Rob Bole, CPB’s former vice president of Digital Media Strategy, is now helping lead digital media efforts for the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Bole and Raina Kumra are co-directors of a new board-initiated innovation practice integrated into the existing BBG Office of New Media, it announced Monday (June 27). Kumra previously served as senior new media advisor to the U.S. Department of State’s Office of eDiplomacy. The two will “help advance the BBG’s mission to reach larger worldwide audiences where they are through innovation, enterprise journalism and audience engagement,” a BBG statement said. They’ll work to streamline international broadcasting collaborations among BBG’s networks: the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio and TV Marti, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting.

PBS39 spent Monday (June 28) moving into new digs at the SteelStacks Public Media and Education Center in Bethlehem, Pa. The Morning Call reports the 29,000-square-foot building includes two high-definition studios, a green screen and twice as much office space as the previous studio. A 16-by-9-foot TV screen outside will give the public either a peek at what’s going on in the studio or a show. But that screen and other technical equipment is still weeks from delivery, due to production setbacks after the tsunami in Japan.

Independent journalists working in public media are having an increasingly tough time making their livings as producers for public television and radio, according to a survey of 206 indies commissioned by the Association of Independents in Radio and the Independent Television Service. Over the past three years, the financial struggles of working as an indie have become harder for 64 percent of those reporting and producing for radio. A much larger majority of TV and film indies — 81 percent — reported that their financial challenges have deepened. The outlook among radio indies, who comprised 75 percent of survey respondents, is somewhat brighter than for those working in television, film and Internet production, who made up only one-quarter of the survey sample.

Alabama Public Television is shuttering its state capital bureau and suspending production of its political roundtable, Capitol Journal. The shutdown, part of a network-wide downsizing that includes lay-offs for 19 staff, responds to the latest round of state funding losses for APT. With policymakers’ decision this year to cut APT’s subsidies by $1.3 million, APT has lost 50 percent of its state support since 2008, Executive Director Allan Pizzato tells the Montgomery Advertiser. He’s also scaling back operations at APT’s Huntsville station and ending production of the music series, We Have Signal. APT is the third public TV station to curtail its political coverage in response to funding cuts imposed by state policymakers: New Hampshire Public Television is putting New Hampshire Outlook on hiatus and Miami’s WLRN is dropping legislative coverage from the Florida Public Radio Network.

The New Jersey Senate was one vote short of blocking WNET’s agreement to take over the New Jersey Network, the Star-Ledger reported Monday night (June 27). A similar resolution had overwhelmingly passed the Assembly last week. Public Media NJ, a nonprofit subsidiary of WNET/Thirteen, takes over the NJN TV operations Friday (July 1). Some lawmakers were not pleased. “New Jersey’s taxpayers will be on the hook for millions of dollars annually to support the continued operation,” Sen. Loretta Weinberg said, noting that the state will spend at least $4.7 million a year. “So while we hand this network off to a New York operator, we are not saving that much money.”

The departure of the entire four-person faculty from Maine’s small but influential Salt Institute for Documentary Studies has caused concern among the school’s alumni, many of whom found their way into public radio via Salt’s unique classes in audio production. The teachers who left have either declined to discuss their resignations publicly or said their reasons for leaving were personal and unrelated. The executive director of the Portland-based school and its board of trustees echo those accounts. That has done little to assure alums, however, who fear that the close timing of the departures suggests problems behind the scenes. “It’s a pretty clear picture that there’s an underlying issue and a reason they all decided to leave,” says Jen Dean, a photographer and Salt grad who has represented alumni in meetings with Salt leadership.

John Kaplan was scared. He’d been diagnosed with not one but two types of lymphoma, and chemotherapy had begun to ravage his once-thick head of hair. So he did what came naturally when confronted with human drama: Kaplan, a photographer and teacher of photography, picked up a camera and began to shoot. “For me initially, it was a way to cope with fear,” Kaplan says. He assigned the story to himself and went to work. That simple self-portrait in his bathroom mirror — a haggard-looking man holding a camera above his shedding pate — became his first work on a triumphant personal documentary that has won more than 20 awards, including a Cine Golden Eagle.

