Ten of the 12 public radio stations participating in the NPR-led Argo Project intend to continue reporting on their specialized topics when the blogging pilot ends this month. “[F]or some stations, it’s been an eye-opening experience in how original, web-native publishing can expand audiences in ways that repurposed radio content might not on its own,” reports Andrew Phelps of Nieman Lab. “At four of the 12 stations, their Argo blog drew monthly audiences bigger than every other part of their news sites combined.” Blogs published by California stations KQED and KPBS were top performers in the Argo Network, and both intend to keep reporting next year.

Fair use, the right to employ copyrighted material in certain situations without licensing it, is in resurgence after two dismal decades of widespread misinterpretation — and nowhere is the right getting more exercise than in public broadcasting. Public broadcasters have been leaders in asserting their rights appropriately, and can use them even more to advance public media in a participatory and digital era. As Peter Jaszi and I detail in our new book, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (University of Chicago Press, 2011), media makers are recognizing fair use as an essential free-speech right at a time when the fundamental bargain between the public and copyright owners has become dangerously imbalanced in favor of rights holders.

There’s a new game in town — relatively new to public television, anyway. Blessed with digital multicast channels and eager to attract new viewers, PBS stations are finding success with high-school football and other sports as varied as NASCAR and Special Olympics on their schedules. Station execs concede that airing more sports can mean preempting PBS program staples — maybe exchanging Frontline for field goals. They can also face questions about the propriety of carrying women’s basketball in place of Washington Week in Review. Still, they insist, gains in viewer interest, the opportunity to promote other shows during game broadcasts, and the positive vibes of bringing communities together more than justify any inconvenience or criticism.

This year's Pipeline survey found projects planned, begun or completed about Francis Scott Key and Phil Ochs ... religious pilgrims and itinerant carnies ... Shakespeare and NASCAR ... Margaret Mitchell and Harper Lee ... Col. George Armstrong Custer and Joe Paterno ... Johann Bach and Freddie Fender ... aging brains and young multitaskers. Mark (Survivor) Burnett does a "reality" show for PBS about prime ministers' chefs, and David (Farmer's Wife) Sutherland gives us verite of an aspiring Sioux social worker. Ken Burns follows up on the Central Park jogger case and Ric Burns looks at the blood spilled by the Civil War and the bad blood that still remains.

There was no shortage of ideas for keeping Capitol News Connection afloat. CNC’s stock in trade was chasing down politicians for local legislators’ take on the day’s developments in Congress. Before it was shuttered in September, public radio’s little nonprofit news bureau on Capitol Hill tried expanding into online news reporting, revising fees, selling localized coverage of Congress to newspapers and TV stations as well as pubradio, and developing widgets and apps to boost its income. As founder and CEO Melinda Wittstock worked relentlessly against recession economics to save the cash-strapped newsroom, she turned to a dot-org hope. Her conception for NewsIt, a crowdsourced social-media news platform, was perhaps her biggest idea to date.

Minnesota-based American Public Media announced Nov. 29 the future cohabitation of two new-media tools for use by public media newsrooms. APM’s Public Insight Network (PIN), which helps journalists find story topics and sources in their communities, has acquired Spot.Us, a platform for raising money to support freelance reporting. Launched in 2008, Spot.Us allows freelancers to post pitches on its website for stories they’d like to report and ask for donations to support their efforts. Spot.Us takes a 10 percent cut of the donations for its own expenses and charges news organizations to create surveys for their websites. Readers who answer the surveys get credits that they can apply to Spot.Us

KCAW/Raven Radio in Sitka, Alaska, may not have a skeleton in its closet, but it has one in its basement. Contractors working beneath the studio in October uncovered human remains that may predate the 103-year-old building. KCAW General Manager Ken Fate told Current on Nov. 28 that the station is “working closely with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska” to determine whether the body is that of a tribal ancestor. The station reported on its website that when the bones were discovered between two slabs of bedrock, work immediately stopped. An archeologist was unable to determine the precise age, sex or ethnicity of the remains; the police said that because the bones were old, the site wasn’t considered a crime scene.

