Freakonomics Radio, a new co-production featuring journalist and Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner, unveiled its biweekly segment for Marketplace yesterday. The topic for the lead story? Major League Baseball. Specifically: whether the crackdown on steroid use is to blame for the decline in the number of home runs being hit. During an appearance at the Public Radio Program Directors conference in Denver last month, Dubner said the show came into being after he told WNYC senior producer Collin Campbell that, as much as he enjoyed appearing on the station’s PRI series The Takeaway, he couldn’t deal with the early hours required for morning drive-time radio.

WMFE/Public Media for Central Florida is instituting two-week furloughs for all 35 staffers, reports the Orlando Sentinel. Also, there’s also no raises this fiscal year. Station President Jose Fajardo told the paper that membership and corporate underwriting goals are down by $250,000. WMFE is speaking with CPB about its Stations in Severe Financial Distress program, although it has not formally signed on, Fajardo told Current.

CPB President Pat Harrison will be in St. Louis on Oct. 12 as KETC/Channel 9 unveils its new brand identity as the Nine Network of Public Media, the station announced today (Oct. 5). It’s part of the celebration for the opening of its new digital facility, the Nine Center for Public Engagement. There’ll be six interactive demonstration stations in the new building: nineVoices, a website where community members post videos with solutions to local problems; Homeland, an immigration initiative; nineAcademy, digital video storytelling; the Public Insight Network, a site where participants serve as resources for pubmedia news gatherers; and interactive experiences with Nine on Twitter and Facebook.

Bill Buckmaster announced Tuesday (Oct. 5) that he is leaving his the Arizona Illustrated anchor chair after 23 years on Arizona Public Media. His last day is Jan. 1. Two days later, he’ll begin a pubaffairs radio show, Buckmaster, on AM 1330 KJLL. The Tucson Citizen website opined, “This will leave a gaping hole in our local television news. His knowledge, experience and professionalism were a far cry from the ‘two years and I’m out of here’ careers of too many people in our local television news.” (Fascinating factoid: Buckmaster is one of only two broadcasters with an asteroid named after him.

Is public funding of media a good idea? That’s what Spot.us, an open source project to fuel “community powered reporting,” wanted to know. So it did an online survey with assistance from the Reynolds Journalism Institute and Free Press. Just over 400 web users participated to answer, among other things, how media should be financed. Would they support a pubmedia endowment to increase funding for educational programs, arts, and investigative journalism? Overwhelmingly, 84 percent, said yes; 3 percent said no; the rest were undecided. They also would overwhelmingly support (93 percent) the creation of a matching grant program that would combine foundation grants with public funding to support innovation and investment in local news and journalism.

NPR’s Twitter followers are “gadget hounds” and “news junkies,” according to survey results released last week by NPR Research. Of the 10,244 NPR Twitter followers who completed the survey last month, more than three-quarters said they get all or most of their news online. Nearly a third said they spend between one and two hours a day with NPR content but — unlike Facebook fans that NPR surveyed this summer– fewer Twitter users experience NPR content as radio listeners. Two-thirds of responding Twitter followers, or 67 percent, said they listen to NPR radio broadcasts, compared to three-quarters (76 percent) of Facebook fans.

Why everyone but public broadcasters is making federal policy for public media The FCC’s recent National Broadband Plan and its Future of the Media initiative have highlighted a chronic problem in U.S public broadcasting: The system has no long-term policy planning capacity, and therefore it always has had great difficulty dealing with the periodic efforts by outsiders to critique and “reform” it. Public broadcasting ignores most media policy research, whether it originates in academia, think tanks or federal agencies, and it often seems out of touch with major national policy deliberations until too late. That disengagement is highly dangerous because it allows others to set the national legal and regulatory agenda for communications without assuring adequate policy attention to public-service, noncommercial and educational goals.

