Franklin, Mass., is creating a nonprofit to run the town’s public access channels, reports the local Milford Daily News today (May 29). The town’s Cable Advisory Board hopes to increase public involvement, separate the channel from government entanglements and move it to a larger studio. Comcast stopped running the studio as part of the most recent license agreement the town signed last year. The town has since hired two part-time workers. In the past 10 years, Comcast has stopped running many cable access stations it inherited when it purchased AT&T Broadband, leaving towns to figure out how to keep providing those services, the paper notes.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed a $13.8 billion budget Saturday (May 28) for the fiscal year beginning July 1, which includes $1.5 million in operating grants for public broadcasting stations. However, he also warned pubcasting stations that he intends to target the funding next year. He called on the stations to make what he called appropriate preparations for losing their state funding.

The new managing director of news and culture for WGBH-FM/89.7 in Boston is Phil Redo. He’ll guide the overall strategy of the NPR station’s news and cultural programs and oversee WGBH-FM’s editorial partnership with Public Radio International. Redo worked for WGBH as an independent media consultant and was instrumental last year in its purchase of WCRB-FM/99.5, the station said in a release. Redo was formerly vice president and general manager of Greater Media Boston, a five-station FM radio group, and v.p. of operations and strategy at WNYC, New York Public Radio.

Here’s a tantilizing development: a free TiVo for radio. That’s the promise of DAR.fm (for Digital Audio Recorder), a Web site that lists every single radio show on 1,800 AM and FM stations across the country. The New York Times reports that listeners can “search, sort, slice and dice those listings” by genre, radio station or search phrase, then request the program and “shortly thereafter, an e-mail message lets you know that your freshly baked show is ready for listening.” “It lets you time shift, of course, but also presents the entire universe of radio broadcasting in one tidy menu,” it adds.

Public media stations are producing live webcasts from two major music festivals this Memorial Day weekend. New Jersey’s WFMU returns to Barcelona, Spain, for the Primavera Sound Festival, presenting two days of live concerts that began at 3 p.m. ET today with Suicide, the influential protopunk duo. (Listen and chat with other music fans here.) Seattle’s KEXP and NPR Music launch three days of coverage of the Gorge Amphitheatre’s Sasquatch Music Festival tomorrow at 3:25 ET. This is the first time that NPR Music has taken its web listeners to Sasquatch. In addition to KEXP, three radio stations are participating in the festivalcast: KUT in Austin, Texas; Oregon’s OPB Music; and The Current from Minneapolis.

After the University of Central Florida Board of Trustees approved the new WUCF-PBS on Thursday (May 26), “a small crowd at the meeting applauded loudly and cried out in celebration,” according to the Orlando Sentinel. “We see this as an opportunity to step up and serve the community in a new way,” said Grant Heston, UCF’s assistant vice president for news, information and UCFTV. “We look forward to finalizing this with PBS in the coming days.” The university is partnering with Brevard Community College in Cocoa. BCC operates public TV station WBCC, a secondary PBS station. Through an exisitng partnership with UCF, BCC broadcasts UCFTV. 

The University of Central Florida Board of Trustees today (May 26) gave its approval to become the PBS licensee for Orlando, the Orlando Business Journal is reporting. WUCF-PBS will launch when current affiliate WMFE-TV stops broadcasting July 1, following its sale to religious broadcaster Daystar. The deal includes a one-time, $1 million cash infusion to the station for HD. Both UCF and BCC already operate their own TV stations and would create content for the channel. UCF will commit $380,000 a year in personnel to the station.

Florida public broadcasters are reeling after Republican Gov. Rick Scott vetoed all public radio and television Community Service Grants today (May 26). That’s a loss of nearly $4.8 million in the next fiscal year, WMNF in Tampa reports. The governor kept funding for the Florida Channel, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the legislative sessions and Supreme Court hearings, Janyth Righter, executive director of Florida Public Broadcasting Service, tells Current. “Elimination of state funding will inevitably lead to the loss of programs, services, and jobs in communities across Florida,” the pubcasting group said in a statement, adding that “supporters of local public broadcasting stations across the state are deeply dismayed” at the governor’s decision.

