The governor says the state can’t afford New Jersey Network anymore. NJN’s leaders say it would do better as a nonprofit anyway. But the NJN employees’ union predicts that a spun-off nonprofit NJN inevitably would fade away, its valuable assets and New Jersey news lost forever. Looks like the ideal time for a Legislative Task Force on Public Broadcasting, lawmakers decided June 29.

Dish Network is suing the Federal Communication Commission over the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act, which requires the satTV provider to deliver noncom stations’ HD signals by next year, reports Broadcasting & Cable. The suit, filed last week (July 1) in Las Vegas where Dish is incorporated, seeks a temporary restraining order and injunction against the FCC’s enforcement of the Act. “This is not a case about whether PBS provides important and worthwhile programming or should receive funding from the government,” Dish said in a statement. “Dish highly values PBS programming … This case is about who gets to make the editorial judgment whether to carry local PBS stations in HD — Dish or the government.”

Stirrings of audience life in multicast channels may the big reason why the national Nielsen ratings acquired by PBS have been rising even though local Nielsen numbers are still generally slipping. Audience analyst Judith LeRoy, co-director of TRAC Media Services, told Current that Nielsen includes multicast channels’ viewers in national PBS numbers, which are network-oriented, while they are counted as separate channels in local data, which are more strictly channel-oriented. Multicast channels such as Create, World, V-me and some locally packaged channels tend to have no measurable audience or a fraction as many viewers as the largest PBS channel in town, but small increments from two or three additional channels per market could mount up quietly, given that most stations don’t see the data because they’d have to pay extra to Nielsen.

To advance Vocalo, its radio/web experiment in reaching a younger, more diverse audience, Chicago Public Media (formerly Chicago Public Radio) said Friday that it’s shifting its emphasis to the broadcast side to create “a dynamic broadcast that draws a sizeable audience.” Vocalo is dropping the jobs of five training and outreach employees. Seven Vocalo staffers remain, writes Vocalo blogger Robert Feder. This fiscal year, the licensee will have to operate without $312,000 that the state government contributed in fiscal 2010, the Chicago Tribune reported. WTTW public television earlier said it would cut 12 percent of its staff after losing $1.25 million from Illinois.

NPR won four national Edward R. Murrow Awards in latest RTDNA contest honoring excellence in electronic journalism. Top winners among the 14 additional public radio newsrooms recognized by the Radio Television Digital News Association for 2009  include Boston’s WBUR, honored for overall excellence among large-market radio stations, and Michigan Radio’s The Environment Report, cited for best news series in the radio network division. Among five public radio outlets that won in the small-market division, North Country Public Radio in Canton, N.Y., won a Murrow for investigative reporting by David Sommerstein and WSHU in Fairfield Conn., for Charles Lane’s continuing coverage of attacks against Latinos in Patchogue, Long Island.

Public TV cleaned up at the Creative Arts Daytime Emmy Awards June 25 PBS and American Public Television, as distributors, had 16 winners (and earlier, 53 nominations). Nickelodeon’s programs and artists won 11 Emmys and ABC’s won 10. Sesame Street scored seven and Electric Company five. Avec Eric, APT’s new food series with chef Eric Ripert, took an award for graphic design. The competition covers broadcasts during the calendar year 2009, 2 to 6 p.m. Public TV winners included: Outstanding Children’s Animated Program Curious George Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Ellen Cockrill, Carol Greenwald, Dorothea Gillim David Kirschner and Jon Shapiro, e.p.;

A pubradio reporter testified Wednesday (June 30) about being hit by a police officer during a violent May Day event three years ago, according to Courthouse News Service, a nationwide news service for lawyers and the media based in Pasadena, Calif. Patricia Nazario of KPCC in Pasadena told the court she had hidden behind a tree to call her editor when a police officer stabbed his baton to the right side of her back. Nazario asked him why he did so, the officer said, “Shut up, move!” then hit her just above her knee, knocking her down, she testified. She said the cellphone she was using to talk to her boss went flying over her head.

