Should preserving noncommercial television licenses be the top priority for public broadcasters, or should financially unstable public TV stations be sold, become unstaffed repeaters or allowed to die off to right-size an extensive system of stations? Independent Public Media says: Save those licenses. And it’s volunteering to take over failing pubTV stations to do just that. IPM, founded by John Schwartz, a public media activist in Colorado and founder of several stations, announced Oct. 5 that it would draw on a pot of some $40 million to save stations at risk of going dark or being sold to station operators outside of pubcasting.

The board of WBAI-FM/Pacifica Radio in New York City has passed a resolution that the station must drop the number of on-air fundraising days by 40 percent over the next three years and expand its membership “quickly by 35 percent,” reports Matthew Lasar on the Radio Survivor blog. The Local Station Board (LSB) said in a resolution, “WBAI’s on-air fundraising is based on repetitive recorded half-hour and hour-long pitches for premiums. The LSB is concerned that so much valuable air-time is being spent on pitching premiums, such that the station is in danger of becoming another version of the home shopping network.”

Clear Channel Radio today (Oct. 17) announced the launch of WNYC News & Conversation on the revamped iHeartRadio, its free digital radio app. The new channel will feature WNYC programming including news-talk programs The Brian Lehrer Show, The Leonard Lopate Show, and The Takeaway, a co-production of WNYC and Public Radio International (PRI).

PBS UK “promises to be one of the most interesting channel launches for some time,” according to the Guardian, “as long as the programming can deliver on the public service promise.” In an interview with the British paper, PBS President Kerger says the channel, which launches Nov. 1, will present 500 unique hours of content this year and 1,000 hours next year. Very little will be children’s programming; Kerger notes that a survey showed the market is already “well served” for that content. Kerger also hopes the channel will “give people here in the UK a sense of how news is reported in the United States”— although PBS NewsHour will air one day later there.

VegasPBS “may have found just that new business model” that will help public TV stations survive, reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “While maintaining and even expanding its traditional educational mission, VegasPBS has branched out in ways unusual for PBS stations,” including landing Homeland Security grants to build a regional emergency response support system. The station is now an $18 million-a-year diversified business, with nearly $63 million in net assets. And General Manager Tom Axtell says the station may launch a nightly newscast, a rarity in the pubTV system. “We have weathered the recession pretty well,” he said.

KCPW in Salt Lake City is less than two weeks from a loan default that could put it off the air. The new nonprofit licensee celebrated its purchase of KCPW frequency to maintain the news/talk station in 2008, but it’s now struggling to make payments on loans that financed the $2.4 million purchase. Wasatch Public Media has until Oct. 31 [2011] to pay off a $250,000 loan from National Cooperative Bank, and if it fails, the bank will call in a separate $1.8 million loan. A rescue package put together last week by Salt Lake’s Redevelopment Agency fell through over the weekend.

“I was trying to watch Masterpiece Mystery! tonight, and the intrusive and pointlessly repetitious imposition of a large, animated, pink and blue graphic advertisement for the PBS Fall Arts Festival on top of the program in progress was extremely annoying,” writes one of several displeased PBS viewers to Ombudsman Michael Getler. Several spoke out against PBS’s ongoing experiment with on-screen program promotion graphics.

PBS Kids launched more than 40 cross-platform games today (Oct. 13) — its largest offering of interactive math content for preschoolers to date — designed to help children build math skills. The games are accessible through computers, mobile devices and interactive whiteboards so that children engage with the same characters as they cross devices, PBS said in a press release. Games include Monkey Jump from Curious George, a Hermit Shell Crab Game from The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That! and a Carnival Count-off from Fizzy’s Lunch Lab. PBS partnered with CPB on the project, which is supported by a Ready To Learn grant from the U.S.

WMFE-TV in Orlando, Fla., may have announced its sale on April 1, but that deal has yet to be finalized, reports the Orlando Sentinel. The FCC told the newspaper it is wading through more than 500 public comments on the impending sale to religious broadcaster Daystar, and is examining the makeup of its proposed local board. Meanwhile, WMFE-FM has had two successful fund drives since the April announcement and continues on the air. The new PBS primary station in the Orlando market is WUCF-PBS, a collaboration between University of Central Florida and Brevard Community College. Viewers who tune to the former WMFE-TV now see a screen directing them to WUCF-PBS.

For NPR to truly reflect the rich diversity of America, it must shed the “monochromatic vision” that it shares with many liberal institutions, writes Joel Dreyfuss, managing editor of The Root, in an open letter to incoming NPR chief Gary Knell. Dreyfuss, a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists that pressed Knell’s predecessor Vivian Schiller to diversify NPR’s newsroom, warns that Juan Williams’s “fiery exit” from the network last October was much more than a badly handled personnel decision “gone nuclear.” He points to former NPR News chief Ellen Weiss, who fired Williams and resigned months later after an internal inquiry into the dismissal, as an example of the arrogance and “liberal myopia” that has inhibited NPR’s efforts to fully represent the “glorious rainbow cacophony” of voices, stories and worldviews to be found in America.

CPB is publicly announcing its grant of more than $6.6 million to consolidate broadcast operations of nine New York public television stations, plus New Jersey’s pubTV network, into a single entity. The grant will allow the stations to build and manage an automated central master control — a CPB priority in recent years — which will handle on-air operations of 34 pubTV channels run by the stations. The facility will be housed at WCNY in Syracuse. CPB expects that the stations will have combined savings of  $25 million over 10 years. Each station will retain control of its broadcast schedule and multicast channels.

In approving its $250,000 short-term loan to Salt Lake’s KCPW, the city council overruled the recommendation of its redevelopment loan committee, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. The committee considered the loan too risky because KCPW had not proven it could repay the principal on its debts, the Tribune‘s Glen Warchol reports. A city councilman told Warchol that the station, which has until Oct.31 to pay off its $250,000 loan to National Cooperative Bank, is important to the city’s development and promotion efforts. “It clearly is not going to be the most secure piece of debt we own.

30 Rock actor Alec Baldwin will host Here’s the Thing, an interview show via podcast, starting Oct. 24 for WNYC in New York City, the Associated Press reports. Guests will include big names such as actor Michael Douglas, Republican campaign strategist Ed Rollins, reality-show celeb Kris Kardashian Jenner, comic Chris Rock, actress Kathleen Turner, author Erica Jong and veteran talk-show host Dick Cavett. Baldwin has subbed for host Kurt Andersen, and supplied some pretty funny pledge pitches to stations. But he was interested in doing more, said Dean Cappello, WNYC’s chief content officer. “Alec is one of our hometown guys,” he said.