National Endowment for the Humanities announced yesterday $5 million in TV grants to projects including WETA’s four-hour The Jewish Americans; WGBH’s We Shall Remain, a five-parter on Native American history; and KCET’s three-hour In the Name of God and King: The Spanish Empire. The broadcast projects were among 171 receiving aid. Details were posted online, organized by grantees’ states: Alabama to Illinois (10-page PDF), Indiana to New Mexico (9-page), and New York to Wyoming (11-page).

KTOO in Juneau, Alaska, is buying two FM stations to offer a wider selection of programming. It already operates one FM outlet — the most listened-to station in Juneau, it says. The broadcaster will consult with listeners as it works out the stations’ formats.

The Boston Globe and Broadcasting & Cable report on the House Appropriations subcommittee vote yesterday to cut $115 million in federal aid to public broadcasting. [Links to the joint statement of PBS, APTS and NPR and CPB’s separate statement.]

TiVo launches today a service that will let some of its subscribers watch videos from selected Internet sources, including the National Football League and the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal reported. TiVoCast works only with the company’s new Series 2 recorders, which have Internet instead of phone connections.

Writers Guild of America and three pubTV producing stations completed negotiations on a three-year contract that includes provisions to share revenues from ventures delivering programs over new digital platforms, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

NPR exec Ken Stern sent this memo to public radio stations’ Authorized Representatives as a followup to the New Realities Forum in May 2006. News from Ken Stern – Digital Distribution Consortium Working Group June 6, 2006 Dear Colleagues: Last month, about 300 of our colleagues gathered at the New Realities National Forum in Washington. We discussed the future of public radio and our service, and envisioned the benefits of working together differently in the future. It was an exciting and motivating session and we’d like to extend our thanks to all who participated in the forum and the retreats leading up to it.

NPR’s David Kestenbaum’s use of the word “pissed” in a question to an interviewee should not have survived editing, says Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin. “I think that the public radio audience is, (in general), not easily shocked, and they are able to handle harsh language but only when it is contextual and comes directly from the people being interviewed — not from the reporter.”

The Prairie Home Companion film is the first major release for Picturehouse Films, a recently formed distributor whose president, Bob Berney, is profiled in the Washington Post. “This is the kind of film that is representative of Picturehouse,” Berney says, “in that it’s a specialty film, but it’s also a populist film.”

In a cost-cutting move, Seattle’s KCTS is taking over operations of KYVE, the public TV station in Yakima that it has owned for more than a decade. Most of KYVE’s staff will lose their jobs, but viewers should not notice a difference, says Pat Mallinson, KCTS spokeswoman, in the Yakima Herald Republic.

Sam Husseini calls for a more vital and powerful Pacifica Radio network. “What needs to be scrutinized is the collusion of incumbent programmers, many of whom were put in place by the previous utterly corrupt management, with the current management that seems resistant to change — and stays in place largely because of support from incumbent programmers,” he writes.

The New York Times profiles NPR’s Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!” “The ability of the people on the show to think on their feet just astounds me,” says a devoted fan.

Connecticut Public Radio in Hartford has replaced midday classical music with local and national news and talk programming. Execs tell the Hartford Courant that a 37 percent decline since 2003 in the station’s classical music audience prompted the change. “I hope that listeners understand that we’re not making a snap decision,” says President Jerry Franklin.

The film adaptation of A Prairie Home Companion offers “the pleasant addition of [Robert] Altman’s trademark layered improv by celebrity actors and the unsettling subtraction of the listener’s imagination,” writes the Washington Post‘s Marc Fisher.

Public radio engineers are forming their own association, reports Radio World. The Association of Public Radio Engineers will advocate “good engineering practices,” develop training programs and organize the annual Public Radio Engineering Conference, among other duties. It will also have a formal relationship with NPR Labs. (More from Radio World.)

Michael Lazar has stepped down as president of Capital Public Radio in Sacramento, reports the Sacramento Bee. Citing unnamed sources, the paper reports that CPR’s board wanted more aggressive leadership in a president.