An often-overlooked corner of the evolving pubmedia ecosystem hides PEG access (public access, educational, government) channels. But the recent conference of the Alliance for Community Media PEG advocacy group revealed the trend that more of the channels are transforming into “community media centers” to further their public-service mission, write Bill Densmore and Colin Rhinesmith at the New America Foundation blog Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age. The support once required from the cable industry is fading away; cities including Los Angeles and Las Vegas have totally pulled the plug. But the Web offers low-cost (or free) ways to deliver information to Web-savvy citizens, PEG supporters say.

Five staffers have been due to the ongoing merger between PBS affiliates CET in Cincinnati and ThinkTV in Dayton, Ohio, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. The two have been operating together since 2008 as Public Media Connect Inc., headed by president David Fogarty. “We’re going through changes with staff realignments and technical operations,” in both cities, he told the newspaper. CET’s signal is now being sent from Dayton. All channel monitoring and program traffic are done there for both. One master control operator from each station, two producers and an educational services staffer lost jobs. Fogarty said they’re also cutting some part-time and contract personnel.

San Francisco’s KQED is adding weekday newscasts to its FM station and as on-demand audio on its website, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “These will be the first local news-only reports on KQED-FM in several years and will air on the half hour from 6:04 a.m. to noon and at 4:33 p.m. The two minutes of air time will be subtracted from the NPR newscasts that precede them,” the Chronicle reports. The expanded news service launched this morning; a blog reporting breaking news, News Fix, rolls out next month.

The Ford Foundation was noncommercial television’s first big funder, years before Congress contributed large sums — supporting efforts to acquire reserved channels, helping to start stations in major cities, and backing National Educational Television, the system’s major production and distribution organization in its early years.

Public Law 90-129, 90th Congress, November 7, 1967 (as amended to April 26, 1968) This law was enacted less than 10 months after the report of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Broadcasting. The act initiates federal aid to the operation (as opposed to funding capital facilities) of public broadcasting. Provisions include: extend authorization of the earlier Educational Television Facilities Act, forbid educational broadcasting stations to editorialize or support or oppose political candidates, establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and defines its board, defines its purposes, authorize reduced telecommunications rates for its interconnection, authorize appropriations to CPB, and authorize a federal study of instructional television and radio.

Several hundred e-mails landed in PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler’s in-box regarding the three-part doc “Turmoil and Triumph: The George Schultz Years,” running this month on PBS (image, PBS). Viewers raised many of the same issues that media watchdog FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) did regarding the laudatory tone of the film as well as funding closely linked to the former Secretary of State — particularly by the Bechtel Foundation, where Schultz was president for seven years. In response, PBS told Gelter in part: “No PBS funder is permitted to exercise editorial control over content. This is the most important consideration in our underwriting policies.

Jesse Thorn, host and creator of The Sound of Young America, speaks up for humor on public radio by announcing that Mississippi Public Broadcasting can’t air his program unless and until it resumes broadcasts of Fresh Air, the NPR talk show that MPB Radio dumped because of “gratuitous discussions on issues of an explicit sexual nature.” Fresh Air is “one of the best radio shows in the world,” Thorn writes, and its editorial standards have been acknowledged with Peabody and Murrow awards. “This incident is of particular concern to us here at The Sound of Young America not just because we create a show with a format similar to Fresh Air‘s, or because Terry Gross is a personal hero of mine, but also because much of our show is focused on humor, and that seems to be the real target of the ban,” Thorn writes.

Citing North Carolina’s Open Records laws, Alcoa Aluminum Inc. wants UNC-TV — licensed to the University of North Carolina — to turn over all reporting documents relating to its North Carolina Now segments titled, “Alcoa and the Yadkin River.” UNC-TV spokesman Steve Volstad told Current that station attorneys will “abide by the letter of the law,” and are still researching the request. There’s a great deal of information at stake, including anything related to reporter Eszter Vajda’s research into Alcoa’s request for a new 50-year lease of four hydroelectric dams in the state. UNC-TV earlier this month (July 6) provided that information to its state legislature as part of its investigation into the dam lease renewal.

Documentarian and baseball fan Ken Burns will premiere his latest film, “The Tenth Inning,” today (July 16) at Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center for the Arts, reports The Dartmouth newspaper. The original 1994 “Baseball” series ran nine episodes and covered the history of the sport from the Civil War to 1992. The sequel, produced with filmmaker Lynn Novick (both above), focuses on recent developments in the sport. It’ll have its broadcast premiere Sept. 28 on PBS.

Why did Mississippi Public Broadcasting drop Fresh Air from its radio schedule? The blog “A Unitarian Universalist Minister in the South” set off a blogosphere chain reaction yesterday by speculating that the “recurring inappropriate content” cited by MPB Radio Director Kevin Farrell must be the show’s willingness to treat homosexuals as normal people, not the “evil incarnate bent on destroying the American dream, baseball and apple pie, too.” MPB Executive Director Dr. Judith Lewis didn’t get into the details in a statement issued late yesterday, after Gawker and the Huffington Post had picked up on the story. “Too often Fresh Air‘s interviews include gratuitous discussions on issues of an explicit sexual nature.

The Los Angeles Times said that PBS “flexed its usual strength” when the News and Documentary Emmy nods were announced today (July 15) and the network received 37. Frontline scored four and Frontline/World, three; Nova and P.O.V. each had four; and Bill Moyers Journal, which ended this year, received three. “Mosque at Morgantown,” one of the “America at a Crossroads” series funded by CPB, also is in the running. The 2010 lifetime achievement award goes to noted documentarian Frederick Wiseman, perhaps best known for his groundbreaking 1967 cinema verite “Titicut Follies.” Several of his 30 films ran on PBS, including “Domestic Violence” and “High School.”

Online donations to nonprofs are up 23 percent this March, April and May over the same time last year, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports. The Blackbaud Index of Online Giving keeps tabs on nearly 1,800 nonprofit organizations with combined donations of $400 million annually. It found that groups with annual budgets of more than $10 million saw Internet donations grow 28 percent during that period compared to last year; those with budgets of $1 million to $10 million rose 21.3 percent; and those with budgets of less than $1 million grew 13.1 percent.

NPR’s David Folkenflik, State of the Re:Union creator Al Letson, and PBS’s Frontline are public broadcasting’s winners in this year’s National Press Club Awards. The Press Club honored Folkenflik for press criticism in “Why GQ Doesn’t Want Russians to Read its Story“; Letson for “Brooklyn: Change Happens,” an episode of the series spawned by via CPB’s Public Radio Talent Quest initiative; and Frontline for consumer journalism in The Card Game, a documentary reported by Lowell Bergman and coproduced with the New York Times.

A unique nonfiction film that its producers call “a road movie on the web” is getting attention within the indie production world, according to the Independent, a news site for media makers. Viewers interested in “Prison Valley” sign into Twitter, Facebook, or create an account on the film’s site. Then the movie, from French producers David Dufresne and Philippe Brault, begins in a car driving along Skyline Drive in Cañon City, Colo., heading toward an area that’s home to 13 prisons. There are opportunities to take detours into additional interactive content, and visitors see the names of others who are watching.