The two remaining finalists bidding for KCSM, public TV in San Mateo, Calif., are local groups affiliated with Independent Public Media and Public Media Company, reports the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club (citing a report in the Palo Alto Daily Post, which is not published online). The bid amounts are not yet public. Among offers rejected by licensee San Mateo County Community College was one from another pubcaster, KMTP-TV in San Francisco, which airs multilingual, ethic programming. Jan Roecks, the college’s director of general services, will make her recommendation on the buyer to the trustees when they meet again later this month.

A public radio legend in Kansas City, Mo., is retiring at the end of the month. Walt Bodine, 91, has spent 72 years in the news business, and generations of listeners grew up hearing his trademark tagline, “What do you say to that?” His Walt Bodine Show dates to 1978, and has aired on KCUR since the early 1980s. He  launched a late-night talk show, Night Beat, on a local AM station in the 1960s. His son Tom Bodine told the Kansas City Star that his father was on the air on July 17, 1981, after two skywalks collapsed during a dance at the Hyatt Regency hotel near downtown, killing 114 persons and injuring 216 more.

Vern Coleman, 86, who worked 14 years as an audio engineer at WGBH working on such shows as The French Chef, The Boston Pops and Evening at Symphony, died March 18 at his home in Marstons Mills, Mass., after a long battle with leukemia. He was nominated for a primetime Emmy Award for best live sound in 1976, for his work on New Year’s Eve at Pops; he attended the Emmy ceremonies in Hollywood but lost to the soundman for Johnny Carson. Coleman also worked  as a contract engineer for WBUR in Boston, among other stations, and as a staff engineer of commercial WCVB.

Jane Krutz, an enthusiastic advocate for the Arkansas Educational Television Network for more than 47 years, died March 25 in Little Rock. She was 86. “It is literally true that there might not have been an AETN without her,” said Allen Weatherly, executive director of AETN, in a tribute to Krutz on the network’s website. “In fact, she was advocating for a public television station for Arkansas years before we finally made it to the air in the mid-1960s.” Krutz frequently appeared during membership drives, testified before Congress for public broadcasting in 1995, served since 1996 on the AETN Commission, and received the PBS National Volunteer of the Year award.

Stanley Harrison, a former communications director for CPB, died of cardiac arrest after a stroke on April 5 in Miami Beach, Fla. He was 81. Harrison oversaw communications for CPB from 1976 to 1985. He was born in Baltimore to Frank and Thelma Baer Harrison. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science at the University of Maryland, College Park, and his doctorate in government and public administration from American University in Washington, D.C. At the time of his death, he was teaching at University of Miami’s School of Communication. He also taught part time at American University and at the Pentagon.

A former mayor of Elmira, N.Y., is the new v.p. of advancement, communications and content delivery at dual licensee WCNY in Syracuse. John Tonello will oversee the $20-million “Campaign for WCNY” to raise funds for the station’s new Broadcast and Education Center downtown. He’s also responsible for membership, public relations, volunteers and events, development, grants and overall fundraising, as well as brand image, on-air trafficking and messaging on all WCNY platforms. Tonello has more than 20 years of experience in communications, public affairs and information technology. He was mayor of the south-central New York city from 2006 through 2011.

Four more pubTV stations have joined the Mobile500 Alliance, a group of TV broadcasters advocating for partnerships to accelerate the nationwide availability of a commercial mobile digital television service. The organization is headed by John Lawson, a former APTS president. New to the alliance are Chicago’s WTTW, Maryland Public Television, Public Broadcasting Atlanta and New Mexico PBS. They join three other pubcasters in the alliance, MHz Networks in Washington, D.C., WGBH in Boston and Twin Cities Public Television in Minneapolis-St. Paul. WGBH, Public Broadcasting Atlanta, and New Mexico PBS are already broadcasting Mobile DTV. Dan Schmidt, WTTW president, said the station’s board formed a committee to consider the best options for using WTTW’s broadcast spectrum.

