Jane Krutz, an enthusiastic advocate for more than 47 years for the Arkansas Educational Television Network, died Sunday (March 25) in Little Rock. She was 86. “It is literally true that there might not have been an AETN without her,” Allen Weatherly, executive director of AETN, said in a tribute on the network’s website. “In fact, she was advocating for a public television station for Arkansas years before we finally made it to the air in the mid 1960s.” Krutz frequently appeared during membership drives, testified before Congress for public broadcasting in 1995, served since 1996 on the AETN Commission, and received the PBS National Volunteer of the Year award.

The PBS NewsHour is developing a Friends of the NewsHour initiative, similar to that created for WGBH’s Masterpiece strand, to allow viewers to contribute directly to the weeknight news program. The fund would solicit gifts from major donors. Bo Jones, president of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, told Current that he’s just begun to plan the project. “We want to consult with local stations to elicit ideas and their input,” he said. “We plan for Friends to be a cooperative effort with the stations.” The Masterpiece Trust has raised more than $2.5 million since January 2011, said Ellen Frank, director of major gifts at WGBH in Boston.

CPB has awarded a $500,000 grant to NPR in support of its international news coverage. The grant, announced during a March 26 awards dinner honoring NPR correspondent Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, supports travel costs for reporters and their producers, as well as the work of NPR’s foreign desk editors, according to CPB Chair Bruce Ramer. As NPR’s foreign desk steps up its reporting from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, reporters are putting themselves “on the frontline of historic news events,” Ramer said.”This will help NPR stay on the story as long as it takes.” “This is going to be so important for our work,” said NPR President Gary Knell.

KQED has moved its Silicon Valley offices to downtown San Jose, within walking distance of City Hall. The new site includes office space, multiplatform production facilities and the TV studio for KQED Plus, the new identity of KTEH after the Monterey pubstation merged with KQED six years ago (Current, May 15, 2006).  KQED Plus is led by Executive Director Becca King Reed, producer of This is Us, the weekly magazine show profiling individuals from South Bay. KQED’s main headquarters remains in San Francisco.

NPR tapped CNN veteran Edith Chapin to run its foreign desk News chief Margaret Low Smith announced Chapin’s appointment last week along with another change on its foreign desk: Didi Schanche, a former Associated Press correspondent and editor who joined NPR in 2001, is to become deputy senior foreign editor. When Chapin officially signs on May 14, she will oversee NPR foreign correspondents based in 17 bureaus worldwide as well as a team of editors and reporters in Washington, D.C. She succeeds longtime foreign desk editor Loren Jenkins, who departed last November. Chapin has spent her entire career at CNN, beginning in 1987.

On a recent afternoon at NPR, Andy Carvin was watching a video of a protest purportedly shot in the Syrian city of Homs, a locus of that country’s uprising against its repressive regime. The video’s location surprised Carvin, considering the firepower the government has unleashed on the city to quell the uprising. As he often does, he looked for telltale landmarks in the background, listened to the chants and accents of the protesters, and checked if the weather in the video matched the day’s forecasts. He ended up asking his Twitter contact who had disseminated the video for more verification. This vetting process occupies most of Carvin’s workdays.

Southern Oregon University has fired longtime Jefferson Public Radio Executive Director Ron Kramer, the Mail Tribune in Medford, Ore., is reporting. Kramer held both positions since 1974. University President Mary Cullinan presented Kramer with the termination letter on Friday (March 23). The move does not affect Kramer’s position as head of the JPR Foundation, the station’s fundraising organization. A recent university audit had advised against Kramer holding both those positions, citing a potential conflict of interest. Kramer’s termination is effective June 30.

The FCC has delayed decisions on two transactions involving sales of public TV stations to Daystar Television Network to examine whether the religious broadcaster meets its criteria for localism and educational programming by noncommercial broadcasters. The scrutiny scuttled a deal involving WMFE in Orlando, pending for nearly a year, and held up a decision on KWBU in Waco, Texas. Daystar, a Texas-based religious network, has been in the market for public TV stations since at least 2003, when it paid $20 million for KERA’s second TV channel in Dallas. It most recently bid on KCSM in San Mateo, Calif. The WMFE sale fell apart after the FCC sent queries to the local entities that had been set up to operate the Orlando and Waco stations.

The merger of PBS member station WTVI in Charlotte, N.C., with Central Piedmont Community College was approved March 20 by Mecklenburg County commissioners in a 6–3 vote, saving the station from going dark. Like a number of other troubled stations, WTVI’s broadcast area is overlapped by other PBS outlets — in this case, South Carolina ETV as well as North Carolina’s UNC-TV network. The county will provide $357,000 to finalize the deal and $800,000 over the next four years for equipment upgrades. The college will use WTVI as a base for journalism and videography courses and develop a digital media curriculum.

PBS has agreed to consider “alternative scheduling options” for the independent production showcases Independent Lens and POV, which lost carriage and audience after the network moved their shared time slot from Tuesday to Thursday nights. By late last week, several hundred producers had signed an online petition started by Chicago-based Kartemquin Films after Current reported March 15 [2012] on negotiations over scheduling of the series. The petition concludes: “We are deeply concerned that PBS’ poorly considered decision could jeopardize both the meeting of public broadcasting’s mission and . . . the innovation that is crucial to the future of public broadcasting.”

American Public Media will begin distributing the BBC World Service to U.S. pubradio stations July 1 [2012], ending the British network’s 26-year distribution relationship with Public Radio International. A five-year BBC-PRI contract is expiring, but the two networks will still collaborate on their co-productions such as The World and The Takeaway. Portions of the World Service air on 521 stations in the U.S. “BBC World Service radio has been enjoying record audiences in the U.S., and we are delighted to be working with American Public Media to ensure that more U.S. listeners have access to the BBC’s impartial international journalism and programming across public radio,” said Richard Porter, controller, English, for the BBC, in a statement to Current.