NewsWorks.org, the ambitious online community news site from WHYY in Philadelphia that launched in November, “just might be the most clearly articulated potential template for public media’s Web future,” notes NetNewsCheck in a story today (June 20). William J. Marrazzo, WHYY president, plans on pumping $1.1 million a year into the site, which has been in development for nearly a decade; NewsWorks generated about 45 percent of WHYY’s $100,000 online revenue during the company’s 2011 fiscal year. So far it receives about 210,000 visitors monthly, with a growth rate of about 20 percent per month. Marrazzo said the station wants to “cut our teeth on hyperlocal markets,” as well as broaden the multimedia skills of its journalists and reach a younger audience with the site.

WBGO in Newark, N.J., launches a new broadcast performance series this week, The Checkout: Live from 92YTribeca, hosted and curated by Josh Jackson as an extension of his weekly music magazine. Featuring modern jazz, the monthly series debuts on Wednesday, June 22 with a performance by New York-based pianist and composer Dan Tepfer, “one of the most formidable jazz musicians on the international stage,” and special guest saxophonist Noah Perminger. Performances will be broadcast live at 8 p.m. eastern on WBGO 88.3 FM, streamed on WBGO.org, and offered as a video webcast on NPR Music. The series is part of a larger service expansion that WGBO is rolling out this summer: it’s launching an HD Radio channel focusing on emerging jazz artists and strengthening its signal in Manhattan, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Summer 2011 issue of Nieman Reports is now online, chock full of intriguing reading on public-interest media. Former NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard ponders “Online Comments: Dialogue or Diatribe?” (her take: “We would have more honest, kinder, civil exchanges if people used their real names”). Other writers include former Steve Weinberg, Investigative Reporters and Editors director; and Michael Skolar, v.p. of interactive at Public Radio International. It’s published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

The fallout from Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s decision to end all state funding to public broadcasters continues. Five positions have been eliminated from WSRE’s full-time state of 27, the Pensacola State College station said in a statement online. Some local productions will go on hiatus pending future funding. And the station is dropping what it calls a “longtime favorite” program, The Lawrence Welk Show, to help reduce programming costs. “The difficult decision to cancel programs and eliminate the jobs of valued WSRE employees was made after an exhaustive review of our entire organization, and with the greatest reluctance,” said G.M.

LulzSec, the shadowy, mischievous hackers that launched a high-profile attack against PBS.org over Memorial Day weekend (Current, June 13), posted a statement Friday (June 17) explaining their motives and claiming they have access to far more secret information than they’ve revealed. “Do you think every hacker announces everything they’ve hacked?,” the statement says. “We certainly haven’t, and we’re damn sure others are playing the silent game. Do you feel safe with your Facebook accounts, your Google Mail accounts, your Skype accounts? What makes you think a hacker isn’t silently sitting inside all of these right now, sniping out individual people, or perhaps selling them off?

Triple-A music veteran Nic Harcourt is joining KCSN 88.5 FM at California State University, Northridge, the school announced Friday (June 17). Harcourt has spent 12 years a KCRW/Los Angeles, 10 as music director and host of the influential Morning Becomes Eclectic program. He was the first broadcaster to webcast in video live in-studio sessions and the first pubradio host to take the show on the road with live broadcasts from events in New York, Austin, Vancouver and London, the announcement notes. “Many artists, including Adele, Coldplay and Norah Jones, have credited Harcourt for putting them on the map and helping them achieve stardom,” it adds.

In a unique live broadcast that began Thursday (June 16), viewers of public television’s NRK2 in Norway can watch all 8,040 minutes of the Hurtigruten MMS Nordnorge cruise ship and its roughly 670 passengers and crew as the vessel steams north along Norway’s jagged coastline, reports Reuters. Coverage includes all on-board announcements and views from 11 cameras focusing on fjords, boat traffic around the ship, officers on the bridge and passengers strolling the decks. “It is slow, it is very slow,” said Rune Moeklebust, the project manager for the show. Moeklebust said 1.3 million of Norway’s 4.9 million residents at least were “stopping by” NRK2 between 8 p.m.

