Julie Walker, a freelance reporter for NPR, was among the journalists arrested yesterday when the New York City Police Department evicted Occupy Wall Street protestors from Zuccotti Park. Walker told Associated Press she was arrested for disorderly conduct after she requested the name and badge number of a police officer who had grabbed her arm twice. “I told them I’m a reporter,” she told AP. “I had my recorder on before he ripped it out of my hand.” At least seven journalists were arrested in New York during the police action, and several reported being rough-handled, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Public television stations serving rural areas are receiving $4.75 million in grants to complete the digital transition, according to Agriculture Under Secretary for Rural Development Dallas Tonsager. Fifteen licensees will get between $25,540 and $750,000 for projects under the Public Television Digital Transition Grant Program. Money may be used to acquire, lease, and/or install facilities and software necessary to finish the digital transition, the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service said in a statement. The funding is especially valuable in the wake of the end of the 49-year-old Public Telecommunications Facilities Program (Current, April 18).

Howard Swartz, executive producer of Nova, is joining Discovery Channel, effective immediately. He’ll be vice president of development and production at Discovery, a new position. Swartz will be based at the channel’s Los Angeles office to develop and supervise production of Curiosity. Swartz had joined Nova in January 2010. Swartz also worked at National Geographic Channel on programs including Explorer, Five Years on Mars and Inside the Living Body.

Two men who played key roles in the NPR fundraising sting in February have split with media trickster James O’Keefe. Simon Templar and Shaughn Adeleye, who posed as Muslim philanthropists and secretly recorded their conversations with NPR development execs, fault O’Keefe for selling them a “false bill of goods,” according to the Daily Beast. The pair say they designed a far-reaching, well-researched operation that was to extend far beyond NPR, but O’Keefe was only interested in a “hit job.” “All he cared about was that he had people saying embarrassing stuff on video,” Templar tells media critic Howard Kurtz.

Rick Steves, whose travel commentaries run on both public television and radio, is the Journalist of the Year in the 2011 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition, sponsored by the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation. Steves also won gold awards for his travel blog and Travel With Rick Steves broadcasts on public radio, and a bronze award for Rick Steves’ Europe: Season Six distributed by American Public Television. “Rick Steves connects with a wide audience today,” the society said in a statement, “sharing his travel adventures and insight in all forms of media from print, radio and television to blogs and tweets.”

A report released today by media reform advocates at Free Press chronicles the impact of four years of budget battles in state capitals and finds that the public TV system is at a precarious tipping point. Since the onset of the recession in 2008, public broadcasting stations in 24 states have lost $85 million in financial support from what has historically been one of their most reliable funding sources — state governments. Public TV networks in at least four states — North Carolina, Oklahoma, Maine and Idaho — are considering shutting down transmitters serving sparsely populated regions, and New Hampshire Public Television is among those drastically scaling back on local production.

Children now have their own “augmented reality” educational mobile app from PBS Kids. The Fetch! Lunch Rush App was created by WGBH in Boston and is based on its PBS Kids Go! series, Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman. “Augmented reality is becoming a popular marketing tool and a compelling feature for gamers, but no one has fully explored what this could mean for educating children,” said Jason Seiken, PBS’s s.v.p., interactive, product development and innovation, in a statement. Augmented reality blends a physical, real-world view with computer-generated sensory input including sounds, video or electronic graphics. In the app, star Ruff Ruffman takes the lunch order for his studio crew.

Texas Public Radio’s KSTX/89.1 FM reports that Jim Leonard, an on-air host for 17 years, died Nov. 10 of complications from a heart transplant he received in September. Leonard was 61, and had battled heart disease for decades, the station said in a statement on its website. “First and foremost, Jim Leonard was one of our best voices on KSTX,” said Texas Public Radio’s Nathan Cone, director of classical programming, who worked with Leonard for more than a decade. “He was sharp at writing copy for air, and adept at handling the pressure of hosting our local broadcasts of All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

To the Point host Warren Olney is under fire for his Nov. 11 talk show linking the child sex abuse scandal at Pennsylvania State University to barriers that prevent same-sex couples from becoming adoptive or foster parents. “This entire broadcast was utterly worthless, embarrassing, and completely unacceptable,” wrote Gawker’s Seth Abramovitch in a scathing critique posted on Friday. After the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to objected to the program, Olney apologized for the misunderstanding and promised further discussion of the topic today. GLAAD has also requested that producing station KCRW and distributor Public Radio International remove the Nov.

