Chicago’s WBEZ-FM is studying ways to acquire a second frequency in the city, reports the Sun-Times.

Public radio engineers say that iBiquity Digital Corp. has improved its digital audio codec, reports BE Radio. Meanwhile, WGUC-FM in Cincinnati has gone digital.

KPCC-FM in Los Angeles and K-Mozart, a local commercial classical station, will promote each other on their airwaves, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Any pressure the producers of Day to Day might feel is understandable. The new show’s selling points read like a wish list compiled by someone burping up buzzwords from pubradio confabs. NPR pitches the newsmag — its first since Weekend Edition Sunday, 16 years ago — as a midday show newsy enough to draw listeners on lunch breaks back to NPR, but zesty and offbeat enough to pepper the schedule with diversity and youthfulness. Not only that, but stations are looking to Day to Day to lift ratings between their towering drivetime tentpoles, Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Further, as pubcasters hunt high and low for partnerships, Day to Day builds off an editorial and promotional relationship with Microsoft’s online magazine Slate — a pairing that has alarmed a few media watchdogs.

The New York Times reports on choices in cable and satellite TV for video-on-demand and high-def programming, and how these services may change in the next year.

Alex Chadwick is keeping an online diary for Slate about the launch of Day to Day, the new NPR newsmag that is being produced in partnership with … Slate. Revelation: Chadwick made an intern cry.

A Yankee remake of the BBC’s Coupling, coming to NBC this fall, will feature rewrites of the British scripts, the New York Daily News reported. The original Britcom now airs in the States on public TV stations.

Undercut fiscally by underwriting declines, San Francisco’s KQED trimmed its work week and salaries 10 percent and reduced its staff 11 percent (including nine layoffs), the Associated Press reports.

In a New York Times op-ed, Yale political scientist David Greenberg weighs the meaning of a revelation in the new PBS Watergate documentary — Nixon aide Jeb Magruder’s remark that he heard Nixon okay the Watergate break-in. As reprinted in the Charlotte Observer.

Conservative writer Rob Long writes in the L.A. Times why he donates to NPR though its programming drives him to shout back, spraying his dashboard with angry spittle.

A Venice Beach bike repairman told coworkers a recent pledge to KCRW scored him “a kick-ass tote bag,” “reports” the humor mag The Onion. (Last item under “News in Brief.”)

WNET’s Bill Baker decries the twin disasters of FCC deregulation and diminished support for pubcasters in an op-ed for the University of Minnesota’s student newspaper.

The new Broadway show Avenue Q, produced by former employees of Sesame Street, spoofs the kids’ show by dragging it “into a curse-filled world of Gen-X angst, unemployment and promiscuous, drunken sex,” writes Jake Tapper in The New York Times.

Public television producer John Schott has a weblog.

“We’ve changed our strategy from being an exporter of British programming into being a creator of global programs,” says Mark Young, president of BBC Worldwide Americas, in the L.A. Times.