Friday roundup: Spot.us, Radiolab’s Austin tour, lessons from Sesame Workshop and more

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I’m still recovering from an excessive intake of margaritas, tacos and corporate branding at SXSW, but I won’t let it keep me from sharing this roundup of news and links you might have missed this week:

• Writing for PBS MediaShift, Khari Johnson digs up additional details about the demise of Spot.us, the journalism crowdfunding platform acquired by American Public Media in 2011. One factor: “Several people who worked closely on the Spot.Us transition left the organization, complicating efforts to maintain and scale the platform.”

• Poynter examines the substantial amount of work that went into developing a SXSW-pegged audio tour of Austin, Texas — a collaboration between Radiolab and Detour, a new creator of sound-rich audio tours. “For all its bells and whistles, the Radiolab serial killer tour may be too expensive for most media outlets to duplicate, at least by the program’s standards,” writes Chris Thompson.

• An interaction designer at NPR goes deep on how the network creates rich multimedia experiences such as “Borderland” and “Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt.” “One way I often describe the stories we tell is that they are of the web and not just on the web,” writes Wes Lindamood for Source.

• A Brookings Institution project is looking at Sesame Workshop to learn how its international co-productions are helping children.

• Students at Georgia State University continue to fight the school’s handover of their radio station to Georgia Public Broadcasting. Radio Survivor notes that in an appeal filed with the university system’s board of regents, students allege the school misused activity fees when it bought a new transmitter for WRAS, among other grievances.

• And WCNY in Syracuse, N.Y., is suing a church that it claims backed out of a contract to buy its former studios. A church attorney alleges that “significant” damages to the building were not fixed, reports syracuse.com.

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