PBS on Wednesday officially announced its upcoming 20-episode Market Wars, at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour. In it, four antiques experts search cross-country for unique items to take to auction. Whoever makes the highest total profit at auction in each episode is named the winner. “With affectionate humor, Market Wars follows the combatants, gleaning the best tactics from the battlefield and arming viewers to pursue their own successful treasure hunts,” PBS said. Executive producer is Antiques Roadshow’s Marsha Bemko. Pubcasters first heard details of the show at the NETA convention in Kansas City, Mo., last October (Current, Nov.

SoundCloud, a web start-up that combines audio production with social networking, raised $50 million in new venture capital, according to TechCrunch. Investors including Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and GGV Capital of Menlo Park, Calif., are backing a ramped-up expansion in the United States for the Berlin-based company.

NPR and the Association of Independents in Radio unveiled a new payment structure for freelance contributors that provides a 7.5 percent increase to station-based and independent radio producers. The change, announced by interim news chief Margaret Low Smith to take effect immediately, includes a three-tiered compensation system and establishes standardized rates for tape syncs. “NPR’s decision to increase rates, which comes at a time of tight budgets, is intended to reflect our commitment to the vital network of station-based and independent reporters whose contributions enhance our programming every day,” Smith wrote in her Jan. 1 email. It took nearly a year of negotiations with AIR and internal consultations within NPR to adopt the new rate system, according to AIR President Sue Schardt.

The efforts by noncom Radio Bilingue, which is expanding and building five stations along the U.S.-Mexico border, “are key as the number of Latinos in the U.S. keeps growing and the nation moves toward a presidential election,” reports the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News. “We want to offer news and information that’s relevant to the lives of our listeners,” said executive producer Samuel Orozco, “so that they can use it as citizens, to be able to participate in the decision-making process and be active members of society.” “They’re a model of how Latino public broadcasting can flourish,” Florence Hernandez-Ramos, director of Denver-based Latino Public Radio Consortium, told the paper.

PBS is hoping to “make audiences think of public television more like the top-tier programming of HBO, Showtime and other channels they are willing to pay for,” according to the New York Times. As chief programmer John Wilson said, “Think of PBS and the local stations as premium television on the honors system.” An aggressive promotional campaign helped “Downton Abbey” on Masterpiece win six Emmy Awards, the paper noted. “The thinking was that [PBS] had to up their game,” said Kliff Kuehl, president of KCPT in Kansas City, Mo. “That’s what we’ve evolved to — trying to give people that pay-TV moment.”

A local “Ad-Hoc Committee for Responsible Public Radio” led by longtime pubcaster Fred Flaxman is asking the Federal Communications Commission to deny the license renewal of WCQS in Asheville, N.C., charging that the station violated requirements to form a community advisory board and conduct listener surveys, according to the Citizen-Times. The station filed a response with the FCC saying that it is now in compliance. “The matters raised by the petition are not only outside the FCC’s jurisdiction but have along ago been resolved” by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it said. The station’s broadcast license, held by Western North Carolina Public Radio (WNCPR), would have been automatically renewed on Dec.

“2012 will be a make or break year for public broadcasting in New Zealand,” according to the Spy Report, an Australian media news site. “New Zealand governments have never shown a strong commitment to public broadcasting, but 2011 has witnessed a remarkable dismantling of what little there was of public broadcasting on television.” On Dec. 23, it says, Stratos Television, the country’s only national independent noncom channel, went dark; its c.e.o., Jim Blackman, cited “transmission costs coupled with the economic environment and general lack of support at all levels” as the cause. The noncom children’s and family channel, TVNZ 6, ended broadcast on Feb.

The Tampa Bay Times is looking back at a rough year for pubcasters in the state, after Gov. Rick Scott’s decision in May to veto nearly $4.8 million in state funding. Public TV stations lost more than $300,000 and each public radio station saw a $60,000 drop. All told, in the Tampa Bay area, WEDU, WMNF and WUSF radio and TV stations lost a total of around $1 million. “And while Tampa Bay area public broadcasting fans initially responded with a surge in donations,” the paper noted, “as the year wore on, local stations found themselves increasingly challenged to find new, permanent solutions to the funding dilemma.”

