• The podcasting venture launched by former This American Life producer Alex Blumberg has raised more than $1 million, reports Technical.ly Brooklyn. It’s incorporated under the name American Podcasting Corporation for now, but co-founder Matt Lieber says a new name is coming soon.
• A longtime DJ on KSKA-FM, Alaska Public Media’s Anchorage station, was shot and killed Tuesday, according to the station. Marvell Johnson’s 16-year-old foster son has confessed to the crime. Police found Johnson dead in his bedroom after a local student reported the incident, said Anchorage police in a press release. Johnson, 64, had hosted a show on the station for 35 years, sharing dedications and requests from prison inmates between music sets.
• Two doctors who specialize in the connection between incarceration and health have teamed up with Sesame Street to call attention to the effects of imprisonment on the health of prisoners’ families. Drs. Scott Allen and Jody Rich took note of Alex, a Muppet with an incarcerated father, and cited him in an article for the Annals of Internal Medicine. That led to a collaboration on a video and an exciting chance encounter between the doctors and Count von Count. “When we finally went [to Sesame Street] it impressed our friends and families more than anything we’ve done before: instant credibility from our children and their friends,” Rich said.
• Over at Radio Survivor, Jennifer Waits points out that Jones College in Jacksonville, Fla., has sold an FM and an AM station to religious broadcaster Educational Media Foundation for a total of $3.375 million. The stations were airing easy listening and adult standards formats.
And in another post, Waits writes about her visit to the University of Pennsylvania’s student station, WQHS. That leads to a trip into the past of WXPN, also operated by the university and once a student station as well — until offensive material on the station led to it being turned into a professionally operated station by 1980. What was the offending material? Waits’s post refers to “the infamous ‘Vegetable Report,'” which prompted us to do some Googling, and you can learn more about the Vegetable Report here and here.