KCET has completed the sale of its historic Sunset Boulevard studio lot to the Church of Scientology for an undisclosed sum. Al Jerome, president of the station that left PBS in January, said it will remain on the property for another year.

PBS and NPR were among news outlets that gave the Storify website a test run before its public launch today (April 25), according to the New York Times. Storify is one of several new sites (including Storyful and  Tumblr) that are developing ways to help journalists sift through online content and publish the most relevant information. NPR Twitter guru Andy Carvin, who recently drew raves from the online world for his social networking coverage of revolutions in the Middle East and northern Africa, first used Storify to cover the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in January. “It quickly evolved into looking at how people were discussing the media coverage surrounding it and its potential political impact,” Carvin, senior strategist on NPR’s social media desk, told the Times.

WNET in New York City has submitted a bid to manage the television side of the New Jersey Network, “and is expecting to hear back next week,” the Wall Street Journal is reporting (third item).The network has been in play since last year (Current, July 6, 2010), when Gov. Chris Christie decided the state must end its $11 million subsidy due to budget constraints. The Journal says other pubcasting stations interested in the network include WHYY in Philadelphia, and local groups such as WBGO, the Newark NPR affiliate. Transfer of NJN has been set for July 1.

    April 25, 2011 PTFP to Shutdown Grant Round CancelledOn April 15, 2011, the President signed Public Law 112-10, The Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act of 2011, which provided no funding for the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program (PTFP) in Fiscal Year 2011. As a result, NTIA will not process applications it has received or award any additional grants under the PTFP. NTIA has begun the orderly shutdown of PTFP and will destroy copies of all applications received for the FY 2011 grant round upon the shutdown of the program. NTIA will continue to monitor PTFP grants it has previously awarded to ensure that taxpayer funds are utilized in the most responsible and efficient manner.

Louisville Public Media’s WFPL is replacing its local midday talk program State of Affairs with Here & Now, the nationally syndicated show from WBUR in Boston. With the switch, WFPL plans to put more emphasis on in-depth news reporting and interviews that can be aired within Here & Now and other national programs. The local news inserts “will be sort of like State of Affairs interviews except they will be a little shorter,” Todd Mundt, chief content officer, tells the Louisville Courier-Journal. “This allows us to delve into topics that maybe wouldn’t get an hour but they’re still important.”

NPR News is reporting new details about detainees from the U.S. military’s Guantanamo Bay prison. A series of investigative reports, mined from secret documents leaked last year to WikiLeaks, were published last night on NPR.org; NPR correspondents Tom Gjelten, Dina Temple-Raston and Margot Williams will report more findings on NPR News programs throughout the day. The New York Times, which received the cache of classified military documents from an anonymous source, shared them with NPR. Huffington Post reports behind-the-scenes details of the race among major news outlets to publish their findings from the WikiLeaks Gitmo documents. Both the New York Times and NPR benefited from the expertise of Margot Williams, a former Times reporter now working in NPR’s investigations unit.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors has elected David Ensor, former NPR reporter, as the new director of Voice of America (VOA). Ensor’s more than 30-year career includes reporting for the All Things Considered team in the 1970s, along with a winning a National Headliner award. He’s been director of communications and public diplomacy for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, since January 2010 and will join VOA in June.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of American Public Media’s The Splendid Table, will now also contribute to the Huffington Post. She’ll write a weekly question-and-answer column for readers looking for culinary advice.

Bill McCarter, president and g.m. of WTTW/Channel 11 in Chicago for 27 years before retiring in 1998, died of complications from cancer Thursday (April 21). He was 81. Dan Schmidt, who succeeded McCarter as president and c.e.o. of Window to the World Communications, told his staff in an email Friday: “Bill left an indelible mark on WTTW, WFMT and public media nationally,” according to Chicago media columnist Robert Feder. Before joining WTTW, McCarter ran WETA-TV in Washington, D.C., and was chairman of the Association of Public Television Stations (APTS). He also spent time at WHYY in Philadelphia and WNET in New York.

KQED is offering quite the thank-you gift to listeners: A Pledge-Free Stream. Beginning today (April 21), fans who donate at least $45 online before May 5 will receive access to a special programming stream to listen to KQED Public Radio on a computer or smartphone without interruption for the duration of the May fund drive. “This is, we hope, only a step toward alternative funding models that generate significant donor revenue and enable uninterrupted access to great programming,” Donald Derheim, station c.o.o., said in a statement. “We’re hopeful that what KQED does here in the Bay Area will spread everywhere to the benefit of public radio listeners around the world.”

Vivian Schiller may no longer be president of NPR, but that isn’t stopping her from making news with her views on public radio. “You are now competing in the big leagues and are no longer the scrappy underdog,” she said, addressing her remarks to former colleagues during a speech at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center Wednesday (April 20). “You must become your own disruptors. If you don’t aggressively reach out to new audiences on new platforms, someone else will. There is no such thing as lasting media loyalty, especially in this age of media promiscuity.” She also said public radio needs to “let go of the nostalgia” of the craft.

Craig Gilbert, who created TV’s original reality series, An American Family, on WNET and PBS in 1973, said the experience “was pretty damn tumultuous, and I don’t want to go over it anymore.” But luckily for New Yorker readers he does, in the mag’s current issue. He’s displeased with HBO’s upcoming Cinema Verite, which dramatizes the making of the controversial 12-part program focusing on the Loud family. “If you are given the assignment to write a two-hour film that exposes the making of An American Family, the only avenue to take is that the producer is corrupt,” Gilbert says.

TIME magazine has selected its Top 100 most influential people in the world, and it includes Masterpiece Executive Producer Rebecca Eaton. Her tribute is written by actress Gillian Anderson, who appeared in Any Human Heart on the pubcasting series. “As Masterpiece, still on a publicly funded network, celebrates this remarkable [40-year] anniversary, we Americans are fortunate to have Rebecca at the helm: someone committed to bringing great television drama to the widest possible audience, week after week,” Anderson writes. Among Eaton’s fellow honorees on the 2011 list: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Facebook c.e.o. Mark Zuckerberg, and Britain’s Prince William and his fiancee, Kate Middleton.

A Georgia judge whose sentencing practices were scrutinized in “Very Tough Love,” a recent edition of This American Life, has threatened to sue host Ira Glass and his public radio program for libel. The March 25 episode examined the drug court administered by Superior Court Judge Amanda Williams for Georgia’s Glynn, Camden and Wayne counties through the stories of three offenders who participated in the rehabilitation program, including a young woman who attempted suicide after Williams sentenced her to indefinite detention in solitary confinement. Glass contrasted the punitive sanctions that Williams imposed with national guidelines for drug court programs, concluding that the judge’s approach is unduly harsh.

KERA in Dallas is eliminating six staff positions and ending its Think television production this week, the station announced today (April 20). (The radio version of the show, Think with Krys Boyd, continues on KERA-FM.) Mary Anne Alhadeff, KERA president, said in a statement that the organization has had a balanced budget for six consecutive years, “and it is important that continues.” “The position reductions and the ending of Think TV are part of an ongoing management process to remain fiscally responsible and to move the organization forward in an ever-changing media landscape,” Alhadeff said. The statement cited uncertainty over federal public broadcasting funding for fiscal year 2012, which comes up for debate soon on Capitol Hill.