Bob O’Rourke, a former vice president for public relations at the California Institute of Technology who helped develop several pubcasting science features, died Tuesday (Dec. 27) of complications following a lung transplant. He was 72. O’Rourke conceived the idea for AirTalk: The CalTech Edition, a collaboration with local NPR member station KPCC in Pasadena, Calif., as well as The Loh Down on Science, “the fun way to get your daily dose of science in less than two minutes,” hosted by Sandra Tsing Loh. He also was a driving force behind Curious, a four-part pubTV series from WNET that focused on the work of scientists at CalTech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The Federal Communications on Wednesday (Dec. 28) issued an order reaffirming the “tribal priority” it created in 2009 to bolster Native American rights in broadcast licenses. In a concurring statement, retiring Commissioner Michael Copps called the order a “wonderful step” toward “bringing modern telecommunications to Indian Country.” John Crigler, a longtime telecom attorney working with Native Public Media (NPM), told Current that the order recognizes “the inherent right of tribes to serve their own people, by recognizing that tribes and Alaska Native villages are political, not racial classifications.” Crigler said the FCC adopted a requirement that protects tribes from proposing a broadcast allocation, only to lose it to a non-tribal bidder at auction.

Kentucky Educational Television in Lexington begins programming partnerships with pubradio stations in the state in January, it said in a statement Wednesday (Dec. 28). Participating will be WEKU in Richmond and WKMS in Murray, with other pubcasters coming on soon. “Our partnership with Kentucky public radio stations will strengthen the public broadcasting service for Kentuckians by expanding access to trusted signature public affairs programming,” said Shae Hopkins, KET executive director. KET series and programs available to public radio stations for broadcast will include Kentucky Tonight, Comment on Kentucky, One to One with Bill Goodman, Connections with Renee Shaw, Education Matters, Jubilee, Legislative Update, candidate forums and election night coverage.

KNPB, PBS in Reno, Nev., will end children’s programming at 12:30 p.m. starting next week, cutting 2.5 hours from its nine-hour daily schedule of kids’ shows, reports Technorati, noting that the change “will put KNPB tied in third place for the fewest hours of daily children’s programs among 30 PBS affiliated stations surveyed in the western United States,” after California stations KRCB in Rohnert Park and KCSM in San Mateo, which is currently for sale. The new schedule goes into effect Jan. 2, 2012. In an email to Technorati, Kurt Mische, KNPB president, said that the changes “will allow us to serve a larger audience of viewers .

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, on the stump ahead of Iowa’s Jan. 3 GOP caucuses, today (Dec. 28) told a crowd at a deli in Clinton, Iowa, that if elected, he would end public broadcasting funding, reports ABC News. “We subsidize PBS,” he said. “Look, I’m going to stop that. I’m going to say, ‘PBS is going to have to have advertisements.’ We’re not going to kill Big Bird, but Big Bird’s going to have to have advertisements, all right? And we’re going to have endowments for the arts and humanities but they’re going to be paid for by private charity, not by taxpayers — or by borrowers.”

Robert A. Woods, 80, a retired founding partner in the communications law firm of Schwartz, Woods & Miller, died Dec. 22 following a long illness. A funeral service will be held Thursday morning in Bethesda, Md. The firm handled FCC and other matters for numerous public broadcasting stations as well as for common carriers and commercial broadcasters. Woods had served as outside general counsel for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and the Joint Council on Educational Broadcasting, which advocated the commission’s reservation of channels for educational TV in the 1950s. Woods and Louis Schwartz started the firm in 1970. Lawrence M.

An 11-page diatribe from a former Antiques Roadshow appraiser to producing station WGBH provides a look deep inside public television’s most popular national show as Roadshow knockoffs proliferate on cable channels. The issues raised by Gary Sohmers, a Hawaiian shirt-clad, Converse sneaker-wearing pop-culture expert, reveal in particular how intensely the program works to protect its brand. In the case of another appraiser, the Boston station stood its ground with a $900,000 copyright-infringement lawsuit. In response to Sohmers, WGBH is conducting an internal review of his complaints about the Appraisal Event Participation Agreement that all experts sign, though they are not financially compensated for work and must pay their own travel and hotel expenses for multiday shoots nationwide.