PBS is a signatory to an international joint declaration, announced at 11 a.m. local time today (11/11) at the Future of Broadcast Television summit in Shanghai, calling for worldwide cooperation among over-the-air (OTA) television broadcasters to define requirements, unify standards and promote technology sharing, in order to benefit both developed and underdeveloped countries and conserve resources. According to Advanced Television, a European media news site, the declaration stated in part, “We need to explore new ways of cooperation, seek the progressive unification of standards, and realize technology sharing so that the efficiency and convenience enabled by digitization will be realized — not reduced by system fragmentation.

Joaquin Alvarado, senior vice president for digital innovation at American Public Media, is one of two new members on the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Board of Directors, the nation’s oldest independent nonprofit investigative reporting organization announced Thursday (Nov. 10) on its California Watch website. Alvarado and Gabriel Stricker, director of global communications and public affairs at Google, join the board “at a critical time,” the organization said. Over the past three years CIR has grown from a staff of seven and budget of $1.7 million to a staff of 32 and budget of nearly $5 million. Its editorial output during that time has included more than 40 major investigations (most developed for multiple formats and published or broadcast in more than 300 outlets) and more than 1,400 blog entries and Daily Reports.

The New York Times is reporting that longtime public broadcasting talk-show host Charlie Rose will co-host a new version of CBS’s The Early Show. The new two-hour show, expected to be announced next Tuesday, “will defy the gauzy conventions of morning television,” the newspaper predicted, emphasizing a hard-news and conversational approach like Morning Joe on MSNBC and The View on ABC. Rose will join another new co-host, Gayle King, who hosts a talk show on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network, and current hosts Erica Hill and Jeff Glor. CBS declined to comment on the record about the changes. Rose declined to comment for the latest story but previously said he would “not under any circumstances” end his PBS show because of added Early Show duties.

In Washington, D.C., Jennifer Lawson’s successor as g.m. of Howard University’s WHUT-TV is Jefferi K. Lee, a 30-year TV veteran with 17 years at the D.C.-based cable network Black Entertainment Television. Lawson, who was the top program exec at CPB and PBS in the 1980s and ’90s, returned to CPB as program chief early this year. Lee served as BET’s executive v.p. of network operations and programming and in other roles while the cable network expanded to 24 hours, added new channels, built a corporate campus in D.C., and went public on the stock market. Since leaving BET more than a dozen years ago, Lee headed his communications consulting firm, Lee Productions, and, during the homeland security rush, served as chief exec of Bio-Defense Research Group Inc.,

I can’t tell you how glad I am to be here.  Or maybe I can.  Last Friday, after filming in Washington for our new series, I was waiting at Union Station for the train back to New York when a woman about my age approached me with a quizzical look on her face. She asked: “Weren’t you Bill Moyers?” “Once upon a time,” I answered. She said, “I’ll be darned . . . I didn’t think you were still with us.” “Well, I think I am,” I answered.  I guessed that she was a news junkie, so I said: “Maybe you have me confused with other on-air journalists, old-timers like David Brinkley.

PBS International announced today it has signed a multi-year broadcast and distribution agreement with China Educational Television (CETV) in Beijing, part of the country’s ministry of education that operates five TV channels and 11 IPTV channels. It will provide a weekday primetime slot for PBS-branded programming on CETV-3, a series titled Clear View produced and presented by Chinese anchor and producer Jim Fang that will premiere in January 2012. “This is, by far, the largest deal we have done in China,” Tom Koch, PBS International’s vice president, said in a statement. CETV’s distribution arm, Beijing Zhongxian Media, will be PBS International’s sales agent in China for its library of more than 500 hours of documentary, children’s and lifestyle programming.