The First Lady of Tanzania, Salma Kikwete, launched Kilimani Sesame’s Malaria Education Outreach Campaign today (June 16) in the East African country. The campaign includes four malaria prevention public service announcements for TV and radio in Swahili, as well as nearly 16,000 storybooks to be distributed to primary schools nationwide. Children got to hear Kikwete read the book titled Chandarua Salama (“The Safe Net”) at offices of Wanawake Na Maendeleo (WAMA) in Dar es Salaam, a charity headed by the First Lady. The storybook, printed in Swahili and English, follows Muppet friends Lulu, Neno and Kami as they go through their bedtime routine and learn the importance of sleeping under a bed net to prevent the mosquito-borne illness.

ProPublica has launched the Twitter stream #MuckReads, a way for readers, reporters and editors to share public-service news stories. The nonprofit investigative news org calls it the next evolution of its Investigations Elsewhere roundup. “#MuckReads is an experiment in social aggregation,” ProPublica said in on its site. “The feature as you see it is just the beginning. We’ve got big plans for feature upgrades and integration with Facebook, but first we want to see what works and what needs more tinkering.”

News 21, a journalism education project launched in 2005 at five j-schools, will be available to all journalism and mass communications programs in the country thanks to $3.9 million in new support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the two announced today (June 15). The support brings the total initiative to $19.7 million. It will be administered by Arizona State University. The expansion comes after an independent evaluation found the initiative has “already helped transform” curricula and is getting more students news jobs “at a critical juncture in the industry’s history,” the statement said.

The FCC’s latest report “The Information Needs of Communities” may be long on verbiage and short on remedies, but it does offer some key insights for independent producers, public media analyst Jessica Clark writes for the Association for Independents in Radio’s MQ2 blog. Public broadcasters’ expansion onto online and mobile platforms, as well as the explosion of nonprofit media outlets, creates new opportunities and more competition in many arenas, Clark writes. She points to a key FCC recommendation that policy makers reconsider which types of media deserve CPB aid. “[T]his report does not explicitly recommend additional funding for public broadcasting,” Clark writes, “However, it does recommend CPB funding requirements be reconsidered so that it’s easier for new kinds of projects and outlets to receive federal dollars.”

Fresno, Calif., broadcaster Radio Bilingüe has suspended the LAForward and Los Angeles Public Media projects “for the foreseeable future,” it announced Wednesday (June 15). “Radio Bilingüe’s efforts to secure a radio broadcast outlet in Los Angeles for LAPM have proven unsuccessful, while federal funding cuts to CPB’s digital appropriation are precluding the agency from assuring support to LAPM in the coming years,” the statement said. With backing from CPB, work began two years ago to develop and test programming for a new multiplatform public media outlet targeting young, educated minority listeners in Los Angeles (Current, July 20, 2009).

MinnPost and Voice of San Diego — two online nonprofit news outlets often held up as models for the future of local news coverage — actually receive scant web traffic, according to a new report, “Less of the Same: The Lack of Local News on the Internet” (PDF). The study was commissioned by the FCC as part of its quadrennial review of broadcast ownership regulations. The author is Matthew Hindman, assistant professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. (Details on the 11 FCC studies here.) Hindman used comScore panel data tracking 250,000 Internet users across more than a million Web domains, focusing specifically on online local news within the top 100 U.S.

The City Council in Chattanooga, Tenn., has voted down a plan to contribute $275,000 to WTCI/Tennessee Valley PBS to launch a Chattanooga Channel, reports the Chattanoogan. Paul Grove, WTCI president, had proposed that all City Council meetings, including committees, would be aired live and streamed on a website. Grove said the channel would bring new “access and transparency” to city government. Councilwoman Pam Ladd said the channel “is a wonderful idea,” but not a priority at this time. The council will pay WTCI $60,000 to continue televising its meetings; the county is dropping that spending.

Despite WMFE’s dire warnings to the FCC about its financial stability, trustees chairman Bob Showalter said the Orlando, Fla., station will not fail because the radio presence remains strong. “90.7 is hugely viable,” he told the Orlando Sentinel Tuesday (June 14). “Things are not dire at 90.7.” He said trustees plan on putting the $3 million from the pending TV sale in a quasi-endowment, spending the dividends on 90.7 and increasing local news coverage.

The BBC is developing an app for its reporters in the field to file video, still photos and audio directly into the BBC system from an iPhone or iPad, according to Journalism.co.uk. “Reporters have been using smart phones for a while now but it was never good quality,” said Martin Turner, head of operations for newsgathering. “You might do it when there was a really important story. Now it is beginning to be a realistic possibility to use iPhones and other devices for live reporting, and in the end if you’ve got someone on the scene then you want to be able to use them.

What is lost when a city’s college radio station is sold and converted to a public radio outlet? It’s a question that free-form radio fans are asking with increasing frequency as student-operated FMs drop off the left end of the dial. In Nashville, where Vanderbilt University’s WRVU ended its nearly 60-year run as an FM station last week, radio audiences gained a full-time classical music service from the city’s NPR News station, WPLN. But WRVU’s fans and advocates lamented the sudden loss of a station that essentially operated as a community radio outlet. WRVU was “one of the only venues for Nashville artists of all stripes to get airplay — rappers, punks, headbangers, even blues and bluegrass bands,” the Nashville Scene reported.

Lefty TV talker Keith Olbermann announced last month that PBS documentarian Ken Burns would be a “key contributor” and “regular part” of Olbermann’s new show on Current TV — which surprised Baltimore Sun TV writer David Zurawik. “Yes, I was surprised, too,” Burns told Zurawik in a column today (June 14). “I appeared on Countdown a lot. And he’s been a friend for a long time. And when he moved [to Current TV], I said, ‘Oh, I’ll come and do it [the new show]’. And I think that’s what it is.” However, Burns said, he refused to accept a salary as a regular contributor.

David Fanning, executive producer of Frontline, raised his concerns about public broadcasting on-air fundraising while accepting Quinnipiac University’s Fred Friendly First Amendment Award on Tuesday (June 14). An excerpt: “Where once stations were lead by broadcasters and educators who believed deeply in the mission of public broadcasting, now as money gets tighter a new generation of leaders comes in, brought in by worried board members who almost inevitably turn to the person in charge of fundraising to help manage the station. “With that comes programming choices that are safer, and the pursuit of audience for the sake of audience, and membership for the dollars.

In 2011, as partisan critics attacked NPR, Frontline chief David Fanning urged public media to specialize in strong journalism. Fanning, who was accepting Quinnipiac University's annual Fred Friendly First Amendment Award, quoted the famed CBS News producer: public TV's "most precious right will be the right to rock the boat."

NPR, Vermont Public Radio, and Austin’s KUT led public radio news outlets in National Edward R. Murrow Awards announced today by the Radio and Television Digital News Association. NPR won Murrows in four categories of the radio network/syndication division; VPR bested small-market radio stations in three categories; and, KUT won two trophies in the competition among large-market stations. Four additional pubradio outlets — Michigan Radio; KUNC in Greeley, Colo.; WSHU in Fairfield, Conn.; and WITF in Harrisburg, Pa. — won Murrows in news reporting categories. WBUR.org, a leading pubradio website published by Boston’s WBUR, took the national Murrow for news websites in the large-market radio division.

The websites for PBS and NPR took home several Webbys from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences at ceremonies Monday night (June 13) in New York City. PBS.org won a People’s Voice for charitable/nonprofit orgs, and NPR.org scored both People’s Voice and Webby for news. NPR News’ “Election 2010: It’s All Politics” received a People’s Voice for politics. And in podcasts, NPR was a double winner again. Here’s a full list.