CPB has brought back Peggy O’Brien as senior v.p., educational programming and services. In 1994-2000, she headed CPB’s earliest Ready to Learn efforts and served as v.p. of education. Cheryl Williams, now v.p., will report to her. She comes from Cable in the Classroom, where she was executive director.

Members of Azerbaijan’s parliament and its national TV and radio council left last week to study public TV in the United States, Baku Today reported. The tour, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, will stop in D.C., Ohio, Texas and New York.

The New York Times reports on the tensions stations feel about competing against NPR for major donors, and against satellite radio for listeners.

Clear Channel is distributing programming from liberal network Air America in five cities, reports the New York Times. Though public radio could lose listeners to the format, San Diego public station KPBS-FM has sold underwriting to Clear Channel as it advertises the change. Also in the Times, more coverage of KGNU-FM’s purchase of a station in Denver.

In the Boston Globe‘s take on PBS’s Friday-night pundit zone, hard-core lefties and righties alike accuse pubTV of kissing up to Congress. PBS still speaks only of “diversity.”

Forbes lists the salaries of some highly paid public TV execs. (Last item.)

CorpWatch.org reports the commercial TV networks have reduced convention coverage to about 18 hours this year, about 10 percent of its total in 1972, while the TV industry has increased its take of political ads by 40-fold during the same period to about $1 billion.

The Anchorage Press profiles community radio pioneer Jeremy Lansman.

Retired PBS newsman Robert MacNeil discusses the sanguinary political landscape in today’s San Franciso Chronicle, claiming, “Democrats want to see more blood flow from the arrows of journalists and Republicans want more red meat out there going after Democrats.” MacNeil also derides the Fox News Channel and wonders if journalism is returning to its partisan roots. (via mediabistro.com)

Beat reporters can be “secret weapons” for online news sites when they prepare FAQs, primers and other nondeadline pieces that web users would love, writes Dan Froomkin in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review. He’s talking about newspaper reporters, but the same could be said about people on the beat for pubradio.

More coverage of KGNU-FM’s purchase of a Denver AM station in Rocky Mountain News, the Denver Business Journal and the (Boulder, Colo.) Daily Camera.

Development Exchange Inc. has posted an overview and white papers from May’s Public Radio Leadership Forum.

David Lieberman reports in USA Today the view of Wall Street analyst Tom Wolzien: cable networks won’t take much more audience from broadcasters unless cable spends heavily for more attractive programs. Cable nets already increased spending 30 percent in three years, but Wolzien says growing cable carriage and not programs explain cable’s growth.

Community station KGNU-FM in Boulder, Colo., is paying $4.1 million for an AM station in nearby Denver.

North Dakota’s Prairie Public Television lost its transmitter near Devil’s Lake in an ice storm last May and hopes to restore it by spring 2005, the Grand Forks Herald reports. The capital cost to restore service to 9,000 people: $2 million.