New application guidelines have just been posted for the Division of Public Programs on the National Endowment for the Humanities website for “America’s Media Makers: Development and Production” grants. One upcoming deadline is June 29, for “Bridging Cultures through Film: International Topics.” The division funds radio, television, and digital projects in the humanities intended for public audiences.

Jill Seltzer, former head of institutional advancement for WBEZ/Chicago Public Media, is the new president of the Screen Actors Guild Foundation. Seltzer told the Hollywood Reporter that her background dovetailed well with her new position. “The job is a mixture of fundraising, program delivery and management,” she said. The foundation is a separate entity from the guild and is responsible for its own fundraising. The organization serves actors, through targeted outreach, and the general public, through literacy programs in public schools, hospitals and shelters.

As part of a deal finalized Thursday (June 16), the 20 full- and part-time employees of WDUQ FM in Pittsburgh are terminated effective June 30, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports. Duquesne University is turning over control of the station to Essential Public Media, a joint venture between WYEP-FM and Public Media Co. (a new subsidiary of Public Radio Capital). Two employees, interim General Manager Fred Serino and Business Manager Vicky Rumpf, will remain through the transition.

The First Lady of Tanzania, Salma Kikwete, launched Kilimani Sesame’s Malaria Education Outreach Campaign today (June 16) in the East African country. The campaign includes four malaria prevention public service announcements for TV and radio in Swahili, as well as nearly 16,000 storybooks to be distributed to primary schools nationwide. Children got to hear Kikwete read the book titled Chandarua Salama (“The Safe Net”) at offices of Wanawake Na Maendeleo (WAMA) in Dar es Salaam, a charity headed by the First Lady. The storybook, printed in Swahili and English, follows Muppet friends Lulu, Neno and Kami as they go through their bedtime routine and learn the importance of sleeping under a bed net to prevent the mosquito-borne illness.

ProPublica has launched the Twitter stream #MuckReads, a way for readers, reporters and editors to share public-service news stories. The nonprofit investigative news org calls it the next evolution of its Investigations Elsewhere roundup. “#MuckReads is an experiment in social aggregation,” ProPublica said in on its site. “The feature as you see it is just the beginning. We’ve got big plans for feature upgrades and integration with Facebook, but first we want to see what works and what needs more tinkering.”

News 21, a journalism education project launched in 2005 at five j-schools, will be available to all journalism and mass communications programs in the country thanks to $3.9 million in new support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the two announced today (June 15). The support brings the total initiative to $19.7 million. It will be administered by Arizona State University. The expansion comes after an independent evaluation found the initiative has “already helped transform” curricula and is getting more students news jobs “at a critical juncture in the industry’s history,” the statement said.

The FCC’s latest report “The Information Needs of Communities” may be long on verbiage and short on remedies, but it does offer some key insights for independent producers, public media analyst Jessica Clark writes for the Association for Independents in Radio’s MQ2 blog. Public broadcasters’ expansion onto online and mobile platforms, as well as the explosion of nonprofit media outlets, creates new opportunities and more competition in many arenas, Clark writes. She points to a key FCC recommendation that policy makers reconsider which types of media deserve CPB aid. “[T]his report does not explicitly recommend additional funding for public broadcasting,” Clark writes, “However, it does recommend CPB funding requirements be reconsidered so that it’s easier for new kinds of projects and outlets to receive federal dollars.”

Fresno, Calif., broadcaster Radio Bilingüe has suspended the LAForward and Los Angeles Public Media projects “for the foreseeable future,” it announced Wednesday (June 15). “Radio Bilingüe’s efforts to secure a radio broadcast outlet in Los Angeles for LAPM have proven unsuccessful, while federal funding cuts to CPB’s digital appropriation are precluding the agency from assuring support to LAPM in the coming years,” the statement said. With backing from CPB, work began two years ago to develop and test programming for a new multiplatform public media outlet targeting young, educated minority listeners in Los Angeles (Current, July 20, 2009).