Cookie Monster wants to host Saturday Night Live. (Hey, if octogenarian Betty White can do it . . .) Want to help? Watch Sesame Street’s latest soon-to-be-viral video: Cookie Monster’s audition tape for Saturday Night Live, then visit the “Cookie Monster should host Saturday Night Live!” Facebook page. As of Wednesday (Nov. 23) morning, more than 44,000 folks have signed up. As one wrote, “OMG!! This will be awesome!!!!!”

Brian Reddington, senior v.p., development, has moved from supervision of its Online Giving Initiative to focus solely on the PBS Foundation, Michael Jones, PBS c.o.o, said in a memo today (Nov. 23). PBS’s controversial national online fundraising campaign, set to begin on PBS.org in January, will now be overseen by Jason Seiken’s PBS Interactive team. Bob Minai and Kristin Calhoun will head up the effort. Keith Brengle, recently hired as director, online giving, will now report to Minai. “Jason Seiken clearly has serious online expertise and credibility, and the experience of working with PBS member stations,” said longtime development pro Michael Soper, PBS’s head development officer, 1978-92, and now a nonprofit consultant.

PBS has hired a director of station development services to plug the hole created in June when laid off four staffers in the development unit (Current, Nov. 1). Valerie Pletcher will be a director of station development services beginning Dec. 1, Joyce Herring, s.v.p. of station services, announced to staff in a memo. Pletcher will work as a liaison with system development professionals on informational and training needs, best practices and the development portion of the Annual Meeting. From 1997 to ’99, Pletcher was manager of sponsorships and marketing for the PBS Sponsorship Group; from ’94 to ’96 she was underwriting manager at WVPT/Virginia Public Television.

Robert Feder, longtime Chicago media columnist, is departing Chicago Public Media and its Vocalo blog. He said in a post today (Nov. 23) that he’ll reveal his new online home soon. “With the recent redesign of the Vocalo blogs and their move to a new site at WBEZ.org, I have decided it’s time for me to leave,” he said. Before signing on with Vocalo — a mashup of traditional and new media designed to engage a diverse audience — in November 2009, Feder spent 20 years covering media at the Sun-Times. Phil Rosenthal, Chicago Tribune media columnist, said Vocalo’s move to the WBEZ site, “puzzling for its urgency and lack of necessity, has been snarled in technical difficulties.”

Chicago’s WFMT-FM (98.7) set a record with fall pledge, bringing in $695,000, General Manager Steve Robinson said in a Sun-Times story today (Nov. 23). Then two trustees kicked in to round that up to $700,000. The previous top figure was $620,000. Average contributions increased 17 percent to $199 from last year’s $170. Robinson also asked contributors if they wanted to donate CD premiums to local schools, and many did.

Hiki Nō, PBS Hawaii’s new and innovative student news network, has secured the funding it needs and will launch in February 2011, blogs station President Leslie Wilcox today (Nov. 23). It has raised $1.2 million from local and national funders including the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. CPB and the the Clarence T.C. Ching Foundation provided seed money. Hiki Nō will partner with teachers and middle and high school students from all of Hawaii’s islands to create a collaborative network to deliver community-based news and information to the state via PBS Hawaii’s broadcast and web platforms.

Tavis Smiley said “it’s unthinkable, it’s untenable, it’s unacceptable,” that KCET execs didn’t let him know that they were breaking from PBS as of Jan. 1 (Current, Oct. 18). He told the Los Angeles Times in a story today (Nov. 23) that being out of the loop when his show is produced on the lot at the L.A. station is “unconscionable.” “I literally got a phone call as KCET was making the statement publicly, as this story was breaking,” he said. “I was traveling, so I wasn’t even in the city. I didn’t even find out about this until hours after it had been announced.”

Three PBS documentaries are on the short list for Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced. “Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould” premieres Dec. 27 on American Masters, “Waste Land” will air on Independent Lens in April 2011, and  “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe” ran on P.O.V. this June. The Academy Awards nominations will be announced at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on Jan. 25, 2011, live from Los Angeles. CORRECTION: Make that four PBS docs in the running for the coveted Oscar. Cynthia Lopez notes that P.O.V.’s “Enemies of the People” is also short-listed; that’ll air next year.

What’s really at stake in the battle over federal funding to NPR, and how can the field’s advocates make the best case for continued support? Public broadcasters began speaking out last week in friendly venues, testing their message points and strategizing about whether and how to mount a more aggressive campaign to enlist broad public support. At yesterday’s Public Media Camp in Washington, D.C., attendees discussed the political attack with Jay Rosen, press critic and j-school professor at New York University, who participated via Skype in a session on the response to the “culture war.” Rosen, who described himself as sympathetic to the fight to preserve federal funding, called for a blogger — one who works independently and outside of NPR and PBS — to report on the debate, critique press coverage of it, and call out the “most outrageous statements” from the field’s partisan critics.

Public media needs coding collaborators. That’s what pubcaster Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices writes in today’s (Nov. 22) Hacks/Hackers blog. Large pubradio stations have ambitious Internet projects going, but they also have the staff and cash to do so. Mid-to-small stations and independents need simpler, smaller apps. Golding has two examples of pubmedia-specific API how-tos that could cheaply and immediately help hundreds of sites.

In a followup to a Current investigation (Aug. 23 and Sept. 7), the New York Times reports today (Nov. 22) that Mykalai Kontilai, the new owner of Nightly Business Report, agreed to leave the instructional programming business in 2000 and paid $250,000 as part of the settlement of a fraud suit. Kontilai confirms making the payment but denies agreeing to step out of the field. Ronald Reed, former president of AGC/United Learning, an educational content provider that has since become part of Discovery, told the newspaper: “We felt, from our point of view, that it would be best not to have him in the industry,” after discovering “what we considered to be inappropriate business practices.”

The Week, a digest newsmag, has a good gathering of links to last week’s coverage of the ongoing attacks on NPR and its government funding. One comment on the post: “Even us conservative southern rednecks love NPR. It should be a sacred cow!” Another, a roundup of opinion columns, is on the Atlantic’s site.

A group of 40 New Jersey officials and pubcasting leaders met for more than eight hours Friday (Nov. 19) to hear advice from journalists and academics on saving the New Jersey Network after state funding ends soon (Current, July 6, 2010).  Included were State Treasure Andrew Eristoff, an aide to Gov. Chris Christie, Sen. Nia Gill (D-Essex) and execs from WHYY in Philadelphia, jazz station WBGO in Newark, and WNYC and WNET/Thirteen in New York City. Steve Adubato Jr., president of Caucus Educational Corporation, a producer of public affairs, cultural and educational programs for more than 20 years, told the Star-Ledger that the conversation made it clear that the current television-centered pubcasting model is not sufficient.

WBUR General Manager Paul La Camera is departing his post at the end of the year, he told the staff at a station meeting today (Nov. 19). “I’m going to be 68 next month and I think that’s an appropriate expiration date for someone to be running a dynamic contemporary media entity that increasingly has to surge into the digital world,” La Camera said after making the announcement. “To be frank, I’m more of a traditionalist, and that’s not necessarily my strength.” La Camera was appointed g.m. in October 2005.

Leave it to Roger Ebert to pen a love letter to NPR. The movie critic (and prolific blogger) today (Nov. 19) came to the defense of the beleaguered network. “NPR surely is the voice of America — the voice I hope the world is listening to via the internet,” Ebert writes. “It is the voice of our better nature. We are not all snarling dogs of Left and Right, feasting on shreds torn from the Body Politic. Some of us (maybe most of us, when the mood is right) are kind, curious, sane. We are interested in other peoples, other lifestyles, other choices.