Pacifica Radio’s listener support is down almost 25 percent since 2006, and stations KPFA, WBAI and WPFW “have been running seriously in the red” for several years, according to Arlene Engelhardt, executive director of the Pacifica Foundation, in a column on Radio Survivor. Pacifica “as a whole” lost $5.5 million from 2007 to 2010, she said. Those three years would have included the financial contraction that came with the 2008 financial crisis and recession, when cash-strapped stations turned to the network for aid. “Stations have met their payrolls by not paying their share of network-wide expenses (Central Services) — for Democracy Now!

Three talk-show staffers at WILL-AM in Urbana, Ill., are retiring, Illinois Public Media said on its website. Departing will be David Inge, longtime host of morning show Focus; the show’s producer, Harriet Williamson; and Afternoon Magazine host Celeste Quinn, married to Inge for 24 years after the two met at the station. Inge, retiring June 30, has conducted more than 12,000 Focus interviews in his 29-plus years as the program’s host. He started at the station as a classical music announcer, then became a reporter. He also hosted WILL-TV’s pubaffairs Talking Point from 1992 until it ended in 2001.

Now on current.org, a behind-the-scenes look at the work at Oregon Public Broadcasting in the months leading up to its scheduled national GOP primary presidential debate, canceled just days before the high-profile event.

Kartemquin Films is beginning work to form a permanent advocacy group to serve as a liaison between independent filmmakers and PBS, in the wake of the controversy surrounding PBS’s rescheduling of Independent Lens and P.O.V. and their subsequent ratings and carriage woes (Current, March 12, 2012). Gordon Quinn, artistic director and founder of the Chicago documentary production house, said he is in conversations to partner with the International Documentary Association on the effort. Public television “is not just another outlet for independent producers,” Quinn told Current. “The public aspect of it is of vital importance to us.”

PBS’s fiscal 2013 draft budget, which the board today (March 30) approved to send to stations for comment, contains a 2 percent membership dues increase. At the board meeting at headquarters in Arlington, Va., Barbara Landes, PBS c.f.o., said this is the first dues increase for stations since fiscal 2009. Also at the meeting, directors unanimously approved a change in language in PBS’s common-carriage policy to align with PBS’s ongoing primetime revamp. The two-hour nightly limit was removed to accommodate three-hour programming blocks. The change does not affect total common carriage hours over the season, or station flexibility to preempt common-carriage programming.

Wisconsin Public Television will be testing a “text to pledge” model that it hopes will combine the immediacy that mobile users expect with the more nuanced interaction that stations need to establish a lasting relationship with members. David Dickinson, online manager at Wisconsin Public Television, writes in a post on the PBS Station Products & Innovation blog that the station wants to provide users the ability to text a number with a pledge for any amount, then the station will contact them to fulfill payment and become a member if they choose.That approach “may offer the best of both worlds,” Dickinson writes.

Several basic partnership models have emerged in the growing collaborative journalism ecosphere, writes the Free Press‘s Josh Stearns on MediaShift. There are commercial partnerships, often contractual agreements among newspapers and TV stations; nonprofit and commercial agreements, such as the recent NBC-pubmedia partnerships (Current, Jan. 17); public and noncom collaborations, connecting pubmedia outlets with one another or with other nonprofit news organizations (Current, March 30, 2009); university collaborations; and community and audience cooperative work, including APM’s Public Insight Network (Current, Jan. 24, 2011). “We are still at the early stages of experimentation with large- and small-scale collaboration across the news and journalism ecosystem,” Stearns writes.

The FCC has selected three companies — Auctionomics, Power Auctions and MicroTech — to help it design upcoming spectrum auctions, reports Broadcasting & Cable. Leading the team is Auctionomics Chairman Paul Milgrom, a Stanford professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences who was the main academic contributor to the FCC’s original spectrum auction design. Also on the board of Auctionomics, reports TV Techology, is Reed Hundt, former FCC chair. Power Auctions, based in Washington, D.C., has designed spectrum auctions for Canada and Australia, and MicroTech of Vienna, Va., will lend technical expertise. Congress last month authorized the FCC to conduct auctions of TV spectrum to free up bandwidth for mobile devices (Current, Feb.

