This item has been updated and reposted with additional information. ESPN on Thursday unexpectedly withdrew from a reporting collaboration with Frontline investigating brain injuries in National Football League players, the New York Times reports. “League of Denial,” a two-part special premiering in October, was Frontline‘s first editorial partnership with the cable sports network, which pays the NFL more than $1 billion a year to broadcast Monday Night Football. The Times, citing unnamed sources with direct knowledge of the situation, said ESPN’s role “came under intense pressure by the league . . . after a trailer for the documentary was released Aug.

Illinois-based Tri States Public Radio has negotiated an agreement to operate Knox College’s student-run WVKC-FM as a full-time NPR station. Broadcasting at 1000 watts from the college’s campus in Galesburg, Ill., WVKC already carries NPR’s Morning Edition under a programming agreement with Tri States, which is licensed to Western Illinois University in Macomb, about 50 miles southwest of the small college town. When the deal takes effect in mid-September, TSPR’s mixed-format NPR news and music programming will be broadcast on WVKC’s 90.7 FM around the clock. Under the 20-year management contract announced this month, Knox College retains its license to WVKC.

Representatives of several liberal groups delivered signed petitions to New York City’s WNET Aug. 13, urging the station to ask PBS to air the documentary Citizen Koch, a critical look at the increasing political influence of the conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

Marian McPartland, a concert pianist and the long-running host of NPR’s Piano Jazz, died Aug. 20 at her home in Long Island, N.Y., of natural causes. She was 95.

Commemorating the accidental abundance of zucchinis in 1993 that spawned the creation of WQED’s hit series QED Cooks with Chris Fennimore, the Pittsburgh pubcaster will honor the prolific late-summer veggie for the program’s 20th anniversary. Back then, Fennimore, WQED-TV p.d. and an enthusiastic cook, was helping tend a community garden plot that exploded with the green squash. “So I asked Nancy Polinsky, director of continuity at the time, if she’d make a promo asking people for zucchini recipes,” Fennimore said. He had no idea that first recipe for zucchini cheesecake would be the beginning of more than 50 live cooking marathons ranging from “A is for Appetizers” to “S is for Seafood,” a growing line of cookbooks that proved to be popular pledge premiums and a hit show that passed its 100th-episode milestone in March 2012.

Teshima Walker, executive producer of NPR’s Tell Me More, died Aug. 16 after a two-year battle with colon cancer. She was 44.

Pacifica Radio will dedicate Tuesday’s broadcasting day to raising funds for its “American Women Making History and Culture, 1963-1982” preservation and access project. Pacifica Radio Archives just received a $128,000 matching grant for the initiative from  the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the National Archives — the largest grant ever made to pubradio for preservation of historic recordings, Pacifica said. The collection includes recordings from Pacifica stations pertaining to the period known as second-wave feminism. Interviews feature activists Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis; members of Congress Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug; and authors Rita Mae Brown and Anaïs Nin, among many other voices.

This item has been updated and reposted with additional information. NPR President Gary Knell has taken a new job as the chief executive of the National Geographic Society. Knell will succeed the society’s current president, John Fahey, when his term at NPR ends in late fall. Knell has served as CEO of NPR since December 2011. He came to the position after heading Sesame Workshop. “I am deeply honored to have been chosen to lead this incredible organization as it celebrates 125 years of educating people through its media about the world in which we live,” Knell said in the release.

Downton Abbey merchandise will accompany the Edwardian drama’s fourth-season premiere on British television next month and on PBS in January 2014, reports The Associated Press. There’ll be a board game, housewares, clothes, beauty products and even Downton wine. The Downton beauty line includes soap, nail polish, lip gloss, lotion and scented candles, “whimsically packaged and adorned with quotations from the series,” according to AP. Knockout Licensing in New York City, handling Downton merchandising for the United States and Canada, has deals for jewelry from Danbury Mint and Christmas ornaments from Kurt Adler, both going on sale later this year. “We are businesspeople,” Gareth Neame, e.p.,

Foundations and major donors are increasingly asking public broadcasters to demonstrate the impact of their work on their communities, prompting pubcasters to consider new metrics that go beyond traditional audience measurement. The new emphasis by funders has prompted a flurry of activity and discussion as some pubcasters work to identify best practices and standardize measurements, and others debate whether the impact of nonprofit journalism should be quantified at all. “We do have to talk about these things and think about them in our role as public broadcasters in the 21st century,” said Jack Galmiche, c.e.o. of the Nine Network of Public Media in St.

Music City Roots: Live from The Loveless Cafe, a weekly radio show and HD webcast featuring roots, alt-country and Americana music from Nashville, is heading to public television as a 13-episode series showcasing performances from its 2012 season. The show will be released for pubTV broadcast Sept. 5, presented by Nashville Public Television and distributed by American Public Television. Carriage commitments from 75 stations so far includes major markets such as WNET in New York and WGBH in Boston. In each episode, emcee Keith Bilbrey — a former Grand Ole Opry announcer — welcomes musicians to a 600-seat barn at the Loveless Cafe, built in 1951 and locally famous for its homemade fried chicken and biscuits.

WYES in New Orleans has laid off eight staffers and canceled its decades-old tradition of on-air auctions, reports the Times-Picayune. Station President Allan Pizzato told the newspaper that revenue from the annual auctions of art, merchandise, travel tickets and wine “is not significant enough for us to be even doing it.” “This is an effort to basically reorganize our resources,” Pizzato said, “so we can move in a direction that will help us raise more dollars to help WYES, and use those resources in a fashion we know will work.”

Jack Germond, a longtime political pundit on WTTW’s nationally syndicated public affairs program The McLaughlin Group, died Aug. 14 at his Charles Town, W.Va. home, of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to the Associated Press.