The Public Radio Program Directors Association will expand its training programs for stations this year and continue its Sense of Place studies of local audiences, with funding from NPR and the Millstream Fund. PRPD will offer three workshops based on the Morning Edition Grad School classes that it has offered in recent years. “New MEGS” will extend training to all newsmagazines, including All Things Considered and Weekend Edition, and is designed for hosts, news directors and program directors. The first workshop will be offered May 18 in Charlotte, N.C. “JMEGS” (MEGS for Journalists) applies MEGS principles to journalism, focusing on selecting stories, interviewing, writing, planning newscasts and promoting news reports.

You can take a photographic stroll around the Washington, D.C., rowhouse of Jennifer Lawson, CPB’s s.v.p., television and digital video content, thanks to Thursday’s Washington Post. The Real Estate section features a peek inside the 1909 architectural gem that Lawson and her husband Tony Gittens, founder and director of Film Fest DC, had modernized for their empty-nest years. The Post noted that the kitchen and adjacent seating area hold two of six televisions in the home. “I actually need to watch Downton Abbey — it’s my professional responsibility,” Lawson quips.

This item has been updated and reposted with additional information. After more than two decades on the air, NPR’s Talk of the Nation will come to an end in June to make way for the newsmag Here & Now, which will be revamped under a new partnership between NPR and Boston’s WBUR-FM. Talk of the Nation will air its last episode June 28, ending a 21-year-long run. The call-in talk show has helped launch big names in public media, including original host John Hockenberry, This American Life’s Ira Glass and PBS NewsHour’s Ray Suarez. NPR Chief Content Officer Kinsey Wilson said the network decided to end Talk of the Nation because a newsmagazine might pull a bigger audience in midday.

Patrick Butler, president of the Association of Public Television Stations, will be the featured guest on C-SPAN’s The Communicators at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Saturday, with a repeat at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Eastern April 1. He’ll discuss the future of public broadcasting with Communications Daily reporter Kamala Lane, and Communicators host Peter Slen.

Bret Marcus, executive producer of SoCal Connected on KCETLink in Los Angeles, addressed the award-winning investigative program’s future in a statement today. “SoCal Connected is going on hiatus as Season 5 ends this week, although we will continue to be on the air twice a week with some original programming and the best of the season,” said Marcus, s.v.p., news and factual programming. “As happens every year, there are questions about the show’s future. And the answer is always the same. SoCal Connected depends on public funding and we don’t know at this time what that funding will be. We are very proud of what we have accomplished this year, and hope SoCal Connected will be back for Season 6.”

Blue Ridge PBS in Roanoke, Va., is shutting down two transmitters due to state funding and federal sequestration, according to the Roanoke Times. Households in the Tri-Cities region of Bristol, Va./Tenn. and Kingsport and Johnson City, Tenn., and far southwest Virginia, will lose the station’s over-the-air digital signal. About 15 percent of viewers in that area receive its programming through digital antennas or converters. The state cut all funding for pubcasting last year, which meant a drop of about $1 million for Blue Ridge PBS, nearly a third of its operating budget. Sequestration shaved another 5 percent this month.

Is KCETLink’s award-winning news show SoCal Connected ending production? There’s no official announcement from the pubcaster in Los Angeles yet, but co-host Madeline Brand tells Current that she’s “proud to have worked” on the program. “It’s a journalistic gem in TV news,” she said. “The show regularly aired investigative, hard-news stories and in-depth interviews — something that’s becoming increasingly rare in all media. Unfortunately, it costs a lot of money to do that.” LA Observed is reporting that Brand posted on Facebook that she was “sad that today was the last taping day of  SoCal Connected.” In 2011, KCET was forced to shut down production of new episodes a few weeks earlier than usual, after losing U.S.

Judges in the 72nd annual Peabody competition selected winners as “the best in electronic media for the year 2012,” including PBS programs presented on Independent Lens, NPR’s coverage of the Syrian conflict and a ProPublica investigation produced with This American Life.

NPR called on rockers OK Go to mark the network’s move to new digs, the Washington Post reports. The performance, “filmed in meticulous, stop-motion-ish staccato at the old offices and the new — and on a truck weaving through the streets of Washington in between,” will be featured in a video that lands online late next month. NPR is relocating from 635 Massachusetts Ave. NW, in downtown D.C., where it has been since 1994, to 1111 North Capitol St. NE, near Capitol Hill.

New England Public Radio in Amherst, Mass., got a helping hand earlier this month from a famous friend when listener and local resident Bill Cosby staged a benefit performance for the station’s capital campaign. Cosby’s March 2 show at Symphony Hall in Springfield, Mass., raised $140,000 for the station, drawing more than 2,000 attendees who each paid from $37.50 to $75 to see the comic. The event stemmed from relationships between Cosby and various station staff that developed over the past few years. Cosby first got in touch Tom Reney, host of the station’s weeknight jazz show, says General Manager Martin Miller.

Veteran radio pubcaster Tanya Ott is joining Georgia Public Broadcasting as vice president of radio, responsible for management of 17 stations statewide, GPB announced today. She assumes her post in mid-May. Ott is currently news director at WBHM-FM in Birmingham, Ala. She has also worked in Florida, Colorado and New York and for national programs including NPR’s Morning Edition and APM’s Marketplace. At GPB, Ott additionally will oversee multiple ongoing GPB initiatives, including the Southern Education Desk pubmedia  consortium; the Center for Collaborative Journalism, a partnership between GPB Radio Macon, The Telegraph and Mercer University; and several statewide radio partnerships.

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler takes on a controversial documentary aired by a local station, Denver-based Colorado Public Television, in his latest column. Burzynski the Movie — Cancer Is Serious Business ran as a March pledge special on CPT. It follows a Polish-born physician and biochemist Stanislaw Burzynski and his work at the Texas clinic he established in 1976 for a cancer treatment based on what he calls “antineoplastons.” As Getler notes: “There is almost nothing about this film that isn’t controversial.” Getler said he received about a dozen critical letters even before it even aired. The problem, as Getler sees it, is the film’s bias.

SoundCloud, the Berlin-based web company that serves as a hub for listening to and sharing audio, added a new tier of service this month for producers and media companies seeking more exposure to its users.