For more than 20 years, public radio has followed a winning formula that is often summarized as “super-serve the core.” That is, a station will be most successful with listeners if it picks a specific type of listener — the core audience — and plans its schedule to attract and hold that type throughout the day and the week.Critics of the core audience strategy object that public radio ends up serving only a well-educated and middle-aged slice of the public — recently a cume audience of 11 percent of the population within a week, which is still a large audience by many measures.At

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service on Monday (April 4) released a report, “Findings from Ready to Learn: 2005-2010,” (PDF) that distills several research and evaluation studies of the early childhood literacy initiative funded by Congress and the U.S. Department of Education in 1992. Among the findings: — PBS shows featuring Ready to Learn concepts motivate children to request trips to bookstores or libraries for books; — preschool-age children who watch Sesame Street spend more time reading for pleasure in high school, and they get better grades in English, math, and science than kids who don’t; — when Ready To Learn video, online, and print materials were combined with teacher training, lesson planning, and classroom instruction, kids from low-income backgrounds were able narrow or close the achievement gap with middle-class kids.

St. Louis Public Radio will break ground for its $10 million new home on April 15. General Manager Tim Eby says the three-story, 27,000-square-foot building is expected to take a year to complete. It’ll be just east of the city’s PBS member station KETC.

The beta version of the Federal Communications Commission’s new website is now live. “This beta launch isn’t a beta in a traditional sense,” writes FCC Managing Director Steven VanRoekel on the Official FCC Blog page. “FCC.gov will change again — and quickly. It’s an approach that’s fairly foreign to the way most agencies work on the Web. But we’ll build this new experience on a solid, future-ready platform; we’re taking a page from the online entreprenuer’s playbook, releasing products quickly and often, and letting the many eyes of the Web drive the continuous improvement we hope FCC.gov will come to embody.”

America’s Public Television Stations presented a Champion of Public Broadcasting Award to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), a key ally in the battle to preserve federal funding for public broadcasting. Sen. Reid has been an advocate for increasing CPB aid and for preserving Ready to Learn, the federal program that provides funding for some PBS Kid shows. This year, Sen. Reid been an outspoken opponent of House Republicans’ efforts to defund CPB and NPR. After the House approved H.R. 1076 last month, Sen. Reid declared that the bill was “unlikely” to gain any traction among Senate lawmakers. “Harry Reid steps in the ring every year on our behalf to ‘float like a butterfly, and sting like a bee,'” said Tom Axtell, g.m.

PBS NewsHour newsman Jim Lehrer is this year’s recipient of the Fourth Estate Award, the highest honor from the National Press Club. “Jim Lehrer has embodied the time-tested core values of journalism dating back to when many people had only black and white screens and continuing through today’s era of high definition television and social media,” National Press Club President Mark Hamrick said in a statement. “Amid the cacophony of a sometimes shrill media landscape, he has remained the true voice of reason, balance and fairness.” Lehrer is the 39th recipient. Previous award winners include Walter Cronkite, Christiane Amanpour and David Broder.

An April 2 fire at KUAR-FM in Little Rock, Ark., is being investigated as possible arson by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. When the station suddenly went off the air around 5:30 p.m. Saturday, the station’s engineer went to the transmitter site on Shinall Mountain to determine the problem. Smoke was pouring from the building but the lock on the front door had been changed so he couldn’t enter. KUAR is currently using a standby transmitter to broadcast at a lower power, and General Manager Ben Fry estimates damages at between $100,000 and $200,000.

The Center for Public Integrity is launching the iWatch News site dedicated to nonprofit investigative journalism, the New York Times is reporting today (April 4). It’ll be updated daily with 10 to 12 original investigative pieces and aggregated content from other sources on money and politics, government accountability, health care, the environment and national security.

OK, so CNN discovered that some Americans think that public broadcasting accounts for 5 percent of the federal budget, or $178 billion (yes, with a “b”) annually. Whew. That got Salon columnlist Alex Pareene thinking about what NPR and PBS could do with that kind of money — like Thai silk tote bags filled with precious stones as pledge premiums.

WMFE is offering members a chance for donation rebates now that it has announced its pending sale to Daystar, the Orlando Sentinel is reporting. The station also told the paper that WMFE “had numerous conversations over the course of the last year about the various issues facing our station” with PBS, “including the burdens associated with being in an overlap market, the unsuccessful PBS fundraising platform and the inequities of the fee structure, which was predicted to increase by 37 percent over the next two years.” A source familiar with the PBS dues structure tells Current that under the existing model and early estimates for fiscal 2012, WMFE’s fiscal dues would increase around 6.1 percent; under the proposed formula being considered, its dues would not increase.

Jose Fajardo, president of WMFE in Orlando, told WMFE-FM today (April 4) that station management and the board “looked at mergers, partnerships, going the KCET route as an independent public TV station” before deciding on the sale, announced April 1. “The numbers just didn’t add up, no matter which alternative we looked at.” One insurmountable problem he cited: PBS dues. He said WMFE pays about $1 million dollars a year, and he said that could increase up to 37 percent under a new formula the network is considering. Meanwhile, its pledge support is down 34 percent since 2007. After WMFE’s sale announcement, PBS released a statement saying: “PBS learned today of WMFE’s decision to sell its television station.

Community Educators of Orlando Inc. — which has the same mailing address and president as Daystar religious broadcasters — has filed with the FCC to purchase WMFE in Orlando, Current learned today (April 4). Greg Guy, a managing partner at media broker Patrick Communications in Elkridge, Md., confirmed the $3 million price. The FCC application, filed by WMFE licensee Community Communications Inc., can be viewed here.

WHDD in Sharon, Conn., the smallest NPR station in the country, gets its own story in today’s (April 4) New York Times. “In its own eccentric way, in these quite perilous times for public broadcasting, WHDD is not a bad model for what truly public radio might be,” it notes. The station — motto: “Robinhood Radio: Slightly off … but very good” — airs an eclectic amalgam of shows, from segments on language by Nat Benchley, grandson of humorist Robert Benchley and brother of Peter, author of Jaws; to shows on NASCAR racing and Indian music. As one fan put it, it’s “a hybrid between an old fashioned-community radio station and a highbrow NPR station.”

“It would be a shame,” writes New Republic reporter Eliza Gray, “if populists and yuppies, fighting a culture war over tony NPR, ended up taking down PBS in the process” as Congressional budget cuts continue to loom for funder CPB. She contends that “yuppie elites” are focused on saving NPR because “they’re afraid they won’t be able to poach eggs and drink coffee on Sunday morning anymore while listening to This American Life.” None of the GOP criticisms of liberalism apply to PBS, she notes, “whose viewers mirror the demographic makeup of the United States almost exactly, yet its budget still appears to be on the chopping block along with NPR’s.”

Now might not seem like the best time for the public broadcasting system to be pondering philosophical questions of identity and purpose, since its unwanted promotion to high-profile partisan punching bag in Congress. The official ponderers of the system’s Editorial Integrity for Public Media initiative beg to disagree. Now more than ever, they say, public broadcasting must make its case by defining its purpose and identity to the larger world — because if it doesn’t, its critics will. “In this political environment there’s a lot being thrown around about integrity, bias, and ‘just who are these public broadcasting guys, anyway?’” said Tom Thomas of the Station Resource Group, co-director of the editorial initiative.