CPB has cut $50,000 in funding from the University of Minnesota’s Radio K due to low ratings, reports the school’s Minnesota Daily newspaper. Radio K marketing director Alex Gaterud told the paper that the station gets about five times that much from student services fees, but it will still feel the loss. “In any public radio or public broadcasting setting, that’s a huge hit,” Gaterud said. “We’re confident we can deliver [an] excellent product continuously, but we’re still looking to fill that gap.” The ratings were gathered via Arbitron’s Portable People Meters, which have been controversial in the past for producing much lower numbers than the previously used listener diaries (Current, Sept.

Here’s a tribute to public broadcasting at its best, through the experiences of longtime Nebraska Educational Television programmer Ron Hull, who just turned 80. Although Hull has come and gone from the station a few times, “he never really went away,” the local Journal Star noted. He’s now senior adviser to NET and professor emeritus of broadcasting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and reports for work in his fourth-floor office at 6:30 every morning. “This place I love,” he said — even after 55 years.

The Knight Foundation announced four new categories for its next Knight News Challenge: mobile, authenticity, sustainability and community. Details at Knightblog and Neiman Labs. The window for entries opens Oct. 25 and closes Dec. 1. The competition backing innovations in news media has awarded $23 million to 56 projects in its first four years; WBUR in Boston and Public Radio Exchange were among this year’s winners.

PBCore, Public Media Platform, Argo and American Archive: “One or more may rock our world,” writes Barrett Golding on Hacks/Hackers of the four ambitious pubmedia initiatives. However, “All four of the above projects are well-conceived, led and executed by consummate pros. . . . But all suffer from similar limitations: they’re top-down, closed, exclusive (some proprietary), and expensive.” Golding, keeper of the PubMedia Commons blog, suggests another approach: “The bottom-up, grassroots, social inclusiveness of open-source projects — what in tech parlance is more bazaar than cathedral. Imagine some small-scale journocoder community solutions that deliver immediately useful results, cheaply and quickly.”

Although it had been negotiating with KCET for nearly a year over a dues disagreement, PBS was taken aback with the Oct. 8 announcement that the station was dropping its membership. “How quickly it happened was a surprise,” PBS President Paula Kerger said in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday (Oct. 10). The decision left confusion in its wake. KOCE President Mel Rogers says it has to “ramp up in a hurry” to assume primary station status. “It’s in our interest to make sure viewers get the same content at the time they’re accustomed to watching it,” he said. “That’s the goal we’re shooting for.”

KOCE in Huntington Beach, Calif., will assume primary PBS station responsibilities in the Los Angeles area when KCET severs its ties with PBS, writes station president Mel Rogers in a short note on the KOCE website. Rogers also called area PBS affiliates KLCS and KVCR its “partner stations.” He said the three will work together “to ensure all PBS shows are not only available, but are easy to find for our viewers.” Those stations, along with KCET, have been discussing a four-way partnership in an attempt to solve the tricky overlap situation in the L.A. market (Current, Aug.

KCET, public television’s major station in the nation’s second-largest media market, is dropping its PBS membership as of Jan. 1, 2011, station President Al Jerome told Current Friday (Oct. 8). The Los Angeles station will be the largest independent pubcaster in America. Jerome said he and Gordon Bava, chairman of KCET’s board of directors, came to the decision “very recently.” Jerome told his staff at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Friday, and also informed PBS that afternoon. The station had petitioned the PBS board for a dues reduction or a shift to PDP (Program Differentiation Plan) status but was rebuffed (Current, Aug.

The 11th season of what may be the only locally produced kids’ show on public TV premieres today (Oct. 8) on WTIU in Bloomington, Ind. The Friday Zone is a weekly program for children ages 8 to 11 with guests, projects and on-location segments — the Thanksgiving edition includes a trip to an orchard and corn maze. Co-hosts are Indiana University students Emily Fergason, a junior, who returns from last season; and newcomer Taylor Crousore, a sophomore. The show won a regional Emmy last year. (Image: Scott Witzke, WTIU)

At 5:15 a.m. today (Oct. 8), NPR and AFTRA (the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) reached agreement on a five-year contract, NPR President Vivian Schiller told pubradio staff in an e-mail message. The deal is subject to ratification by the bargaining unit. Details later today, Schiller added, “after some of us get some sleep.” Get a feel for how the deal unfolded on the NPR AFTRA Twitter feed.

Lisa Fowlkes, deputy chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, addressed the upcoming station Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) update at last week’s Radio Show convention in D.C. Broadcasters must update to CAP within six months as part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) — which could cost stations up to $2,000 per full-power transmitter. “Absent authority from Congress, the FCC has no authority to provide any type of funding, including credits from annual regulatory fees, for broadcasters to purchase new equipment, if that is necessary,” Fowlkes said during the discussion moderated by a reporter from Radio World.

This year’s 12 selections for the Independent Television Service’s Global Perspectives Project tell stories in places as varied as Cambodia, Nicaragua, Iceland, Ethiopia and Uganda. The dozen films were selected from 489 submissions from 117 countries representing 75 languages, ITVS announced today (Oct. 7). The films will be featured on Independent Lens, P.O.V. and Global Voices, all on PBS. They’ll also run on commercial outlets such as the Sundance Channel and HBO, and online. For details on the films, click here.

Leslie Wilcox, president of Hawaii PBS, blogs about a generous “major donor.”

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), on Wednesday (Oct. 6) was declared an official Super Reader during a visit to Marshalltown, Iowa, to honor his work in promoting and helping fund public television, according to the local Times-Republican. As such, Harkin is now eligible to wear his very own Super Reader Cape. “Where I work, they will probably not let me wear it,” Harkin told kids at the Marshalltown Public Library. “But when I go back to my office, I can wear it.” Presenting the honor was Dan Wardell, Iowa Public Television Kids Club host. Super Reader is part of PBS’s Super Why!

The Writers Guild of America East, which reps writers at several pubcasting stations, has written to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski with a suggestion: Comcast should donate $10 million annually over 10 years for news and public affairs programming as a requirement of its merger with NBC Universal. The Los Angeles Times reports that Michael Winship, president of the guild, and Lowell Peterson, its executive director, wrote that the merger “would further consolidate the production and distribution of news and public affairs programming relied on by the American public.” So they think Comcast should “contribute significant resources to the production of truly independent content.”

Lots going on at Mister Rogers’s production company in Pittsburgh. First, it’s no longer known as Family Communications Inc.; it’s now the Fred Rogers Co.  There’s a website redesign. And it just received a two-year grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s office of Community Oriented Policing Services. The $496,000 is for a nationwide roll-out of the company’s video-based police training program, “One on One: Connecting Cops & Kids.” It was one of only 19 recipients of 321 applications, and one of the four largest grants, according to the production company. It began developing “Cops & Kids” about a decade ago.