WHYY in Philadelphia distinguishes itself among public broadcasting outlets for excessive compensation of its chief executive, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported yesterday. Citing the latest tax filing for Philly’s major pubcasting outlet, the Inquirer reported that President and CEO William Marrazzo’s total compensation of $740,090 in 2007 included $415,993 in salary, $317,240 in benefits and $6,857 in expenses. “Marrazzo’s total outstripped that of chief executives at WNET and WGBH, with five and six times WHYY’s revenues,” the Inquirer reported. “It also exceeded the compensation of the heads of the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio, networks that serve stations countrywide.” Board Chairman Jerry Sweeney told the Inquirer that Marrazzo’s compensation is tied to performance and necessary to retain him as top executive.

The afternoon team at Chicago’s newest noncommercial radio station is on the air, talking crime and punishment. Most public radio shows would steer a conversation about the city police force along a course charted by producers well in advance and predictably typecast with expert pontificators. Not Vocalo.org. Host-producer Robin Amer shares news of a personnel change in the Chicago police, a nugget fresh from the website of the Chicago Sun-Times. Co-hosts Dan Weissman and Luis Perez grill her for details from the just-published bulletins in front of her. So far, no one here knows many facts to add to the breaking news, but the loose discussion opens a window for soliciting other perspectives on policing.

New Jersey’s state-owned NJN network confirmed yesterday that Elizabeth Christopherson, executive director for 14 years, will leave the job Dec. 1. She told the NJN staff in a memo on Monday. Spokeswoman Ronnie Weyl said the director has a new job, yet to be announced. Christopherson has not won state leaders’ support for NJN’s proposal to become an independent nonprofit. The blog PolitickerNJ.com reported yesterday that the proposal was pronounced “dead.” That assessment came from an official of the state treasurer’s office during yesterday’s state Public Broadcasting Authority meeting, Weyl said.

The University of Michigan’s WFUM-TV in Flint, Mich., is the latest of a growing number of pubTV stations to plan an early turnoff of analog broadcasting. WFUM will turn off both its analog and digital transmitters Nov. 19 for three days while Thomson technicians move the DTV signal generators into its Channel 28 transmitter. The analog will stay off. On Nov. 22, the station will resume DTV broadcasts but on the old channel long used for analog, Director of Engineering Wayne Henderson tells Current. Starting Nov. 19 — 90 days before the nationwide analog turnoff Feb. 17 — the FCC allows analog turnoffs by stations that follow a streamlined notification procedure.

Cincinnati’s and Dayton’s public TV stations announced today that they will merge but keep their local identities and facilities. David Fogarty, head of Dayton’s ThinkTV for 15 years, will serve as president of the merged nonprofit, the Dayton Daily News reported today; Susan Howarth of Cincinnati’s CET, described in the news release as an “enthusiastic proponent” of the merger, will leave. Fogarty was a producer and executive at Twin Cities PTV, a Peace Corps worker in Colombia and an ABC News producer before coming to Dayton.

CPB advertised Monday to hire a person or organization to scope out the proposed American Archive of pubcasting content. Proposals for management of the one-year, $3 million pilot program are due by Nov. 14. The manager, which must have experience in big-project management and digitization, will use an RFP to select a group of pilot radio and TV stations and assist the coding and digitization of their program archives. The project will also create a “substantial” sample online archive and prototype demo by the ides of March 2009; do research on costs, storage and restorage techniques and criteria for selection of materials to be archived; and develop best practices and training materials.

“For abject gloominess, it would be hard to top “The War Briefing,” Frontline‘s deeply reported look at the war in Afghanistan and the insurgency targeting Pakistan,” writes Tony Perry in a Los Angeles Times review. The doc “finds nothing but bad news for the U.S. and NATO effort — not enough Western troops, weak central governments in Kabul and Islamabad, and an enemy funded by heroin profits and increasing in size and lethality. … The major thesis is not new — that the U.S. didn’t follow through after the quick knockdown of the Taliban following the terrorist attacks of Sept.

A survey of 1,400 adults by the PBS program Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and the United Nations Foundation about religion and America’s role in the world found that “the vast majority of Americans believes the U.S. has a moral obligation to be engaged on the global stage in a variety of ways,” reported Bob Abernethy on the program’s Oct. 24 edition (transcript here). “At the same time, Americans are divided about equally on whether the U.S. has a positive or negative impact on the world.” The survey found that 61 percent of Americans believe that God has “uniquely blessed” the U.S. 

The four-year struggle to establish WRNI in Providence, R.I., as an independent public radio service for the state crossed a long-awaited threshold last month, when its aspiring licensee announced the station’s independence from Boston’s WBUR, the NPR News powerhouse that partnered with local pubradio supporters to establish WRNI a decade ago. Rhode Island Public Radio, the station’s licensee-to-be, began operating WRNI-AM Sept. 1 under a management contract with Boston University’s WBUR Group. The agreement anticipates state approval of the $2 million sale under loan terms covered by WBUR and its university licensee. “We don’t anticipate difficulty in getting a favorable ruling,” said RIPR Chairman Jim Marsh.

NPR’s Andy Carvin offers a video tour of NPR’s election studio.

The ethanol industry’s overreaction to “Heat,” a Frontline doc about climate change that aired this week, says “a great deal about the nervous state” of the industry, writes a Chicago Tribune columnist. The Renewable Fuels Association, a pro-ethanol group, attacked the doc as one-sided (PDF). But “nothing in the broadcast was new to anyone who has paid attention to the ethanol debate over the last couple years,” writes David Griesing.

Don’t count on schmoozing with a glass of wine in hand if you drop in at a Vegas PBS event. Members of the school board that holds the station’s license are unsure whether adults should be allowed to drink liquor at the station, which will share a campus with a new high school, reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal. One board member suggested that the station “stick to alternatives such as ‘smoothies.’” The station hopes to stage wine-and-cheese receptions.

In Contenders, a five-part series concluding on today’s All Things Considered, producers Joe Richman and Samara Freeman profile some of the most unconventional, and interesting, presidential candidates in American history. Tonight’s installment recalls the 1972 campaign of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to seek the Democratic party nomination. Links to pieces that aired earlier this week, as well as other Radio Diaries documentaries for NPR, are here.

The first phase of Public Radio Makers Quest 2.0, a CPB-backed grant program for audio-centric experiments with new media, is off and running. The Association of Independents in Radio, which is managing the program, began accepting nominations for potential grantees last week and named members of the talent committee that will decide which of the nominated producers move on to the proposal-writing phase. The nomination deadline is Oct. 31.

In a posting on The Daily Beast, the new website from former New Yorker editor Tina Brown, Scott Horton wonders whether PBS’s decision not to air the documentary Torturing Democracy (by Sherry Jones) is connected to the Bush Administration’s propositions to slash PBS funding. More than half of pubTV stations are airing the doc independently tomorrow night because “PBS would not run the show–at least not until President Bush has left office,” says Horton, who writes on legal and national security affairs for Harper’s Magazine. The doc, which digs deep into the administration’s torture policies, “was completed and circulated to PBS decision makers on schedule in May of this year.