The White House nominated Lawrence E. Strickling to head the Commerce Department’s NTIA, the agency that administers annual rounds of PTFP matching grants to help pubcasters buy equipment. He and Julius Genachowski, the nominee for FCC chair, are both friends of the Obamas from Chicago, the Washington Post pointed out. Both Strickling and Genachowski graduated from Harvard Law and went to the FCC, Strickling as chief of the Common Carrier Bureau and Genachowski as chief counsel. Before serving as policy coordinator in the Obama campaign, he worked at three telecom companies, most recently the optical fiber service provider Broadwing Communications.

PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer has signed a major new corporate underwriter, Intel Corp., through the rest of 2009. As part of the deal, NewsHour staffers will help plan and moderate several small meetings on national issues and a larger conference on innovation this year, says spokesman Rob Flynn. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the program will thank Intel with a 30-second underwriting credit and a short mention at the other end of the show, plus short mentions on Tuesday and Thursday. The NewsHour also has underwriting from Chevron Corp., Grant Thornton LLC accounting and consulting, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and more than a dozen other foundations.

How bad is the economy? So bad that treats for PBS board members are disappearing. At the meeting today in Arlington, Va., Chairman John Porter quipped to the board, “Symbolic of the careful work being done on the budget, there will be no snacks at break time. We’re doing every single thing to make certain the budget is as tight as possible.” Board members didn’t go hungry, as lunch was indeed provided. Also announced at the meeting, good news for stations: PBS dues will remain at fiscal 2009 levels for FY10.

The Huffington Post has unveiled details of its expansion into investigative journalism. With an initial budget of $1.75 million, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund will hire 10 staff journalists who will coordinate stories with freelancers. Work produced by the investigative team will be available for any publication or website to use at the same time it is posted on the Huffington Post, said Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief. The Atlantic Philanthropies and other unnamed donors backed the venture. In its report on the HuffPo’s new unit, Poynter’s E-media Tidbits points to other nonprofit and philantrophic efforts to produce investigative reporting, including OhmyNews.com

That brouhaha over a proposed NPR pledge drive? It’s based on outdated assumptions about the potential for pubradio growth, according to marketing consultant John Sutton. “The industry is losing money each year by not allowing NPR to raise money directly from listeners,” he writes emphatically on RadioSutton. “We know from past research that listeners to two stations will support both stations and give average or above average gifts. They have room in their budgets to do both. Even now. Even in this economy….The issue here shouldn’t be whether or not NPR should be allowed to raise money directly from listeners.

Jessica Clark, author of a a recent white paper on public media, shares thoughts on the future of public broadcasting in an interview at MediaShift Idea Lab. One point: “‘Legacy media’ is top-down, one-to-many media: print, television, radio, even static web pages. We’re advancing a more dynamic, relevant definition of public media — one that’s participatory, focused on informing and mobilizing publics around shared issues.”

“Investments are not a sport, not a game, not entertainment,” says NBR co-anchor Susie Gharib, echoing the mantra of the most resolutely serious and uncool business program on television.

PBS station paid dues are running about 4 percent behind last year at this date, network CFO Barbara Landes told the board at today’s meeting in Arlington, Va. As of Friday, figures were down 4 percent compared with this same time last year. That’s actually an improvement since January, when dues were down 8 percent compared with January 2008. Landes said PBS had been “tracking closely” the payment of dues, for both timeliness and amount. “Any threat to the flow of dollars has significant implications for PBS as well as producers,” she added. Landes reiterated that PBS does not waive dues or late fees for stations.

Thanks to the June arrival of the Sands Casino Resort in the industrial Lehigh Valley in east central Pennsylvania, the region can expect the opening of a shiny new public TV station as well.

The nation’s nonprofits are in serious trouble, according to a report released today by the Nonprofit Finance Fund. It’s a survey of 986 nonprofits in markets across the country. Among the troubling findings: 31 percent don’t have enough cash to cover more that one month of expenses; 12 percent expect to operate above break-even this year; 16 percent think they’ll be able to cover operating expenses in 2009 and ’10; 52 percent expect the recession to have a long-term or permanent negative financial effect on their organization. This link offers both a summary and another link to the full PDF report.

The nearly $400,000 salary of KQED president Jeff Clarke is creating discontent within the station, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. That’s a pretty good chunk of change considering the station has laid off 30 employees, cut 13 percent of its budget and froze executive salaries until 2010. Senior managers also voluntarily reduced their salaries 13 percent. “In this economy, [Clarke’s salary] just doesn’t make sense,” Kevin Wilson, president of Local 51 of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, to which most of the station’s employees belong.

Reps from NPR will be attending this year’s PBS General Managers’ Planning Meeting May 11 in Baltimore. The meeting coincides with the annual PBS Showcase. At today’s PBS Board Meeting, member Jennifer Lawson said she’s pleased with the growing collaboration between the two pubcasting entitites. “I love the fact that we’re including NPR as part of these meetings,” said Lawson, g.m. of WHUT in Washington, D.C. “It’s wonderful that there are more and more forums and circumstances that bring all of us together as public media.” The board meeting runs through tomorrow at PBS headquarters in Arlington, Va. Issues before the governing group include Station Services membership policies and fundraising programming dues in overlap markets.

On the Media, the NPR-distributed weekly press review, released a correction last week apologizing for what it called a “lapse in journalistic judgment” in preparing its November 2008 report about the public radio show The Infinite Mind.

Top NPR personalities have proposed that the network mount a national pledge drive to help close its widening budget gap. There is a historic precedent for the idea, Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg tells the Washington Post: NPR appealed for direct listener support in 1983, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. “Think how much we’d be able to do now if were were doing something similar,” Stamberg says. But during an interview with Current last week, NPR President Vivian Schiller downplayed the proposal for an NPR pledge drive. “They are not our listeners,” she said, nodding to the on-air fundraising prerogatives of member stations.

In a new round of budget-cutting, NPR has reduced salaries and benefits for its officers and is proposing that union employees accept similar concessions.