PBS won six News and Documentary Emmy Awards at ceremonies Monday (Sept. 26) in New York City. P.O.V. claimed four statuettes, and Independent Lens and Frontline each won one. A full list of winners is here (PDF). For those keeping score, these awards join 14 Primetime Emmys and 12 Daytime Emmys awarded to programs on PBS, for a total of 32 Emmys this year.

Fred Fiske, senior commentator at WAMU 88.5 in Washington, D.C., is retiring at age 91 on Tuesday (Sept. 27), which marks his 64th anniversary on the local airwaves. “It’s been a wonderful ride,” he said in his final commentary on Monday. Fiske started on radio as a child actor in the 1930s. His career includes serving as a presidential announcer and veteran affairs commentator for Mutual Broadcasting, providing live coverage of the inaugurations of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. During the 1950s, Fiske hosted a midday pop music program at Mutual’s WWDC, and soon became Washington’s highest-rated music host. He arrived at WAMU in 1977.

In response to several recent disasters worldwide, CoastAlaska has developed two small portable FM radio stations for use by pubcasters in the state, called Radio to Go. The nonprofit, a service partnership among seven stations, developed the portable radio setup in case a transmitter or studio building is put out of service. The FCC-compliant portable stations can be set up and broadcasting on the air in a matter of minutes, CoastAlaska says. The two units will be located in separate communities in shipping cases that can be loaded onto a Coast Guard helicopter, commercial flight or marine transportation. Cost per unit is about $10,000, including shipping cases, a 150 watt FM radio transmitter, CD players, digital audio recorder, radio tuner, mixer and microphones, cables and transmitting antenna and mast.

The upcoming public TV series Catholicism gets an early and enthusiastic review from Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor-at-large of National Review Online. “It is openly a work of evangelization (complete with available study guides and a prayer card), and is done in a way that is welcoming to a wide potential audience,” she writes. “Catholicism is classic, revolutionary, and plausibly — like the Gospels themselves — game-changing reality TV.” Chicago’s WTTW is sponsoring station, premiering four of the program’s 10 parts; it’s distributed by Executive Program Services. Catholicism was filmed in more than 50 locations in 15 countries over two years.

WYSO-FM in Yellow Springs, Ohio, will move its studios and increase its signal strength from 37,000 watts to 50,000 watts before the end of the year, reports the Dayton Daily News. The improvement is made possible by a $1 million grant approved Friday (Sept. 23) by Antioch University’s board of governors to provide the public radio station with a new broadcast facility. The power upgrade will extend the station’s reach to more listeners in southwest Ohio and provide the existing audience with a higher quality radio signal with less interference. The Federal Communication Commission has already approved the changes, university officials said.

Lynn Novick has shared directing or producing credits on several of documentarian Ken Burns’ major films, including Frank Lloyd Wright in 1998, The War in 2007 and last year’s Baseball: The Tenth Inning. And yet she remains in his shadow. Here’s a New York Times profile of Novick, who began her career as a production assistant at WNET and spent time working as an associate producer on A World of Ideas with Bill Moyers.

WQED in Pittsburgh is launching what looks to be the first pubTV multicast channel in the nation dedicated to all pledge programming, all the time. WQED Showcase “will include local pledge programming that has previously aired on the main channel, as well as national pledge programming that we were not able to schedule on the main channel due to space limitations,” George Hazimanolis, spokesperson for the Pittsburgh station, told Current. And, yes, “viewers will be asked to make a contribution to WQED just like on any other pledge program,” Hazimanolis said. The new channel “will be another way for WQED to maximize revenue so that we can continue to fulfill our core educational mission to this community,” said Deborah Acklin, station president, in a statement.

