Staff members of NPR’s Day to Day and News and Notes, based at the network’s western production center in Culver City, Calif., are meeting today with NPR News chief Ellen Weiss about cancellation of their programs and pending layoffs, according to three pubradio sources. An NPR West staffer says word inside the building is that more than 60 people will lose their jobs. It is unclear whether the production center, established in late 2002 in a major expansion of NPR’s news operations, will remain open.

The kind of leaders needed to drive this transformation are not just media organization managers but also community leaders.

"Being in Baghdad is a narrow escape every day,” says Loren Jenkins, NPR foreign editor, reflecting on the dangers surrounding the network’s team of reporters and Iraqi employees who have covered the Iraq War and occupation for five years.

Cheryl Halpern, CPB board member and former chair, has been nominated by President George Bush to be an alternate United Nations representative, according to JTA, a global Jewish news agency. UN alternates represent the United States at committee meetings and other smaller forums.

Five positions have been eliminated and several programs halted at Northeastern Pennsylvania Educational Television Association due to an expected $200,000 funding shortfall, according to the Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Gone are a television production staffer, a documentarian and an FM radio news person, as well as the CEO’s part-time administrative assistant and a receptionist. The layoffs represent about 8 percent of its workforce. The station, better known as WVIA Public Media, also is putting on hiatus its “Pennsylvania Polka” and “WVIA Ballroom” shows. Two documentary projects were scrapped. Job openings and compensation for training, travel, dues, maintenance and hospitality were frozen.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based civil liberties group, filed a Freedom of Information Act request [PDF] with the Department of Homeland Security seeking documents related to the E-Verify underwriting credits airing on NPR. The group also is pressing NPR to take the spots off the air. “The ad running on NPR is part of a political campaign to make E-Verify mandatory for all U.S. employers,” wrote EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg in a letter [PDF] to NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard. “Perhaps NPR could also look more closely at how the government tries to influence public opinion through expanded media presence and paid sponsorship.”

Filling the vacancy left by the departure of Patty Wente, KWMU-FM in St. Louis has hired Tim Eby, g.m. of WOSU-FM in Columbus and former chair of the NPR Board. He starts work in St. Louis on Inauguration Day, the Riverfront Times reported today. Consultant Rob Paterson twitters appreciatively about KWMU and its public TV neighbor.

Reclaim the Media, a Seattle-based nonprofit “dedicated to pursuing a more just society by transforming our media system and expanding the communications rights of ordinary people,” is offering a unique holiday gift for the broadcast fans on your list: A set of Media Heroes Trading Cards. Forget baseball greats Mickey Mantle and Ernie Banks, instead you can collect and swap such luminaries as longtime PBSer Bill Moyers, “Media Matters” host Bob McChesney and Pacifica Radio founder Lew Hill. How about a Children’s Television Workshop card to show off at your next pubcasting confab? A set of 21 cards sells for $10.

As if they march under the banner, “Leave no grandma behind,” commercial and public stations, city by city, have begun a series of “soft shutdowns” of analog transmitters that’s likely to grow in frequency and duration until all viewers are converted and accounted for.

Bill Lichtenstein, executive producer of pubradio’s The Infinite Mind, got a phone call Nov. 20 from a New York Times reporter with troubling information: the program’s host, psychiatrist Fred Goodwin, had been paid more than $1 million by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline since 2000. “My first question was, where did you get that information?’’ Lichtenstein said in an interview with Current. When the reporter said that Goodwin had told him, Lichtenstein was stunned. “When he began to read me the dollar amounts of fees, year by year, I went from stunned to shocked.” The $1 million-plus figure had been uncovered by Iowa Sen.

Chihiro “Cherry” Enoki, who shared a Daytime Emmy nomination this year for her editing work on the pubTV show Design Squad, died in a fall while climbing California’s Mount Shasta Nov. 28 [2008]. She was 33.

Bill Lichtenstein, executive producer of pubradio’s The Infinite Mind, got a phone call Nov. 20 from a New York Times reporter with troubling information: the program’s host, psychiatrist Fred Goodwin, had been paid more than $1 million by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline since 2000. “My first question was, where did you get that information?’’ Lichtenstein said in an interview with Current. When the reporter said that Goodwin had told him, Lichtenstein was stunned. “When he began to read me the dollar amounts of fees, year by year, I went from stunned to shocked.” The $1 million-plus figure had been uncovered by Iowa Sen.

There is no shortage of factors to explain why public TV ratings have kept sliding. For one, the proportion of viewers with access to satellite and cable has increased, bringing a surge in fragmentation. Then there’s Nielsen’s audience estimation system, undergoing its own upheaval while some pubTV stations still lack the encoders that let the ratings company know they’re out there. On top of all this, some station leaders say PBS isn’t doing enough to create programming that grips viewers. Over the last 10 seasons, PBS’s ratings have dropped 37 percent, from 1.9 in 1998-99 to 1.2 in 2007-08. The primetime weekly cume — the percent of all households that tuned into pubTV in a typical week — has dropped 35 percent to 19.9 in 2007-08.

Chicago Public Radio laid off 11 full-time employees today — 9 percent of its workforce, according to the station. “Although we continue to see positive growth in our overall audience and high responsiveness to our fundraising campaigns, we have experienced revenue shortfalls due to a significant drop in our average donation and limited growth in corporate underwriting,” the station said in a letter to its board and Community Advisory Council, also shared with Current. The cuts come as the station faces a $1.5 million budget shortfall, according to the Chicago Tribune. The Chicago Reader lists some of the laid-off employees, which include two hosts of CPR’s startup web/radio hybrid, Vocalo.org

Brian Lehrer, host of an eponymous weekday talk show on New York’s WNYC, fielded a variety of questions this week from readers of the New York Times’s website. “Frankly, I don’t consider my program a radio show anymore,” he wrote in response to a question about podcasting and the future of radio. “I think of it as a radio-based multiplatform interactive news and issue … media thing. If we come up with a short, cogent name for that, I’ll use it. Ideas welcome.” (Via the PRPD blog.)