The Iowa Board of Regents on Thursday endorsed a report that calls for Iowa’s three university-based radio stations, WOI, WSUI/KSUI and KUNI/KHKE, to merge into a network called Iowa Public Radio, the Des Moines Register reports. The move is expected to generate more listeners, extend coverage and reduce the amount of state support for the stations by $300,000.

More Tavis: The now ex-NPR host tells Salon in a Q-and-A that the network is “not National Some-of-the Public Radio, it’s National All-of-the-Public Radio. And NPR has got to do a better job of making that moniker… a reality.” Smiley says his show’s numbers outpaced projections, refuting researcher claims that the audience only wants to hear, as the webmag puts it, “the dulcet tones of Linda Wertheimer sound-alikes who’ve come to define public radio.” (free day pass req.)

Have you heard? Bill Moyers will make his final appearance as host of PBS’s Now tonight. Today’s litany of Bye to Bill stories includes pieces from, among others, the New York Times, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Dallas Morning News, who also printed a speech Moyers recently gave at Harvard Medical School. For a different take on the Moyers legend, check out this profile on conservative website FrontPageMag.com, which describes the esteemed journalist as a “sweater-wearing pundit who delivered socialist and neo-Marxist propaganda with a soft Texas accent.”

Minnesota Public Radio programmers described their new format for their just-acquired third Twin Cities station as an “anti-format” for younger ears that will gather eclectic music and “take the work out of finding music and put the fun back in,” Deborah Rybak reported in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. MPR bought the channel, WCAL, from St. Olaf College over the objections of WCAL’s classical music fans. Some spoke against the station sale at an FCC hearing on media consolidation in St. Paul last week. With money from the sale, the college said it will endow five chairs and repair the organ in its chapel.

“Nothing is pushing me, but something is pulling me, and I don’t know what that is.” Bill Moyers, who delivers his last edition of Now tomorrow night, may have one more PBS series up his sleeve, reports the New York Daily News.

“In the rush to proclaim [Bernard] Kerik the next secretary of Homeland Security, NPR sounded as though it were reporting on behalf of the White House, not about the White House,” writes NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin in his latest online column.

Jim King, founder of the Cincinnati-based X-Star public radio network, will retire next year. “We’ve done what no one else said could be done,” he tells the Cincinnati Enquirer. “. . . We’ve bucked the trend and programmed a station the way we wanted to, changing the types of programming every three or four hours.”

The Boston Globe reports that Boston University officials and the attorney for Jane Christo, former g.m. of WBUR-FM, disagree over who wielded the most influence over the station’s operations.

“The real key is you want to get them up and moving but you don’t want them to turn their heads from the TV.” Newsday reports on kids’ shows that encourage tots to get off the couch.

WDUQ-FM in Pittsburgh is replacing its transmitter, going digital and expanding its signal eastward with repeaters, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gaztte.

Media reform advocate Jeff Chester challenges PBS’s panel on enhanced funding to consider whether public TV deserves the gift of auction spectrum revenues.

In the Village Voice, WFMU deejay Irwin Chusid discusses his championing of outsider musicians.

In the Life, the gay/lesbian pubTV show that raises much of its operating funding from viewers, has set a $350,000 goal for a capital campaign for a new studio in Manhattan. [Current profile of the show.]

“If I felt that I was getting the kind of commitment that I needed to grow the program, then I wouldn’t have resigned,” says Tavis Smiley in the Chicago Sun-Times about leaving his show.

… at the bluest of TV channels, public broadcasting’s WNET, in the bluest of cities, New York, you know this country has entered a new cultural twilight zone,” writes New York Times columnist Frank Rich. WNET’s decision to kill a spot on the feature film, Kinsey, is a harbinger of the battles ahead as “politicians and the media alike pander to that supposed 22 percent of ‘moral values’ voters.”