After the University of Central Florida Board of Trustees approved the new WUCF-PBS on Thursday (May 26), “a small crowd at the meeting applauded loudly and cried out in celebration,” according to the Orlando Sentinel. “We see this as an opportunity to step up and serve the community in a new way,” said Grant Heston, UCF’s assistant vice president for news, information and UCFTV. “We look forward to finalizing this with PBS in the coming days.” The university is partnering with Brevard Community College in Cocoa. BCC operates public TV station WBCC, a secondary PBS station. Through an exisitng partnership with UCF, BCC broadcasts UCFTV. 

The University of Central Florida Board of Trustees today (May 26) gave its approval to become the PBS licensee for Orlando, the Orlando Business Journal is reporting. WUCF-PBS will launch when current affiliate WMFE-TV stops broadcasting July 1, following its sale to religious broadcaster Daystar. The deal includes a one-time, $1 million cash infusion to the station for HD. Both UCF and BCC already operate their own TV stations and would create content for the channel. UCF will commit $380,000 a year in personnel to the station.

Florida public broadcasters are reeling after Republican Gov. Rick Scott vetoed all public radio and television Community Service Grants today (May 26). That’s a loss of nearly $4.8 million in the next fiscal year, WMNF in Tampa reports. The governor kept funding for the Florida Channel, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the legislative sessions and Supreme Court hearings, Janyth Righter, executive director of Florida Public Broadcasting Service, tells Current. “Elimination of state funding will inevitably lead to the loss of programs, services, and jobs in communities across Florida,” the pubcasting group said in a statement, adding that “supporters of local public broadcasting stations across the state are deeply dismayed” at the governor’s decision.

Eight persons showed up at a WMFE Board of Trustees meeting Wednesday night (May 25) to voice concerns about sale of the PBS affiliate’s license to religious broadcaster Daystar. One was former Democratic U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson. “People spoke out against the sale,” Grayson told the Orlando Sentinel in an email. “I told them that they should ask for an FCC hearing on the transfer, and they should solicit competing offers from local groups that want to continue public broadcasting.” Station President Jose Fajardo also told the paper that proceeds from the $3 million sale “will help pay for any money that will need to be reimbursed to state or federal agencies.”

KCET in Los Angeles raised $70,495 during its May 24 live televised benefit for Japan, 100 percent of which will go to relief efforts in the regions most affected by the earthquake and tsunami disasters, the station says. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa made a special appearance during the three-hour primetime show, which will be rebroadcast locally from 3 to 6 p.m. Saturday. KCET is working with U.S.-Japan Council to disburse funds to NGOs in Japan. Above, from left, KTLA’s Frank Buckley and actress Lily Mariye with Villaraigosa, L.A. Deputy Police Chief Terry Hara, actor George Takei, and U.S.-Japan Council’s Bryan Takeda during the telethon.

Florida’s WXEL-FM, the public radio station that broadcast on 90.7 FM in Palm Beach, has been converted into full-time music outlet WPBI, owned and operated by American Public Media’s Classical South Florida. The FCC approved the $3.85 million license transfer agreement last week, overruling objections from local groups who sought to prevent longtime owner Barry University from splitting the NPR news/classical music station from its public TV sibling. Sale opponents, including the WXEL Community Advisory Board, lobbied unsuccessfully to retain local control of both stations. “This is an exciting day for public radio listeners across South Florida,” said Doug Evans, Classical South Florida president, in a news release announcing that the sale had closed.

The Nightly Business Report will be broadcast by SiriusXM nationally five nights per week starting May 30, the Miami Herald is reporting today (May 26). SiriusXM will air the personal investment program at 7 p.m. Eastern weeknights on SiriusXM Public Radio (XM channel 121 and Sirius channel 205 with Sirius Premier), and again at 10 p.m. “This is a big first step toward the goal we’ve set for ourselves, which is to build a global distribution for NBR on both television and radio,” Mykalai Kontilai, the former educational video businessman who acquired the show with partner Gary Ferrell from WPBT/PBS 2 nine months ago (Current, Aug.

