KVIE-TV in Sacramento, Calif., laid off seven staffers this week, reports the Sacramento Bee. The cuts amount to 10 percent of KVIE’s staff. General Manager David Lowe said a drop in viewer donations prompted the belt-tightening.

“[W]e didn’t want to cut across the board,” NPR News chief Ellen Weiss says in this NewsHour interview about the budget cuts and lay-offs announced on Wednesday. “We didn’t want to say, ‘You know what? Try to do the same quality, try to do the same amount of journalism, try to have the same reach nationally and internationally, but try to do it with less money.'” Efforts to diversify and grow the audience through News & Notes and Day to Day, two cancelled shows targeting African American and younger audiences, are no longer “just something we do through one program or even two programs,” but have to go across “everything NPR does,” from radio programs to web-based content and mobile services.

The first permanent StoryCorps booth outside of New York City will be installed in Atlanta next year — located temporarily in a studio at Public Broadcasting Atlanta’s WABE-FM until 2011, when it moves in the city’s new civil rights museum, the Center for Civil and Human Rights, the station announced today. “WABE is family to us,” said project founder Dave Isay in the release. “There is no other station in the country that’s dearer to our hearts that cares more about StoryCorps and public broadcasting.” While New York now has the only permanent StoryBooth, San Francisco is hosting one through next October, and a mobile booth is patrolling Alaska through April.

Tonight’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer includes a segment on the NPR job cuts. The Washington Post‘s Marc Fisher is a confirmed guest. NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard may also participate. Correction: The NewsHour‘s Jeffrey Brown will interview Ellen Weiss, NPR senior v.p. of news. Fisher and Shepard will not participate, according to a producer.

An online petition to save News & Notes challenges NPR’s official explanation for the show’s cancellation: “several staff members report a different reason given to them . . . which had nothing to do with audience levels or funding,” writes journalist/blogger Jasmyne Cannick, a News & Notes commentator and L.A.-based political consultant. She asks News & Notes fans to write NPR execs to express support for “one of the best national radio newscasts dedicated to African-American news and views.” Baratunde Thurston, a blogger and News & Notes commentator, also questions NPR’s decision to cancel the show: “In the grand, new age of Obama, this is happening?

The Independent, an online (previously print) publication about independent film, reports that some filmmakers are unhappy with how the Independent Television Service (ITVS), a CPB-backed organization that funds independent productions, control films’ content and “plays hardball” during contract negotiations. In more than a dozen interviews with sources who remain mostly anonymous, the publication found that “the organization can at times be a difficult partner, placing unnecessary demands on filmmakers … shrouding the collaborative process in secrecy, and at times stifling the independent, creative spirit of the very filmmakers it is designed to support.” Many producers came to ITVS’s defense, but apparently, some felt pushed to make their films more journalistic and “balanced” even though they didn’t regard their film as journalism.

DTV, the only satellite provider offering PBS in high definition, has added 14 more markets for local pubTV, reports Multichannel News. More are planned for 2009. The new markets include Burlington-Vt.-Plattsburgh, N.Y.; Toledo, Ohio; Youngstown, Ohio; Flint-Saginaw-Bay City, Mich.; Indianapolis; Knoxville, Tenn.; San Diego; San Francisco; Springfield-Holyoke, Mass.; and Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.

A roundup of reports on the downsizing at NPR: The decision to cancel Day to Day and News & Notes, two mid-day shows that originate from studios in Culver City, Calif., “seemed to have the least impact on our audience” and allowed NPR to avoid making “a thousand cuts in everything,” Interim President Dennis Haarsager says in the New York Times. The LA Times describes the role of Day to Day in covering stories from the West coast and quotes Haarsager describing “a la carte ways” that the network can distribute its stories. “Not everything has to have a brand, a title.

Neither Day to Day nor News & Notes were attracting large enough audiences or underwriting revenues to stay on the air given the revenue losses that NPR has taken since July, according to a memo sent to NPR staff this afternoon. “[W]e concluded that it was necessary to eliminate some activities completely to achieve the long term savings we require while protecting our core mission,” wrote Dennis Haarsager, interim president, in the memo. Of the $23 million projected budget deficit announced today, $14 million is attributable to expected shortfalls in corporate underwriting, said Dana Davis Rehm, senior v.p. The 64 employees being laid off include 29 who work on the two canceled shows, Rehm said.

NPR is eliminating 64 jobs to address a projected budget deficit of $23 million and confirming that Day to Day and News & Notes will go off the air on March 20, 2009. Many of the personnel cuts come from laying off staff of the two canceled series, NPR announced in a news release, but job and spending cuts extend across the company to reporting and production, station services, digital media, research, communications and administration. Twenty-one open positions will not be filled. “With all of NPR’s revenue sources under pressure, these actions were necessary to responsibly stabilize our finances and put NPR on a realistic path,” said Dennis Haarsager, interim president.

Staff members of NPR’s Day to Day and News and Notes, based at the network’s western production center in Culver City, Calif., are meeting today with NPR News chief Ellen Weiss about cancellation of their programs and pending layoffs, according to three pubradio sources. An NPR West staffer says word inside the building is that more than 60 people will lose their jobs. It is unclear whether the production center, established in late 2002 in a major expansion of NPR’s news operations, will remain open.

The kind of leaders needed to drive this transformation are not just media organization managers but also community leaders.

"Being in Baghdad is a narrow escape every day,” says Loren Jenkins, NPR foreign editor, reflecting on the dangers surrounding the network’s team of reporters and Iraqi employees who have covered the Iraq War and occupation for five years.

Cheryl Halpern, CPB board member and former chair, has been nominated by President George Bush to be an alternate United Nations representative, according to JTA, a global Jewish news agency. UN alternates represent the United States at committee meetings and other smaller forums.

Five positions have been eliminated and several programs halted at Northeastern Pennsylvania Educational Television Association due to an expected $200,000 funding shortfall, according to the Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Gone are a television production staffer, a documentarian and an FM radio news person, as well as the CEO’s part-time administrative assistant and a receptionist. The layoffs represent about 8 percent of its workforce. The station, better known as WVIA Public Media, also is putting on hiatus its “Pennsylvania Polka” and “WVIA Ballroom” shows. Two documentary projects were scrapped. Job openings and compensation for training, travel, dues, maintenance and hospitality were frozen.