PBS’s budget for next year reflects a harsh reality: Revenues from member stations are flat for a third straight year, and scant other income opportunities lie ahead. The all-important annual program budget, as projected for fiscal year 2012, will remain at about $200 million, where it’s been stalled for a decade. For the first time in the past five years, there will be no new children’s series. The News and Public Affairs Initiative is on hold. PBS is retooling its primetime schedule to attract more viewers and underwriters and negotiating to push down program production costs per hour. “We are finding ourselves focused more and more on what we can do,” PBS President Paula Kerger said in an interview with Current.

PBS has postponed the rollout of an online news aggregation site called PBSnews.org that it had planned to start in January or February. ... Plans for the news site had grown out of the PBS News and Public Affairs Initiative and a report filed almost two years ago by Tom Bettag, a network news veteran ...

Jim Lehrer, who has reported the news of the day for more than 50 years, became part of it May 12 when he announced that he will step away from the weeknight anchor desk at PBS NewsHour in June. A big Washington Post story the next day, dominating the feature section, lauded him as “one of America’s most respected newsmen.” It estimated that come June 6, when Lehrer cuts back to once-weekly appearances, he will have anchored some 8,000 broadcasts “and a few zillion newsmaker interviews.” This week (May 19) Lehrer turns 77. “I feel good about this,” Lehrer told Current May 13.

OK, it’s really, truly, finally official: A Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor is indeed retiring. That’s what he tells the New York Times, anyway. “In order to have some say about this and in order to maneuver this, I should do this sooner rather than later,” he says in today’s (May 13) story. “One should not wait for the very last minute, when one has become a pitiful hulk shambling on and off stage exciting the sympathy of the audience. I don’t want to come to that point.” When Keillor told the AARP Bulletin in March that he was leaving, Minnesota Public Radio chief Bill Kling, who brought Prairie Home into national distribution, downplayed the announcement as a publicity stunt.

Western Massachusetts broadcaster WFCR-FM has adopted a new name — one that seems to speak of ongoing expansion: New England Public Radio. CEO Martin Miller announced the plans at a station event Wednesday night. Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the station announced it has arranged to buy new quarters in downtown Springfield, south of its longtime home in Amherst, and has bought a new FM frequency in the Berkshire Mountains town of Adams, northwest of Amherst. The news and classical music station, licensed to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, added a second program schedule, all-news/talk, on a leased station in the 1990s and in October acquired WNNZ-AM for the schedule.

The fifth issue of Pop Up Magazine — self-described as “the world’s first live magazine” — unfolded onstage in New York last night (May 12) with a 25-member cast that included WNYC’s Radiolab producer Pat Walters. In a May interview, Pop Up’s Editor in Chief Dougal McGray explained the group’s origin in 2009: “We’re a small group of old friends — writers, editors and designers who have worked for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, This American Life, The Atavist, Wired, Spin and Interview. On a whim, we decided to launch a magazine that would exist for just one night, live on stage.

Late last month, PBS began “experimenting” with a new sponsorship format for online videos of its major broadcast TV programs, writes PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler. And now Getler is receiving letters of complaint from online viewers. Videos of shows such as Frontline and Masterpiece now have a couple 15- to 30-second sponsorship messages from commercial companies inserted within the program, not before or after as in TV broadcasts. While only a “handful” of people have written to Getler, ” it struck me as a potentially fundamental change in approach that was worth recording.” Jason Seiken, s.v.p. for PBS Interactive, told Getler that this potential revenue stream is necessary because PBS.org

In a long-anticipated news anchor succession at NPR, Audie Cornish will become host of Weekend Edition Sunday after Liane Hansen, who helmed the broadcast for two decades, retires. “Audie is an outstanding journalist and wonderful storyteller,” said Ellen McDonnell, executive director of news programming, in this morning’s NPR announcement. “Audiences will connect with her warmth, curiosity and humor. We’re thrilled she is taking on this new role.” Cornish, who now covers Capitol Hill and guest-hosts NPR newsmagazines as a substitute, is an experienced news and feature reporter. She covered the campaign trail during the 2008 presidential election and spent three years reporting from the south as NPR’s Nashville-based correspondent.

Jim Lehrer, anchor of PBS NewsHour and its former incarnations for 36 years, is stepping away from the weeknight broadcast, the Washington Post is reporting. Lehrer, 76, said he would leave as anchor on June 6 but continue to appear on Fridays to moderate the show’s weekly news analysis segment featuring a panel of journalists. He will also continue to be involved with the program’s producer, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, based in Arlington, Va. In a statement, Lehrer said the timing was based on “the complete integration of the NewsHour’s on-air and online operations” (Current, Jan. 11, 2010) and his “complete confidence in the current NewsHour team, both on-and-off-camera, to continue producing the nightly program and its companion website as a haven for ‘MacNeil/Lehrer Journalism’: serious, fair-minded daily reporting steeped in the traditions of the broadcast’s co-founders.”

This just in, the NPR Store is now offering a Carl Kassell Autograph Pillow and Pen, which it readily admits is an “odd homage” to the longtime NPR newscaster and Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! scorekeeper and answering machine voice. The item’s existence immediately prompted a heartfelt apology from Cowering NPR on Twitter. The anonymous Tweeter/s also revealed that the eerie-looking pillow is actually last year’s NPR Labs creation.

The pending sale of WMFE-TV in Orlando to Daystar, a Texas-based religious broadcaster, has generated more than 450 comments to the FCC, the Orlando Sentinel reports today (May 12). Here’s one: “The contemplation of this sale was never pre-announced to the general public by the current governing organization,” writes Lawrence D. Stephey of Winter Park, Fla. “Had the public known, I’m sure a number of extraordinary fund raising campaigns would have been launched to preserve the frequency for educational use.” Meanwhile, two University of Central Florida students have launched a web campaign to save the station, via a website and Facebook page.

Ken Burns, star PBS documentarian, and Michael Moore, a onetime sensation on PBS’s POV series, will among the regulars on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, scheduled to appear weeknightly on Al Gore’s Current TV channel starting June 20. Olbermann left the MSNBC cable channel in January after NBC execs discovered to their dismay that their lead anchorman, known for ceaseless, vehement criticism of the Bush administration, had contributed to Democratic campaigns. Current TV is carried on cable systems reaching 60 million households in this country and on its website, Current.com (or Current.tv). 

Federal Communications Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker is leaving the agency to oversee government affairs for Comcast, the New York Times reports. The move comes just four months after Baker voted to approve the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal. Craig Aaron, president of the media reform group Free Press, said the departure is “just the latest, though perhaps most blatant, example of a so-called public servant cashing in at a company she is supposed to be regulating.”