Friday roundup: Today’s pubradio SXSW activities; a Mister Rogers ride gets revamped

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• Five public radio stations — KXT, WXPN, WFUV, KUTX and The Current — will offer live radio broadcasts and web streams at 1 p.m. Eastern time Friday of Public Radio Rocks, a five-hour lineup of performances from the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. Featured bands will include Lucius, The Hold Steady and Temples. Also from SXSW, NPR Music will live-stream a keynote address by Lady Gaga Friday at noon Eastern time.

Daniel Tiger will be the new face of the pubTV neighborhood at Idlewild and SoakZone. (Image: Fred Rogers Co.)

• Eastern Pennsylvania theme park Idlewild & SoakZone is discontinuing its Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make-Believe ride, which it had operated since 1989, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports. But Rogers will retain a presence at the park: the ride will reopen next year as a Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood–themed attraction. The theme park and the Fred Rogers Company, which produces Daniel Tiger, both agreed to swap out the old show for its animated successor. “Obviously Mister Rogers is not on the air, and Daniel Tiger is,” Fred Rogers Company CEO Bill Isler told the Post-Gazette.

• PBS’s documentary series POV has announced its summer 2014 lineup. The program’s 27th season will kick off June 23 with When I Walk, a film in which director Jason DaSilva examines his life with multiple sclerosis. Other films will include American Revolutionary, a portrait of 98-year-old Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs; Getting Back to Abnormal, a chronicle of a city-council election in New Orleans; and A World Not Ours, about a Lebanese refugee camp for Palestinians, which will conclude the show’s summer lineup Aug. 18. Read the full schedule, and descriptions of the films, at POV‘s website.

• The American Society of Newspaper Editors gave nonprofit newsroom ProPublica its 2013 award for Distinguished Writing on Diversity. The winning entry was reporter Michael Grabell’s Temp Land, a series about the growing number of temporary workers in America’s labor force.

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