A new commercial AM/FM news-talk station in Washington, D.C., hopes to attract a chunk of public radio’s audience by combining a livelier sound with meatier coverage, reports the Washington Post‘s Marc Fisher. The Post is partnering on the station with Bonneville International, owner of the city’s successful WTOP-AM.

NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin says a recent NPR story took a condescending attitude toward small-town media.

Arbitron will begin rolling out its Portable People Meter, a new audience-measurement technology, in July, reports Radio Magazine. Consultant John Sutton warns that the PPM’s introduction could bring new limitations on some of the most useful data that pubradio gets from Arbitron.

Michael Coleman tells the Detroit Free Press that he did not embezzle from Michigan Public Media in Ann Arbor, his former employer. Coleman is now g.m. of WDET-FM in Detroit. A Detroit News columnist compares news of the embezzlement charges to “hearing that your mother has been brought up on shoplifting charges.”

If pediatricians agree that media screen time is not appropriate for children under age two, why are Sesame Workshop and a leading child advocacy organization co-producing a DVD series for babies? “Essentially it is a betrayal of babies and families,” one critic of the new brand of infant media and toy products tells the Washington Post. Child development experts have asked Zero to Three, the advocacy group that’s co-producing the Sesame Beginnings DVD series, to end its association with the Workshop. “We believe that your partnership . . . is exploitative of both babies and parents and severely damages your credibility as an advocate for the health and well-being of young children,” write the leaders of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, in a March 17 letter.

Breaking with his custom not to write about PBS programs until after they’ve aired, Ombudsman Michael Getler wades into the controversy over The Armenian Genocide.

Consultant and blogger Robert Paterson gives a sneak peek at a New York Times feature about NPR’s growth in the post-Kroc era, dated for Sunday. “To put it in perspective, the [Baltimore Sun] just closed my old Beijing bureau,” says Frank Langfitt, a Sun alum and NPR reporter. “NPR just opened a Shanghai bureau. It’s night and day.”

The Prometheus Radio Project says the FCC could open a filing window for full-power noncommercial FM frequencies within six months, reports Radio World.

The website for the Prairie Home Companion movie is up, complete with trailer. “Radio like you’ve never seen it before.”

“NPR over the years began taking itself enormously seriously — as it should,” says Bob Edwards in a Newsweek online article about his XM gig. “In the end I was so micromanaged that they were telling me how to pronounce syllables of words.”

Three former employees of Michigan Radio in Ann Arbor were charged this morning with felony embezzlement. They are accused of illegally taking money, food, airline tickets, furniture, a pool table and other goods and services. One former employee, Michael Coleman, is now g.m. of WDET-FM in Detroit.

Digital video recording pioneer TiVo is introducing a new service that will automatically record and aggregate educational kids programs, the Associated Press reports (via USA Today). The new tool, which will debut mid-year and be part of TiVo’s recently launched KidZone parental-control feature, will record shows tagged with the “E/I” label that denotes educational and informational programming for kids. It will also include a list of shows recommended by the Parents Television Council, Common Sense Media and Parents’ Choice Foundation. The service will be free but is only available to subscribers with standalone Series2 machines.

Kontiki Inc., the Silicon Valley company behind Open Media Network, has been bought by VeriSign Inc. for $62 million, according to Paidcontent.org, which calls Kontiki “among the few legitimate [peer-to-peer] solution providers out there and certainly the one with the most traction among the media industry.” [VeriSign news release.] The firm provides online players for the BBC, AOL and other online video contestants. Pubcasting exec Dennis Haarsager, who has worked with Kontiki chief Mike Homer to shape OMN as a model for pubcasters online, views the sale as a positive sign.

The investigation into Michigan Radio in Ann Arbor now underway includes a look at underwriting incentives given to station employees, reports the Detroit Free Press. A former account exec received a pool table, Persian rugs and meals at local restaurants in exchange for underwriting spots, according to his attorney.

A former Voice of America employee questions whether public radio stations should carry the BBC World Service without warning listeners that the service is funded by the British Foreign Office. “. . . [I]t is disturbing that a foreign broadcaster has taken such a prominent role in U.S. public radio,” writes David Pitts in the Washington Post.