programs halted at Northeastern Pennsylvania Educational Television Association due to an expected $200,000 funding shortfall, according to the Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Gone are a television production staffer, a documentarian and an FM radio news person, as well as the CEO’s part-time administrative assistant and a receptionist. The layoffs represent about 8 percent of its workforce. The station, better known as WVIA Public Media, also is putting on hiatus its “Pennsylvania Polka” and “WVIA Ballroom” shows. Two documentary projects were scrapped. Job openings and compensation for training, travel, dues, maintenance and hospitality were frozen.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based civil liberties group, filed a Freedom of Information Act request [PDF] with the Department of Homeland Security seeking documents related to the E-Verify underwriting credits airing on NPR. The group also is pressing NPR to take the spots off the air. “The ad running on NPR is part of a political campaign to make E-Verify mandatory for all U.S. employers,” wrote EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg in a letter [PDF] to NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard. “Perhaps NPR could also look more closely at how the government tries to influence public opinion through expanded media presence and paid sponsorship.”

Filling the vacancy left by the departure of Patty Wente, KWMU-FM in St. Louis has hired Tim Eby, g.m. of WOSU-FM in Columbus and former chair of the NPR Board. He starts work in St. Louis on Inauguration Day, the Riverfront Times reported today. Consultant Rob Paterson twitters appreciatively about KWMU and its public TV neighbor.

Reclaim the Media, a Seattle-based nonprofit “dedicated to pursuing a more just society by transforming our media system and expanding the communications rights of ordinary people,” is offering a unique holiday gift for the broadcast fans on your list: A set of Media Heroes Trading Cards. Forget baseball greats Mickey Mantle and Ernie Banks, instead you can collect and swap such luminaries as longtime PBSer Bill Moyers, “Media Matters” host Bob McChesney and Pacifica Radio founder Lew Hill. How about a Children’s Television Workshop card to show off at your next pubcasting confab? A set of 21 cards sells for $10.

As if they march under the banner, “Leave no grandma behind,” commercial and public stations, city by city, have begun a series of “soft shutdowns” of analog transmitters that’s likely to grow in frequency and duration until all viewers are converted and accounted for.

Bill Lichtenstein, executive producer of pubradio’s The Infinite Mind, got a phone call Nov. 20 from a New York Times reporter with troubling information: the program’s host, psychiatrist Fred Goodwin, had been paid more than $1 million by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline since 2000. “My first question was, where did you get that information?’’ Lichtenstein said in an interview with Current. When the reporter said that Goodwin had told him, Lichtenstein was stunned. “When he began to read me the dollar amounts of fees, year by year, I went from stunned to shocked.” The $1 million-plus figure had been uncovered by Iowa Sen.

Chihiro “Cherry” Enoki, who shared a Daytime Emmy nomination this year for her editing work on the pubTV show Design Squad, died in a fall while climbing California’s Mount Shasta Nov. 28 [2008]. She was 33.