All three major bond-rating firms have now downgraded the Colorado Public Radio bonds that provided $4.7 million for the network’s 2001 expansion. The reason: CPR’s 2008 decision to take on the costs of an additional FM channel ...

NPR is one of few national broadcast news organizations to see its “believability” ratings increase last year in survey research by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, according to the State of the News Media, the annual report from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Twenty-seven percent of survey respondents said they believed “all or most” of what NPR reported, an increase of 5 percent from surveys conducted in 2006. The percentage rating PBS’s NewsHour as highly believable remained at 23 percent, unchanged since 2004. Political ideology continues to influence the credibility ratings that respondents gave to specific news organizations, and NPR saw a bigger increase in its credibility ratings by Democrats (37 percent of whom described NPR as highly credible) than Republicans (18 percent).

NOW on PBS is $1 million short for 2009 and has announced all employees will take unpaid, eight-week furloughs this year. John Siceloff, executive producer, said in a memo to staff that no one will be laid off. He cited “severe cuts” in grants to the show by philanthropies struggling with “plummeting endowments.” Ironically, the announcement comes just as the show was awarded the prestigious Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Journalism, given by the Annenberg Center at USC.

Mountain Lake PBS, located at 1 Sesame Street in Plattsburgh, N.Y., is facing a 28 percent loss in its budget if the state’s 2009 budget proposed by Gov. David Paterson is approved. President and CEO Alice Recore told the local Press Republican that 14 members of the State Assembly have sent a letter on behalf of New York pubTV stations to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, asking that $5.7 million in funding be restored, which would bring the reduction down to about 20 percent — in line with other education funding cuts.

Producers of Here and Now have forged a new content partnership with the BBC World Service. Beginning today, the BBC will contribute a daily segment to the midday news magazine, which is produced at WBUR in Boston. Public Radio International, which distributes both Here and Now and BBC World Service programming to U.S. public radio stations, announces the new partnership here. “PRI has consistently found that strategic partnerships enhance the quality of content, which helps listeners better understand our interconnected world,” said Michael Arnold, PRI content director.

Five-time Academy Award winner John Williams’s new theme music for Great Performances will debut March 25 on its production of King Lear. “After 36 years of showcasing the best in the performing arts for American audiences, we wanted to reinvigorate our Great Performances broadcast identity for today’s digital HD generation,” executive director David Horn said in a statement.

“The problem facing American journalism is not fundamentally an audience problem or a credibility problem,” according to The State of the News Media, an annual report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “It is a revenue problem—the decoupling, as we have described it before, of advertising from news.” The Columbia Journalism Review has a quiz to test your recall on changes since 2004, when the project issued its first report.

This year’s Making Your Media Matter conference, “Ethics, Money and Mission,” featured an appearance by George Stoney, an early advocate of public television and now an NYU professor and filmmaker. Nonprofit heads, funders and students from as far away as Nigeria and Kenya participated in the event last month; videos and links to various reports are now on the website of the Center for Social Media of American University, which organized the event.

Ken Burns will proceed with his films as planned despite General Motors’ withdrawal as a major sponsor, according to Washington’s WETA, Burns’ co-production partner.

Christopher expects that the animation will attract young viewers. Moreover, it enabled him to visualize a Native American parable that figured in Samuel de Champlain’s life.

A public broadcaster removed unexpectedly from the board of Catholic Church–controlled KMBH public radio and TV in Harlingen, Texas, is heading an effort to create an independent public radio station in the Rio Grande Valley. Betsy Price of Brownsville and 30 other volunteers call themselves Voices from the Valley. Their goal is to provide more local and NPR programming than KMBH currently carries. The group’s forthcoming announcement of its board members may coincide with more news about KMBH, the region’s only pubcaster: CPB’s inspector general is completing a review of its compliance with grant rules and examining station financial documents related to CPB.

Fundraising is 50 percent off projections at the Arkansas Educational Television Network Foundation. Executive Director Allen Weatherly cited the recession and reception issues during its DTV transition. Those problems affected KETS in central Arkansas and KETZ in southeast Arkansas. The foundation is the broadcaster’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit fundraiser.

The FCC today announced station requirements for the last stage of the digital transition. Rules for stations that have not yet transitioned include notifying viewers of potential signal loss, providing information about antennas in viewer education campaigns, and reminding viewers of the importance of rescanning digital TVs and converters. The deadline is now set for June 12.

Variety reports that This American Life and Endgame Entertainment will produce a feature film based on the Arthur Phillips short story “Wenceslas Square.” The spy love story was featured on This American Life last summer. TAL’s Ira Glass and Alissa Ship, who handles film rights and development, will produce the film with James D. Stern of Endgame Entertainment.

Sesame Workshop announced today that it is cutting 67 of 355 positions, citing “the unprecedented challenges of today’s economic environment.” Also today, Harvard University psychologist Susan Linn, who heads up Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, asked the PBS KIDS Sprout network to dump The Good Night Show, an evening program about a puppet getting ready for bed. “It is disturbing that that even as late as 9:00 p.m. – after three hours of television viewing – Sprout would encourage its preschool audience to ask parents for even more screen time,” Linn said in a statement on the group’s website.