The New Jersey Public Broadcasting Authority — whose future is set to be debated yet again today (Dec. 9) in Trenton — has approved two long-term lease agreements, hopeful that the New Jersey Network will remain in the state after it is cut loose from state funding (Current, July 6). So far interested buyers include WNET/Thirteen and WNYC in New York City and Philadelphia-based WHYY. The Senate State Government Committee is expected to discuss today disbanding the authority and could consider a bill to give control of NJN’s future to a bi-partisan committee of legislators.

Nonprofits remain upset with Apple’s ongoing ban on making donations on the iPhone through charity apps. Donors are directed out of a nonprofit’s app and to its own website, making the process of contributing more cumbersome. CPB and the Public Radio Exchange met about three years ago with Eddy Cue, the Apple exec in charge of iTunes, which handles the App Store. “We heard there were really serious internal discussions about this at Apple after that, but we haven’t gotten any traction,” Jake Shapiro, executive director of PRX, told the New York Times in a story Wednesday (Dec. 8). “One of Apple’s major objections,” he said, “has been that if donations were to go through its payment mechanism, it would have to be in the business of managing and distributing funds and verifying charities as well.”

The Association of Independents in Radio (AIR) and Independent Television Service (ITVS) have teamed up to survey the field of independent journalists who have been paid or commissioned to produce reporting for public radio, TV or digital platforms within the past two years. The Scan of Public Media’s Independent Journalists, to be conducted by MarketTrends Research through Dec. 31, was commissioned by CPB to provide a more complete picture of the journalistic capacity of the field. It complements findings of the census of public radio and television journalists conducted this summer by Public Radio News Directors, Inc. This survey seeks insights about formats and distribution outlets for indie media makers, as well as their sources of income outside of public media.

Veteran Chicago newsman and former Vocalo writer Robert Feder has joined Time Out Chicago, a weekly cultural magazine, as media critic. Feder left Vocalo in November, just as the blogs were moving from an independent site to WBEZ’s online home.

The new chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee is Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.). That’s good news for pubcasters, because also in the running was Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), who favors halting all federal funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Rogers, on the other hand, voted in June 2005 to restore $100 million for CPB. And earlier that year, when Kentucky Educational Television reached out to him, Rogers helped raise awareness of public broadcasting’s role in public safety efforts, culminating in a partnership between APTS and the Department of Homeland Security/FEMA on the Digital Emergency Alert System (DEAS).

Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), sponsor of a bill to defund CPB, has asked the Government Accountability Office to audit CPB and NPR funding. Two Texas congressman sent a similar letter to the independent investigative agency on Nov. 18, singling out NPR. In a Tuesday (Dec. 7) press release, Lamborn said that “it is imperative that an accurate and complete snapshot of CPB’s use of taxpayer funding be available to lawmakers and the public. Unfortunately,” he said, “the charts, figures, statistics and documents posted on these entities’ websites — and often cited in the news media — do not sufficiently account for the complicated revenue streams between and within these entities. 

WBUR in Boston has a new general manager. Charles Kravetz, longtime news and programming director of New England Cable News, is stepping into the position to be vacated by Paul La Camera on Jan. 1, 2011. Upon arriving at the new cable channel in 1992, Kravetz assembled a news operation from scratch. Within five months he supervised the building of a newsroom, hired 90 staffers and started 24-hour programming. He also opened four new state bureaus and led the news team to Peabody, Murrow and duPont-Columbia awards.

A white paper on the future of public media warns that the field must step up its public advocacy and structural reforms if it is to meet the news and information needs of local communities and citizens. “Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive,” by veteran news exec Barbara Cochran, follows up on the recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, October 2009. That report challenged public broadcasting to “move quickly toward a broader vision of public service media,” one that is “more local, more inclusive and more interactive.”

Alyce Myatt, a programmer and former producer who has experience with foundations, PBS and production, is the new director of media arts for the National Endowment for the Arts. She starts work Jan. 3 as head of NEA’s grantmaking in film, video, audio, web and other electronic media. Myatt served as PBS’s director of children’s programming, an e.p. for Children’s Television Workshop and Nickelodeon, as a grantmaker for the MacArthur Foundation and, most recently, as executive director of Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media, an association of foundations interested in media. She succeeds Ted Libbey, the NPR music commentator and now PBS arts advisor, who took the NEA job in 2002.

KLRU in Austin, Texas, has set the stage (literally) for what it calls a “world-class celebration” to unveil its new Austin City Limits theater. The big event is Feb. 24, 2011, and rocker Steve Miller and his band will do the honors. A new Austin city skyline backdrop will also be revealed — fans of the show know what a big deal that is. The move has been several years in the planning (Current, July 20, 2009) and will provide the iconic music show with a 2,500-seat auditorium (up from its present 250) in a $300 million downtown redevelopment (as opposed to its nearly hidden studio on the University of Texas campus).

Calling it a “first-of-its-kind agreement,” the Washington Post is reporting today (Dec. 7) that noncom Pacifica Radio is adding the Middle East-based news channel Al Jazeera English to its five outlets nationwide. Stations in New York, Houston and Berkeley, Calif., will begin to carry the audio portion of Al Jazeera’s TV news broadcast this week; Los Angeles and Washington will do so next year. Pacifica is the first American radio broadcaster to air programming from AJE, the English-language offshoot of the Arabic-language Al Jazeera network. Read the Pacifica press release here. Houston NBC affiliate KPRC/Local 2 shot a segment this morning at Pacifica’s KPFT.

Four ITVS films were honored last week (Dec. 3) at the IDI Documentary Awards ceremonies, presented by by the International Documentary Association: “Waste Land,” which received the IDA Pare Lorentz Award; “For Once in My Life,” for music documentary; “Bhutto,” the ABC News VideoSource Award; and “The Oath,” the IDI Humanitas Award. Watch clips here.

Hollywood’s The Wrap eyeballs the overall public broadcasting picture — “Massive budget shortfalls, vicious in-fighting and a power shift in Washington” — and predicts even more dire times ahead. Congressional champions are few, it says, and the incoming GOP members are even more anti-pubcasting than during the mid-1990s, when CPB was nearly extinguished. “These people are more conservative to the point where the only media they see as legitimate is Fox, and everything else is unreliable,” says Raphael Sonenshein, a professor of political science at Cal State Fullerton. And just how relevant is public broadcasting? “All media is being asked to reinvent itself — and that includes public media,”says Tom Glaisyer, a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation.

PBS documentarian Ken Burns has some strong opinions about reality television — and all are negative. In an interview for a Kansas City Star series on the subject, he tells TV critic Aaron Barnhart: “The nomenclature is what’s infuriating to me. This is not reality. Nobody proposes or dates or checks people out in front of millions of people. The notion that this is reality is beyond the pale. What it does is just become a vehicle for the same shallow consumerist mentality that is driving our country into the dirt.” Burns continues: “There is an aspect of voyeurism that is interesting, but what we’ve done — and it’s the definition of decadence — each generation of reality shows has to up the ante.

PBS NewsHour is partnering with The Economist to run docs on subjects that the magazine covers, including politics, health, technology, religion and government. Starting in January, “The Economist Film Project” will accept films for review. Segments will air on NewsHour and the project’s website through 2012.