While Digg and other online news aggregators use popularity to recommend articles, the new site NewsCred asks users to rate the credibility of the article, the journalist, the news org and even the news sources by choosing “credit” or “discredit.” The users’ reactions combine to yield a rating between 1 and 100. Public input has been limited because the site just graduated from alpha to public beta stage on Tuesday, and all of the rated media are scoring north of 99 points (NPR is at 99.12, a point above right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin). But that can’t last. NewsCred kicks off its press release with statistics indicating that most Americans distrust journalism.

The Agriculture Department yesterday announced $5 million in digital TV equipment grants to pubTV stations in 19 states. In less-populated areas, the department’s Rural Development grants have been supplementing the Commerce Department’s annual Public Telecommunications Facilities Program aid. Central Michigan University’s six-station network (WCMU and kin) covering the upper half of lower Michigan received the biggest sum, $750K for new digital production equipment, including a satellite uplink truck. Among the bigger checks are those payable to Northern Michigan University, the Oklahoma, Arkansas, South Dakota and Nebraska networks and KEET in Eureka, Calif. For info on the grant program, see here. Last month, another program in the agency gave grants totalling $15 million for broadband facilities to rural communities, cable companies and Indian tribes.

NBC News correspondent Martin Savidge has been named anchor of public TV’s new nightly news program Worldfocus, produced in New York by WLIW and conceived by WNET President and longtime network newsman Neal Shapiro, who heads up the parent organization of both pubTV stations. Former CBS Evening News producer Marc Rosenwasser is executive producer of the program, which begins airing Oct. 6 and is a direct competitor to public TV’s long-running BBC World News, previously distributed by WLIW but now represented by KCET in Los Angeles (Current, May 12). Worldfocus aims to contextualize international events for an American audience.

Keith David has won an Emmy for his voice-over narration of Ken Burns’ The War. The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences presents several awards of excellence in “juried categories” before the Primetime Emmy Awards on Sept. 21. David won the award in 2005 for his narration of the PBS doc Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.

Marketing and research consultant John Sutton questions whether a CPB-backed project to recommend audience-growth strategies for public radio is on the right track. Directed by the Station Resource Group, the Grow the Audience project published an analysis of audience trends and began consulting with system leaders this summer. Sutton faults the initial work for “starting in the same place of past audience growth failures–age and ethnicity–and not with values and content.”

WGCU in Fort Myers, Florida, is the latest hybrid-format pubradio station to move classical music programming off its main broadcast service. On Sept. 8, the station launches a 24-hour all-classical HD Radio channel, primarily drawn from American Public Media’s nationally syndicated service Classical 24. Its primary FM service picks up NPR’s Fresh Air and the Diane Rehm Show, as well as the BBC’s World Have Your Say. Syndicated jazz and other niche music programs air at night. “If you look for the audience for the kinds of program[s] we’re going to, you’ll find that audience is much greater than the classical music audience,” says Kathleen Davey, g.m.,

Pandora, the Internet radio service that allows listeners to customize musical selections to their own tastes, is “approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision,” founder Tim Westergren tells the Washington Post. Under the royalty fee structure imposed on Web radio stations last year, Pandora projects that 70 percent of its total projected revenues of $25 million will go to royalty payments. The Post’s TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington, an early advocate for Pandora, doesn’t see the music industry backing down from their “absurd” position on webcasting royalties, and says perhaps Pandora should be sacrificed for the larger good of eventually bringing the music labels to their knees.

Leroy Sievers, TV journalist and author of NPR’s My Cancer blog, died on Friday at the age of 53. Since NPR notified blog readers of his passing, more than 1050 remembrances and notes of condolence have been posted on the My Cancer page. NPR’s obit and commemoration is here.

On his blog, John Proffitt unveils the internal reorganization of Alaska Public Telecommunications, which got underway yesterday. “The primary collapse is to bring together radio and television and the web — to date just a subset of my duties — under a single manager (me),” he writes. The Anchorage-based joint licensee now comprises four divisions: streams, production, advancement and operation.

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler questions why PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer paid little attention to John Edwards’ admission of an extramarital affair. “[T]he decision not to report the Edwards confirmation story struck me as both patronizing to people who depend on PBS for news, and journalistically mind-boggling,” Getler wrote in his weekly column. But the ombud also noted that most NewsHour viewers who wrote him on the subject favored the show’s decision not to cover the story when it first broke.

Arbitron is gearing up to introduce its Personal People Meter ratings system in Los Angeles, and the LA Times reports on local broadcasters’ reactions to the new methodology. “By and large, it’s a more accurate way of monitoring how people truly do listen to the radio,” Southern California Public Radio President Bill Davis tells the Times. “The overall audience is actually much larger, but time spent listening is going to be less.” Arbitron reports data from its June trial run of PPM in Los Angeles here [PDF]. There’s more PPM news on PRPD’s website, where Arthur Cohen blogs about Arbitron’s first people meter measurement of digital radio.

PubForge, a group of veteran web programmers collaborating on open-source tools tailored to the needs of public broadcasters, is conducting a survey to determine what tools and resources programmers and producers need the most. The group’s wiki already offers some applications and invites others to share expertise and collaborate on problem-solving. KJZZ webmaster John Tynan, a PubForge organizer, describes his objective for convening the group here.

Two initiatives led by NPR will soon offer station websites greater automated handling of editorial content and national sales of underwriting to help support those sites.

The Public Radio Exchange announced this week that it received a $250,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to support expansion of its website, creation of unique content and strategic planning. The online marketplace received a MacArthur grant earlier this year to support similar efforts (coverage in Current).

Fifteen pubcasters received CPB grants to support programming about national issues in this year’s elections. The grants are part of the funder’s Station-Based Election Programming Initiative.