Add Sarasota and Charlotte counties in Florida to the growing number of areas where pubTV channels are being moved onto digital tiers that cost more for viewers to watch. The latest station is WUSF in Tampa. Comcast customers in the two affected counties must subscribe to a service that costs three times as much as basic cable, reports the local Herald-Tribune.

NPR ombudsman Alicia C. Shepard writes in her latest column, “What makes NPR’s storytelling so powerful and compelling is the adroit use of sound.” However, those sounds can sometimes be quite disturbing. Shepard reports that several listeners “strongly objected” to an April 7 Morning Edition story that used the screams of a Pakistani girl being flogged by a Taliban commander.

Alex Jones wants one or more of the world’s richest people to establish a $2 billion endowment that would provide permanent funding for PBS’s NewsHour, reveals journo David Westphal, blogging on the Annenberg School for Communication site. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, floats the idea in his upcoming book, Losing the News: The Uncertain Future of the News That Feeds Democracy. Regarding NewsHour, Jones writes: “If Warren Buffett or a group of billionaires wanted to change the world, this is how they could do it. It’d be one hour of prime viewing time for every television in the country.

Four years after classical station WCAL left the air in the Twin Cities region, its fans have committed to raise the legal costs and appeal their case to the Minnesota Court of Appeals. Save WCAL filed a brief yesterday asking the appellate court to undo St. Olaf College’s sale of the station to Minnesota Public Radio, which now uses the frequency for its contemporary music service, The Current. The WCAL group, represented by attorney Michael McNabb, has had mixed results so far with its claim that the college ignored the intent of donors who kept WCAL going for 80 years. The case won some favorable comments from retiring Judge Gerald Wolf but lost in February with Judge Bernard Borene’s summary judgment upholding the legality of the sale.

NPR announced today another 13 layoffs, part of cost-cutting measures to close an $8 million budget gap this fiscal year. Two were senior positions, while another was a news management job eliminated in March, says Dana Davis Rehm, senior v.p. of marketing, communications and external relations. The remaining positions were in the communications, legal, and IT divisions. All of the positions were nonunion jobs. The cuts will save NPR $700,000 this year and come after an additional 64 jobs were eliminated in December. NPR President Vivian Schiller discussed the cuts and NPR’s financial picture in an all-staff meeting today at NPR headquarters.

The University of Michigan announced today it will close WFUM in Flint and expects to arrange for transfer of the channel to another public TV operator by this summer. Some or all of 21 employees will lose their jobs. A detailed fact sheet, in a Word document, says the station is projected to lose revenues equal to one-third of its operating budget. WFUM was one of the stations found to be in “fragile” economic condition by a CPB survey, the university said. The survey predicted the recession would reduce pubTV stations’ income by 14 percent this year. In Flint, WFUM membership and underwriting revenues are projected to drop 26 percent from last year’s level and the station has used all of its reserves, the university said.

NPR technicians represented by the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians have ratified a new contract with management. The votes, collected yesterday, were 72 percent in favor and 28 percent against, according to NABET. The contract reduces NPR’s contributions to retirement plans, cuts three holidays and requires employees to take week-long furloughs. It also suspends jurisdictional rules governing some technicians’ jobs. NPR employees represented by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, who make up a much larger share of the network’s workforce, also ratified their contract yesterday. Details from AFTRA are forthcoming. Current covered the NABET negotiations in an earlier article.

PBS is helping to collect public comments on the journalism’s iffy future for a blue-ribbon Knight Commission that compares itself to the Carnegie Commission of 40 years ago. The 15-member commission is scheduled to vote on its recommendations in May. A summary of its draft report finds that journalism is “a critical intermediating practice” (and other good things). Since Tuesday, a handful of people have contributed remarks on the pubTV network’s little-known social network, PBS Engage — a comment line that will be open until May 8. The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, funded by the Knight Foundation and run by the Aspen Institute, features a Carnegie-like cast of 15 commissioners, including Co-chairs Theodore Olson, former U.S.

PBS ombudsman Michael Getler’s latest column features additional letters from viewers regarding the use of Al Jazeera news reports on WorldFocus, as well as more on Frontline’s “Sick Around America.”

Proposed budget cuts in Pennsylvania are putting two stations in jeopardy of closing, according to testimony at a hearing Wednesday of the Senate’s Communications and Technology Committee. Gov. Ed Rendell wants to eliminate the network that links stations statewide, and end grants to individual stations. “The precipitous decline in funding would have a severe, if not fatal, effect on our two smallest stations,” Tony May, chairman of the Pennsylvania Public Television Network, told the committee. May told Current that Philadelphia’s WYBE and WQLN in Erie each count on state funding for more than 30 percent of their budgets, and that there are “certainly alternatives to going dark but none of them are very palatable.”

Philadelphia’s WHYY-FM/TV laid off 17 employees or 8 percent of its staff Wednesday to help balance its budget for the upcoming fiscal year, the Inquirer reported today, quoting spokesman Art Ellis’s reassurance to audiences that the affected workers include “no one directly involved in news or content production.” The newspaper, which examined President Bill Marrazzo’s pay at great length in November, yesterday reported pointedly that his $740,090 potential salary, benefits, expenses and deferred compensation in fiscal ’07 equalled 62 percent of the amount saved by the layoffs.

WNYC radio opened its long-awaited Jerome L. Greene Performance Space on Tuesday in Lower Manhattan, reports The New York Times. It’s wired for TV, radio and video streaming, and features a reconfigurable wood stage, seating for more than 100, programmable LED lighting and robotic cameras. “It’s not just about going back to performance; it’s also about adding a 21st-century multiplatform aspect,” said Laura Walker, the president and chief executive of WNYC.

In what may be a harbinger of nationwide problems, angry viewers continue to complain to Maryland Public Television that they’ve lost the station. The problem: Comcast moved MPT from its basic lineup of channels to the digital tier, The Washington Post reports. “We’ve had quite a few calls,” station spokesman Michael Golden told the newspaper. “More than ‘many.’ ” The move affects tens of thousands of viewers in 10 Maryland and Virginia counties plus the District of Columbia. And there are more problems in Delaware.

PBS head Paula Kerger has responded to the three Native American tribes regarding their concerns over the series We Shall Remain, according to the Cape Cod Times. The Mashpee Wampanoag, Narragansett and Wampanoag of Gay Head (Aquinnah) tribes of Massachusetts had complained to the network about their representation in the first episode, “After the Mayflower,” which detailed tribal interactions with Pilgrims. In her letter, Kerger said the producers did reach out to the tribes and interviewed several tribal members. More on the tribal letter here.

Posted in Current‘s reader forum, DirectCurrent, by Mark Jeffries on April 22, 2009 at 12:55pm In the Current article on spring fundraising and pledge drives, they say that Twin Cities Public Television (KTCA, St. Paul) placed its emphasis on the fans of established programming instead of relying on the off-message poppy concerts, Lawrence Welk retrospectives and disguised infomercials that have become too often the bread-and-butter of pledge drives — the concept, of course, that public radio has been able to emphasize in pledging for years with great success. Can I hope that the success of TPT might inspire other PTVers to dump what must be expensive shows to license and bring pledge drives back to the proper emphasis of the regular programming that regular viewers of PTV stations want?