In state capitals, public broadcasting advocates have been fighting uphill battles to preserve a key piece of stations’ revenue puzzle.

Federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are investigating an April 2 transmitter fire at KUAR in Little Rock, Ark., as possible arson. [Two weeks later, the station said it was still operating at 75 percent of its usual power.] The fire, which crippled the station’s signal right before its spring pledge drive, was started by an intruder who stripped copper wiring at the transmitter site, used accelerant to start a blaze, and then put a new padlock on the building to prohibit anyone from entering. Copper wire theft is “a huge problem for radio stations,” according to Ben Fry, g.m.

WMFE’s sale of its TV station in Orlando, Fla., leaves two smaller public stations reluctant to assume the role of big kid on the block. Other PBS member stations in the state are now discussing how to provide the full PBS schedule to Orlando, the country’s 19th largest TV market, according to Rick Schneider, chair of the Florida Public Broadcasting Service and president of Miami’s WPBT. The Orlando area’s largest PBS station will become a new outlet for the Daystar Television religious broadcasting chain. The buyer is Community Educators of Orlando Inc., based in Texas and headed by Daystar chief exec Marcus Lamb and his wife, Joni Lamb.

After PBS declined to designate the proposed show Something Different with Bill Moyers (w.t.) for common carriage, Moyers has withdrawn the program, according to the New York Times. Carnegie Corporation backed the concept with $2 million grant last month, opening the possibility that Moyers would come out of retirement to mount a new weekly production. “After discussions with my underwriters, we have decided to pursue other options and projects,” Moyers explained in an e-mail to the Times. PBS plans to unveil its fall schedule to member stations next month, it said in a statement. “Until then, we’ll continue to work with Bill and all of our talented producers to create an engaging and diverse program offering.”

Legislation to end state funding for New Hampshire Public Television got a thumbs-down recommendation from the Senate Finance Committee on April 13, according to Fosters.com. On a 4-3 vote, the panel ruled that H.B. 133 is “inexpedient to legislate.” The bill would eliminate $2.7 million in state subsidies to NHPTV, roughly a third of its budget. The bill still goes before the full Senate; a vote is expected this month.

The impending sale of WMFE-TV in Orlando to religious broadcaster Daystar leaves Growing Bolder without a presenting station. It’s WMFE’s only local production, shining a light on the older yet vibrant folks among us. The series started last season on 20 pubTV stations and is now up to 275. “We’re looking at this as a chance to move to a presenting station in a bigger market with more infrastructure to promote and secure underwriting,” former local anchor Marc Middleton, who now heads Growing Bolder Media, tells the Orlando Sentinel. “WMFE has been a great partner, but without any staff on the TV side, we’ve had to do all the sales and marketing on our own.

What drives PBS documentarian Ken Burns to poke at history’s ghosts? In a revealing, low-key interview in the current New York magazine, he reveals that his mother died when he was 11 and his only memories of her are while she was gravely ill. It’s that pain that he says prompted him to making docs, a medium that “psychologically worked for me. Some of the things we do are to keep the wolf from the door.” After a bit more prodding, the mag notes, “Burns goes full Freud.” “I mean, I’ve talked to a psychiatrist about this. He said, ‘Well, look what you do for a living.

There isn’t really a name for what Andy Carvin does, writes Paul Farhi in this Washington Post feature story on NPR’s social media strategist. Are his relentless tweets on social unrest in the Middle East a form of curation, social media aggregation or interactive digital journalism? “I see it as another flavor of journalism,” Carvin says. “So I guess I’m another flavor of journalist.”

Tiny Marfa Public Radio — KRTS/93.5 FM in far west Texas — has “earned its spurs,” writes Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Bud Kennedy, as the only news station to sound the warning and then stay with the story Saturday (April 9) when wildfires burned through Fort Davis and the Big Bend. On Saturday afternoon, host and programming director Rachel Osier Lindley was on her way to her second job at a grocery and saw a house west of town ablaze. She called station General Manager Tom Michael, screaming that U.S. 90 was blocked and that she couldn’t get to her own house.

There’s “a lot of truth” in Sue Schardt’s recent speech about the lack of diversity in public radio, writes John Sutton, Maryland-based marketing consultant, on his blog. Schardt, executive director of Association for Independents in Public Radio, spoke passionately during a February NPR Board meeting, calling for the field to acknowledge its obligation to serve all of the American public, not just its core audience of highly educated, affluent, white listeners. Sutton disagrees that public radio’s focus on growing its core audience is a bad thing, but that’s a subject for his blog on another day. He lays responsibility for the field’s lack of diversity at the feet of its leadership.

PBS announced at the NAB Show in Las Vegas today (April 12) that later this year it will begin testing a next-generation emergency alert system to deliver multimedia alerts using video, audio, text and graphics to cellphones, tablets, laptops and netbooks, as well as in-car navigation systems. The pilot is part of work on  a new Mobile Emergency Alert System, the first major overhaul of the nation’s aging Emergency Alert System since the Cold War. PBS Chief Technology Officer John McCoskey said in a statement that PBS has been involved in testing digital broadcasting as a part of an upgraded emergency system since 2005.

As expected, CPB lost digital funding, recession aid to stations and radio interconnection money in the budget agreement for the remainder of the fiscal year, finally hammered out last week on Capitol Hill. The bill, H.R. 1473, zeros out $25 million in station “fiscal stabilization” grants and $25 million for replacement and upgrade of the radio infrastructure, and reduces digital spending from $36 million to $6 million. There’s also a small — .2 percent — across-the-board trim for all non-defense discretionary spending. Main appropriation for FY11, $445 million. One reported sticking point in the contentious negotiations was a provision to prohibit federal funding for NPR; the Democrats managed to kill that.

Philip Bennett, a former Washington Post managing editor and current Duke University journalism professor, is joining Frontline in the new role of managing editor. Bennett will oversee program content across multiple platforms and help develop longterm editorial strategy for the series. During 12 years at the Post, Bennett was deputy national editor and assistant managing editor for foreign news, supervising the newspaper’s international coverage. He was named the Post’s managing editor in 2005. He joined the Duke faculty in 2009, and will continue in his role there. He’ll also plan collaborations between the award-winning WGBH show and university.

Initial findings of a CPB-funded study on the potential impact of the reduction or loss of federal funding to the system anticipate further local production and staff cutbacks, as well as scant new revenue sources for stations, the CPB Board heard at its meeting in Washington, D.C. today (April 11). Matt McDonald of Hamilton Place Strategies, which also consulted on collaboration projects in New York and Illinois, presented the first phase of research, which looks at how stations have reacted to the recession. Using budget numbers from 2008 and ’09, the report shows that on average station fundraising was cut 7.5 percent; local production, 7.1 percent; general operating/administration, 5.2 percent; broadcasting engineering, 4.4 percent; and other costs, 7.6 percent.

The National Association of Black Journalists decided over the weekend to pull out of next year’s panethnic Unity: Journalists of Color conference, Richard Prince’s Journal-isms blog is reporting. One practical reason: Though NABJ members amount to half of Unity conference attendees in 2008, the association didn’t share proportionately in Unity event revenues and will do better by holding a separate conference in 2012. Unity conferences have been held every four or five years since the first in 1994. The participating groups have been NABJ, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association and the Native American Journalists Association.