Massachusetts station WFCR is buying WNNZ, a 50,000-watt outlet on 640 AM, and converting it into noncommercial operation, the WFCR Foundation announced today. WFCR began programming NPR news and talk on WNNZ in 2007 under contract with Clear Channel Communications. The $600,000 purchase, to be initially financed through a four-year loan from Public Radio Capital, secures the AM outlet for WFCR’s expanding news and information service. In August, the Amherst-based pubcaster acquired another channel for news — WNNZ-FM, a 100-watt station on 91.7 MHz that was previously operated by prep-school students of the Deerfield Academy.

In a memo to NPR employees today (Oct. 13) posted on the Poynter Online Romenesko journalism blog, President Vivian Schiller cautioned staffers against participation in the dueling rallies on the National Mall planned for Oct. 30 by Comedy Central’s faux-news pundits, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. ” … [N]o matter where you work at NPR you should be very mindful that you represent the organization and its news coverage in the eyes of your friends, neighbors and others,” she said in the memo, which was attached to a copy of NPR’s News Ethics guidelines. “So please think twice about the message you may be sending about our objectivity before you attend a rally or post a bumper sticker or yard sign.”

In an interview with the St. Louis Beacon, the nonprof news site partnering with St. Louis’s KETC, CPB President Pat Harrison makes a strongly worded case for the corporation’s involvement in funding news coverage. “My job is to invest in high quality journalism and let the chips fall where they may,” Harrison said. “I don’t even have to like it; I just have to make sure it gets funded. And I am dedicated to that. We are going to gore people’s oxen. On any given day, I may have somebody from one side of the aisle complaining that we are very, very left, and another call that says we are too right.

“KCET is dead; long live KCET,” writes Los Angeles Times TV Critic Robert Lloyd in today’s (Oct. 13) column. He’s adopting a wait-and-see attitude toward the station’s departure from PBS as of Jan. 1, 2011. “If, as the station has claimed, the economic downturn had made it difficult for KCET to raise the money PBS demanded from it, will it be any easier, without the lure of an Antiques Roadshow or American Masters, to raise the money to realize this unrevealed new vision?” Lloyd writes. “One can easily imagine, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, a vicious circle of diminishing returns, in which cheaper programming leads to fewer pledges, which in turn leads to even cheaper programming, which leads to fewer pledges.”

President Barack Obama today (Oct. 13) announced his choice for appointments to several administration posts. Included is Beth Kobliner, to serve as a member of the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability. The financial expert has a regular segment on public radio’s The Takeaway and is a content adviser to Sesame Workshop’s upcoming Financial Education Initiative, a bilingual outreach program to promote financial literacy in very young children. Here’s a video interview of Kobliner at last year’s TV Critics Press Tour, discussing her participation in the doc “Your Life, Your Money,” which ran on PBS in April 2009.

Here’s an interesting exchange on the future of soon-indie KCET between Doc Searls, head of Project VRM at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and John Proffitt, longtime public broadcaster and pubmedia analyst. “KCET has some faith — or at least a good idea — that Whatever Comes Next will be good enough for lots of people to watch,” Searls writes on his blog. ” … Dumping PBS was a brave move by KCET. They deserve congratulations for it.” But Proffitt predicts that the station will slowly become “a video production house for grant-funded film and commercial work where possible,” and be gone in five years.

Just what does Minnesota Public Radio’s Bill Kling have in mind for the regional news initiative announced last month as his next act? A $100 million expansion of newsgathering capacity at public radio stations in four to six major markets, reports Newsonomics blogger Ken Doctor. Minnesota Public Radio and KPCC in Los Angeles, sister stations in Kling’s American Public Media family, are planning an alliance with New York’s WNYC and Chicago’s WBEZ. Each participating station would hire 100 reporters and editors. “That’s ‘public radio’ grown into ‘public media,’ meaning that these news operations would be digital-first, text-heavy and video-ready, while porting over the audio from radio,” Doctor writes.