Denise Franklin is gone from her post as general manager of NPR member station WFDD at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. “There are a lot of talented professionals at WFDD, and I wish them the best,” Franklin told the Winston-Salem Journal. “I can’t comment beyond that.” Brett Eaton, Wake Forest spokesman, confirmed to the paper that Franklin is no longer employed by the university but declined further comment. Franklin had been with the station for 11 years, first as a news host. She became g.m. in 2007. Interim g.m. is Molly Davis, the station’s director of marketing and community outreach.

Rick Lore is the new vice president and chief development officer at Maryland Public Television, responsible for membership, on-air fundraising, major and planned giving, publications, outreach and community engagement at the station in Ownings Mills, Md. Lore had joined the station on an interim basis last fall following the departure of Joe Krushinsky, MPT’s former vice president of institutional advancement, who is now director of station development services at PBS. Previously he served as executive director of Friends of Milwaukee Public Television, the fundraising affiliate of Milwaukee Public TV. Earlier, he worked for nearly eight years as director of on-air fundraising for PBS, as well as director of development for pubTV stations in New Hampshire and Dayton, Ohio.

Two pioneering pubcasters in Philadelphia, John B. Roberts and Bruce Harrison Beale, died on the same day, March 8 [2012]. John B. Roberts, one of the founding directors of WHYY-FM/TV in 1957, died of a spinal infection at his home in the retirement community of Rydal Park in suburban Philadelphia. He was 94. In 1953, Roberts had founded the Temple University public radio station, WRTI-FM, now an outlet for classical and jazz music, and taught communication at the university from 1946 to 1988. “When I was an undergrad at Temple in the 1970s, “WRTI was staffed and managed by students,” said Temple faculty member Paul Gluck, who served as station manager of WHYY-TV from 1999 to 2007.

Patricia Simon, president of PBS39 in Bethlehem, Pa., is leaving the station after 10 years to pursue other opportunities, reports the local Express-Times. Station Board Chair Jamie Musselman announced today (March 28) that Timothy Fallon will act as c.e.o. while the board of directors begins a search for a new leader. Fallon has been involved with the station since 1995 and served as chairman 2002-04.

NPR member station WTMD-FM is moving from an 1,800-square-foot facility in the center of the Towson University campus to an 8,000 square-foot broadcast and community gathering place this fall in the new Towson City Center. The new home will provide a live-music performance space, a community meeting room and classroom, studios and offices. WTMD’s General Manager Stephen Yasko said on the station’s website that the new building will be contain than a pubradio station serving the Baltimore region. “We’ve designed this space to be a combination: a music lovers’ clubhouse, community meeting space and education center,” he said. “Our listeners and the public will be invited into WTMD every day to experience the best in national and Baltimore bands.”

The Masterpiece Trust has received a $1 million gift from San Diego philanthropist Darlene Shiley. It’s the largest gift to date for the Trust, which was established in January 2011 to allow major donors to directly support the Masterpiece strand, and enable those donors to provide part of their gift to a local station. Half of Shiley’s gift, made on behalf of her and her late husband Donald, will go to KPBS in San Diego. Shiley was one of the first donors to the Trust, with a previous gift of $250,000. Other stations that have received a local portion of major gifts to the Trust include WNET, New York City; Vermont Public Television; WTCI, Chattanooga, Tenn.;

Matt MacDonald of PRX has an idea for funding pubcasting. “Public radio and television stations should collaborate and work together with Visa, Mastercard or American Express to create an nationally branded affinity public media credit card,” he writes in a blog post today (March 27), which is an extension of his recent session at IMA. “Each transaction made with that credit card would get rounded up to the nearest dollar and the card holder uses a website that allows them to determine how it gets allocated back out to participating stations, programs and producers.” If there are 170 million people using public media each month, MacDonald writes, “then there are a large number of credit card transactions each day performed by public media consumers.