When Jim Pagliarini and Judy Diaz say public TV should pay more attention to a younger audience, they’re not thinking of viewers in their 20s and 30s. Their Next Avenue project, based at Twin Cities Public Television, aims at Boomers, the big generation now between the ages of 45 and 65, with its biggest numbers toward the younger end. In contrast, 60 percent of PBS’s audience is over 60, Diaz says, though it has many Boomer viewers. “We’re not reaching them, and we’re not engaging them now,” says Diaz. Boomers — “that’s an NPR audience,” she adds. She also uses a word heard more often in public radio: Next Avenue will “superserve” its audience.

In the Miami Herald today (Oct. 3), Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal updates readers on its collaboration with WLRN, pubradio and TV for south Florida. The partnership began seven years ago with construction of a studio in the paper’s newsroom. The radio staff is emphasizing breaking news, and two news-oriented broadcasts have been added each afternoon. (And we know what you’re wondering. Yes, he is of that Gyllenhall family. Anders is the uncle of actors Jake and Maggie.)

Writer David Fagin doesn’t quite understand the furor over pop star Katy Perry’s bustier on Sesame Street. He worked for the show several years back and reveals in a column on the AOL News opinion page that life behind the scenes is not quite as innocent as viewers might expect. Like when “certain members of the crew used to place postcards containing images of scantily clad women on the rack inside Mr. Hooper’s grocery store.” Or when the prop department snuck boxes of condoms next to the cereal in the store. And then there were the holiday parties: “Elmo and his pals would perform R-rated skits that would leave the audience in stitches.

NPR will be a dominant force in media in 10 years because its membership-based funding model is “finely tuned to the habits of millennial news consumers,” said Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, at the Washington Ideas Forum Thursday (Sept. 30) at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. “I have a feeling that membership models and philanthropy models will be stronger than advertising-supported models, people will be willing to pay for news they can trust.” Check out the video of his comments, as well as the entire session, on the Atlantic’s website.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency on Thursday (Sept. 30) adopted the new digital message format for the Common Alerting Protocol standard, reports the Broadcast Law blog. That triggers the 180-day countdown for stations to update Emergency Alert System equipment to ensure that it is able to handle the new protocol. The format adoption is the latest step toward the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, which expands the longtime alert system used by radio and television to other devices, including mobile phones and PC’s. One pubradio staffer told Current that stations may pay up to $2,000 to update each full-power transmitter — “a pain for small operators who are struggling,” he added.

Execs from the four Los Angeles-area PBS affiliates considering a collaboration met Wednesday (Sept. 28) to discuss a restructuring plan, according to the Los Angeles Times. No update on the continuing countdown to the possibility of primary station KCET going independent as of Jan. 1, 2011 (Current, Aug. 5, 2010). Heads of KCET, KOCE, KVCR and KLCS got together at KOCE in Huntington Beach. “We’re not spending a lot of time thinking about what this consortium would be like without [KCET] because we hope they’re still part of it,” said Larry Ciecalone, president of KVCR in San Bernardino.

An ambitious 18-part series of call-in shows on mental health premieres tonight (Sept. 30), produced by WDSE/WRPT PBS North, serving northeastern Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin. The 30-minute Speak Your Mind, airing Thursday nights, aims to openly discuss mental health topics, increase public awareness and reduce the stigma of mental illness. It’s hosted by psychologist Dr. Caroline Phelps and former local news anchor Pat Kelly. Topics include depression, managing stress, family issues, learning and behavioral problems in children, anxiety and eating disorders. For 28 years the station has done Doctors on Call “to give the community the language they need to communicate with their doctors,” Juli Kellner, WDSE director of production and programming, told Current.

Four pubTV stations are joining in a STEM Collaborative to help middle-schoolers in science, technology, engineering and math, the stations announced today (Sept. 30). But this is no dry and dull initiative. Students will use geometry, algebra and proportional reasoning to build a skateboard ramp, measure a roller coaster, whip up recipes and plan a rock n’ roll tour. Maryland Public Television, Alabama Public Television, Arkansas Educational Television Network and Kentucky Educational Television will develop the digital-media projects. Math By Design, Scale City, ProportionLand Park and Rock n’ Roll Road Trip are all online at stemcollaborative.org, along with supporting materials for educators.