• CPB CEO Pat Harrison sat down with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Monday for an interview about her background in advance of a visit to WQED for the station’s 60th anniversary. Harrison chatted about her beginnings as a freelance writer and as the founder of the National Women’s Economic Alliance and about how her Brooklyn upbringing influenced her leadership abilities. “You would go from one block to the other at that time, and you were in a different country,” she said. “You didn’t want to be fighting on the playground all the time, so you had to find a way to connect with some sort of common denominator, or you wouldn’t survive third grade.”

• A lengthy Columbia Journalism Review feature focuses on a conflict over journalistic ethics at Anchorage-based Alaska Public Media. CFO Bernie Washington has been nominated to serve on the State Assessment Review Board, which helps to determine revenues from oil taxes in the state. APM journalists are concerned about Washington’s appointment compromising the network’s coverage of the review board. “We are aghast, quite frankly, aghast that our management doesn’t understand that this is a solid, more than apparent conflict of interest,” Steve Heimel, host of Talk of Alaska, told CJR. • President Obama will nominate Elizabeth Sembler for a second term on the CPB board, the White House announced Thursday.

PBS’s fiscal 2015 draft budget contains a recommendation for a 2.5 percent increase in dues paid by member stations. The PBS Board, meeting Friday morning at headquarters in Arlington, Va., voted to send the proposed budget to member stations for comment. Stations did not see an increase in membership assessments this year due to an anticipated FY13 windfall of $22 million generated in part by higher income from PBS Distribution deals for Masterpiece megahit Downton Abbey. By the end of FY13, PBS officially closed its books with an extra $24.5 million. PBS management is proposing the 2.5 percent dues increase for FY15, which would generate about $4.6 million.

• WUGA-TV in Athens, Ga., is cutting all local programming from its schedule and eliminating six staff members as of June 30, the University of Georgia announced Thursday. The changes come as a result of a study requested by Jere Morehead, president of UGA, the station’s licensee. The study determined that the cost of ramping up local programming and student involvement for the station “was just too great relative to the cost of the operation,” according to the release. WUGA will switch to carrying the PBS World Channel full-time beginning July 1. The move will save the university about $565,000 annually, the release said.

A visualization of Localore's reach, prepared by AIR.

• The standoff at Pacifica’s headquarters in Berkeley, Calif., got coverage on a local news program on Oakland’s KTVU. Executive Director Summer Reese is defying the board’s efforts to dismiss her and has camped out at the office, with supporters and even her mother in tow. Watch KTVU’s video and see the barricaded door, an air mattress used by the holed-up staff, and more trappings of this unusual episode. The report also features Pacifica Board Chair Margy Wilkinson, who is trying to fire Reese. Wilkinson alleges that at some point employees were shredding documents, which Reese denies in an oddly clipped statement in the segment.

KQED has created two new multiplatform desks to expand the San Francisco station’s coverage of culture and politics. Two executives will oversee the Arts Desk. David Markus is executive in charge; he spent the past five years as editorial director of Edutopia, the George Lucas Education Foundation’s K–12 education support website. Arts Managing Editor Joe Matazzoni was the founding senior supervising producer of the Arts & Life section and NPR Books on NPR.org. The desk’s staff includes Arts Partner Manager Siouxsie Oki, previously KQED’s director of external affairs, and Arts Education Manager Kristin Farr, who has produced arts videos for the station.

Women and Girls Lead, a public media–based outreach and empowerment program, has evolved into a broader international effort, seeking to drive positive societal change in Kenya, India, Bangladesh, Jordan and Peru. The public-private initiative grew out of the national documentary-based campaign created in 2011 by the Independent Television Service with funding from CPB. It is designed to build engagement around issues such as women’s leadership, violence prevention and economic empowerment. Films presented through the initiative include the five-part Women, War & Peace; The Interrupters, about a Chicago woman working to defuse gang violence in her community; and Strong!, profiling a champion woman weightlifter.

Ken Burns decides on films through a deliberative process, involving both his creative team and accommodating PBS’s desire for multipart series that draw monster ratings and acclaim.

• NPR’s monthly listenership hit an eight-year high in 2013 with an average of 27.3 million listeners each month, according to the State of the News Media study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, released Wednesday. NPR’s average monthly audience was up from 26 million in 2012. On public television, the weeknight broadcast audience for PBS NewsHour continued to slide, dropping 3 percent from 2012 to an average of 947,000 viewers. The average audience in 2012 was 977,000, down 8 percent from 2011, when the average audience was 1.06 million viewers. The Pew study also found that while legacy media, especially newspapers, continued to provide the bulk of content, audience for online news outlets continued to grow at a brisk pace.

• This American Life has yet to decide on a new distributor, contrary to Chicago media writer Bob Feder’s report over the weekend that the show would go to Public Radio Exchange. Feder posted a correction today with a statement from TAL host Ira Glass. TAL hasn’t even started negotiations, Glass said. “We’re about to begin a round of talking to possible distributors,” Glass told Feder. “There’s also the option of self-distribution, which is attractive.” Public Radio International announced March 20 that it would no longer distribute the show as of July 1. PRI has distributed the program for 17 years.

NPR announced Monday that it has landed the first news-provider slot on Apple’s iTunes Radio. iTunes Radio, which is integrated into Apple’s iTunes software, now features a 24-hour stream of NPR content including national newscasts and stories from Morning Edition and All Things Considered. The stream will also carry other NPR news and cultural programming. NPR said that in the future, digital streams from NPR member stations will also appear on iTunes Radio. Update: Acting NPR CEO Paul Haaga said in a memo to station executives Monday that digital streams from NPR member stations can be added to iTunes Radio if stations switch stream formats to meet Apple’s requirements.