Oklahoma Educational Television Authority has dropped three longtime on-air news personalities due to state budget cuts, reports the Oklahoman. News anchors Gerry Bonds and George Tomek and weatherman Ross Dixon, “who have won numerous awards and combined for nearly 45 years of experience with OETA,” the paper notes, left after Wednesday’s (June 30) 6:30 p.m. Oklahoma News Report. John McCarroll, OETA exec director, said a $994,000 drop in the 2010 fiscal budget by the Legislature, added to $725,000 additional cuts this year, prompted the changes. He said their salaries “are a big part of that $994,000 that we’re going to be able to divert to other things.”

The Miami Herald‘s columnist Glen Garvin recently came across a piece he wrote in June 1993 bashing NPR. Now he writes: “NPR remains a cultish echo chamber with a tiny audience anchored in a dying medium, funded almost entirely with money extorted from taxpayers. Other than that, public radio is great.” Here’s the original 7,300-word column that ran in the Chicago Reader.

Garrison Keillor is taking a hiatus. Nope, not from pubradio’s popular Prairie Home Companion, but rather from “The Old Scout,” his weekly newspaper column. The Star Tribune in Minneapolis says Keillor told his syndicator, Tribune Media Services, that he wants to complete a screenplay and start writing a novel. No word on when he’ll return to his newspaper writing.

The radio station at Gaston College in Dallas, N.C., is beginning the process of becoming an NPR affiliate, according to the Gaston Gazette. The catalyst, officials at the community college say, was losing a state grant when the Legislature zeroed out college radio funding this year. Fundraisers weren’t bringing in enough money to WSGE and the college had to make up the shortfall. The station has applied for a CPB grant that would help pay for becoming an NPR affiliate; it will hear on that in July.

PBS CEO Paula Kerger has inked another three-year contract, according to PBS. No word on salary. According to a 2009 survey of nonprofits by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Kerger was making $534,500 at the end of fiscal 2008, up from $424,209 in 2007. During 2008 she had $60,198 in benefits and an expense account of $11,225.

A change in format at WTJU, the University of Virginia pubradio station in Charlottesville, is the subject of dueling forums, a walkout by a longtime DJ and an upcoming town hall meeting. The furor began, according to the C-Ville arts and news site, when new g.m. Burr Beard sent an internal e-mail describing “The All New Consistent and Reliable WTJU.” The station currently plays an eclectic mixture of music selected by DJs. The proposal would drop the number of weekly hours for rock and jazz and institute a rotation of four songs per hour, chosen by department directors from 20 releases and electronically placed on a DJ’s program log for airplay each hour.

The West Virginia governor’s office is attempting to determine whether Educational Broadcasting Authority employees can still participate in on-air pledge drives for West Virginia Public Broadcasting, the Charleston Gazette is reporting. A recent legislative audit determined that pubcasting staff should not provide services for the network’s two fundraising nonprofs, the Public Broadcasting Foundation and the Friends of Public Broadcasting. Friends organizations supporting pubcasting in both West Virginia and Florida have recently come under scrutiny (Current, June 21, 2010). The groups give pubcasters more flexibility and speed in purchasing and contracting than government procedures usually permit and they can pay for programming or other mission-related activities that the stations couldn’t otherwise afford.

Vegas PBS’s $60 million Educational Technology Campus was dedicated Monday (June 28), reports the Las Vegas Business Press. The 112,000-square-foot facility houses operations and production for the station, as well as the Clark County School District’s Virtual High School and educational media database. “Our role in the community as a local media company is to work with organizations to empower them through the use of the technologies and the distribution networks we have,” said g.m. Tom Axtell. Vegas PBS has seven broadcast channels and oversees six closed-circuit channels, and a Homeland Security database of building blueprints for police and fire departments to access during civil emergencies.