A federal appeals court in San Francisco today upheld the law banning for-profit goods-and-services ads on pubcasting stations but threw out the restrictions on issue-oriented and political ads. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 for the mixed verdict in a First Amendment case brought by Minority Television Project, longtime licensee of noncommercial San Francisco station KMTP-TV. The FCC had fined KMTP in 2003 after it illegally aired commercials for goods and services 1,900 times between 1999 and 2002, the appeals court said. The court accepted the government’s traditional argument that goods-and-services advertising would harm public stations’ programming by boosting their incentive to reach bigger audiences.

The Center for Investigative Reporting is launching an investigative news channel on YouTube, funded by an $800,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, to serve as a hub for investigative journalism. The channel will feature videos from commercial and noncom broadcasters and independent producers, including NPR, ABC News, The New York Times, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop and ITVS. The center plans to add  contributors and seek submissions from freelance journalists and independent filmmakers from around the world. “One of the goals of this partnership will be to raise the profile and visibility of high-impact storytelling through video,” said Robert J.

WBEZ’s This American Life is planning its third live simulcast show, May 10 from the Skirball Center at New York University to 550 movie theaters nationwide. “I saw this amazing dance performance by Monica Bill Barnes’ company,” said host Ira Glass in the announcement, “and I thought — that is totally in the style of our radio show. But obviously you can’t have dance on the radio.” So TAL “built this lineup of stories mixed with super visual things,” he said, centered on the theme, “The Invisible Made Visible.” In addition to the dancers, guests include fellow pubcaster Glynn Washington, host of Snap Judgment; comic Mike Birbiglia with a new short film; and live music by the rock band OK Go.

WHYY’s Fresh Air is one of the fastest-growing public-radio shows on the web, reports Nieman Lab. One major force behind that success is web producer Melody Joy Kramer, who has “slowly and single-handedly built a huge following by approaching the job as a digital native, a citizen of the community she wanted to reach. She figured out how to turn radio stories into conversations.” The show’s Twitter account now has 70,000 followers, up from 3,800 before she arrived in January 2010 from Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, where she was a writer and managed co-host Carl Kassel’s Facebook page.

Apps for tablets and smartphones may get buzz, but public media stations have a growing opportunity to reach audiences not just with apps, but via web pages optimized for mobile devices. Traffic to station websites from mobile devices has grown from 9 percent last July to 14 percent in March, according to Steve Mulder and Keith Hopper of NPR Digital Services. And while both usage of NPR apps and visits to NPR’s mobile site have grown, the latter has outpaced app usage in growth over the past two years. NPR now has twice as many mobile web users as mobile app users.

Tim Regan-Porter, director of the new Center for Collaborative Journalism in Macon, Ga., provides early details on how the Knight-backed partnership among Mercer University, the local Telegraph newspaper and Georgia Public Broadcasting will work, in a post today (April 10) on MediaShift. The ambitious vision, Regan-Porter said, is “not only establishing a new model for journalism education but also helping to transform local communities and save democracy itself.” Mercer journalism students will train in a working newsroom, alongside professional journalists, through the four years of the program — some students even living above the center, Regan-Porter said. GPB is boosting local coverage by launching Macon Public Radio, which will make the central-Georgia community the only town outside Atlanta to have “significant locally focused public-radio programming,” he said.

The National Endowment for the Arts is considering substantial cuts — possibly totaling $1 million — in funding for PBS arts programming through the NEA’s Arts in Media initiative, according to the New York Times. The NEA told execs with Great Performances and American Masters that the shows would each receive $50,000 in the 2012 financing cycle, down from $400,000 each in 2011. Independent Lens would get $50,000, down from $170,000; P.O.V., $100,000, down from $250,000. KQED in San Francisco was turned down for a $350,000 request; it received $200,000 for its PBS series Sound Tracks in 2011. Simon Kilmurry, executive director of P.O.V.