John Boland, executive v.p. of San Francisco’s KQED-TV/FM, will join PBS in September as chief content officer. His hiring, announced at today’s PBS Board meeting, is the first change to PBS’s executive ranks since President Paula Kerger signed on in March.

“New-media’s consumer-supported business model is not much different from public broadcasting’s long-standing membership pledges and corporate sponsorships,” observes media writer Diane Mermigas in a column examining the challenges ahead for PBS.

Robert Conrad, president of WCLV-FM in Cleveland, says the technological shortcomings of HD Radio “[are] really very discouraging and [are] leading us to wonder why we should bother to promote HD. To do so will only disappoint, and, perhaps, antagonize a significant segment of the audience who finds that the system doesn’t deliver.” (Via The Future of Radio.)

Charlie Rose returns to his round table tonight after emergency heart surgery interrupted on overseas trip in March, AP reports. Topic No. 1 will be heart surgery. Guest hosts have included WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, ABC’s Barbara Walters, NBC’s Brian Williams, CBS’s Bob Schieffer and The New Yorker‘s David Remnick. Interviews from his show are available on demand for 99 cents each through Google Video.

James Barrett, NPR’s first public relations director and a former director of public information for New York’s WNET, died of pneumonia June 4 in Fairfax, Va., according to the Washington Post. He was 75.

Board members and senior staffers are running the Public Radio Partnership in Louisville, Ky., in the absence of a permanent president, reports the Courier-Journal. The article details further strife among staff and members of the board, with one member resigning last month and two others stirring up controversy.

As pubcasting girds for another fight over federal funding, the Washington Times asks “public TV insiders of a conservative bent” whether the rightward cause they championed has been lost.

National Endowment for the Humanities announced yesterday $5 million in TV grants to projects including WETA’s four-hour The Jewish Americans; WGBH’s We Shall Remain, a five-parter on Native American history; and KCET’s three-hour In the Name of God and King: The Spanish Empire. The broadcast projects were among 171 receiving aid. Details were posted online, organized by grantees’ states: Alabama to Illinois (10-page PDF), Indiana to New Mexico (9-page), and New York to Wyoming (11-page).

KTOO in Juneau, Alaska, is buying two FM stations to offer a wider selection of programming. It already operates one FM outlet — the most listened-to station in Juneau, it says. The broadcaster will consult with listeners as it works out the stations’ formats.

The Boston Globe and Broadcasting & Cable report on the House Appropriations subcommittee vote yesterday to cut $115 million in federal aid to public broadcasting. [Links to the joint statement of PBS, APTS and NPR and CPB’s separate statement.]

TiVo launches today a service that will let some of its subscribers watch videos from selected Internet sources, including the National Football League and the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal reported. TiVoCast works only with the company’s new Series 2 recorders, which have Internet instead of phone connections.

Writers Guild of America and three pubTV producing stations completed negotiations on a three-year contract that includes provisions to share revenues from ventures delivering programs over new digital platforms, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

NPR exec Ken Stern sent this memo to public radio stations’ Authorized Representatives as a followup to the New Realities Forum in May 2006. News from Ken Stern – Digital Distribution Consortium Working Group June 6, 2006 Dear Colleagues: Last month, about 300 of our colleagues gathered at the New Realities National Forum in Washington. We discussed the future of public radio and our service, and envisioned the benefits of working together differently in the future. It was an exciting and motivating session and we’d like to extend our thanks to all who participated in the forum and the retreats leading up to it.

NPR’s David Kestenbaum’s use of the word “pissed” in a question to an interviewee should not have survived editing, says Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin. “I think that the public radio audience is, (in general), not easily shocked, and they are able to handle harsh language but only when it is contextual and comes directly from the people being interviewed — not from the reporter.”

The Prairie Home Companion film is the first major release for Picturehouse Films, a recently formed distributor whose president, Bob Berney, is profiled in the Washington Post. “This is the kind of film that is representative of Picturehouse,” Berney says, “in that it’s a specialty film, but it’s also a populist film.”