An informative series of 40 interstitials on the Freedom Riders has won Mississippi Public Broadcasting and its Assistant Director of Production Edie Greene a 2012 Public Humanities Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, for preserving the state’s culture. The 30-second interstitials tell personal pieces of the larger story of the Freedom Rides, the 1961 civil-rights protest that challenged segregation in the deep South. The bus journeys culminated in Jackson, Miss., where hundreds of the activists were jailed. Greene told Current that initially MPB was considering producing a film, but soon favored the interstitial approach.

Two prominent nonprofit news organizations, The Bay Citizen, based in San Francisco, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, based in nearby Berkeley, are in merger talks, the Wall Street Journal reported. The paper quoted Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting,as saying, “There’s been no decisions made and it’s unclear where the conversations will lead, if anywhere.” The Bay Citizen produces news for its own website, but also provides San Francisco-area coverage for The New York Times. The Center for Investigative Reporting partners with major news media outlets, including public broadcasters such as Frontline and NPR.

Community licensee WTVI-TV in Charlotte, N.C., is in early merger talks with Central Piedmont Community College to keep the pubcaster on the air, reports the Charlotte Observer. WTVI President Elsie Garner and CPCC President Tony Zeiss met with Mecklenburg County Manager Harry Jones last week to see if the county would underwrite transition costs for a merger, the paper said. But Commissioner Bill James referred to the plans as “a little PBSkull-duggery,” and added: “We have defunded our PBS affiliate. Ever since then, they’ve been trying to figure out a way to get back on the government dole.” Last June, Garner asked Mecklenburg County to restore a total of $1 million in funding that was cut in recent years, saying that the station wasn’t in immediate danger of shutting down but “if you keep bleeding money, after awhile, yeah that’s the logical thing.”

Marketplace retracted a commentary by Leo Webb, an Occupy Oakland protester who described himself as an Iraqi War veteran struggling to recover from his experience as an Army sniper, after bloggers at This Ain’t Hell did some basic fact-checking and labelled his story “BS.” After looking into Webb’s story themselves, editors at Marketplace agreed. They replaced the commentary with an Editor’s note that read, in part, “Marketplace has an obligation to provide accurate information. That was not met in this commentary. It has been retracted and the text and audio have been removed from the web site.” Webb’s commentary was an installment of “My Life is True,” a series of first-person narratives by people living on the edges of the economy.

Two pubradio broadcasters are among this year’s recipients of the Studs Terkel Community Media Awards, reports Robert Feder, media writer for Time Out Chicago. Honored at March 14 ceremonies in Chicago will be Maria Hinojosa, host of  NPR’s Latino USA, and Chip Mitchell, a reporter for WBEZ-FM. The third recipient is Mick Dumke, political reporter for the Chicago Reader. The annual honors are presented by the nonprofit Community Media Workshop, a resource and advocate for grassroots local journalism that Terkel helped found in 1989. This year the awards commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Terkel, a writer famed for his oral histories of working-class Americans and a broadcaster known for his Studs Terkel Program, which aired on pubradio WFMT in Chicago from 1952 to 1997; Best of Studs Terkel still airs on the station.

David Piccerelli, president of Rhode Island PBS, said he was shocked to learn of Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s proposal to eliminate state funding for Channel 36, which provides about a third of its $3 million budget. “If this is a policy plan that the governor wants to put forth,” Piccerelli told local CBS affiliate WPRI, “then I think we should probably put together a policy plan rather than just cutting us off at the knees and telling us to go do it.” Chafee’s proposed budget cuts RI PBS’s current state support from $932,562 to $425,286 next fiscal year, and ends it altogether in 2014.

“This is NPR,” a new Facebook page, provides a peek behind the scenes at its people, headquarters and stations nationwide. There are links to events, job opportunities, photos of folks who stop in for studio interviews, pictures by NPR White House Correspondent Ari Shapiro on the campaign trail.

