The Washington Post‘s Marc Fisher reviews NPR’s new music website and finds that it’s a lot better than the narrow formatting of most public radio stations: “NPR Music sounds more like a creative, genre-busting radio station than do many actual public stations. It’s a place where radio adds value, with smart critics presenting and telling stories about music, programs that happily smash through the genre limits that make so much of radio too predictable, and online-only shows such as All Songs Considered which grew out of listeners’ fascination with the music producers used to fill the spaces between stories on NPR’s “All Things Considered” newsmagazine.

“Persuasion, the first production from PBS’ Complete Jane Austen, badly overadjusts, adding so many fussy modern flourishes and out-of-place romantic gestures it almost undermines the inherent beauty of Austen’s work,” writes Robert Bianco in USA Today. Laurence Vittes of the Hollywood Reporter disagrees: “Persuasion, the first installment in the new Jane Austen cycle…finds an excellent, demographic-widening middle road between the stiff, formal attempts of 20 and 30 years ago and flights of cinematic fancy like Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park from 1999.”

Food for thought on the future of radio: Rob Paterson blogs about the arrival of Wi-fi to the car and Mark Ramsey describes how RCA’s Infinite Radio–a table-top unit integrating AM/FM, Wi-Fi, and Slacker Personal Radio–blows HD Radio away.

Pubradio marketing consultant John Sutton summarizes conclusions from the first study to use Arbitron Personal People Meter data to analyze pledge-drive listening.

Public Radio International has apologized for a recent skit on Fair Game with Faith Salie that recommended an imaginary “Huckabee family recipe” for “Deep-Fried Body of Christ — boring holy wafers no more,” the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights said yesterday. The recipe skit was one of several based on weight problems of the preacher/presidential candidate (here’s another), but this one was pulled from the nightly comic interview show’s website, the league said, concluding: “We are satisfied with this outcome — it effectively ends this issue.”

The Hawaii Public Television Foundation is selling land it bought in 2003 to house PBS Hawaii, reports the Honolulu Star Bulletin. The foundation bought the property in Waikiki for $2.4 million in 2003, and its value has since tripled. Technical issues and 60-foot zoning restrictions thwarted plans to create a broadcast center there. The foundation “will invest proceeds from the sale of the Waikiki property into a long-term home for PBS Hawaii, which has been unable to secure a long-term lease with the University of Hawaii for years,” reports the paper. The station has offered to renovate and expand its current home at the University’s Manoa campus in return for a 30-year lease.

Promoting his new weeknight talk show on KIRO-AM, Luke Burbank tells the Seattle Times about “the freedom that was missing” as co-host of NPR’s Bryant Park Project: “Fifteen producers. A tight schedule. Doing segments he just wasn’t that into. ‘There was all this money on the line and then people were just messing with you so much,’ he says.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed to drop commercials on public TV in the country. Instead, Prime Minister Francois Fillon said public TV would receive proceeds of a new tax on commercial broadcasters ad sales and possibly an “infinitesimal” tax on Internet access and mobile phones, Bloomberg reported. The comments sent the stock price up nearly 10 percent for the biggest commercial channel, TF1. Bloomberg pointed out that Martin Bouygues, CEO of the largest investor in TF1, is godfather to the French president’s son Louis.

A fire that knocked Austin community station KOOP off the air last weekend was set intentionally, city fire officials say. The blaze caused more than $300,000 in damage. The station, which shares the 91.7 frequency with the University of Texas’ student-run KVRX, moved to its current location in 2006 after two fires at its previous home caused more than $4 million in damages, total, with the latter blaze destroying the building entirely. Neither of the earlier fires was ruled to be arson. KOOP has a history of infighting, though things had apparently stabilized, according to local reports. That said, Jim Ellinger, KOOP’s founder, ousted in 1999, said Monday that the station keeps burning down because of its “own bad karma.”

A new report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center on the children’s interactive media market finds that most digital products for kids do not utilize available research on children’s educational needs. “D is for Digital,” which focused on products for ages 3-11, found only two explicitly curriculum-based video games on the market. The report, which includes recommendations to the industry, researchers and policymakers, can be downloaded here.

“My prediction for 2008 will be that a tidal wave of innovation will converge and make TV on demand normal for the mainstream audience by early 2009,” writes Robert Patterson today in his blog. “As this happens, the money now invested in TV advertising and in supporting public TV will shift away – it will follow the audience.” In his first in a series of installments on the subject, he says this trend will cause the “slow but sure death” of many local stations, reminiscent of the music and newspaper industry. Patterson will be writing about what pubTV stations can do to survive the shift.

Too Beautiful to Live, a three-hour talk show featuring former NPR host Luke Burbank, debuted last night on Seattle’s KIRO-AM. “I’ve always thought I was a little too interesting for public radio, and a little too smart for commercial radio,” Burbank said in a BlatherWatch preview of the new show. Like Bryant Park Project, the NPR show that Burbank left less than a month ago, Too Beautiful won’t sound like NPR. “We’ll be real people talking about our lives,” Burbank said.

Among other gadgets to be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show, the San Jose Mercury News previews a new HD Radio media access technology that NPR plans to introduce at CES. UPDATE: Here’s the official news release describing the initiative and today’s live demonstration at CES.

WAMC in Albany, N.Y., agreed to drop its bid to build a new full-power radio station in territory already served by North Country Public Radio, according to the Albany Times-Union. The proposal, one of three vying at the FCC for the 91.7 frequency in Lake Placid, would have bumped NCPR’s translator service to the town.

A couple of blog postings about the marketing of HD Radio prompted vigorous debates about the viability of the nascent broadcast technology. Consultant Fred Jacobs critiques the concept behind the new ad campaign created for HD Radio Alliance stations, prompting a pre-holiday venting about all that is wrong with HD Radio. And Mark Ramsey, who predicted two years ago that HD would die on the vine without a better marketing plan, comments on the lackluster sales of HD Radio units [Via PRPD].