As expected, PBS got a Golden Globe nomination early this morning for Downton Abbey. The Masterpiece megahit got its nod in the Best Television Series — Drama category. Its competition? Breaking Bad on AMC; The Good Wife, CBS; House of Cards, Netflix; and Masters of Sex, Showtime. It’s PBS’s only nomination in the annual awards, presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Downton cast members and producers took part in a discussion moderated by arts reporter Bill Carter of the New York Times Tuesday night, which was recorded for use by PBS member stations. Creator Julian Fellowes and EP Gareth Neame joined actors Hugh Bonneville, Laura Carmichael, Robert James-Collier, Michelle Dockery, Allen Leech, Phyllis Logan and Lesley Nicol onstage at the historic Hudson Theatre in the Millennium Hotel.

Tavis Smiley may be celebrating 10 years on PBS, but that tenure hasn’t been easy. In a Los Angeles Times interview, the talk show host admits that getting hip, high-profile guests is tough. “As the handlers get younger and younger and as the artists crave more and more to be in the social media zeitgeist, it becomes harder and harder for my producers to get through to clients the value of being on PBS,” he said. “It’s not an easy sell.” And KCET’s decision in 2010 to drop PBS membership left Smiley without a production home.  “We go overnight to paying for office space, studio rental, parking stalls for my staff — we go overnight to paying full freight at a commercial outlet here in town,” Smiley said.

St. Louis Public Radio and the St. Louis Beacon, a nonprofit news site, merged Dec. 10. The partners have yet to decide how to brand the combined newsroom. Their website will feature the names of both partners, but St. Louis Public Radio will not change its on-air brand, said Tim Eby, g.m. Following a mandate from faculty members at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, which holds St. Louis Public Radio’s license, the merger will not require additional financial support from the university. UMSL will absorb the Beacon’s 18 full-time employees alongside St. Louis Public Radio’s 36 full-time and 11 part-time workers.

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is aiming to add another 5,000 hours of digitally native or previously digitized content to supplement the 40,000 hours currently slated for preservation. Casey Davis, the archive’s project manager, posted a call for interested stations on the archive’s blog Dec. 9. The archive hopes to collect the additional 5,000 hours over the next two years. Some of the materials may come from those digitized during the archive’s 2009 pilot project, Davis said. On Nov. 21, Boston’s WGBH and the Library of Congress announced they would take on joint stewardship of the American Archive, transitioning the project away from CPB.

CPB Board members got an ominous preview Monday of the corporation’s upcoming white paper about spectrum issues in public broadcasting. At a meeting at CPB’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., Harry Hawkes of Booz & Co.’s media and technology practice told board members that if the FCC goes ahead with plans to clear 120 MHz of spectrum for use by mobile devices, 110 to 130 pubcasting stations will need to shift due to repacking even if their operators don’t participate in the auction. “That means that one-third of the system could have to change channels,” noted Vincent Curren, CPB’s c.o.o. “This will likely be more disruptive than the digital transition.

Remember Norwegian Public Television’s marathon broadcasts of five straight hours of knitting and five days of the “action” on a cruise-ship journey? Well, an American production company has acquired the rights to the trend now officially called Slow TV, reports the New York Post. LMNO Productions bought rights to the camera-switching technology that allows for verrrry long stretches of television. Pubcasters can jump on the trend thanks to Executive Program Service. EPS offers a more manageable, one-hour version of the Norway cruise and has trimmed Norwegian Public Television’s 10-hour documentary on the longest train journey in the country into a new 60-minute program.

Phil Charles, retired longtime g.m. of KGLT-FM in Bozeman, Mont., died Nov. 29 of heart failure at his home in Cape May Court House, N.J. He was 65. Charles joined KGLT in the 1980s and stayed for more than two decades before retiring in 2010. He introduced a freeform format on the station. A licensee of Montana State University, KGLT brands itself as “Alternative Public Radio” and airs music and several nationally distributed public radio programs. Before arriving in Bozeman, Charles worked at a series of alternative stations throughout the 1970s, including KSAN in San Francisco and KSJO and KOME in San Jose, Calif.

PBS and United Kingdom–based Sky Vision Productions are collaborating on a pair of documentaries about Typhoon Haiyan, to air in both countries, RealScreen reports. Sky1 is collecting footage from the Philippines in the aftermath of one of the deadliest natural disasters in history, which the UK network will use for a documentary to air Dec. 11. PBS will repurpose the same footage for an episode of the science program Nova with the working title Monster Typhoon, to air Jan. 22, 2014. The program will feature interviews with survivors and storm scientists and will examine conditions in the Philippines in the storm’s aftermath, the government’s crippled relief efforts and the probability of more giant storms to come as Earth’s climate changes.

A guitar played by Bob Dylan at his famous Newport Folk Festival appearance in 1965 sold for nearly $1 million Friday, two years after it was featured in an episode of PBS’s History Detectives. The 1964 Fender Stratocaster went for $965,000 at New York auction house Christie’s, setting a new auction record for a guitar. A Christie’s spokesperson told CNN that it was purchased by an unidentified buyer. In 2011, the daughter of a pilot who flew Dylan to performances in the ’60s submitted the guitar to History Detectives, claiming that it was the same instrument the musician played at Newport, then his first live electric performance.

A federal appeals court last week upheld a ban on political and public-issue commercials on pubcasting stations, ruling that its removal would compromise their educational mission. The split 9–2 decision was handed down Dec. 2 by a panel of judges on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Writing for the majority, Judge M. Margaret McKeown said that the restrictions Congress imposed on advertising were intended to shield noncommercial broadcasters from the competitive pressures of commercial media, not to limit constitutionally protected free speech. “The hallmark of public broadcasting has been a longstanding restriction on paid advertising to minimize commercialization,” McKeown wrote.

The publicity onslaught preceding the Jan. 5 premiere of Downton Abbey arrives in New York next week in the form of a tea truck. Variety reports that costumed servers will hand out free tea and biscuits to fans of the hit Masterpiece costume drama. And, this being 2013, the tea truck will be closely tracked on PBS’s Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram. Following appearances by stars of the show on various network TV shows, the week culminates Dec. 12 in what Variety calls a “standing-room-only fan event” at Times Center with a panel discussion featuring writer Julian Fellowes and E.P. Gareth Neame.

FCC Chair Tom Wheeler announced today that the agency is shifting broadcast spectrum auctions from 2014 to 2015. In a blog post, Wheeler said that the decision for the delay was based on the complexity of the undertaking. “Having spent most of the last decade helping technology-based companies from the ground up,” he wrote, “I know the incredible challenge of taking a cutting-edge product from concept to market on deadline.” Wheeler said he believes the FCC “can conduct a successful auction in the middle of 2015.” He said the agency’s Spectrum Task Force will provide more details about the timeline in a presentation at the January 2014 FCC meeting.