A Dutch government proposal to scale back activities of its overseas broadcaster, Radio Netherlands Worldwide, is unlikely to affect its most widely carried English-language programs on U.S. public radio stations, according to editors and managers behind the shows. The subject areas of The State We’re In and Earth Beat both would fit well within reorganization plans outlined by Dutch policymakers this month — to focus the service on freedom of expression in countries where such rights are suppressed. The Dutch cabinet also proposed to operate RNW as an arm of the Foreign Ministry. The change — set to be debated by the Dutch Parliament this week — is part of a fiscal-austerity plan that would strip some 20 percent of RNW’s government funding.

The Knight Foundation awarded $420,000 last week to support the development of Zeega, an open-source HTML5 platform co-created by independent public radio producer Kara Oehler, a creator of the Mapping Main Street project. Zeega will enable the creation of “participatory multimedia projects on web, tablet and mobile devices,” according to its website. The platform will allow creators to combine web-based media including audio, maps, photos, video and text. Oehler and her collaborators, Jesse Shapins and James Burns, were inspired to create Zeega after producing the multimedia Mapping Main Street project, according to an article in the Harvard Gazette. (The three are affiliated with the university.)

New Jersey’s lower legislative house last week voted down the plan by Gov. Chris Christie (R) to turn over the channels and role of the NJN television network to New York’s WNET, and the state Senate is expected to follow if it votes Monday, June 27, according to observers on NJN’s Reporter’s Roundtable. NJN may disappear even if the Senate concurs with the Assembly, however. Last week Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Paul Sarlo (D) raised the option of extending NJN funding for a few more months but predicted that the governor would veto it. The issue has been fully partisanized.

The new report to the FCC about the state of the media and the future of American journalism estimates that filling gaps in local reporting would cost from $265 million to $1.6 billion a year. It also suggests various ways in which the government could help nonprofit media afford to bridge that chasm. “The main focus of government policy should not be providing the funds to sustain reporting but helping to create conditions under which nonprofit news operations can gain traction,” the report advises. But observers point out that the FCC has no power to make many of those changes, which include adjusting tax laws for pubmedia organizations, getting foundations to fund more journalism, and rethinking CPB’s legislated spending proportions to allot more money to nonbroadcast and multimedia innovators.

One of the Knight News Challenge winners announced last week was Zeega, an open-source HTML5 platform co-created by independent public radio producer Kara Oehler, a creator of the Mapping Main Street project, which received $420,000. Zeega will enable the creation of “participatory multimedia projects on web, tablet and mobile devices,” according to its website. The platform will allow creators to combine media web-based media including audio, maps, photos, video and text. Oehler and her collaborators, Jesse Shapins and James Burns, were inspired to create Zeega after producing the multimedia Mapping Main Street project, according to an article in the Harvard Gazette.

LulzSec, the hacking group that saw itself as pirates on the Web seas, has disbanded and ceased all activity, according to its final statement posted on Sunday (June 26). Its 50-day run of Internet security breaches included targeting PBS.org (Current, June 13) to protest Frontline’s “WikiSecrets” report; its six members also hit Sony, the U.S. Senate, the FBI and Britain’s X Factor TV show. What was it all about? ” … [W]e truly believe in the AntiSec movement. … We hope, wish, even beg, that the movement manifests itself into a revolution that can continue on without us.

John F. Gregory, an early general manager at KPCC-FM in Pasadena, Calif., died May 9 at his Los Angeles home. Gregory led the station at Pasadena City College in the late 1970s and early ’80s, longtime KPCC newsman Larry Mantle wrote on a station blog. During that time Gregory professionalized the station, establishing it as one of the first NPR-member stations and hiring a full-time staff of five to qualify for CPB funding. He hired Mantle as news director in 1983. After the college separated from the Pasadena city public school system, the station went with the college and changed its call letters from KPCS to KPCC in 1979.

Bob Paquette, senior news producer and local host of Morning Edition at WFCR-FM in Amherst, Mass., died unexpectedly May 28 of an apparent heart attack. He was 55. For many listeners, Paquette was “the voice of WFCR every morning,” station General Manager Martin Miller said in a release. “There are no words to express our shock and grief over the loss of our colleague and friend Bob Paquette. Our heartfelt condolences and sympathies go out to Bob’s husband, Michael Packard, and to their families, friends and colleagues.” “Believe it or not, getting up at 4 a.m. is not such a bad gig,” Paquette said in his profile on the station’s website.