NPR has hired a new digital media chief: Kinsey Wilson, executive editor of USA Today and usatoday.com since 2005. He joins NPR on Oct. 20 as senior v.p. and g.m. of digital media. Wilson helped lead the merger of USA Today‘s newspaper and online newsrooms in 2005, the same year that he discussed the impact of technology on the news business in this Online NewsHour interview.

Young British actor Matthew Goode, who starred as Charles Ryder in Julian Jarrold’s recent Brideshead Revisited movie in theaters, starts Oct. 5 as host of Masterpiece Contemporary, the upcoming third sub-series in the imported drama series on PBS, WGBH announced. Goode has already acted in Masterpiece presentations My Family and Other Animals and Inspector Lynley and Miss Marple mysteries. In theaters, he has acted in Woody Allen’s Match Point and Scott Frank’s The Lookout, and will play the villain in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen next March.

Explaining that she “was continually thwarted to do the job I was hired to do,” Nicole Sawaya announced yesterday that she had resigned as executive director of Pacifica Radio. Sawaya, who had given the job a second chance after quitting for several months last winter, said she gave the Pacifica National Board notice Aug. 3 that she would be out of the budget by Sept. 30. In the form of a letter to the late Pacifica founder Lewis Hill, Sawaya regretted the present state of the lefty pubradio net, which she said has “dysfunctional” governance, “shoddy and opaque” business practices and a work force that includes both “dedicated and smart” broadcasters as well as those who merely protect their self interest and resist change.

Five months before all TV broadcasting goes digital, Public Telecommunications Facilities Program is still spending $9 million of its $19 million grant pool on digital conversion of 31 pubTV grantees, according to the Commerce Department announcement on Thursday. Among the 110 grants, 20 will extend pubcast service to new areas, including the first pubTV service to Great Falls, Mont., and Canton, N.C. To keep stations on air in emergencies, PTFP made 12 grants to assist the installation of electrical generators or uninterruptible power supply systems at six pubradio stations and 15 pubTV stations. Here’s the complete list of grants.

CPB and the Association of Independents in Radio announced today a $400,000 grant program to encourage independent producers to try bold projects that have one foot in broadcasting and the other in new media (though with broadcast dominant). AIR will administer the grant program, Public Radio Makers Quest 2.0, which will spend $20,000 to $40.000 on each of about a dozen projects. Ingrid Lakey, former e.p. of Justice Talking and once p.d. of WETA-FM, will head the project as talent manager. AIR posted this Q&A.

The New York Times’s Neil Genzlinger takes umbrage at Maria Hinojosa’s performance on an installment of PBS’s Now that focuses on the role of women in politics. “Sure, the news media is male-dominated, and maybe this I’m-the-story goo is what women want in their public-affairs programming,” he writes. “If so, PBS should start a separate network. HerPBS, say.”

Todd Mundt shares the list of winners of the Public Radio Program Directors’ Awards for Creative Excellence, announced today at the PRPD conference in Hollywood. Todd also blogged the keynote address by Bruce Theriault, senior v.p. of radio at CPB.

Houston’s KPFT, a Pacifica station, has been off the air since sustaining damage from Hurricane Ike. In an update Chief Engineer Steve Brightwell describes the situation: “While it is possible for KPFT to get 50 watts on the air and operate a minimal daytime schedule with a portable generator (which we don’t yet have), it will require a massive expense of manpower and gasoline, only to serve a small neighborhood in Northwest Houston, with the overwhelming majority of regular listeners being left out.”

Like a modern-day presidential candidate, WETA-FM classical deejay Nicole Lacroix spoke in a vast stadium Sept. 13, though the crowd had not really come for her. The spectators had come for Washington National Opera’s opening night free telecast of La Traviata to the Jumbotron at the city’s new baseball park. Lacroix was “charming and knowledgeable” as emcee, according to critic Micaele Sparacino on Concertonet.com, an international website that covers classical music. He noted that the audience was full of 20-somethings, some with their kids. A press report said the opera filled about 15,000 seats, just over one-third of the stadium’s capacity.

ABN Radio, the largest farm radio network in Ohio, will relocate its headquarters to Ohio State University, where it will share a building with WOSU Public Media next year. It will renovate space recently vacated by WOSU, which opened its new digital radio facility in the building. Tom Rieland, WOSU’s g.m., says the partnership “could lead to many interesting programming collaborations.” ABN, heard on 65 stations, is run by a small, owner-operated company that runs BARN (Buckeye Ag Radio Network), according to WOSU. (Correction: It is not operated by the trade publishing company DTN, whose name appears at the bottom of ABN’s website.)

Three new nominees for CPB Board seats plus two nominated for reappointment came down decisively in favor of public broadcasting during a Senate hearing yesterday. The genial give-and-take is captured in a video webcast of the hearing on the Senate website (drag the cursor past 31 minutes, to avoid dead air). New nominees, as reported in Current, are Hollywood attorney Bruce M. Ramer, educator and APTS Board member Liz Sembler and Nevada broadcast journalist Loretta Sutliff (known in Elko as Lori Gilbert), who spoke up for local reporting. Coming back for second terms are Republican activist and former CPB Chair Cheryl Halpern and former Democratic senator and governor David Pryor.

Charges against Amy Goodman, two producers of her program Democracy Now! and other journalists arrested by St. Paul police during the Republican National Convention will be dropped, Mayor Chris Coleman said today, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. The city had already dropped felony charges, including those against the program’s two producers,leaving only misdemeanors on Wednesday, the program announced.

When Congress adopted the Public Broadcasting Act 40 years go, it put its contribution to public TV and radio into the hands of the nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting with a structural characteristic and two mandates that have caused conflict and inertia ever since. The law has the President nominate the CPB Board and the Senate confirm the CPB Board. Rather than keeping political appointees off the board, it splits them almost equally. The majority are chosen by the White House from its own party and the minority of board members named, in practice, by Senate leaders of the other party.

“Sid the Science Kid is a great show for teaching science to little kids, but not so great for the adults watching with them,” writes Wired blogger (a.k.a. “geekdad”) Matt Blum about the new PBS Kids show from the Jim Henson Company. Sid, which is geared toward kids 3 to 6, doesn’t have those jokes only parents would get, he says–such as Cookie Monster introducing himself as Alistair Cookie.

Cindy Browne never promised them a rose garden. In fact, the founding executive director of Iowa Public Radio repeatedly promised the network’s 50-some staffers a long passage through anger, grief and confusion, before things would get the least bit rosy. Over the past three years, events delivered some of the expected benefits of combining the public radio operations at Iowa’s three big state universities, as well as the promised discomforts for both listeners and staffers. The next steps are up to a new set of executives. In coming months, IPR will hire, besides an executive director, a content director, a music director, a development director and a Cedar Rapids reporter.