Public broadcasters should receive proceeds from a tax on campaign ad spending to support their political coverage, argues Wick Rowland, president of Colorado Public Television, in an op-ed in the Rocky Mountain News. “A 3 percent tax on the commercial media expenditures for the 2008 federal elections would have provided roughly $100 million, which could have been invested in a public broadcasting political coverage trust fund,” he writes. “With such a resource, public television and radio stations all over the country could greatly expand and improve their debate work.”

PBS Hawaii plans to buy the soon-to-be-vacated headquarters of Honolulu’s NBC affiliate and move into the studios within the next few years, reports the Pacific Business News. The pubcaster now leases space from the University of Hawaii but failed to secure another long-term lease from the school. It may add a building to its new home, which is much smaller than its current space. “It’s a wonderful ‘control your own destiny’ moment,” said PBS Hawaii President Leslie Wilcox.

CPB has released its FY 2009 Business Plan, which details use of discretionary funds. Up for evaluation is the Challenge Fund, a joint effort with PBS to fund programs that draw a larger audience. “We will investigate alternative methods for attracting and developing these projects,” according to the plan. The 10-part PBS series Carrier, which won widespread critical acclaim, was a Challenge Fund project. CPB also will select one or more of the seven project prototypes in the American History & Civics Initiative for full production funding. The American Archive project moves ahead with grants to stations and content producers to digitize and preserve local content.

PBS President Paula Kerger says the network is “thinking very carefully about what role we will play in news coverage moving forward,” adding that PBS continues to look at “different ways we can partner” with NPR. She spoke to blogger Leonard Witt, a media prof at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University after her speech at an Atlanta Press Club luncheon Dec. 3. One hurdle to PBS’ newsgathering capabilities: funding. The radio network has “made a huge commitment to newsgathering. And in part they’ve been able to do that because they were the beneficiaries of a substantial bequest from Joan Kroc,” a $200 million infusion that NPR received in November 2003.

Kermit H. Boston, a longtime lay leader in public TV, died Nov. 23, the San Francisco Chronicle reported yesterday. Boston, 73, suffered a heart attack after returning home from Grace Cathedral, where he chaired the board. The onetime Pennsylvania school teacher and principal had guided many nonprofits as well as individuals in a long life of mentoring, educational publishing and leadership in the African-American communities of several cities. He served on the boards of Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia and as board chairman of Manhattan’s Riverside Church before moving west. In San Francisco, he served on the KQED Board from 1997 to 2002, and it elected him chair for the last two years.

Underwriting credits for the Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify program, an electronic database that allows companies to verify employment eligibility of new hires, have stirred up objections from listeners and some station managers, reports NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard. The credits, which began running last month, create the perception of a conflict of interest between NPR’s news coverage and funding relationships. “It just makes you a little queasy,” says Sean Collins, executive producer of Latino USA, a weekly series that is also carrying the spots. “I don’t think we do a good enough job of reiterating the concept of a firewall.

The Public Radio Tuner is now being offered to iPhone users, but this blogger is less than impressed with the application. “Seriously, you can’t mark a station as a favorite and there is no search function. Not the most convenient app I have seen.” Web technologists at APM, NPR, PRX and PRI are collaborating on enhancements to the tuner, to be released in early 2009.

The latest analysis from public radio’s Grow the Audience project identifies a “short list” of market factors that drive performance of individual NPR News stations–namely education levels, competition within each market for NPR News listeners and the presence of key psychographic segments. The report [PDF], published online last week by Station Resource Group and Walrus Research, concludes that strategies to grow the public radio news audience start with the two most-listened to programs, NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered. In addition, the analysts predict that the cume ratings for NPR News would grow substantially if hybrid news/classical music stations in Houston, Tampa and Atlanta went to all-news formats.

On Sunday, West Virginia Public Radio’s Mountain Stage will celebrate its 25th anniversary with its 684th production, Joan Osborne, Kathy Mattea and a multilayer cake from Baltimore’s Charm City Cakes (home of the Food Channel’s Ace of Cakes). The show has presented nearly 1,700 musical artists of all genres, produced on stages around the state, in both Charleston, W.Va. and S.C., and as far afield as San Diego and Winnipeg. Traditionally, host Larry Groce invites the performers for a joint number at the end of each broadcast. (The producers also have done 39 standard-definition TV shows and nine HDTV specials.)

NPR’s Baghdad-based reporting team narrowly escaped an assassination attempt on Sunday. After conducting interviews and having lunch with their two Iraqi drivers in a kebab shop, correspondent Ivan Watson and producer/translator Ali Hamdani were returning to their parked car when Iraqi soldiers intercepted them and pulled one of the drivers away from the vehicle. The armored BMW, which had been planted with a so-called “sticky” bomb, exploded into flames. Multimedia reporting on the incident, including video, photos and Watson’s reportage for NPR, are here.

Europeana, the continent’s online cultural library, attracted so much attention on its debut Nov. 20 — 10 million hits an hour, 3 million simultaneously — that the website crashed and won’t be back until mid-December, according to a notice on the nonfunctioning site. Technical second-guessers told PCWorld.com that traffic was three times the expected level and planners failed to buy adequate hardware load balancers. The European Commission said 52 percent of the digitized cultural objects were contributed by France, 10 percent each from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands and tiny shares from the other member states. For a preview, click the video starring Descartes, Darwin, Beethoven and Callas and featuring Little Kim.

There have been facetious presentations of dancing on public radio, but none has been as visually compelling — or as facetious — as this performance of the NPR Dancers to the works of B.J. Leiderman and his various Salieris. Thanks to Alaskans Duncan Moon and John Proffitt, who noticed the video, which came out of the creative ferment of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre improv company.

NPR’s next president made one giant leap in the news business two years ago when she moved from long-form documentary production into digital media for the New York Times Co., but it wasn’t the first or the last of Vivian Schiller’s career.In the early 1980s, Schiller was living in the Soviet Union, working as a translator and guide for professional groups touring the country, when she was hired as a “fixer” for the Turner Broadcasting System. The job required her to do everything from translating during negotiations for TV productions to making dinner reservations, and it gave her an entrée into television.

To make time for talks with concerned stations, NPR has put on hold a proposed trial of online giving on NPR.org.

Patty Wente, the former g.m. of KWMU-FM in St. Louis, reached a settlement Nov. 13 with the station’s licensee, the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Wente will receive $50,000, and her departure from the station will be officially recorded as a resignation, not a firing. In exchange, the former manager will drop a grievance against the university, among other conditions. The city’s Riverfront Times posted the full settlement on its website. Wente was fired June 2 based on preliminary findings from a review of KWMU’s finances and management under her tenure. Since leaving KWMU she has started a consulting business, The Wente Group.