Just where did folk singer Pete Seeger come up with the idea for that hammer song, anyway? Well, now you can submit that question and others to him directly — electronically, that is. The PBS Engage blog is soliciting questions for the legendary troubadour and musical activist in honor of his 90th birthday concert on Great Performances Thursday night (check local listings) and throughout August. Lauren Saks, web producer and blogger for Engage, will choose five questions for Seeger to answer; responses will be posted next week.

Two from public radio compete in separate categories of the online election held by Chicago’s Museum of Broadcast Communication. Public voting ends Friday night. Click to get your ballot. This year, 16 broadcasters are nominated in four categories: Ira Glass is up against several other national radio names, and Ed Walker, host of Sunday night showcase of radio serials and comedy, The Big Broadcast, on WAMU here in D.C., is one of the local broadcasters nominated. In a fifth category, posthumous, Studs Terkel is one of three winners already announced. (The voting by deceased voters is complete.) WAMU has been giving Walker a push with promos for weeks, and the Washington Post this morning features a profile of the 77-year-old hometown favorite, who formed a memorable comedy team with Willard Scott (the original overweight and jolly NBC Today weatherman) on several D.C.

A personal blog in which a public radio reporter ranted about her remote Alaska town has prompted her departure from NPR member station KDLG-AM in Dillingham (population: 4,933). Eileen Goode resigned Monday after complaints from locals about her blog, “I’m in Dillingham Alaska — What’s Your Excuse?” The station received about three dozen email and phone complaints after someone took notice of the blog and emailed passages to residents. In the blog, Goode writes about everything from a colleague’s lack of underwear (“my co-worker goes commando, and apparently has been doing so for some time”) to, as The Anchorage Daily News noted, “a surreal 5,000-word rant about whether she should cut her toe off.”

Trader: The Documentary, which aired on PBS in 1987, was momentarily posted on YouTube thanks to an anonymous user who uploaded the film in seven parts. The doc profiles Paul Tudor Jones II, 32 at the time, who is now a billionaire hedge-fund manager. Jones asked the director, Michael Glyn, to remove the film from circulation in the 1990s. Why? According to an October 2007 New York Times story, “It is no surprise that Mr. Jones wants some distance from that version of himself. He was a bit of a cowboy, out to prove he was the best. Now, 20 years later, he sits atop the new hedge fund rich.

All the preparation that goes into an episode of NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! is on display thanks to The Chicago Tribune‘s behind-the-scenes story on the popular show. If you happen to be in the Windy City wandering around Navy Pier you may catch a glimpse of a staffer. The show’s offices are “a collection of cubicles on the second floor of Chicago Public Radio’s Navy Pier offices,” the paper says, noting that the Wait Wait employees “are the ones dressed more like bicycle messengers.” Host Peter Sagal describes the process of creating a weekly episode as “the typing and the staring.”

NPR President Vivian Schiller and former NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin throw cold water on the idea that philanthropic support can save ailing newspapers. Schiller tells Newsweek: “I laugh when I see that. The notion is that you declare yourself not for profit, and poof, all of your problems go away….It’s incredibly naive.” Dvorkin blogs: NPR’s Science desk has been an “astonishing magnet for philanthropies,” so much so that science reporting came to be overrepresented in NPR’s overall news coverage. “It was always more difficult to raise money for covering Washington. Or the Middle East. Or any other subject that could be controversial.

CPB has issued a request for proposals for vendors to help with training of participants and logistical work for a planned pubmedia barcamp Oct. 17 and 18 in Washington, organized by PBS and NPR. CPB will help 10 stations send two staffers each. Check out the RFP requirements here.

“We are a news content organization, not just a radio organization,” says NPR President Vivian Schiller, in this New York Times piece on the redesign of NPR.org that launched over the weekend. Improved navigation and readability–especially for news audiences–are hallmarks of the revamped website, a demonstration of NPR’s push to create content that makes NPR.org a “news destination in its own right,” she said, rather than an online companion to its radio programming. Web users who designate a favorite NPR station get a co-branded homepage that’s one click away from a menu of local content. Schiller acknowledges that the site does not resolve the the long-festering “bypass issue.”

Antiques Roadshow embarked on a first-ever effort for the show in Denver last Saturday: Appraisers examined pieces of government-held unclaimed jewelry. The Colorado State Treasurer’s unclaimed property division contains some $450 million of objects or cash. There’s even a Great Colorado Payback website for residents to search. As with all of the tour stops, the action was taped for consideration as part of Antiques Roadshow’s 2010 season. At one recent appraisal session, Roadshow scored its first million-dollar appraisal.

Ben Bernanke is in the news with remarks made during a NewsHour town meeting. During the discussion in Kansas City, Mo., the fed chair said government bailouts by the Central Bank and other moves were necessary to avoid “a second Depression.” Anchor Jim Lehrer moderated the event, set to run in several installments on the show this week. Here’s the transcript.

For several months Alaska’s pubcasters have been working with Livingston Associates, a public media strategic planning firm, on the possibility of merging the largest outlets in the state, according to Anchorage Daily News. Steve Lindbeck, president and g.m. of Alaska Public Telecommunications Inc., said the managers of APTI (the Alaska Public Radio Network, KAKM-TV and KSKA-FM in Anchorage) have been meeting with KUAC in Fairbanks and KTOO in Juneau to share ideas. The new merged network could begin as early as next July, Lindbeck added.

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee has scheduled Patricia Cahill’s nomination hearing for the CPB Board for 2:30 p.m. July 29. If approved, Cahill, g.m. of KCUR-FM in Kansas City, Mo., will be the first active public radio station manager on the board.

New York’s WNET.org and a Brooklyn company Tierra Innovation Inc. announced this week they’re making available to other nonprofits a content management system based on the open-source WordPress Multi-User blogging platform. WNET says on a WordPress site that the CMS enabled it redo 5 to 10 websites a month instead of one or two without the CMS, at a quarter of the cost. Efficiency was necessary because the station had to do 16 national program sites and 27 sites related to the sister stations WNET and WLIW. With the redesign and its big doses of on-demand video, WNET sites have more than doubled their usage.

WGBH will have a smaller production volume for fiscal 2010, President and CEO Jon Abbott told staffers in a letter yesterday. Which means overhead and employee benefits paid by the productions will be “considerably reduced.” That’s one factor contributing to the station’s projected discretionary budget gap of $6.9 million dollars for FY 2010 “that we must and will close,” he wrote. An initial round of cuts requested that departments cut 5 percent of nonpersonnel budget costs; that reduction request is now up to an additional 8 percent. The station is reconsidering infrastructure improvements, negotiated employee benefit savings, and has approached its union leadership to ask for concessions.

Sesame Workshop President and CEO Gary Knell joined other broadcast industry insiders testifying before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Wednesday on the 1990 Children’s Media Act. It established the three-hour weekly minimum of educational children’s programming, and set advertising limits. Committee chair Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) called the hearings to address children’s programming in the digital age. In his address to the committee, Knell advised incentives be used to encourage creation of more cross-platform educational content. He also singled out childhood obesity as an important focus.