CPB advertised Monday to hire a person or organization to scope out the proposed American Archive of pubcasting content. Proposals for management of the one-year, $3 million pilot program are due by Nov. 14. The manager, which must have experience in big-project management and digitization, will use an RFP to select a group of pilot radio and TV stations and assist the coding and digitization of their program archives. The project will also create a “substantial” sample online archive and prototype demo by the ides of March 2009; do research on costs, storage and restorage techniques and criteria for selection of materials to be archived; and develop best practices and training materials.

“For abject gloominess, it would be hard to top “The War Briefing,” Frontline‘s deeply reported look at the war in Afghanistan and the insurgency targeting Pakistan,” writes Tony Perry in a Los Angeles Times review. The doc “finds nothing but bad news for the U.S. and NATO effort — not enough Western troops, weak central governments in Kabul and Islamabad, and an enemy funded by heroin profits and increasing in size and lethality. … The major thesis is not new — that the U.S. didn’t follow through after the quick knockdown of the Taliban following the terrorist attacks of Sept.

A survey of 1,400 adults by the PBS program Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and the United Nations Foundation about religion and America’s role in the world found that “the vast majority of Americans believes the U.S. has a moral obligation to be engaged on the global stage in a variety of ways,” reported Bob Abernethy on the program’s Oct. 24 edition (transcript here). “At the same time, Americans are divided about equally on whether the U.S. has a positive or negative impact on the world.” The survey found that 61 percent of Americans believe that God has “uniquely blessed” the U.S. 

The four-year struggle to establish WRNI in Providence, R.I., as an independent public radio service for the state crossed a long-awaited threshold last month, when its aspiring licensee announced the station’s independence from Boston’s WBUR, the NPR News powerhouse that partnered with local pubradio supporters to establish WRNI a decade ago. Rhode Island Public Radio, the station’s licensee-to-be, began operating WRNI-AM Sept. 1 under a management contract with Boston University’s WBUR Group. The agreement anticipates state approval of the $2 million sale under loan terms covered by WBUR and its university licensee. “We don’t anticipate difficulty in getting a favorable ruling,” said RIPR Chairman Jim Marsh.

NPR’s Andy Carvin offers a video tour of NPR’s election studio.

The ethanol industry’s overreaction to “Heat,” a Frontline doc about climate change that aired this week, says “a great deal about the nervous state” of the industry, writes a Chicago Tribune columnist. The Renewable Fuels Association, a pro-ethanol group, attacked the doc as one-sided (PDF). But “nothing in the broadcast was new to anyone who has paid attention to the ethanol debate over the last couple years,” writes David Griesing.

Don’t count on schmoozing with a glass of wine in hand if you drop in at a Vegas PBS event. Members of the school board that holds the station’s license are unsure whether adults should be allowed to drink liquor at the station, which will share a campus with a new high school, reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal. One board member suggested that the station “stick to alternatives such as ‘smoothies.’” The station hopes to stage wine-and-cheese receptions.

In Contenders, a five-part series concluding on today’s All Things Considered, producers Joe Richman and Samara Freeman profile some of the most unconventional, and interesting, presidential candidates in American history. Tonight’s installment recalls the 1972 campaign of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to seek the Democratic party nomination. Links to pieces that aired earlier this week, as well as other Radio Diaries documentaries for NPR, are here.

The first phase of Public Radio Makers Quest 2.0, a CPB-backed grant program for audio-centric experiments with new media, is off and running. The Association of Independents in Radio, which is managing the program, began accepting nominations for potential grantees last week and named members of the talent committee that will decide which of the nominated producers move on to the proposal-writing phase. The nomination deadline is Oct. 31.

In a posting on The Daily Beast, the new website from former New Yorker editor Tina Brown, Scott Horton wonders whether PBS’s decision not to air the documentary Torturing Democracy (by Sherry Jones) is connected to the Bush Administration’s propositions to slash PBS funding. More than half of pubTV stations are airing the doc independently tomorrow night because “PBS would not run the show–at least not until President Bush has left office,” says Horton, who writes on legal and national security affairs for Harper’s Magazine. The doc, which digs deep into the administration’s torture policies, “was completed and circulated to PBS decision makers on schedule in May of this year.

Thoughtcast explores ideas for reinventing public radio for a more diverse audience in this piece, reported by host Jenny Attiyeh at last month’s PRPD conference.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer interviews John Hockenberry about his new morning drive-time series The Takeaway, now airing on KXOT in Tacoma and KSER in Everett. The live, conversational approach of the PRI-distributed show “allows us to take advantage of the instantaneousness of information sources,” Hockenberry says, yet it comes with its own set of challenges. “The work is remaining vigilant to how quickly things are changing in a news environment . . . .There’s no such thing as a line-up in our show. We sort of understand what we’re doing 20 minutes ahead.”

Prairie Home Companion‘s Garrison Keillor dissects the righteous reform message of the Republican presidential ticket for Salon. Here’s a snippet: “In school, you couldn’t get away with that garbage because the taxpayers know that if we don’t uphold scholastic standards, we will wind up driving on badly designed bridges and go in for a tonsillectomy and come out missing our left lung, so we flunk the losers lest they gain power and hurt us, but in politics we bring forth phonies and love them to death.”

Mark Erstling, currently the acting president of APTS, has been named senior v.p. of system development and media strategy at CPB. In his new position, Erstling will “oversee all of CPB’s activities related to public television and related digital media platforms except for content,” according to a release. Since 2001, Erstling has served as executive v.p. and COO of APTS, where he manages deployment of the Digital Emergency Alert System for the Department of Homeland Security and heads up development of the American Archive for public broadcasting. He has also led APTS efforts to educate consumers about the digital transition.

“She sounded unlike anyone else on the radio . . . which is what you want,” says This American Life‘s Ira Glass in this Washington Post profile of Sarah Vowell. The TAL contributor and author appeared on the Daily Show last night and will be in D.C. tomorrow to promote her latest book, The Wordy Shipmates, in which she explores and explains America’s Puritan heritage. The unruly English colonists of the the Massachusetts Bay Colony, whose writings and quarrels are the focus of her book, are “my ideal of America,” she says in the Post.