The Phoenix City Council yesterday okayed planning for a building on Arizona State University’s downtown campus that will house pubTV station KAET and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, the Arizona Republic reported yesterday. Construction would begin next spring and the building would be occupied by fall 2008.

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler revisits the firing of PBS Kids Sprout host Melanie Martinez last summer and finds a story rich with “irony and hypocrisy” on the actress recently selected to replace her.

President Bush yesterday reappointed former CPB Chair Kenneth Tomlinson to his other federal post, chair of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, overseer of Voice of America and other overseas radio and TV services, the AP reported. The State Department’s inspector general criticized Tomlinson on several matters in August but did not seek a criminal investigation; Tomlinson’s defenders downplayed the accusations. He quit the CPB job after a report by CPB’s inspector general. Just last month the BBG named a new VOA director, Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal veteran Danforth Austin, and a new director of VOA-TV, Russell Hodge, head of the Maryland production company 3 Roads Communications.

WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C., launches a digital channel today that carries programming from WTMD-FM, an noncommercial Adult Album Alternative station in Towson, Md. The channel can be picked up only by listeners with digital radios.

Unionized technicians at Northern California Public Radio (formerly KQED) in San Francisco have voted to authorize a strike, reports the San Jose Mercury News. The 130 employees are frustrated with the slow pace of contract negotiations, says a spokesman with the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians.

A study by the National Endowment for the Arts criticizes public radio for favoring news programming over classical music in recent years, writes Marc Fisher of the Washington Post. “We work in a complicated media environment,” says Ken Stern, c.e.o. of NPR, in response to the report. “We have to fish where the fish are.” UPDATE: Here’s a link to the study (PDF).

The Dallas Morning News profiles Fair Game, the new weeknight show of news and humor from Public Radio International. “This show is proof that public radio is not humor-impaired,” says Jeff Ramirez, radio p.d. for KERA-FM in Dallas.

According to the New York Times, former NPR v.p. for news and (briefly) ombudsman Bill Marimow, hired yesterday as editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, expressed interest in the job as far back as August. Marimow officially takes the reins in Philly Nov. 27.

Bill Marimow, NPR’s former v.p. for news who stepped down last month to become the network’s ombudsman, today was named editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the paper reports (press release here). Marimow previously worked at the Inquirer for 21 years, helping the paper win two Pulitzer Prizes. Marimow wrote a total of two columns as NPR ombudsman. There is no word on his replacement.

PBS announced this week that Ken Burns’ seven-part World War II doc, The War, will air over two weeks (four nights the first week, three the second) beginning Sept. 16, 2007. The episodes will air at 8 p.m. even though the doc includes some profanity. (Burns, in an interview with the New York Times, described the salty language as “so minor and so appropriate to the story.”) Stations can opt to delay broadcast until 10 p.m., or the beginning of the FCC-observed “safe harbor” for edgy content, as numerous pubcasters did with David Grubin’s Marie Antoinette in September.

Listener complaints prompted Bill Marimow, NPR’s ombudsman, to review an interview of Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) that aired on Morning Edition, and the ombud concludes that host Steve Inskeep was tough but fair on his subject. “What some listeners may hear as incivility or rudeness may simply be the product of a broadcast journalist making a tenacious effort to steer an experienced politician toward providing responsive answers instead of reading from a scripted playbook of party messages,” Marimow writes.

Mary Beth Harrell, the Democratic challenger in Texas’s 31st congressional district, accused local PBS station KNCT in Killeen of trying to hurt her campaign by “blacking out” the Nov. 3 edition of Now. The program, which examined how the war in Iraq has affected voters’ attitudes in the community, will air tonight, according to KWTX, the local CBS affiliate.

Arbitron announced Thursday that it will postpone reporting ratings for public radio stations alongside those of commercial stations, according to Mediaweek. Broadcasters had asked the ratings company to wait until it could report satellite and Internet radio listening as well.

The new president of the Public Radio Partnership in Louisville, Ky., dismissed four employees yesterday, including a v.p. of programming and marketing, reports the Courier-Journal. “Though difficult, I’m pretty confident these changes were the right ones to make,” says Donovan Reynolds, who took charge at the station in September after leaving Michigan Public Media in Ann Arbor.

In his most recent report, CPB ombudsman Ken Bode looks at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting’s study of NewsHour guests, released Oct. 4, and sees merit in its criticisms. Noting a statement released by NewsHour e.p. Linda Winslow in response to the study (included in this Current article), Bode says, “I come away with the feeling that the folks at the NewsHour shouldn’t seem so reflexively dismissive of the criticism this time.” PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler’s earlier take here.