Newsleader.com takes a look at how state funding cuts would affect a community radio network in rural Virginia, where in some areas the stations provide the only daily source of news for residents. “If we get a big funding cut, there’re just so many things that we wouldn’t be able to offer,” says Diane Buzzard, g.m. of the Allegheny Mountain Radio Network. “We wouldn’t be able to stay on the air every day. We’d probably have to limit our news feed, we’d probably have to eliminate our part-time news reporters and maybe our full-time news reporter. It would be devastating.”

In his latest post, CPB Ombudsman Joel Kaplan presses WAMU in Washington, D.C., for more transparency about interactions between its donors and journalists. “The public deserves more from WAMU,” Kaplan wrote. “It deserves to know exactly what is going on in its newsroom and at its donor conferences.” Kaplan urged the station to release transcripts, records of attendees and other information related to such events, and he suggested the station offer video streams of any future panel discussions that its journalists put on for donors, such as a recent “Meet the Producers Breakfast.” Kaplan’s focus on WAMU comes after the resignation of News Director Jim Asendio, who objected to the Meet the Producers Breakfast and refused to attend.

WNET and PBS are among broadcasters that filed one of two copyright infringement lawsuits Thursday (March 1) in Manhattan federal court against Aereo, a TV service that streams over-the-air channels to web-enabled devices, reports PaidContent.org, a news site covering the economics of digital content. Aereo, backed by media mogul Barry Diller, announced last month that it would use “proprietary remote antenna and DVR” technology to enable subscribers, for $12 a month, to watch over-the-air broadcasts on their smart phones, tablets and computers. The service, set to launch March 14 in Brooklyn, is similar to the recent ivi TV (Current, Oct.

WGBH, one of four public stations selected last year to pilot a Mobile Emergency Alert System (M-EAS) project funded by CPB and LG Electronics, will test the system on Monday (March 5), according to TV Technology. WGBH will send tornado emergency information to mobile devices via text, video, audio, maps and photos, using the mobile DTV standard ATSC M/H. The test will occur at 10:30 a.m. Eastern. Participating are KLVX in Las Vegas, and Alabama station WBIQ in Birmingham and WAIQ in Montgomery.

“What a difference a year makes,” Patrick Butler, president of the Association of Public Television Stations, told the crowd at the group’s Public Media Summit on Feb. 27 in Arlington, Va. Last year at this time, the House of Representatives had just voted to eliminate all federal funding for public broadcasting. Since then pubcasters have notched several victories, including protecting the fiscal 2011 appropriation for CPB to $445 million. In recognition of Butler’s performance during his first year, the APTS Board of Trustees gave him an extended standing ovation. APTS renamed its longtime Capitol Hill Day public TV political advocacy gathering as the Summit, which included sessions on how both TV and radio stations are “Moving from ‘Nice’ to ‘Necessary,’” and appearances by former U.S.

The Interrupters topped the P.O.V. blog’s exhaustive list of the best documentaries of the past year, based on lists from critical acclaim, documentary festivals, industry organizations and online voting. The Kartemquin Films production, which  recently ran on Frontline, tells the stories of three individuals in Chicago who literally interrupt situations on the streets that are brewing into violent confrontations. Don’t miss the blog’s cool graphic tracking dozens of films.

AOL and PBS today launched the multiplatform project “Makers: Women Who Make America” to showcase “hundreds of compelling stories from women of today and tomorrow,” as the site says. Tim Armstrong, AOL c.e.o., told Bloomberg News, “Women’s content is a major strategic focus for us.” “Makers” filmmaker Dyllan McGee called the online-first approach “the future of documentaries.” The 59 interviews on the site so far include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, tennis great Billy Jean King, newswoman Barbara Walters, entertainment icon Oprah Winfrey and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. In 2013, PBS will premiere a related three-hour documentary telling the story of the women’s movement over the last 50 years.

Legislation enacted last week to authorize FCC auctions of TV spectrum contains some protections for pubcasters, but broadcasters will face technical challenges that will exceed the difficulties of their transition to DTV just four years ago. The new law sketches out an extraordinarily complex process of auctioning off TV broadcast spectrum to mobile digital carriers and repacking reduced TV channels in the remaining spectrum, though many questions remain unanswered. The law now assures broadcasters that any spectrum giveback will be voluntary, for noncommercial and commercial operators alike. The FCC will not force any relocations from UHF to VHF or from high to low VHF channels.

“What a difference a year makes,” Patrick Butler, president of the Association of Public Television Stations, told the crowd at the group’s Public Media Summit on Monday (Feb. 27) in Arlington, Va. Last year at this time, Butler notes, the House of Representatives had just voted to eliminate all federal funding for public broadcasting. But since then pubcasters have notched several victories, including resurrecting the fiscal 2011 appropriation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from zero to $445 million. “Washington wisdom has it that we are likely to bump along this year with a series of stop-gap funding measures through the election; and that the mother of all lame-duck Congresses will come back after the elections to deal with a host of pressing tax and spending issues,” Butler said.

The FCC has denied the request of a Native American college in New Mexico for more time to build a new noncommercial FM station. (PDF of decision.) Navajo Technical College in Crownpoint, N.M., had run into a number of setbacks as it worked toward getting its new station on the air. To start with, the school blew past its FCC-imposed deadline for starting the station due to a misunderstanding. It then revealed to the FCC that it couldn’t build the station at the location it had initially proposed because the solar-powered facility at the site would produce too little power.

There’s a growing disparity between the haves and have-nots among public stations. Their abilities to expand services and revenues are diverging. And if they were to collaborate on fundraising, they’d want different results from it. That was the scene as described by 20 execs and consultants in the Public Media Futures forum held Feb. 16 in Washington, D.C., by the communication schools of the University of Southern California and American University in cooperation with Current. Revenues tend to burgeon where there’s a lot of audience, of course. In public radio, just 32 licensees bring in half of the revenue in the country, said Tom Thomas, co-chief of pubradio’s Station Resource Group.

On his blog, media strategist Mark Ramsey argues that the old Arbitron diaries were better at showing which stations a listener actually values and engages with, as opposed to PPM, which doesn’t depend on a listener’s impressions to record and deliver data. Check out his video. If Ramsey is right, what are the implications for public radio? Are stations that have abandoned diaries missing out on valuable information, and, if so, how to recover it?

Alex Chadwick was lost. It took a journey to an unlikely place — the whitewater rapids of a Utah canyon — for him to find his way back to radio. In 2008, Chadwick found himself absent from the airwaves for the first time in decades. He had stepped down as host of the NPR show Day to Day to return to reporting, only to be laid off a month later, an unceremonious end to 31 years at the network. He then devoted himself to caring for his wife and partner in broadcasting, Carolyn Jensen Chadwick, who was battling multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood cells.

Update: On March 16, This American Life retracted “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” its Jan. 6 broadcast that adapted monologist Mike Daisey’s story about working conditions in Chinese gadget factories. Read more. Crunching a two-hour stage monologue into a 39-minute radio piece was a huge challenge for Ira Glass, e.p. and host of This American Life. Glass decided to adapt The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs after seeing monologist Mike Daisey perform the show that skewers Apple and Jobs for the harsh working conditions in factories where adored Apple products are assembled. Glass said the adaptation “turned out to be much more difficult than either of us expected.”