Essential Public Media unveiled plans to operate 90.5 FM in Pittsburgh, the station now broadcasting NPR News and jazz as WDUQ, as an all-news station as of July 1. Dennis Hamilton, a public radio veteran who is director of consulting for Public Radio Capital, will manage the new station on an interim basis. Under a $6 million license transfer agreement now pending at the FCC, the station will get new call letters, and its new owners will reconfigure Pittsburgh’s public radio landscape by launching the city’s first all-news public radio service. Jazz music programming, which fans of current format had hoped to preserve, will air on an HD Radio channel and Internet audio stream; six hours of jazz programming are slated for Saturday nights on the main broadcast channel.

The Wisconsin legislature’s budget committee today (May 25) approved slicing an extra half-million dollars from an agency that helps deliver the broadcasts of Wisconsin Public Radio and Television, the Superior Telegraph is reporting. The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau says the two-year cut to the Educational Communications Board is atop the roughly 10 percent reductions to most state agencies. The move passed on a 12-4 party-line vote. Across the country, states lawmakers continue to target pubcasting dollars (Current, April 18).

Outgoing NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard reviews the network’s decision to accept an $1.8 million grant from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations last fall — a judgement call that, in the view of unnamed NPR journalists, put the news organization’s credibility as an impartial, trusted news source at risk. “[A] deep current of concern has run through the newsroom about taking money from someone with a well-known, documented political agenda supporting Democrats and Democratic causes,” Shepard writes. The two-year grant supports a worthy cause — launch of the accountability journalism project Impact of Government — but unwittingly opened NPR up to attacks from right-wing partisans.

All of America (well, nearly) is bracing for Oprah Winfrey’s final talk show today (May 25). But Bill Goodman, host of Kentucky Tonight on Kentucky Educational Television, can say he personally knew her way back when. He was news producer and assignment editor at CBS affiliate WTVF-TV in Nashville when Winfrey, then a 19-year-old college sophomore, anchored its weekend newscast. He tells A.M. New York that even back then, Winfrey was “a perfectionist and she worked very hard. As one of the first African-American women on the air, she knew that a lot of people were watching her. She did not want to fail.”

The Orlando Sentinel is reporting that a deal has been reached to keep PBS service in Orlando after affiliate WMFE-TV’s sale to religious broadcaster Daystar is finalized, perhaps as early as July 1. Under a proposed plan, columnist Hal Boedeker writes, the University of Central Florida in Orlando and Brevard Community College (home to PBS affiliate WBCC) in Cocoa will assume responsibility for broadcasting PBS in Orlando. Two UCF panels must agree. The university’s advancement committee votes Thursday morning, and the full Board of Trustees meets Thursday afternoon. “PBS still needs to approve this action, should the UCF Board of Trustees approve it,” Grant Heston, assistant vice president of news and information at UCF, tells the paper.

A new publication calling itself “the world’s first printed magazine dedicated to focus exclusively on the evolving technology area of social media” is launching at the BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2011, going on this week in New York City. The Social Media Monthly includes articles by the Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper and U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa David Huebner exploring the role of social media within the executive branch and diplomatic communications, and the cover interview with Duleepa Wijayawardhana, founder of Empire Avenue, a social media exchange. The premiere issue sports a specially designed cover by artist Yiying Lu, known for her famous drawings of the “Fail Whale” used by Twitter and the “Pale Whale” featuring Conan O’Brien.

Three public media journalists are among the 24 new fellows selected by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Jonathan Blakley, NPR foreign desk producer, will study history, politics and social media in sub-Saharan Africa, and  examine the media environment in the United States leading into the 2012 presidential election. Kristen Lombardi, staff writer at the Center for Public Integrity, will focus on legal and social conditions that promote wrongful convictions, particularly the impact of institutional misconduct and the consequences of systemic resistance to reform. And Jeff Young, senior correspondent with PRI’s Living on Earth, will look at the full costs of energy sources and how new media might convene a more meaningful discussion of energy choices.

Larry Unger, Maryland Public Television’s current chief operating officer, has been named its new president. He’ll take the helm on June 30, when current President Robert Shuman retires after a 15-year tenure. Unger joined the station in 1997. Before coming to pubTV, he spent 11 years as executive vice president and group executive for the Bank of Baltimore. Unger also served for more than five years as an officer of public TV’s Major Market Group, an organization of the industry’s top 30 stations, and was instrumental in MPT’s digital transition. “The elevation of Larry Unger to the No. 1 spot at MPT resulted from an extensive nationwide search over the course of several months,” Maryland Public Broadcasting Commission Chairman Edward Kaplan said in a statement.