For the last few years, three well-funded buyout firms have been quietly picking up licenses to commercial and noncommercial TV stations in a gamble on big payouts from next year’s FCC incentive auction of television spectrum. Current’s research of FCC license applications filed since 2010 found at least 25 separate deals involving three firms: OTA Broadcasting, NRJ TV and LocusPoint Networks. The stations they’ve acquired to date are on the peripheries of major markets, primarily ranging from Boston to Washington, D.C., in the eastern U.S. and from Seattle down to Los Angeles along the West Coast. The three firms are all owned or funded by private equity firms that command billions in assets.

Rod Bates, general manager of NET in Nebraska, is postponing his March 31 retirement by three months to allow the search for his successor to continue, according to the Omaha World-Herald. Also, Jeff Beckman, the state pubcasting network’s top fundraiser, announced his resignation last month, just days after learning he was not among finalists for Bates’ job. He told the newspaper he had been on  “parallel” tracks for both positions, and that failing to make the final cut with NET just “made my decision a whole lot easier.” Bates, who announced his retirement last July, also said that he would be willing to stay past June 30 to ensure a smooth transition in leadership and fundraising.

CPB is presenting its Thought Leader Award tonight to former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education. The alliance is a partner in CPB’s ongoing American Graduate drop-out prevention initiative. “Gov. Wise and the Alliance for Excellent Education are champions for public media’s American Graduate initiative and the educational services that public broadcasting stations provide to their communities,” said CPB President Patricia Harrison in the announcement. “His lifelong commitment to the education of American youth is making a difference, helping more students to graduate from high school ready to succeed in college and in their careers.”

Representatives from four sectors of the public service community made a case for more partnerships with public television during the opening session of the Association of Public Television Stations’ 2013 Public Media Summit Feb. 24 in Arlington, Va. Jane Oates, assistant secretary of employment and training administration with the U.S. Department of Labor, was the most vocal of the panel as she urged public television to collaborate more with local and state government workforce-training programs as a way of sharing key information to the nation’s legions of unemployed workers. “Think how much better we could do if you joined with us.

Bidding has closed on the most recent round of offers in the sale of KCSM-TV, licensed to San Mateo Community College District in California. Potential buyers are Public TV Financing, an arm of Independent Public Media, a nonprofit working to preserve noncommercial spectrum; KMTP-TV, a multicultural noncom channel licensed to Minority Television Project Inc. in San Francisco; the Oriental Culture and Media Center of Southern California, a nonprofit promoting communication among different cultures; and Locus Point Networks, a spectrum speculator that is also buying Towson University’s Class A television channel just outside Baltimore. KCSM went on the market in December 2011, due to a projected $800,000 deficit.

Nightly Business Report, the public TV business news show that has repeatedly shed staff during nearly three tumultuous years under two owners, has been sold again – this time to financial news powerhouse CNBC. The cable network will produce the weeknightly series exclusively for public TV stations from its headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., effective March 4. The show’s bureaus in New York and Washington and its headquarters at Miami’s WPBT will shut down. The sale brings another round of changes to the staff who produce and appear on the show. Anchor Susie Gharib will stay with NBR, but co-anchor Tom Hudson is exiting.

Ted Krichels, associate vice president for public media and general manager of WPSU at Penn State University and a thought leader on public broadcasting ethics, is resigning his station post effective Feb. 28. A short statement from the university said Krichels, a 30-year pubcasting veteran, will “focus on consulting opportunities and independent projects within the public media industry.” In addition to his leadership at the station, Krichels led work to establish the Local Public Media Organizations Code of Editorial Integrity, an update of the 1984 Wingspread Conference’s Statement of Editorial Principles that has been under development for several years.

The Nielsen Co., the stalwart television-ratings tracker, announced Feb. 20 that it plans to track viewing on additional devices beginning in September. The news was reported by the Hollywood Reporter. Among the media Nielsen will include are Xboxes and over-the-top devices that stream programming from services such as Amazon, according to the Reporter. In January, PBS signed a deal to bring some of its local and national programming to Xbox and over-the-top device Roku. Amazon also signed a deal with PBS Feb. 1 to become the exclusive paid-streaming home of the mega-popular Downton Abbey. In recent years PBS has started mining Nielsen data more regularly to garner information about its audience during pledge drives, and it has also pointed out Downton‘s ratings successes.

Palestinian documentary filmmaker Emad Burnat, whose Oscar-nominated film 5 Broken Cameras received funding from PBS’s POV, was detained Feb. 20 at Los Angeles International Airport after arriving in the country for Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony. The news that Burnat had been held for one and a half hours was first tweeted by friend and fellow documentary filmmaker Michael Moore. Burnat later released a statement confirming that he and his family had been detained and threatened with deportation and that they had been forced to provide proof that he had been nominated for an Oscar. “Although this was an unpleasant experience, this is a daily occurrence for Palestinians, every single day, throughout the West Bank,” Burnat said.

More than five months after subpoenaing notes and outtakes from The Central Park Five, a crime documentary about the 1989 arrest and conviction of five innocent young men over the rape and assault of a jogger in Central Park, lawyers for New York City were rebuffed in their attempts to gain hold of the film’s unused footage for evidence in an ongoing federal lawsuit. The decision came on the evening of Feb. 19, as reported by the New York Times. Co-directed by Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah and longtime Burns producer David McMahon, based on extensive research from Sarah, the film was released in theaters in fall 2012 to critical acclaim and will air on PBS in April.

The third-season finale of Downton Abbey drew 8.2 million viewers for its Feb. 17 PBS broadcast, the network and WGBH announced Feb. 19. The numbers come from Nielsen and gave the episode a 5.2 household rating. The episode came in with 50 percent more viewers than the season two finale in 2012 and also drew 300,000 more fans than this year’s season premiere. Nearly 80,000 tweets were sent about the show on the night it aired, according to SocialGuide. Overall, this season of the smash-hit program enjoyed more than quadruple the average PBS primetime ratings.

Current has come a long way in the past two years, but we haven’t stopped thinking about how much more we’d like to do. We’re asking readers to share their insights on our news service and public media coverage by participating in our 2013 online Reader Survey, which closes at the end of this week. Please take a few minutes to tell us how you use Current and what we could do to make our publication and website even more useful in the years ahead. Your feedback will guide us as we make decisions about how to focus our editorial resources and which new products and services would be most valuable to the public media community.

The latest in an ongoing series of Public Media Futures forums will spotlight public broadcasting’s work surrounding the arts. The Feb. 20 roundtable discussion, “The Future of Arts and Culture on Public Media,” will be hosted by the USC Annenberg’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy in downtown Washington, D.C. The center is co-sponsoring the forums with American University’s School of Communication, publisher of Current. Confirmed speakers and participants include Alyce Myatt, director of media arts for the National Endowment for the Arts and a former PBS programming v.p.; Roger LaMay, g.m. of WXPN-FM in Philadelphia; Vincent Curren, CPB c.o.o.;