Eight persons showed up at a WMFE Board of Trustees meeting Wednesday night (May 25) to voice concerns about sale of the PBS affiliate’s license to religious broadcaster Daystar. One was former Democratic U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson. “People spoke out against the sale,” Grayson told the Orlando Sentinel in an email. “I told them that they should ask for an FCC hearing on the transfer, and they should solicit competing offers from local groups that want to continue public broadcasting.” Station President Jose Fajardo also told the paper that proceeds from the $3 million sale “will help pay for any money that will need to be reimbursed to state or federal agencies.”

KCET in Los Angeles raised $70,495 during its May 24 live televised benefit for Japan, 100 percent of which will go to relief efforts in the regions most affected by the earthquake and tsunami disasters, the station says. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa made a special appearance during the three-hour primetime show, which will be rebroadcast locally from 3 to 6 p.m. Saturday. KCET is working with U.S.-Japan Council to disburse funds to NGOs in Japan. Above, from left, KTLA’s Frank Buckley and actress Lily Mariye with Villaraigosa, L.A. Deputy Police Chief Terry Hara, actor George Takei, and U.S.-Japan Council’s Bryan Takeda during the telethon.

Florida’s WXEL-FM, the public radio station that broadcast on 90.7 FM in Palm Beach, has been converted into full-time music outlet WPBI, owned and operated by American Public Media’s Classical South Florida. The FCC approved the $3.85 million license transfer agreement last week, overruling objections from local groups who sought to prevent longtime owner Barry University from splitting the NPR news/classical music station from its public TV sibling. Sale opponents, including the WXEL Community Advisory Board, lobbied unsuccessfully to retain local control of both stations. “This is an exciting day for public radio listeners across South Florida,” said Doug Evans, Classical South Florida president, in a news release announcing that the sale had closed.

The Nightly Business Report will be broadcast by SiriusXM nationally five nights per week starting May 30, the Miami Herald is reporting today (May 26). SiriusXM will air the personal investment program at 7 p.m. Eastern weeknights on SiriusXM Public Radio (XM channel 121 and Sirius channel 205 with Sirius Premier), and again at 10 p.m. “This is a big first step toward the goal we’ve set for ourselves, which is to build a global distribution for NBR on both television and radio,” Mykalai Kontilai, the former educational video businessman who acquired the show with partner Gary Ferrell from WPBT/PBS 2 nine months ago (Current, Aug.

Essential Public Media unveiled plans to operate 90.5 FM in Pittsburgh, the station now broadcasting NPR News and jazz as WDUQ, as an all-news station as of July 1. Dennis Hamilton, a public radio veteran who is director of consulting for Public Radio Capital, will manage the new station on an interim basis. Under a $6 million license transfer agreement now pending at the FCC, the station will get new call letters, and its new owners will reconfigure Pittsburgh’s public radio landscape by launching the city’s first all-news public radio service. Jazz music programming, which fans of current format had hoped to preserve, will air on an HD Radio channel and Internet audio stream; six hours of jazz programming are slated for Saturday nights on the main broadcast channel.

The Wisconsin legislature’s budget committee today (May 25) approved slicing an extra half-million dollars from an agency that helps deliver the broadcasts of Wisconsin Public Radio and Television, the Superior Telegraph is reporting. The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau says the two-year cut to the Educational Communications Board is atop the roughly 10 percent reductions to most state agencies. The move passed on a 12-4 party-line vote. Across the country, states lawmakers continue to target pubcasting dollars (Current, April 18).

Outgoing NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard reviews the network’s decision to accept an $1.8 million grant from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations last fall — a judgement call that, in the view of unnamed NPR journalists, put the news organization’s credibility as an impartial, trusted news source at risk. “[A] deep current of concern has run through the newsroom about taking money from someone with a well-known, documented political agenda supporting Democrats and Democratic causes,” Shepard writes. The two-year grant supports a worthy cause — launch of the accountability journalism project Impact of Government — but unwittingly opened NPR up to attacks from right-wing partisans.