Madeleine Brand, who quit KPCC Sept. 21, told Current that “outside offers just became too attractive” for her to remain at the Pasadena station. Her hourlong morning Madeleine Brand show, which premiered on KPCC in September 2010, morphed last month into Brand & Martinez, when former ESPN sportscaster A Martinez signed on as co-host. The show also grew into a two-hour program for national distribution and will include a mix of segments intended to appeal to minority audiences. The changes were backed by a $1.8 million CPB grant to Southern California Public Radio in December 2011 as part of the One Nation Media Project, bolstering reporting and programming for and about Latinos and other people of color in the diverse Los Angeles area.

Pitch spots requesting donations for an audio preservation project at Detroit’s WDET did not violate fundraising ethics, according to an accredited fundraising consultant who reviewed the campaign at the station’s request. The spots, which simulated tape decay of recorded music in the station’s library to solicit donations for the preservation project, prompted an internal complaint that WDET had misled listeners about the state of its collection (Current, Sept. 10). WDET General Manager J. Mikel Ellcessor, who approved the spots, apologized to staff and to listeners who donated to the campaign, and pledged to have an independent consultant evaluate the matter.

WGBH is offering a digitized collection of 50 episodes of the early pubTV debate program The Advocates, which initially ran on PBS from 1969 for six seasons. The programs are available on the station’s Open Vault archives site. “The Advocates staged debates about important public issues of the day and invited the public to mail in their votes to determine the winner — an early pre-cursor to voting/elimination-style reality television,” WGBH noted in the announcement. National figures appearing include Joseph Biden, Michael Dukakis, Barney Frank, Jesse Owens, Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey. Topics cover an array of issues such as gay marriage, financing of Social Security, limiting campaign contributions, tax credits for school tuition and government-funded healthcare for all Americans.

Now that Arbitron’s new ratings methodology is providing consistent and crunchable year-to-year data on radio listening, public radio programmers and producers are getting a clearer picture of listening trends — and it’s not a cheerful one. Cume and average–quarter-hour audience for NPR News stations has been falling for a year, according to NPR data. AQH began falling in 2008, after stations in the top 48 markets began the switch from diary to Portable People Meter ratings. Weekly cumes remained relatively consistent through spring 2011, then began a sharp decline. The slides have been driven in part by a fall-off in drivetime listening.

Anthony Tiano, president of KQED in San Francisco from 1979–93, died Aug. 12 at his home in Albuquerque, N.M. He was 71. At the time of his death he was president of Santa Fe Productions, which produced programming for public television stations. A statement from KQED said Tiano led the station “through a period of significant growth and change,” including starting a full seven-day schedule for KQED Public Television and the converting KQED Public Radio to an all-news format. Tiano spent more than 40 years running public television stations and producing programming for them. His career began at KNME in Albuquerque while he was attending college.

George Stoney, a pioneering documentarian widely regarded as the father of public-access television, died July 12 at his Manhattan home, days after celebrating his 96th birthday. Stoney was a prolific filmmaker and longtime New York University professor, and was active on the boards of Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a public-access channel, and the Alliance for Community Media. He co-founded the Alternate Media Center, the organization that gave birth to public-access television. “A catalyst, that was the word for George,” said Barbara Abrash, former director of public programs at the Center for Media, Culture and History at NYU, and a longtime colleague and friend.

In the conclusion of an interview on Huffington Post, Bill Siemering, a founding father of NPR, talks about how the network now reflects his original goals. He tells University of Chicago Professor David Galenson about the importance of a good story, saying that although “personal storytelling is less common within the news magazine programs,” This American Life and Radio Lab “excel” at it. “In the very first All Things Considered,” Siemering recalls, “the first voice for the ‘teaser’ in the program was a nurse, who had been a drug addict, talking about when ‘Harry’ comes knocking on your door.

Humorist and essayist David Rakoff, a regular contributor to Public Radio International’s This American Life since the program’s inception, died Aug. 9 after a fight with cancer that dated to his 20s. He was 47. Rakoff worked in publishing before becoming a full-time writer. He appeared dozens of times on TAL to recite his essays, which often balanced pessimism with a wry sensibility. During a live performance of TAL staged in May, Rakoff spoke frankly about the latest battle with the disease. He has also guest-hosted for the show on occasion, filling in for Ira Glass. In a statement on TAL’s website, Glass described Rakoff as “my friend, our friend here at the radio show and our brother in creating the program, making it into what it’s become.

Ken Messer, who served as general manager of PBS affiliate KYVE in Yakima, Wash., from March 2008 through his retirement in June, died Aug. 21 at the age of 70 after a long battle with cancer. Messer was a prominent broadcaster in Yakima. Before joining KYVE, he spent 38 years at Yakima’s CBS affiliate, KIMA-TV, beginning in sales and working his way up to g.m. He was voted Broadcaster of the Year by the Washington Association of Broadcasters in 2005, and by the Yakima Advertising Federation in 2002. “As our friend, colleague and a tremendous community advocate in Yakima, Ken’s loss will be deeply felt,” said Moss Bresnahan, president and c.e.o.

MontanaPBS will launch a fifth full-power station in the state this fall, according to KUSM-TV General Manager Eric Hyyppa. KUKL-TV will offer all five of the station’s digital multicast channels. The new station will serve the area around Kalispell, or some 85,000 residents in the northwestern corner of Montana. “It’s really the last major community in the state that hasn’t had great over-the-air service,” Hyyppa said. “It’s had translators, but no full-power coverage.” With the new station, MontanaPBS will reach nearly three-quarters of the state’s population, up from around two-thirds. MontanaPBS has been working on plans for the station for more than a decade, Hyyppa said.

Roger Fisher, a Harvard law professor who developed the Emmy-and Peabody Award–winning public TV program The Advocates, died Aug. 25 in Hanover, N.H. He was 90. His son Elliott told the New York Times that the cause of death was complications from dementia. Fisher proposed The Advocates in 1969, as a co-production of WGBH in Boston and KCET in Los Angeles. The show was one of the first projects at WGBH for Peter McGhee, who went on to become an influential head of national productions at the station. Fisher served as executive producer for the weekly debate-style public affairs program through 1974, and again for its bi-weekly revamp from 1978 to ’79.

The man behind Sesame Street’s Count von Count, Jerry Nelson, died Aug. 23 at age 78. Nelson, who worked with Muppets creator Jim Henson early in his career, also played Gobo Fraggle on Fraggle Rock, a Henson TV series from the 1980s. Nelson “imbued all his characters with the same gentle, sweet whimsy and kindness that were a part of his own personality,” said Lisa Henson, c.e.o. of  Jim Henson Co., in a statement. “He joined the Jim Henson Co. in the earliest years, and his unique contributions to the worlds of Fraggles, Muppets, Sesame Street and so many others are, and will continue to be, unforgettable.”

Efforts to build political support for continued federal funding of public broadcasting have gained little or no traction on Capitol Hill, a parade of speakers told the CPB Board during its Sept. 10 and 11 meeting in Washington, D.C. Two members of Congress, a CPB staffer and heads of three national pubcasting organizations encouraged CPB’s leaders to do more to convince lawmakers that public broadcasting would be irreparably harmed by the loss of CPB’s $445 million appropriation. Dire warnings from this summer’s report on scant alternative funding sources haven’t swayed lawmakers who’ve pledged to defund CPB. The Booz & Co. financial analysis, requested by Congress in December 2011 and delivered in June, concluded that withdrawal of aid would have a “cascading debilitating effect,” starting first with stations serving rural areas and ultimately leading to the collapse of the public broadcasting system.