A public broadcaster removed unexpectedly from the board of Catholic Church–controlled KMBH public radio and TV in Harlingen, Texas, is heading an effort to create an independent public radio station in the Rio Grande Valley. Betsy Price of Brownsville and 30 other volunteers call themselves Voices from the Valley. Their goal is to provide more local and NPR programming than KMBH currently carries. The group’s forthcoming announcement of its board members may coincide with more news about KMBH, the region’s only pubcaster: CPB’s inspector general is completing a review of its compliance with grant rules and examining station financial documents related to CPB.

Fundraising is 50 percent off projections at the Arkansas Educational Television Network Foundation. Executive Director Allen Weatherly cited the recession and reception issues during its DTV transition. Those problems affected KETS in central Arkansas and KETZ in southeast Arkansas. The foundation is the broadcaster’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit fundraiser.

The FCC today announced station requirements for the last stage of the digital transition. Rules for stations that have not yet transitioned include notifying viewers of potential signal loss, providing information about antennas in viewer education campaigns, and reminding viewers of the importance of rescanning digital TVs and converters. The deadline is now set for June 12.

Variety reports that This American Life and Endgame Entertainment will produce a feature film based on the Arthur Phillips short story “Wenceslas Square.” The spy love story was featured on This American Life last summer. TAL’s Ira Glass and Alissa Ship, who handles film rights and development, will produce the film with James D. Stern of Endgame Entertainment.

Sesame Workshop announced today that it is cutting 67 of 355 positions, citing “the unprecedented challenges of today’s economic environment.” Also today, Harvard University psychologist Susan Linn, who heads up Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, asked the PBS KIDS Sprout network to dump The Good Night Show, an evening program about a puppet getting ready for bed. “It is disturbing that that even as late as 9:00 p.m. – after three hours of television viewing – Sprout would encourage its preschool audience to ask parents for even more screen time,” Linn said in a statement on the group’s website.

CPB, APTS, PBS and NPR on March 6 jointly submitted a letter to Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, requesting a meeting “in the next two weeks” regarding a $307 million supplemental funding request for fiscal 2010. The leaked document appears on the Talking Points Memo website. “Some local stations may disappear entirely, undermining the universal service mandate of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967,” the letter states. It adds that the “longstanding mechanism” of two-year advance funding for CPB, “while vital to public broadcasting, is ill-suited to the current economic crisis.” Supplemental funding for FY2012 would be “simply too late” for stations, so a line item for FY2010 is “indispensable” for the system.

The parents of Roxana Saberi, the freelance journalist detained without charge by the Iranian government, received a phone call from their daughter on Monday, according to this local news account. “She just said she loves us,” Reza Saberi, Roxana’s father, told the Fargo InForum. “But she said, psychologically, it’s really hard to be in prison. It sounds like she’s under great pressure.” Brian Duffy, managing editor of NPR News, said that news organizations have a responsibility to speak up on her behalf. Saberi “provided valuable and accurate reports from a very important and interesting part of the world,” Duffy said.

Advocates for Minnesota Public Radio appeared at the state Capitol in St. Paul yesterday to make the case for funding requests pending before the state legislature. MPR seeks $850,000 to build three new stations and $525,000 to convert some existing stations for HD Radio broadcasts, according to KARE-TV in Twin Cities. In addition, the state network is asking lawmakers for a portion of the revenues generated by the so-called Legacy Amendment, which Minnesota voters endorsed last fall. The Legacy Amendment primarily provides taxpayer funds for clean water protection and natural resource conservation, but it includes a dedicated pool of money for arts, arts education and preservation of Minnesota’s cultural heritage and history.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack yesterday told The Washington Times that Cookie Monster was always his favorite Sesame Street character, and that beets were his least favorite vegetable. The revelations followed a press conference during which Cookie Monster told the Capitol Hill crowd he was there “to get more cookies. Do you think I came to town for a Cabinet position?” The fun was all part of an event highlighting Healthy Habits for Life: Get Healthy Now, the new collaboration between Sesame Workshop and the National Women, Infants and Children Association (WIC), a nonprofit that helps low-income pregnant and nursing women with nutrition information and food assistance.

CPB’s Public Media Innovation (PMI) Fund is offering risk-capital grants of $5,000 to $50,000 for innovative projects that foster the understanding of economics. Total for this round: $200,000. Deadline: midnight, April 17, no exceptions. An hourlong webinar will be held twice, at noon March 11 and March 25, for grantseekers who want to hear about the project. Sign up for the webinar online. Projects must be connected with a public broadcasting station but can primarily use other platforms. The users can be chilidren, teens or adults. Grant requests can be just two or three pages in length, with budgets and timelines.

Top execs from seven news organizations, including NPR and PBS, are appealing to international human rights groups to verify the health and well-being of Roxana Saberi, a freelance journalist who is being held in Evin Prison in Tehran. Saberi, who has reported for NPR, ABC News and the BBC among others, was detained by Iranian authorities on Jan. 31 and has been denied contact with her family since Feb. 10. “We now ask that the specific charges against Roxana Saberi be made public,” the execs said in a jointly issued statement. “If no charges are filed, we now urge her immediate release and ask that she be given permission to return to her home country, the United States.”

After a January exit from the soon to be canceled NPR series News & Notes, Farai Chideya is guest hosting The Takeaway with John Hockenberry this week. Regular co-host Adaora Udoji is on leave.

Joaquín Alvarado, advocate for the National Public Lightpath fiber optic network for public media, will join CPB June 30 as senior v.p. for diversity and innovation. With PBS and NPR, CPB endorsed the Lightpath project for federal stimulus spending in January, and at last month’s IMA Public Media Conference, Alvarado urged involvement in the expansion of fast Internet broadband service. (He describes the Lightpath idea in this video.) Alvarado is founding director of the Institute for Next-Generation Internet at San Francisco State University and a board member of the Bay Area Video Coalition and Latino Public Broadcasting. Earlier in the decade, Alvarado worked on films, as cinematographer and associate producer on Alcatraz Avenue (2000) and writer and director on The Silent Cross (2003), and he has written scholarly articles on ethnic diversity in media.

General Motors is ending its long financial support of public broadcasting documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, due to the automaker’s dire business outlook. GM had covered 35 percent of each film’s budget and funded outreach under a 10-year contract inked in 1999, and had financially supported Burns’ work for years before then. The last film made with GM backing is The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, a six-part series airing this fall. “We’ve been proud to be associated with Ken’s work over the years, as he is certainly the ‘gold standard’ of documentary filmmaking,” GM spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato told The Detroit News.

An update on three New England pubcasters via The Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Mass.: WAMC in Albany, N.Y., has cut staff by 5 percent through attrition and layoffs. Also, Word to the Wise, a longtime daily feature, was discontinued after Merriam-Webster withdrew its funding. WHMT in Schenectady, N.Y., with a budget deficit of $235,000, just mailed its 30,000 members letters marked “urgent, action needed!” G.m. Scott Sauer cited “a serious financial shortfall” during the December fund drive. New York pubcasters also have started a webpage, SaveNYPBS.org, to counter Gov. David Patterson’s pending 50 percent funding cut. Happier news at WFCR in Amherst, Mass.,