In an interview with the Kansas City Star, new CPB Chair and longtime KCUR radio pubcaster Patty Cahill recalls her 2009 Senate confirmation hearing for her appointment to the CPB Board. “I remember thinking, ‘How am I going to sit?’” she tells the newspaper. “Because I’m short and usually my feet don’t touch the ground and I sit on my leg. And I had been at KCUR so long, it seemed like getting a tattoo was a good idea, so I got one on my wrist. And it’s addicting, so whenever one of my daughters would get a tattoo I would go and get one.

Veteran public broadcaster Daniel Schiedel will be the new executive director of the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority, the OETA Board of Directors announced today. Schiedel has more than 21 years experience in public broadcasting. Currently he is general manager of KRSC-TV in Claremore, Okla. He previously served as g.m. of Wyoming Public Television Network, and has worked at pubTV stations in Missouri and South Dakota. Schiedel replaces John McCarroll, who served as OETA executive director for nine years and will retire Sept. 28. Deputy Director of Finance and Administration Toni Matthews will serve as interim executive director until Schiedel begins work at OETA on Nov.

Cleveland commercial classical station WCLV-FM will begin operating as a noncommercial entity Jan. 1, 2013, the station’s owner, ideastream, announced yesterday. “The transition will allow generous businesses and organizations to support the work of WCLV, and will give individuals who appreciate hearing classical music on the radio the opportunity to provide support through donations large and small,” according to the press release. WCLV has been broadcasting since 1962. Last year it was acquired by public radio and TV broadcaster ideastream, but it continued to operate as a commercial station. In migrating from commercial to noncommercial, it follows the example of other classical stations that have also made the change in recent years, such as WQXR in New York, WCRB in Boston, and KING-FM in Seattle.

CPB has selected Crawford Media Services in Atlanta to digitize audio and video content for the American Archive. The CPB initiative is working to preserve local and national public media content from the past 60 years. So far, more than 100 public television and radio stations have identified some 1 million hours of programs, raw footage, unedited interviews, recorded speeches, scripts and photos. Around 40,000 hours will be preserved in the archive. Crawford has worked on similar archival projects for CNN, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the United States Marine Corps and the Coca-Cola Co. CPB is currently in the process of selecting a permanent home for the archive.

In a meeting Tuesday (Sept. 25), a member of the Alabama Educational Television Commission accused two Alabama Public Television employees of giving false information during a recent court hearing, the Birmingham News reports. “We had two employees testify under oath to false information,” said Rodney Herring, a chiropractor from Opelika, Ala. “There’s a side of that where you could go so far as to say that’s perjury, there’s a side of that that maybe they just didn’t know what the heck was going on.” Herring was referring to testimony in August that was part of a lawsuit filed by former APT Executive Director Allan Pizzato over his abrupt June termination.

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.