Que Pasa!, a talk show in English and Spanish on WGVE, a pubradio station owned and operated by the Gary (Indiana) Community School Corporation, has been pulled from the air, reports WBEZ in Chicago. The host is crying censorship; management says it’s a dispute over scheduling. Lisette Guillen-Gardnerhas co-hosts the show with her mother, Maria Guillen. It runs from 8 to 9 a.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, serving northwest Indiana’s Latino population. “Last Thursday (Sept. 15) was our last show. We were surprised to learn that would be our last show,” Guillen-Gardner told WBEZ. Guillen-Gardner said Gary schools Superintendent Myrtle Campbell and schools spokesperson Sarita Stevens, who is also WGVE’s station manager, spoke to her before a show in late August featuring Tony Bennett, Indiana’s superintendent of schools.

In celebration of World Cafe’s 20th anniversary on pubradio, Philadelphia Brewing Co. has created Broadcaster Brown Ale. ” Just like World Cafe,” it says, “Broadcaster Brown Ale is both satisfying, and contemplative; with a silky malt sweetness, the complex flavors of kilned German malts, and the dry finish of our American hops.” The brewer worked with the WXPN show’s creator David Dye to get the “medium-bodied, deep red-brown hued ale” just right. It’ll be available on tap around Philly in October. Dye “will be out and about at various bars to share a pint with you,” the station says, and is putting together special music mixes to play in those venues.

Jamie Widdoes, a director of CBS’ hit sitcom Two and a Half Men, is returning to his hometown of Pittsburgh to produce an as-yet untitled WQED talk show about female empowerment and girls’ self-esteem beginning in December 2011, the station announced Thursday (Sept. 22). It’s the first program of the new Pittsburgh Innovative Media Incubator, a co-venture between WQED and the Steeltown Entertainment Project, a local nonprofit advocating to make the region an entertainment production center. The incubator is funded by a grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. The show will also be offered in syndication to broadcasters such as the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Patricia Cahill, who was just elected vice-chairman of the CPB Board, is announcing her retirement from KCUR-FM in Kansas City. She’ll step down next summer. Cahill has run the station since 1987.

The latest Knight Community Information Challenge Grant winners include a pubcasting station and public access channel. North Country Public Radio, based in Canton, N.Y., gets $302,000 to expand its broadcast and digital operations and encourage residents to contribute content. And the Long Beach (Calif.) Community Foundation receives $327,000 to bring public access TV back to the community, and create hyper-local, multilingual programming on multiple platforms. The Challenge is part of the foundation’s Media Innovation Initiative, a $100 million-plus effort to help meet America’s increasing information needs. Knight Foundation begins accepting applications for the next round of the Challenge on Jan.

  The political turmoil that beset public radio within the past year doesn’t appear to have shaken the esteem that core listeners and contributors hold for NPR or public radio as a whole, according to research results presented Sept. 20 during the Public Radio Program Directors conference in Baltimore. In an online survey of more than 27,000 pubradio members and listeners conducted this summer, 80 percent of respondents disagreed with a survey statement that public radio has been treated fairly by Congress during this year’s budget debates. More than 70 percent also disagreed with one of the criticisms that political foes lobbed at NPR and its stations — that public radio is for “elites.”

Connecticut Public Television and WNPR have signed an agreement with the Hartford, Conn., school system to establish an educational center at the network’s headquarters to provide a “hands-on” immersion lab for the city’s Journalism and Media Academy, reports the Hartford Courant. Starting with the 2013-14 school year, the academy’s 100 seniors will take all of their classes in the new Learning Lab in the CPBN building. In addition to core subjects, students will learn how to produce TV, radio and online media. Hartford faculty will teach the classes, said Superintendent Christina Kishimoto, although the network’s broadcasting and media professionals will “co-teach” for media instruction.

WUCF-TV, the new PBS primary station in the Orlando market, doesn’t have a monetary goal for its first fundraising drive, which began Sept. 15 and ends Sept. 25. “We’re asking 10,000 viewers to contact us via email or letter,” spokesman Grant Heston told the Orlando Sentinel. “If part of that is a donation, that’s great. Being brand new, we want to get to know how this works.” WUCF, a collaboration between the University of Central Florida in Orlando and Brevard Community College in Cocoa, went on the air July 1 after former primary WMFE-TV announced it would be sold to religious broadcaster Daystar (Current, April 18).