Pubradio WTMD at Towson University in Maryland has a unique new ad campaign that came into being after “a crazy night of flashing lights and creativity,” and probably will make you giggle. Or blush. Or both. A local photographer and ad agency both donated their services for the work, which shows what happens to ears that become aroused by all that great music on WTMD.

WCNY-TV in Syracuse today (Feb. 1) announced two new hosts for its longest-running local show, Financial Fitness, while the local Post-Standard is reporting that host J. Daniel Pluff, who started the program in 1992, has left following an ongoing disagreement. Pluff said the station wouldn’t let him decide on guest hosts for the investment advice show, which he produced on a volunteer basis. WCNY President Robert Daino told the newspaper that the station has to maintain editorial control over the program, which regularly scores better ratings than national PBS offerings. New hosts are Jim Burns, a columnist for the Post-Standard and president of J.W.

LeVar Burton, former longtime host of pubTV’s popular Reading Rainbow, has claimed @readingrainbow, reports Huffington Post, with a little help from fellow Tweeters. On Tuesday (Jan. 31), Burton had contacted the account holder directly, who hadn’t used @readingrainbow in three years. When that didn’t work, Burton Tweeted far and wide, asking the Twittersphere for help, and sites like Gizmodo got involved. “Less than two nostalgia-filled hours and hundreds of retweets later,” HuffPost says, the Twitter account was turned over to Burton.  Despite the show’s demise more than two years ago (Current, Aug. 6, 2009), Burton remains its steadfast champion, last year even raising $3 million for his RRKidz reading app in partnership with WNED in Buffalo, Reading Rainbow’s presenting station.

Just in case you missed it, here is a photo of Lego versions of Carl Kasell and Peter Sagal of Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! Creator Dave Kaleta appeared on the WBEZ/NPR show’s Listener Limerick Challenge in September 2011. UPDATE: And leave it to intrepid media reporter Jim Romenesko to get the story behind all this.

Two public media projects are among six finalists for the prestigious Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, presented annually by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. NPR’s Elizabeth Shogren, Howard Berkes, Sandra Bartlett and Susanne Reber, along with Jim Morris, Ronnie Greene, Chris Hamby and Keith Epstein of the Center for Public Integrity, were nominated for “Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities,” which for the first time publicly revealed the EPA’s internal “watch list” of the nation’s most troublesome air polluters. “This report triggered immediate enforcement action in two states, a push for openness by the EPA and an avalanche of coverage across the U.S.,”

Eben Peck, on the staff of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the past seven years, most recently as senior director of government affairs, is the new vice president of government affairs for ASTA, the American Society of Travel Agents. At CPB, Peck was the organization’s primary liaison with the federal government. In his new position, he will be responsible for all of ASTA’s state and federal and state lobbying, as well as its political action committee, ASTAPAC.

Egad! The two-hour final episode of Season 2 of the Masterpiece megahit Downton Abbey looms, on Feb. 19. No more Crawley family and staff intrigue — well, at least until Season 3, which also brings a new and famous face to the cast, Shirley MacLaine. But there’s no doubt that fans will be feeling a tad sad after the season finale. In Philadelphia, they’re gathering to share their angst at a viewing party sponsored by WHYY. Also that day, the station is running a Downton Abbey marathon, all 10 hours of Season 2, beginning at 1 p.m. Is your station doing anything special for the finale?

A signal expansion in the lower Hudson Valley three years ago depleted WDFH-FM’s cash reserves and now the Ossining, N.Y., community radio station “finds itself in financial straits,” according to The Daily Dobbs Ferry. Executive Director Marc Sophos, who helped found the station 39 years ago as a high-school freshman, said the station faces doing dark. “There’s a short-term financial emergency right now,” he said. “It’s urgent. We do need to find this money or else the station will go under. Donations are far less than the operating expenses. We need to be raising $10,000 a month.” “Money is time and time is running out,” Sophos said.