Next year’s Public Media Development and Marketing Conference, the annual event organized by pubradio’s Development Exchange Inc., will include a new track for pubTV professionals, produced by PBS. The conference runs July 12-14 in Seattle. The track will focus on pledge practices, fundraising and community engagement around children’s programming, and television-specific research. DEI and PBS announced the collaboration in a statement Dec. 6. “For the first time, the whole public media family will have the opportunity to focus together on the very best fundraising ideas and practices,” said DEI President Doug Eichten. The partnership “demonstrates the spirit of institutional collaboration that is critical at the national and station levels,” said PBS President Paula Kerger.

Cooperation among Alaska’s public TV stations took a backwards step last week after a modest gain in September. A major result of three years of talks among the three largest stations was that KAKM-TV in Anchorage, the state’s dominant city, would join the AlaskaOne consortium of stations in Fairbanks, Juneau, Bethel and smaller towns, which have shared a TV schedule since 1995. Last week, KUAC-TV in Fairbanks said it will drop out of the AlaskaOne TV consortium as of July 1. The Fairbanks station, which had assembled the feed, opted out after its partners in AlaskaOne voted in November to merge its program feed with that of KAKM in Anchorage.

With $2.5 million from the Knight Foundation, Public Radio Exchange will rev up a new Public Media Accelerator next year to assist new public-media journalism projects with seed money, mentoring and help in finding funds and investors. Knight stresses the mentoring. After experience with more than 200 media projects, Knight has found that the most successful have been “nurtured through outside advice and expertise,” said foundation veep Michael Maness. PRX hasn’t set priorities for projects, chief exec Jake Shapiro told Current, but he expects they will tend to develop software tools, especially mobile apps. Shapiro sees benefits for public media organizations that get their hands geeky with the tech side, as PRX did, instead of outsourcing the work, he wrote on PBS MediaShift’s Idea Lab.

When Gary Knell officially started work this month as NPR’s president, he probably found no shortage of ideas about what he should do with an organization that has recently survived bad headlines, turmoil at the top and a near-death experience with federal funding cuts. But he would be well advised to ignore some of those recommendations. Some say NPR should simply forgo federal funding, which accounts for 2 percent of its annual budget. Receiving even that small amount, they say, leaves NPR vulnerable to accusations of political bias in its news coverage. How much easier it would be, they argue, if public radio would give up the federal dollars and ignore the occasional outbreaks of criticism from Capitol Hill.

Viewers on each end of the political spectrum, conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, have favorite PBS shows, according to a yearlong study by the Experian Simmons consumer research firm. It wanted to see what programs indexed highest and lowest among those viewers. Masterpiece was the third-highest indexing show among liberal Democrats, behind only The Daily Show and Colbert Report, says the Washington Post, which noted, “Masterpiece indexes at a whopping 234, which means a Masterpiece viewer is 134 percent more likely to be a liberal Democrat than the average adult viewer.” Three shows on PBS also rank in the conservative Republican index: This Old House, New Yankee Workshop and Antiques Roadshow.

NJTV will use four “content bureaus” located at universities across New Jersey, the pubcasting network announced today (Dec. 9). Brookdale Community College, Rowan University, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and William Paterson University be equipped with robotic cameras, provide student footage and interviews, and serve as a remote location for NJTV reporters, reports NJBIZ.

A provision to give the Federal Communications Commission authority to compensate broadcasters for giving up spectrum was included in a House Republican end-of-the-year legislation package released today (Dec. 8), reports Broadcasting & Cable. It provides up to $3 billion for relocation expenses to broadcasters for being moved to another channel or sharing channels after spectrum repacking, and gives the FCC until 2021 to reclaim and auction the spectrum, a necessary move as the increase in wireless devices demand more bandwidth.