The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is aiming to add another 5,000 hours of digitally native or previously digitized content to supplement the 40,000 hours currently slated for preservation. Casey Davis, the archive’s project manager, posted a call for interested stations on the archive’s blog Dec. 9. The archive hopes to collect the additional 5,000 hours over the next two years. Some of the materials may come from those digitized during the archive’s 2009 pilot project, Davis said. On Nov. 21, Boston’s WGBH and the Library of Congress announced they would take on joint stewardship of the American Archive, transitioning the project away from CPB.

CPB Board members got an ominous preview Monday of the corporation’s upcoming white paper about spectrum issues in public broadcasting. At a meeting at CPB’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., Harry Hawkes of Booz & Co.’s media and technology practice told board members that if the FCC goes ahead with plans to clear 120 MHz of spectrum for use by mobile devices, 110 to 130 pubcasting stations will need to shift due to repacking even if their operators don’t participate in the auction. “That means that one-third of the system could have to change channels,” noted Vincent Curren, CPB’s c.o.o. “This will likely be more disruptive than the digital transition.

Remember Norwegian Public Television’s marathon broadcasts of five straight hours of knitting and five days of the “action” on a cruise-ship journey? Well, an American production company has acquired the rights to the trend now officially called Slow TV, reports the New York Post. LMNO Productions bought rights to the camera-switching technology that allows for verrrry long stretches of television. Pubcasters can jump on the trend thanks to Executive Program Service. EPS offers a more manageable, one-hour version of the Norway cruise and has trimmed Norwegian Public Television’s 10-hour documentary on the longest train journey in the country into a new 60-minute program.

Phil Charles, retired longtime g.m. of KGLT-FM in Bozeman, Mont., died Nov. 29 of heart failure at his home in Cape May Court House, N.J. He was 65. Charles joined KGLT in the 1980s and stayed for more than two decades before retiring in 2010. He introduced a freeform format on the station. A licensee of Montana State University, KGLT brands itself as “Alternative Public Radio” and airs music and several nationally distributed public radio programs. Before arriving in Bozeman, Charles worked at a series of alternative stations throughout the 1970s, including KSAN in San Francisco and KSJO and KOME in San Jose, Calif.

PBS and United Kingdom–based Sky Vision Productions are collaborating on a pair of documentaries about Typhoon Haiyan, to air in both countries, RealScreen reports. Sky1 is collecting footage from the Philippines in the aftermath of one of the deadliest natural disasters in history, which the UK network will use for a documentary to air Dec. 11. PBS will repurpose the same footage for an episode of the science program Nova with the working title Monster Typhoon, to air Jan. 22, 2014. The program will feature interviews with survivors and storm scientists and will examine conditions in the Philippines in the storm’s aftermath, the government’s crippled relief efforts and the probability of more giant storms to come as Earth’s climate changes.

A guitar played by Bob Dylan at his famous Newport Folk Festival appearance in 1965 sold for nearly $1 million Friday, two years after it was featured in an episode of PBS’s History Detectives. The 1964 Fender Stratocaster went for $965,000 at New York auction house Christie’s, setting a new auction record for a guitar. A Christie’s spokesperson told CNN that it was purchased by an unidentified buyer. In 2011, the daughter of a pilot who flew Dylan to performances in the ’60s submitted the guitar to History Detectives, claiming that it was the same instrument the musician played at Newport, then his first live electric performance.

A federal appeals court last week upheld a ban on political and public-issue commercials on pubcasting stations, ruling that its removal would compromise their educational mission. The split 9–2 decision was handed down Dec. 2 by a panel of judges on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Writing for the majority, Judge M. Margaret McKeown said that the restrictions Congress imposed on advertising were intended to shield noncommercial broadcasters from the competitive pressures of commercial media, not to limit constitutionally protected free speech. “The hallmark of public broadcasting has been a longstanding restriction on paid advertising to minimize commercialization,” McKeown wrote.

The publicity onslaught preceding the Jan. 5 premiere of Downton Abbey arrives in New York next week in the form of a tea truck. Variety reports that costumed servers will hand out free tea and biscuits to fans of the hit Masterpiece costume drama. And, this being 2013, the tea truck will be closely tracked on PBS’s Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram. Following appearances by stars of the show on various network TV shows, the week culminates Dec. 12 in what Variety calls a “standing-room-only fan event” at Times Center with a panel discussion featuring writer Julian Fellowes and E.P. Gareth Neame.

FCC Chair Tom Wheeler announced today that the agency is shifting broadcast spectrum auctions from 2014 to 2015. In a blog post, Wheeler said that the decision for the delay was based on the complexity of the undertaking. “Having spent most of the last decade helping technology-based companies from the ground up,” he wrote, “I know the incredible challenge of taking a cutting-edge product from concept to market on deadline.” Wheeler said he believes the FCC “can conduct a successful auction in the middle of 2015.” He said the agency’s Spectrum Task Force will provide more details about the timeline in a presentation at the January 2014 FCC meeting.

Innovation Hub, WGBH-FM’s weekly hourlong dive into big ideas and innovative technologies, goes national Saturday on SiriusXM’s public-radio content channel, XMPR. The program, distributed by Public Radio International, will air at 10 p.m. Eastern time Saturdays, featuring interviews with thought leaders on cutting-edge news in medicine, education, transportation and more. XMPR is Channel 121 on XM and Channel 205 on Sirius. PRI, which already offers streaming and podcast versions of the program, will make it available next spring for pubradio broadcast. Innovation Hub currently has more than 500,000 followers on SoundCloud. In preparation for a national broadcast, the station said, WGBH and Innovation Hub made additional investments “to cover current events and modern culture through a lens of innovation.” 

The children of Seth Williamson, a longtime music director and host at pubradio WVTF in Roanoke, Va., have filed a lawsuit against a medical manufacturing company over his 2011 death, reports the Roanoke Times. The complaint says that following hernia surgery, Williamson received more than five times the prescribed amount of an analgesic medication and died a short time later of a “massive” overdose. The family contends a medication pump was faulty. They are suing Hospira Inc., which made the pump, and Abbott Laboratories Inc., which once owned Hospira. Both are based in the Chicago suburbs. Representatives of the companies had no comment.

Jason Calacanis is betting big on Swell, the five-month-old app that curates podcasts and news reports. The angel investor, who co-founded the blog network Weblogs Inc., the search engine Mahalo.com and the podcast network ThisWeekIn, announced Dec. 3 that he would invest $250,000 in the app. In a blog post on his tech website Launch, Calacanis cited the app’s pedigree, mission, design and focus on podcasting as reasons for his investment. He had been interested in the similar apps Stitcher and TuneIn, he said, but wasn’t able to invest in them in time. “Being able to bet on a new entrant who I think has the edge in the curation and interface space was a welcome opportunity for me,” he wrote.