An editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican this week salutes community radio station KSFR-FM “for the stroke of inspiration that brings some added class” to the city’s 400th anniversary celebration. News Director Bill Dupuy and reporter Dan Gerrity wrote new words for a monumental old tune, and 28 members of the New Mexico Men’s Camerata recorded it under the baton of Kenneth Knight. Listen online and you can follow these lyrics, ending with a crescendo and sonorous plug for one particular set of call letters: “The sounds of the city in old Santa Festir echoes of history with each passing day.

Arizona Public Media is offering viewers a rare event: A chance to witness two sitting Supreme Court justices talking about the Constitution. The one-hour discussion, “Principles of Constitutional and Statutory Interpretation,” between Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Stephen Breyer, will air live Monday (2:30 Eastern) on PBS World and also stream on the On Demand page at the Arizona Public Media website. Moderating will be NBC News Correspondent Pete Williams, from the Tucson Convention Center.

Big Bird and his Sesame Street buddies are taking to the skies on Australia’s largest airline, Qantas. From Dec. 1, 2009, through Nov. 30, 2010, six Sesame Street videos will be offered free to transpacific passengers.

Choosing from 482 submissions from 82 countries, the Independent Television Service (ITVS) has selected six doc projects for funding, according to Screen Daily. The winners: 74 Square Meters (Chile) by Tiziana Panizza and Paola Castillo Iselsa; The Last White Man Standing (Kenya) by Justin Webster; The Team (Kenya) by Patrick Reed Kenyans; Teacher (Vietnam) by Leslie Wiener; This Is My Picture When I Was Dead (Jordan) by Mahmoud Al Massad; and The Rodriguez Project (South Africa) by Malik Bendjelloul.

PRISA (Promotora de Informaciones), a 22-country Spanish language multimedia corporation, has purchased a 12 percent stake in V-me, reports Billboard magazine. That percentage should increase to a majority position in the next year. “PRISA is a perfect partner for V-me,” president and CEO Carmen M. DiRienzo said in a statement. The nearly three-year-old V-me (Current, Feb. 12, 2007) is a partnership with pubTV, reaching almost 80 percent of Hispanic households in the United States.

The Public Media Innovation Fund today announced Round Four funding. Total grants of $205,000 for economic and financial literacy projects went to KQED in San Francisco; WPSU in University Park, Penn.; Maryland Public Television; KNBA in Anchorage; Wisconsin Education Communications Board; KUEN in Salt Lake City; and North Country Public Radio in Canton, N.Y. Details on their project here.

Where is the arts programming on PBS? So asks Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, on Huffington Post. He laments that arts programs are costly, and “come only from stations that can afford to create this programming, meaning those with strong fundraising operations. And far too few of the local stations do have strong fundraising operations.” He favors a fundamental change for PBS: “Why can’t the parent organization determine the best in American arts and fund its broadcast across the nation? And, he adds, CPB has the clout to make that happen. A PBS arts initiative was mentioned at Showcase in May (Current, May 29, 2009), which would create a weekly arts night of shows.

NPR unveiled the first-ever Internet radio to offer an exclusive menu of NPR stations and programs. The “NPR Radio,” modeled on an earlier WiFi radio by Livio that optimizes Pandora’s music streaming service, allows NPR fans to switch between over-the-air broadcasts of local stations, online streams of more than 1,000 NPR outlets across the country, and on-demand content from NPR.org. More than 16,000 Internet radio stations not affiliated with NPR also are accessible on the device, offered for $199 from the NPR Shop and Livio Radio. Gadget reviews by Wired and CNET poke fun at the radio’s accessibility features for the technology averse.

Another report on the future of American journalism takes aim at public broadcasting for failing to develop the local news gathering capacity that would enable it to deliver on its mission to inform the public. The study, distilled over the weekend by David Carr of the New York Times, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, and Poynter’s Rick Edmonds, recommends a new mechanism for supporting local journalism and calls for an overhaul in how resources are allocated within public broadcasting. Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and co-author Michael Schudson of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism collaborated on “The Reconstruction of Local Journalism,” commissioned by the j-school.

The House Energy Commerce Committee yesterday unanimously approved the Local Community Radio Act of 2009, a bill revising channel spacing requirements in the licensing of new low-power FM stations. H.R. 1147, expected to be taken up quickly by the full House, eliminates third adjacent channel protections for full-power broadcasters with one exception: LPFMs cannot be licensed within three channel spaces of noncommercial full-power FM stations that operate radio reading services, nor can they be adjacent to their FM translators and boosters. Other provisions in the legislation lay out new procedures for dealing with interference complaints and order the FCC to address concerns about potential interference between LPFMs and FM translators of full-power broadcasters.

Public Media Digest has announced a redesign of the now privately owned website. Keith York of KPBS in San Diego and Garry Denny of Wisconsin Public Television took over the public media news site after CPB and the Public Television Programmers Association dropped support, Denny told Current. The new site will feature improved video capacity along with Flash and multimedia advertising; future plans include live chat and video conferencing. Four contributors write or report PMD’s blogs, news coverage and Twitter. PoGo Promotions heads up sales and sponsorship. The site currently claims 1,250 registered users and an average of 350 unique user visits daily.

The Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act was okayed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee yesterday, Broadcasting & Cable reports. It includes an amendment by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) that DISH Network carry public TV stations in HD; DISH has carried some local HD programming but is legally required to carry pubcasting in HD in Alaska and Hawaii only. The Association of Public Television Stations issued a statement thanking the committee and Eshoo for “ending this discriminatory behavior.” APTS had secured voluntary agreements with every major multichannel video programming distributor except DISH. Negotiations between DISH and APTS had been ongoing for three years.

The CPB Inspector General’s office has issued findings from its audit of KMBH (PDF) in Harlingen, Texas, that looked into the station’s compliance with grant rules and examined its financial documents related to CPB (Current, March 16, 2009). KMBH is linking to the report on its home page. The 30-page investigation of RGV Educational Broadcasting Inc., controlled by the Brownsville Catholic archdiocese, was for fiscal years 2007 and ’08. The report found that KMBH didn’t fully comply with requirements to: establish a community advisory board, maintain certain documents for public inspection, describe and document station policy for complying with donor list and political activities rules, establish separate accounting records for CPB grants, and exclude from nonfederal financial support reports transactions that do not qualify as contributions.

The Marine Corps leaned on PBS to remove explicit imagery from Obama’s War, the Oct. 13 Frontline documentary that took viewers into Afghanistan’s Helmand province with rank and file Marines. Opening minutes of the film include a firefight in which Marine Lance Cpl. Charles S. Sharp was fatally wounded. Frontline had followed rules of embedded reporting in filming and presenting the footage, Marine Corps Col. B.F. Salas acknowledged in a letter to PBS President Paula Kerger, but he appealed to her on the basis of “journalistic good taste,” according to this column by PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler. “An accomplished storyteller can inform us without resorting to graphic imagery or what might be termed ‘combat pornography,’” Col.

The Federal Communications Commission is seeking comments on a broadband study by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, asking, among other items, how much weight it should be accorded as the FCC develops a broadband strategy. The 232-page draft report by the Center, which works to “explore and understand cyberspace,” is a comparative study that seeks to define what broadband is and examines how it was developed and is used in Denmark, France, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. From the study: “All countries we surveyed include in their approaches, strategies, or plans, a distinct target of reaching their entire population.