A federal appeals court on Monday upheld a constitutional ban on political advertising on public television and radio stations, Reuters reports. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled 8-3 that Congress was justified in prohibiting pubstations from running paid ads for for-profit entities, issues of public interest and political candidates. In April 2012, a three-judge panel of the same circuit voted to allow pubcasters to run those ads in the Ninth Circuit states of the West.

The new chair of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, is urging public broadcasters to sell their television bandwidth in upcoming spectrum auctions, reports TVNewsCheck. In an appearance Monday at Ohio State University in Columbus, Wheeler advocated for channel-sharing deals in which broadcasters would sell off pieces of spectrum and consolidate their signal with other broadcasters. Wheeler said that arrangement would give “forever cash-starved” pubcasters a “pot full of cash” that they could use as an endowment to run their operations while using spectrum more efficiently. “It may be just a great godsend to the PBS business,” said Wheeler, a former PBS Board member.

The cotton T-shirt, a public radio merchandising staple, is front-and-center in a new multimedia project from NPR's economics reporting unit Planet Money.

NPR news executive Stu Seidel and librarian Kee Malesky have accepted buyout offers from NPR, and social media strategist Andy Carvin has told Current that he plans to take the buyout as well. The employees will leave NPR at the end of the year. Seidel is the network’s managing editor for standards and practices. He worked for NPR as a freelance editor from 1996-98, then joined in December 1999 as senior editor of Weekend Edition Sunday after a year with Marketplace, where he was senior editor. He later worked as deputy managing editor for news. In 2011, he led coverage from Japan of the earthquake and tsunami that hit the country.

As more local pubcasters fall out of compliance with CPB’s rules for transparency and open meetings, they put themselves at risk of new financial penalties from the corporation’s Inspector General. Under a policy that took effect early this year, the IG has more flexibility to recommend fines for station grantees that don’t meet CPB’s standards for releasing financial records, for example, or for providing adequate notice of board meetings. One station — Lakeshore Public Media of northwest Indiana — has already been fined $5,000 because it failed to document announcements of public meetings. Many other stations are vulnerable to such penalties, according to CPB officials, who have been advising local pubcasters about problems with compliance during appearances at public media conferences.

Mountain Lake PBS will air a special live broadcast Dec. 6 to introduce the public to a rare collection of folk songs from the Adirondacks. The Plattsburgh, N.Y., pubcaster and TAUNY (Traditional Arts in Upstate New York) are partnering on the presentation, Songs to Keep: Treasures of an Adirondack Folk Collector, inspired by the Marjorie L. Porter Collection of North Country Folklore at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. Porter, a local historian and newspaper columnist, dedicated her life to preserving the tunes. Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, she traveled the state interviewing and recording musicians and singers and collecting songs, transcripts and writings.

Kentucky Educational Television’s Everyday Learning Collaborative today received more than $1.14 million in grants from the Louisville-based James Graham Brown Foundation and the national PNC Foundation. The new partnership among KET, the National Center for Families Learning and Metro United Way will provide resources for early childhood educators and families throughout the state, with a special focus on low-income children. The Brown Foundation’s grant of $818,775 is the second-largest private gift in KET’s history. As part of its Grow Up Great initiative, the PNC Foundation invested an additional $325,000. PNC had provided $150,000 in 2010 that helped launch KET’s Everyday Science for Preschoolers prototype.

New Jersey–based freeform community radio station WFMU will replace The Best Show on WFMU in January with a program hosted by comedian and musician Dave Hill.

Daphne Dowdy Jackson, v.p. of development and marketing at WPBT in Miami, moves in January to assume leadership of the OETA Foundation, the fundraising arm of OETA-The Oklahoma Network in Oklahoma City. The appointment was announced today by James Cook, chair of the OETA Foundation Board. Jackson will replace President Robert Allen, who retires at the end of December. At WPBT, Jackson oversees renewals, direct mail, additional gifts, telemarketing, sustainers, viewer services, on-air fundraising, major gifts, planned giving, grants and marketing. Jackson’s department raises about $9 million annually. From 2004-12, Jackson was g.m. at Basin PBS in Midland, Texas. She led a successful capital campaign to secure a new home and brought the station out of debt while producing several award-winning public television programs, the announcement said.

PBS just lost another executive to Telegraph Media Group. Jon Brendsel, currently v.p. of product development, will join former PBS digital head Jason Seiken at the London-based TMG in January. Brendsel will be group chief information officer, reports The Drum, a British-based marketing and media website. Brendsel has been at PBS since 2008. His past experience includes six years as senior technical director for America Online. He will report directly to Murdoch MacLenann, TMG’s chief executive.

The Columbia Journalism Review calls Localore “an innovative financing model may change the face of public radio” in an article out today. The project, which pairs independent producers with stations and began rolling out in September 2011, is the brainchild of the Association of Independents in Radio. AIR recently partnered with the Independent Television Service for a new round of funding for initiatives including Black Gold Boom. In the CJR piece, AIR Executive Director Sue Schardt said the project is working to transform the funding model for the pubradio system. “Most stations are really hermetically sealed,” she told the magazine.

PBS SoCal is canceling its longtime magazine show, Real Orange, reports the Orange County Business Journal. The positions for hosts Ed Arnold and Ann Pulice will be eliminated, as will one full-time production job and two part-time positions. Other production staffers will be reassigned. The program has aired on the Los Angeles station since 1997. Production ends in December. “We understand it’s a challenging transition for some of our colleagues,” said station spokesperson Stacy Shaffer, “but we do believe it’s the right decision to help move PBS SoCal forward and strengthen the value of the programming that we provide to Southern California.”