NPR has lined up $17 million in grants and individual gifts to expand two beat-reporting units and to complete development of an app designed to provide a personalized, location-based listening experience of content from NPR and local stations. Most of the funding, about $10 million, supports development of the app, which NPR has referred to internally as Project Carbon. Slated for release by April 2014, the app will enable listeners to hear, read and watch public radio content across digital platforms, providing an experience similar to what Pandora or Spotify offer for music. The app is designed to customize the content it delivers by using geolocation, gathering feedback and tracking when and for how long users listen.

12/16/13: This item has been updated. Oregon Public Broadcasting is preparing to open a permanent bureau in Southwest Washington state by early 2014, and has surpassed $400,000 in funding to make it happen. The bureau will allow OPB to deepen its reporting on Washington’s Clark County, which is located just across the Columbia River from OPB headquarters in Portland, as well as cross-border issues and the Washington State legislature in Olympia. It will contain one staff member, a full-time multimedia reporter, to start. Stories produced by the bureau will be shared across public radio stations and for-profit media organizations in the Pacific Northwest, and with national outlets such as NPR and the PBS NewsHour.

Los Angeles’s KPCC is shuffling news priorities. As LA Observed reports, the station is closing its bureau in the state capital and cutting two general assignment reporters. But it has also made eight new hires since October, mostly to expand healthcare and environment coverage as well as its digital presence. Russ Stanton, KPCC v.p. of content, told LA Observed that the station may reinstate a Sacramento staffer in 2015. In the meantime it will rely on reports from Sacramento’s Capital Public Radio for state-government coverage. The station also launched an iPad app Dec. 2, making it one of the few public stations to put out its own tablet app, according to Nieman Lab.

The Maryland Public Broadcasting Commission is appealing a proposed FCC fine of $20,000 for multiple violations of its Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) rules, reports Broadcasting & Cable. In a Notice of Apparent Liability, the FCC contends that the pubcasting commission, the licensee of Maryland Public Television, broke several rules between June 2008 and May 2010 by failing to provide notification of 11 full-time vacancies to an organization that had requested that information. The agency also said that those failures “reveal a continuing lack of self-assessment” and that the Maryland licensee “provided incorrect factual information” to the FCC regarding the situation.

As expected, PBS got a Golden Globe nomination early this morning for Downton Abbey. The Masterpiece megahit got its nod in the Best Television Series — Drama category. Its competition? Breaking Bad on AMC; The Good Wife, CBS; House of Cards, Netflix; and Masters of Sex, Showtime. It’s PBS’s only nomination in the annual awards, presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Downton cast members and producers took part in a discussion moderated by arts reporter Bill Carter of the New York Times Tuesday night, which was recorded for use by PBS member stations. Creator Julian Fellowes and EP Gareth Neame joined actors Hugh Bonneville, Laura Carmichael, Robert James-Collier, Michelle Dockery, Allen Leech, Phyllis Logan and Lesley Nicol onstage at the historic Hudson Theatre in the Millennium Hotel.

Tavis Smiley may be celebrating 10 years on PBS, but that tenure hasn’t been easy. In a Los Angeles Times interview, the talk show host admits that getting hip, high-profile guests is tough. “As the handlers get younger and younger and as the artists crave more and more to be in the social media zeitgeist, it becomes harder and harder for my producers to get through to clients the value of being on PBS,” he said. “It’s not an easy sell.” And KCET’s decision in 2010 to drop PBS membership left Smiley without a production home.  “We go overnight to paying for office space, studio rental, parking stalls for my staff — we go overnight to paying full freight at a commercial outlet here in town,” Smiley said.

St. Louis Public Radio and the St. Louis Beacon, a nonprofit news site, merged Dec. 10. The partners have yet to decide how to brand the combined newsroom. Their website will feature the names of both partners, but St. Louis Public Radio will not change its on-air brand, said Tim Eby, g.m. Following a mandate from faculty members at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, which holds St. Louis Public Radio’s license, the merger will not require additional financial support from the university. UMSL will absorb the Beacon’s 18 full-time employees alongside St. Louis Public Radio’s 36 full-time and 11 part-time workers.

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is aiming to add another 5,000 hours of digitally native or previously digitized content to supplement the 40,000 hours currently slated for preservation. Casey Davis, the archive’s project manager, posted a call for interested stations on the archive’s blog Dec. 9. The archive hopes to collect the additional 5,000 hours over the next two years. Some of the materials may come from those digitized during the archive’s 2009 pilot project, Davis said. On Nov. 21, Boston’s WGBH and the Library of Congress announced they would take on joint stewardship of the American Archive, transitioning the project away from CPB.

CPB Board members got an ominous preview Monday of the corporation’s upcoming white paper about spectrum issues in public broadcasting. At a meeting at CPB’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., Harry Hawkes of Booz & Co.’s media and technology practice told board members that if the FCC goes ahead with plans to clear 120 MHz of spectrum for use by mobile devices, 110 to 130 pubcasting stations will need to shift due to repacking even if their operators don’t participate in the auction. “That means that one-third of the system could have to change channels,” noted Vincent Curren, CPB’s c.o.o. “This will likely be more disruptive than the digital transition.

Remember Norwegian Public Television’s marathon broadcasts of five straight hours of knitting and five days of the “action” on a cruise-ship journey? Well, an American production company has acquired the rights to the trend now officially called Slow TV, reports the New York Post. LMNO Productions bought rights to the camera-switching technology that allows for verrrry long stretches of television. Pubcasters can jump on the trend thanks to Executive Program Service. EPS offers a more manageable, one-hour version of the Norway cruise and has trimmed Norwegian Public Television’s 10-hour documentary on the longest train journey in the country into a new 60-minute program.

Phil Charles, retired longtime g.m. of KGLT-FM in Bozeman, Mont., died Nov. 29 of heart failure at his home in Cape May Court House, N.J. He was 65. Charles joined KGLT in the 1980s and stayed for more than two decades before retiring in 2010. He introduced a freeform format on the station. A licensee of Montana State University, KGLT brands itself as “Alternative Public Radio” and airs music and several nationally distributed public radio programs. Before arriving in Bozeman, Charles worked at a series of alternative stations throughout the 1970s, including KSAN in San Francisco and KSJO and KOME in San Jose, Calif.