The member-supported local news site MinnPost is dissecting salary numbers of Minnesota Public Radio execs. Blogger David Brauer did “a little spreadsheet crunching” of MPR’s IRS 990 forms for the year ending June 2008. Bill Kling, president and CEO of Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media, made $373,254 in compensation and benefits from MPR/APM, $180,000 from American Public Media Group (APMG) and $48,000 from Greenspring, MPR’s for-profit arm.

Employees at WNET in New York will have three unpaid days off between Christmas and New Year’s Day, according to Crain’s New York Business. Senior managers at the pubTV station will have five days of unpaid leave. Production staffers involved in daily shows will be exempt.

PBS is picking up where Reading Rainbow left off, launching a new annual writing and drawing contest for children in cahoots with public TV stations around the country. More at current.org.

Now here’s an unexpected question: Did Sesame Street take a poke at Fox News? That’s what PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler is looking at in this week’s Mailbag. In the Oct. 29 episode, Oscar the Grouch hosted the Grouch News Network, covering “all grouchy, all disgustin’, all yucky” news. But another character thinks it’s not grouchy enough and threatens to switch to “Pox News, now there’s a trashy news show.” Viewers wrote Getler to complain that the character actually said “Fox” News. “I can’t really blame them,” Getler writes. “When I went and watched the tape for the first time, I thought I heard ‘Fox’ as well, perhaps because of the association one assumes when you hear ‘news’ right after the word.”

New York magazine is celebrating 40 years of Sesame Street with a pageful of fascinating factoids in its current issue. A few: The show was almost called 123 Avenue B. Designer Charles Rosen based the set “on an amalgam of streets in Harlem, the Bronx, the Upper West Side,” according to the mag. The very first episode on Nov. 10, 1969, was sponsored by the letters W, S and E, and the numbers 2 and 3. And Big Bird is still played by Caroll Spinney, now 75 years old. In other Sesame news, don’t miss the new show opening.

Eleven fictional mini-features, each 15 minutes, created by indie filmmakers will ponder what America may look like in the future. The ITVS project, FutureStates, will run exclusively on its new website in March 2010. ITVS said in a statement that the industry will get a peek at the series at AFI’s Digifest on Thursday in Los Angeles.

WTTW-Channel 11 in Chicago doesn’t have one African American reporter or anchor on staff, writes longtime Chicago media columnist Robert Feder on the WBEZ/Vocalo blog, noting the situation “seems like a throwback to some other era.” Chicago Tonight, the station’s public affairs program, has four white and two Hispanic staffers, he says. A WTTW spokesperson told Feder, “Because we reflect Chicago and we’re so Chicago focused, we know we’ve got to have African American talent. . . . It’s very front of our minds.” However, “given the station’s financial straits,” Feder notes, “it’s not likely to happen any time soon.”

Happy birthday, Public Broadcasting Service! Yes, PBS turns 40 today. The U.S. Census Bureau took the opportunity to recognize the system and its “excellent programs and objectivity” in a short news release today. Let’s hope that your station is having birthday cake. Or at least donuts.

Colorado Public Television on Monday announced a partnership with local journalists for a news website and an investigative news show covering the state. The project, Colorado Public News, “is responsive to the reduction of significant investigative journalism that has occurred nationally and locally with the shrinkage of news staffs in print and broadcast media, including the closure of the Rocky Mountain News,” Wick Rowland, president and CEO of Colorado Public Television, said in a statement. Former Rocky Mountain News investigative reporter Ann Imse will be editor-in-chief. “Since traditional advertising isn’t funding in-depth journalism, we are choosing the PBS model of producing great journalism and asking for tax-deductible donations to fund non-profit, public journalism,” Imse said in the statement.

A local group interested in buying the license for WXEL FM and TV in Palm Beach, Fla., has not submitted required documentation, according to owner Barry University, reports The Sun Sentinel. But the Community Broadcast Foundation of Palm Beach and Treasure Coast disagrees. “Now they’ve come back and say they want documentation of your funding,” said Green, who told the paper that Barry officials have refused to meet with his group. “If you meet with us, you can ask us anything you want.” The FCC may have to intervene, according to one source. Station ownership has been in flux for years.

NPR released its staff composition stats after the National Association of Black Journalists questioned the network’s commitment to diversity. “I couldn’t agree more that NPR must increase the diversity of its staff–particularly in management and editorial,” NPR President Vivian Schiller wrote in an Oct. 29 letter to NABJ leaders. “I believe our diversity efforts are best served through transparency, so we are going to lay out the numbers for you.” NPR’s management pool, which NABJ expressed concern about in an earlier letter to Schiller, includes 47 staff who describe themselves as people of color; that is nearly 24 percent of 199 managers at all levels of the network.

Ward Chamberlin, one of the founders of American pubcasting, is one of four journalists who will discuss “Saving the News” Wednesday evening at Yale University, according to the New Haven Register. Chamberlin was COO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting at its inception in 1967, and helped create PBS and NPR. Others in the panel are David Greenway, former editor of the editorial and op-ed pages of the Boston Globe; Robert Kaiser, associate editor and senior correspondent at the Washington Post; and John Yemma, editor of the Christian Science Monitor.

Voices of the Valley, a grassroots group working to create a second pubradio station in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, has encountered a setback, reports The Brownsville Herald. Betsy Price, who had been dismissed from local NPR affiliate KMBH’s board (Current, March 16, 2009), says ESPN nabbed an AM station in Raymondville the group wanted to lease. “We came very close,” she told the paper. “We were working with a broker to get a five-year lease with one of the stations. It was looking good until (ESPN) bought it out. What we were looking at was to partner with Texas Public Radio.

Reception problems with PBS affiliate KUAC in Fairbanks, Alaska, prompted it to move from UHF Ch. 24 to VHF Ch. 9, at a cost of $1.1 million and six days off the air, according to Broadcasting & Cable. It switched in late September by undergoing rechannelization. The new Harris VHF transmitter and ERI transmission line and antenna had to be installed in a “tightly coordinated process,” B&C reported, due to Alaska’s brief period of mild weather. Climate is always a challenge in the state; currently, a message on the dual licensee’s website explains to FM radio listeners that all that static is due to the transmitter operating at reduced power because of antenna icing.

In case you missed it, zombie originator George Romero (the creatures were his creation in Night of the Living Dead) was a guest on the Halloween edition of NPR fave Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! He shared this interesting factoid: Romero got his start working with Fred Rogers on the Mister Rogers episode, “Let’s Talk About Going to the Hospital,” in which a little girl gets a tonsillectomy.