Pacifica Radio’s KPFT in Houston “was the first radio station in the United States to be bombed off the air” in May 1970, soon after going on the air, recalled Rick Campbell in a Houston Chronicle blog. That October, 40 years ago this month, the station was dynamited into silence a second time during a broadcast of Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant.” Three members of the Ku Klux Klan were arrested; two got off by testifying against Jimmy Dale Hutto, who was convicted and sent to jail. He allegedly planned to bomb the Pacifica stations in Berkeley and Los Angeles. When the station resumed broadcasting in January 1971, PBS’s Great American Dream Machine covered the event live.

“Gaming for the Greater Good” is the intriguing title of the Wednesday (Oct. 13) webinar from the National Center for Media Engagement. Learn how video games can do much more than entertain. Online will be Gabrielle Cayton-Hodges, research fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop; Felix Brandon, general manager of MoneyIsland, an online financial literacy game; and Alexa Belajac, director of education and community engagement at WYEP-FM. Register here.

The first Core Publisher news site from Public Interactive is up and running to “rave reviews” from sponsoring station WXXI in Rochester, N.Y., according to the Core blog. Innovation Trail is a collaboration among WXXI and four other upstate New York stations: WNED in Buffalo, WRVO in Oswego, WSKG in Bringhamton, and WMHT in Schenectady. The CPB-funded site focuses on the area economy. The blog says this is the “alpha version” of the website.

NPR’s latest audience study provides good insights for promotion, marketing and multi-platform service strategies, but its recommendation that NPR adopt a less formal presentation style “is an over-simplification that public radio cannot afford to accept,” writes John Sutton, Maryland-based public radio marketing consultant, on his blog. Many programming changes over the past decade have moved public radio to a more conversational style that’s accessible to a broader audience–from host changes at Morning Edition, launch of Public Radio International’s The Takeaway, to the reinvention of economics reporting by This American Life and Planet Money, he notes. “Yet the latest research once again shows that public radio’s elite and highbrow sound remains a barrier to growth.

CPB has cut $50,000 in funding from the University of Minnesota’s Radio K due to low ratings, reports the school’s Minnesota Daily newspaper. Radio K marketing director Alex Gaterud told the paper that the station gets about five times that much from student services fees, but it will still feel the loss. “In any public radio or public broadcasting setting, that’s a huge hit,” Gaterud said. “We’re confident we can deliver [an] excellent product continuously, but we’re still looking to fill that gap.” The ratings were gathered via Arbitron’s Portable People Meters, which have been controversial in the past for producing much lower numbers than the previously used listener diaries (Current, Sept.

Here’s a tribute to public broadcasting at its best, through the experiences of longtime Nebraska Educational Television programmer Ron Hull, who just turned 80. Although Hull has come and gone from the station a few times, “he never really went away,” the local Journal Star noted. He’s now senior adviser to NET and professor emeritus of broadcasting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and reports for work in his fourth-floor office at 6:30 every morning. “This place I love,” he said — even after 55 years.

The Knight Foundation announced four new categories for its next Knight News Challenge: mobile, authenticity, sustainability and community. Details at Knightblog and Neiman Labs. The window for entries opens Oct. 25 and closes Dec. 1. The competition backing innovations in news media has awarded $23 million to 56 projects in its first four years; WBUR in Boston and Public Radio Exchange were among this year’s winners.

PBCore, Public Media Platform, Argo and American Archive: “One or more may rock our world,” writes Barrett Golding on Hacks/Hackers of the four ambitious pubmedia initiatives. However, “All four of the above projects are well-conceived, led and executed by consummate pros. . . . But all suffer from similar limitations: they’re top-down, closed, exclusive (some proprietary), and expensive.” Golding, keeper of the PubMedia Commons blog, suggests another approach: “The bottom-up, grassroots, social inclusiveness of open-source projects — what in tech parlance is more bazaar than cathedral. Imagine some small-scale journocoder community solutions that deliver immediately useful results, cheaply and quickly.”