Google released updates to its Google Currents news-curation app March 20, including enhanced audio capabilities, and Minnesota-based American Public Media is taking advantage of them. The free app, currently available on Android platforms, has a structure similar to those offered by other digital news curators such as Flipboard and Pulse. Users subscribe to feeds from news outlets that appear as simple RSS lists or, if the provider has signed a licensing agreement with Google, as enhanced magazine-style content. Its latest updates include audio playlists and media bars with options to pause and skip tracks. More than 10 million users have installed Currents since its December 2011 launch.

Louisville Public Media topped its $4,000 Kickstarter campaign goal for Unbound, its new short fiction series, six days ahead of schedule. As of 4 p.m. April 3, the Kickstarter project had secured pledges totaling $4,153 from 141 backers. The campaign will conclude on April 8, so could secure additional pledges before it winds down. The first 10-episode season of Unbound is budgeted at cost $9,000. LPM sought $4,000 from Kickstarter backers and the remaining $5,000 from a sponsorship deal with Spalding University in Louisville. Unbound will feature short stories read by authors Frank Bill (“Crimes in Southern Indiana,” “Donnybrook”), Gwenda Bond (“Blackwood”), Holly Goddard Jones (“Girl Trouble”), Neela Vaswani (“Where the Long Grass Bends,” “Same Sun Here”), Silas House (“Eli the Good”), Matt Bell (“In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods”), Roxane Gay (“Ayiti”) and Kyle Minor (“In the Devil’s Territory”) LPM operates Louisville’s three public radio stations: NPR news/talk station WFPL, Triple A music WFPK and classical WUOL.

Susie Hernandez, a past president of the Public Television Programmers Association, has accepted a newly created position at KQED in San Francisco as associate program director. Hernandez will work under veteran pubTV programmer Scott Dwyer. Most recently she was television program director at Arizona Public Media in Tucson, and previously worked at Independent Television Service in San Francisco in several capacities, including as director of broadcast for more than a decade. Hernandez begins work May 1.

TED, the nonprofit behind the high-profile conferences about ideas in technology, entertainment and design (as well as NPR’s new weekend series), and WNET will co-produce TED’s first original television show this spring. TED Talks Education will tape before a live audience Thursday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The New York City station is partnering with PBS and CPB for the hourlong program of short talks by education advocates on the theme of teaching and learning. TED Talks Education will air nationally May 7 on PBS as part of CPB’s American Graduate high-school dropout initiative. Musician John Legend will host.

Peter Sagal, host of NPR's Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me! and PBS's upcoming Constitution USA, makes an appearance on the latest episode of comedian Marc Maron's WTF interview podcast, posted April 3.

This item has been updated and reposted with additional information. Jane Henson, widow of Muppets creator Jim Henson, died today at age 78 after a long battle with cancer, according to the Jim Henson Co., which posted a tribute page celebrating her life. Jane Nebel first met Henson in a puppetry class at the University of Maryland, where she was studying fine arts education. In 1954, while still an undergraduate, Henson was offered a job on WRC, the local NBC affiliate in nearby Washington, D.C., and he asked Nebel to join him in creating and performing puppets for the show, Sam and Friends.

Startup tech company Aereo Inc. won another legal battle against broadcasters Monday after a federal appeals court upheld an earlier ruling that denied a request for an injunction against the company before trial. In a pair of lawsuits, broadcasters, including PBS and New York’s WNET, and commercial broadcasters including ABC, CBS and NBC claimed Aereo is violating the U.S. Copyright Act. The broadcasters had asked for an injunction against the company before the cases went to trial. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled earlier that an injunction would put Aereo out of business and that the broadcasters were likely to prevail.

The Public Radio Program Directors Association will expand its training programs for stations this year and continue its Sense of Place studies of local audiences, with funding from NPR and the Millstream Fund. PRPD will offer three workshops based on the Morning Edition Grad School classes that it has offered in recent years. “New MEGS” will extend training to all newsmagazines, including All Things Considered and Weekend Edition, and is designed for hosts, news directors and program directors. The first workshop will be offered May 18 in Charlotte, N.C. “JMEGS” (MEGS for Journalists) applies MEGS principles to journalism, focusing on selecting stories, interviewing, writing, planning newscasts and promoting news reports.

You can take a photographic stroll around the Washington, D.C., rowhouse of Jennifer Lawson, CPB’s s.v.p., television and digital video content, thanks to Thursday’s Washington Post. The Real Estate section features a peek inside the 1909 architectural gem that Lawson and her husband Tony Gittens, founder and director of Film Fest DC, had modernized for their empty-nest years. The Post noted that the kitchen and adjacent seating area hold two of six televisions in the home. “I actually need to watch Downton Abbey — it’s my professional responsibility,” Lawson quips.