“It’s very simple and it’s very complicated at the same time,” says Meryl Streep of the new film adaptation of A Prairie Home Companion, which opens nationwide June 9. “Nobody says much about this, but the theme of this film is about death,” says director Robert Altman in a Minnesota Public Radio article about the film. The Los Angeles Times says Keillor comes across onscreen as “a sort of hulking Jimmy Stewart.”

Talking Communications presents a podcast interview with John Hendren, NPR’s Pentagon correspondent, who discusses his experiences reporting from Iraq.

Answering a reader’s complaint, NPR’s Ken Rudin says the network’s newish blog is “not seen by anyone here as a ‘by the way’” and remains a “work in progress.”

A House funding committee yesterday moved to cut Smithsonian salaries and expense accounts by $5 million and limit the institute’s “ability to execute any contract or legal agreement which could limit public access to the Smithsonian collections.” (See also the Washington Post.) The action was a response to recent revelations about the Smithsonian-Showtime programming deal, which gives Showtime first look at programs that aim to incorporate more than an “incidental” amount of the Smithsonian’s resources, and about high salaries at the Smithsonian’s commercial sales division, which are the subject of an investigation by the institution’s inspector general.

Have a few hours to kill and a love for pubcasting inside baseball? The CPB Board released its 70-page response to a November report by Inspector General Ken Konz that documented contracting, hiring and oversight problems within the corporation. Konz’s investigation was spurred by press reports about former Board Chair Kenneth Tomlinson’s transgressive efforts to “balance” pubcasting. For the first time in its 40-year history, says the executive summary, CPB has “initiated a top-to-bottom review of its operations and procedures. Never before has the organization undertaken a major organization of every task, operation and practice.” The Board instituted several governance policy changes and enhancements earlier this week (earlier post) and will continue to “engage in an ongoing review of the Corporation’s fulfillment of its statutory mission,” the response document says, “including that of objectivity and balance in radio and television programming.”

“I think Katrina firmly entrenched WWOZ as the keeper of the groove,” says dj Black Mold in a Times-Picayune feature on the New Orleans community radio station.

The CPB Board adopted new governance policies and approved changes to others earlier this week as part of its ongoing effort to reform operations within the funding agency in the wake of last year’s controversy. The Board approved changes to its Code of Ethics for Directors and Conflicts of Interest policy; outlined new procedures for ensuring that the corporation follows all open meetings requirements and does not include “political tests” in hiring decisions; more explicitly spelled out the responsibilities of board members, the board chair and president; and created a new “whistleblower policy” to protect CPB staff from retaliation for reporting suspicions of waste, fraud or other violations of the law or CPB policy (see also Broadcasting & Cable, subscription req.).

Independent public radio producer Sandy Tolan’s new book, The Lemon Tree, has been published by Bloomsbury USA. The book explores the relationship between an Arab family and a Jewish family in the Middle East.

Fellowships galore for public radio reporters: a Knight Fellowship from Stanford University for Andrea Bernstein at WNYC in New York; a Knight-Wallace Fellowship from the University of Michigan for NPR’s Anthony Brooks; and a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for Clark Boyd of The World.

Todd Mundt assesses this week’s New Realities forum for public radio halfway through and finds enough “mediocrity buttressed by self-satisfaction . . . to last me a lifetime.” Consultant Rob Paterson, who helped organize the conference, responds that he saw “evidence of a shift in culture to a more self-sufficient, confident and adult way of being” at the end of the event. More observations from Paterson on his blog and on a New Realities blog of opinions, photos and reports. One new blog to come out of the event: HD Public Radio.

Laura Cantrell, a musician and a DJ on WFMU-FM in Jersey City, N.J., contemplates the art of conjuring a distinct atmopshere on radio, whether the host is live or recorded. Along the way she makes examples of public radio’s Garrison Keillor, Eddie Stubbs and Vin Scelsa.

Louis Rukeyser, 73, died Tuesday after a long struggle with a rare bone marrow cancer. The son of one of the first financial columnists in U.S. newspapers, he became the first financial reporting star in TV. “He was the franchise — proof that the star system worked even for PBS,” said media professor Douglas Gomery in the Baltimore Sun. Rukeyser outlived the new version of Wall Street Week devised by Maryland Public Television to replace his original WSW, which he hosted for 32 years. Rukeyser refused to take a reduced role in the new program planned by MPT.

The contextual ads that pbs.org began introducing in January will begin expanding onto more of its websites, Cindy Johanson tells paidcontent.org. “Once we have more inventory in place, we see sponsored links as one of several strategies to help generate revenue,” Johanson writes in an e-mail Q&A.

Two of the San Francisco Bay Area’s five public TV stations — San Francisco’s KQED-TV/FM and KTEH– announced they are merging into a new nonprofit, Northern California Public Broadcasting. KQED’s Jeff Clarke will be president. Both stations are in good financial shape, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The combo also includes TV station KCAH in Monterey and KQEI-FM in Sacramento. Mergers in public TV have been rare. Two recent ones involved New York’s WNET, which combined with neighbor WLIW in 2001 and acquired control of WXEL in Palm Beach, Fla., this year. In 1994, Seattle’s KCTS took responsibility for a KYVE in Yakima, Wash.

Edtech expert Andy Carvin hosts PBS’s new blog for K-12 educators, learning.now. Carvin’s first column, posted today, challenges school districts to develop more reasonable approaches to filtering Internet content.