The nearly $400,000 salary of KQED president Jeff Clarke is creating discontent within the station, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. That’s a pretty good chunk of change considering the station has laid off 30 employees, cut 13 percent of its budget and froze executive salaries until 2010. Senior managers also voluntarily reduced their salaries 13 percent. “In this economy, [Clarke’s salary] just doesn’t make sense,” Kevin Wilson, president of Local 51 of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, to which most of the station’s employees belong.

Reps from NPR will be attending this year’s PBS General Managers’ Planning Meeting May 11 in Baltimore. The meeting coincides with the annual PBS Showcase. At today’s PBS Board Meeting, member Jennifer Lawson said she’s pleased with the growing collaboration between the two pubcasting entitites. “I love the fact that we’re including NPR as part of these meetings,” said Lawson, g.m. of WHUT in Washington, D.C. “It’s wonderful that there are more and more forums and circumstances that bring all of us together as public media.” The board meeting runs through tomorrow at PBS headquarters in Arlington, Va. Issues before the governing group include Station Services membership policies and fundraising programming dues in overlap markets.

On the Media, the NPR-distributed weekly press review, released a correction last week apologizing for what it called a “lapse in journalistic judgment” in preparing its November 2008 report about the public radio show The Infinite Mind.

Top NPR personalities have proposed that the network mount a national pledge drive to help close its widening budget gap. There is a historic precedent for the idea, Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg tells the Washington Post: NPR appealed for direct listener support in 1983, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. “Think how much we’d be able to do now if were were doing something similar,” Stamberg says. But during an interview with Current last week, NPR President Vivian Schiller downplayed the proposal for an NPR pledge drive. “They are not our listeners,” she said, nodding to the on-air fundraising prerogatives of member stations.

In a new round of budget-cutting, NPR has reduced salaries and benefits for its officers and is proposing that union employees accept similar concessions.

“News this good isn’t free.” I find myself delivering some variation on that remark during every single public radio pledge break on WNPR this spring. We’ve been saying this in Connecticut for years: “Despite the fact that you don’t have to pay for public radio news, you can’t expect to just keep getting stories about the Mexican drug war from John Burnett … or Anne Garrels reporting from an unstable Pakistan for nothing.” Right? We tell our listeners all the time that their contributions make our high-quality journalism possible, and without their help, it could all go away. So it’s understandable that newspaper people might have been a little piqued by the memo leaked to Jim Romenesko’s Poynter.org

NPR programming on public radio stations topped its previous audience record by reaching 27.5 million listeners a week during Arbitron’s fall 2008 survey period. The weekly cume audience for all NPR programs and newscasts, Sept. 10 to Dec. 10, beat the previous high of 26.4 million set last spring. It is one of several ratings gains announced March 23 by NPR Research: Measuring audiences for non-NPR as well as NPR programs on those member stations, the weekly cume hit another all-time high, 32.7 million, 6 percent larger than fall 2007. Broadcasts of NPR’s flagship newsmagazines — Morning Edition, All Things Considered and their weekend siblings — reached 20.9 million listeners, a 9 percent gain.

Groundbreaking collaborations are beginning to surface as public broadcasting stations partner with laid-off print journalists to bolster multiplatform local and regional reporting.

The first big British TV import and a model for PBS’s Masterpiece, the BBC’s 15-part An Age of Kings, is available now for the first time in 40 years, J. Hoberman writes in the Sunday New York Times. (The set on DVD sells for $32.99 at Tower.com.) Compiled from Shakespeare’s history plays — from Richard II, through the Henrys to Richard III — the series was broadcast live in Britain in 1959, with Judy Dench when she was younger but lovely nevertheless, and imported on kinescopes. Two non-network commercial stations aired it first and then National Educational Television.

Rick Boucher (D-Va.), new head of the House Communications, Technology & Internet Subcommittee, recently laid out his priorities for Broadcasting & Cable magazine. They include reauthorization of the Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act, which allows distant viewers, mainly rural, to receive network signals even if they cannot get a local affiliate delivered over the air. Boucher also wants to tackle Universal Service reform, industry funding of telecommunications service to hard-to-reach areas.

Odessa (Texas) College trustees are mulling radio partnerships as an attempt to keep its public broadcasting station on the air, according to The Odessa American. The college can’t afford to keep paying around $100,000 a year to cover the station’s budget shortfall. Texas Public Radio in San Antonio is interested in either helping manage the station or taking it over, but trustees would like to see a local coalition running the station.

On the Media has apologized for what it called a “lapse in journalistic judgment” concerning a November 2008 story on the public radio show The Infinite Mind. Dr. Fred Goodwin, the show’s host, had stirred controversy when The New York Times reported that he had accepted more than a million dollars in speaking fees from drug companies and talked about their brand-name drugs on the show. Infinite Mind producer Bill Lichtenstein had previously denied, in statements on his production company’s website, knowledge of the psychiatrist’s links to pharmaceutical firms. But OTM ‘s report about the flap relied on an account from an anonymous Infinite Mind producer who claimed the show was in fact aware of Goodwin’s activities.

Peter Morrill, g.m. of Idaho Public Television, told a House subcommittee today that public broadcasting fund cuts threatened the completion of the digital transition at his station, according to Broadcast & Cable magazine. In Idaho, he said, some coverage will be lost due to “those darn mountains.” However, due to “the short time frame and desperate economic conditions, it is extremely difficult to finance and deploy the transmitters.” He asked the committee to give stations two years to build out the systems, and to make money available without requiring matching funds.

Will PBS be featuring ever-more British content? Senior v.p. for programming John Wilson tells Broadcast Now, a British magazine, that the economy is forcing the network to use major investments for programs “really vital to the schedule. We cannot afford nice-to-have programming; it has to be must-have programming.” Wilson also says the poor economy may mean PBS will be turning more to UK suppliers for lower-cost acquisitions “when we feel it’s the right kind of content.” The mag calls PBS “a major buyer and co-producer of British factual and entertainment programming.”

George Miles Jr., president of WQED in Pittsburgh, has already taken a hefty salary cut and is asking his board to slice off perhaps 10 percent more. Revenues at the station are expected to fall almost 17 percent this fiscal year. His first salary cut took his compensation from $306,259 to $235,000. He hasn’t ruled out layoffs at the station, which has already frozen salaries, reduced pension contributions, cut health-care spending and eliminated travel and meetings.