The FCC is sponsoring a workshop on June 25 on its plans to reimburse broadcasters for channel reassignment costs following the upcoming spectrum auctions. The 2012 Spectrum Act established a $1.75 billion TV Broadcaster Relocation Fund for those costs. Panelists will discuss issues they feel the FCC should consider when designing the payback, as well as possible models and lessons learned from similar previous programs. Appearing will be Jay Adrick, v.p., broadcast technology, Harris Corp.; Brett Haan, principal, Deloitte Consulting; Jane Mago, e.v.p. and general counsel, National Association of Broadcasters; and Patricia Tikkala, v.p., spectrum, Sprint Nextel Corp. The workshop will run from 2 until 3:30 p.m.

WITF in Harrisburg, Pa., is likely to go to an all-news format on weekdays, dumping the classical music that it now airs during middays, according to Pennlive.com. “We believe there is a need that WITF and NPR’s quality news can help to fill,” said Kathleen Pavelko, WITF’s president. “We also believe that this decision reflects what our listeners want.” WITF’s news programming is twice as popular as its classical music, and a listener survey found a larger appetite for more news programming as well. The station will still air local classical performances on weekend evenings and is launching an all-classical web stream.

Sesame Workshop’s 10th annual benefit gala this week raised more than $2 million, reports the Wall Street Journal. Honoree at the Wednesday (May 30) event at the opulent Cipriani 42nd Street was former President Bill Clinton. “When Elmo started on Sesame Street in 1984 he was 3½ years old and so was Chelsea,” Clinton said, referring to his daughter. “We never missed an episode. Now Chelsea’s 32, and Elmo’s still 3½. Savor it.” Emcee was The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart, who urged the crowd: “Take out a second mortgage! Do whatever you can.”

The National Film Society, the quirky duo that hosted PBS’s first Online Film Festival, now will have their own video creations featured on the PBS Digital Studios YouTube channel. Don’t miss their video announcement, during which they get a crash course in becoming pubcasters — complete with learning the lingo (“Check your local listings”) and drills to memorize station call letters (hey, nice shoutout to KUFM-TV in Missoula!).

Curious about WETA UK, the new all-Brit, all-the-time channel? Then check out its section on the station’s new blog, Programmer’s Choice. Entries are aimed at viewers (as well as pubcasters) wondering how and why the Arlington, Va., station decided to drop its WETA How-To (Create) to launch the nation’s only British multicast channel. Kevin Harris, station manager, explains in one post that while writing a white paper on the future of WETA’s multicast offerings, he and programmer Bryant Wilson discovered not only that those channels are popular within the Washington, D.C., market, but also that that the cable network BBC America was underserving the local audience.

WGBH has reached an agreement with its largest union, the Boston Globe is reporting. The contract terms are the same as March 2011, which the union had initially rejected. The agreement allows the pubcaster to assign individual employees to work across multiple platforms and to outsource work. “We have so many producers in house, but there are times when working with an outside producer makes sense, maybe for a particular project, or in terms of cost efficiencies,” said Jeanne Hopkins, WGBH spokesperson. The Association of Employees of the Educational Foundation, Communications Workers of America, Local 1300, represents 250 production workers, editors, producers, writers, and marketing staffers.

American Public Media’s Marketplace announced today that it is raising its pay rates for freelancers and other outside contributors by 8 percent to 20 percent. The programs, which include Marketplace, Marketplace Morning Report, Marketplace Tech Report and Marketplace Money, will also adopt the tiered freelance payment structure devised by the Association of Independents in Radio, which takes into account the journalist’s experience and the level of effort a piece requires. Contributors will negotiate these factors with the show when accepting assignments. Earlier this year, NPR also adopted the tiered payment structure and raised its pay rates as well.

LinkAsia, a weekly digital/broadcast hybrid news show from nonprofit Link TV, curates stories from citizen journalists as well as packages of official news from commercial and state-run networks including CCTV in China, NHK in Japan, MBC in Korea, NDTV in India and VTV4 in Vietnam. Overseeing the year-old program is George Lewinski, former senior editor at PRI’s The World and foreign editor at NPR’s Marketplace. “A show that started out as a weekly chronicle of politics and business in Asia, created for a U.S. audience — fed from syndicated news packages from Asian nations — is a full, nuanced ongoing examination of life as it is experienced by people who live there, juxtaposed with the ‘official portrait’ of that life by the region’s official media organizations,” writes Caty Borum Chattoo, a LinkAsia studio producer, on MediaShift.

Four foundations are giving PBS NewsHour a total of $3.55 million for on-air and online coverage of the 2012 presidential election, the economy, international developments, and health, science, education and arts news. Participants in the multi-foundation initiative announced today (May 30) are Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. “It’s especially encouraging to have this special general support from some of the nation’s leading foundations,” said Bo Jones, president of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. “It is key to supporting the program’s infrastructure and ability to grow.” The funds will enable NewsHour reporters to report from the field on issues critical in the election, such as jobs, the economy, immigration, education, the environment, and foreign policy, as well as file reports examining the changing nature of the American electorate.

An analysis from the Poynter Institute reveals that PBS and USA Today are the two media organizations that most effectively engage with readers via the visually oriented social network site Pinterest. Reporter Susanna Speier examined 13 local and national news organizations — including the Los Angeles Times, NBC News and Newsweek/The Daily Beast — to compared their average repin to pin ratios, which are similar to retweets and tweets on Twitter. The highest overall repin to pin ratio was PBS; on average, a pin on PBS was repinned six times. USA Today had an average of 4.4 repins; Newsweek/The Daily Beast, 4.3; and the Wall Street Journal, 4.2.

Now on current.org, text of the May 15 speech at the PBS Annual Meeting in Denver by Jason Seiken, head of PBS Interactive, which one g.m. called a “seminal moment” in public broadcasting. Three dozen general managers are coalescing around Seiken’s ideas to transform each station into the YouTube of their local community, allowing public television to serve “millions more people with billions more videos.”

Nearly a year ago, two of the East Coast’s largest metropolitan pubcasting powerhouses took over nine New Jersey pubradio stations, casting uncertainty over the future of public radio news coverage for Garden State listeners. The outlook has begun to brighten as New York Public Radio, operator of WNYC and WQXR, and Philadelphia’s WHYY have brought the New Jersey stations into their operational systems and refined plans to expand and deepen their reporting on New Jersey. For four decades, the New Jersey state government owned and subsidized public radio and TV services delivered through the New Jersey Network. Then last year, New Jersey policymakers decided they wanted out of the broadcasting business.

Here’s a look at “What ‹audio› means for public radio,” from Matthew Tift of Wisconsin Public Radio. Tift is on the panel for the first-ever Public Media Innovators webinar, at 2 p.m. Eastern Wednesday (May 30) from the National Center for Media Engagement and the Integrated Media Association. Subjects will include PBS’s COVE 2.0, the pros and cons of the PRX HTML5 jplayer for audio, and NPR’s experiment in continuous listening, Infinite Player.

The collaborations between several NBC owned-and-operated stations and nonprofit news enterprises, part of Comcast’s deal to takeover NBC-Universal (Current, Jan. 17), are generating “important stories they’ve broken together,” reports TVNewsCheck. KNBC Los Angeles and noncom KPPC-FM together revealed that a teacher arrested for sexually abusing students was paid to retire by the local school district. The nonprofit newsroom ProPublica provided data for stories on NBC stations in New York, Dallas, San Francisco, San Diego and Hartford, Conn., on federal stimulus money. And in Philadelphia, WCAU and noncom WHYY regularly share Web content such as political and cultural reporting and weather.