There will be two events: Monday, March 12th and Saturday, May 12th; for family and friends to remember Jim: Monday, March 12, 2012Funeral Service and Burial11 AM: Promptly Blooming Grove Reformed Church (childhood church where Jim and Brenda went to Bible study)706 Blooming Grove DriveRensselaer (North Greenbush), NY  12144518.286.2910Burial will follow the church service at the nearby Blooming Grove Cemetery. Arrangements are by The Lyons Funeral Home in Rensselaer, NY, 518.283-2282 In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations in Jim’s memory to the American Center for Children and Media, 5400 N. St. Louis Ave.,

An annual event that began as an outreach for the 1999 PBS mini-series I’ll Make Me a World is still going strong in Iowa, and organizers expect it to draw some 20,000 participants Friday and Saturday, reports the Des Moines Register.  The celebration of African-American heritage, I’ll Make Me a World in Iowa, kicks off Black History Month in the state. At the original gathering in 1999, “the prediction was for 300 people to attend, but 1,000 showed up — and now we’ve grown to 15,000 to 20,000 and become a premier arts and cultural organization offering a world-class event,” said Betty Andrews, the festival’s executive director.

The Kentucky Press Association’s News Content Service, which shares stories across dozens of newspapers, is starting a pilot program to supply the state’s public radio stations. WEKU at Eastern Kentucky University and WNKU at Northern Kentucky University have signed on. “It’s a way for us to extend the really great work that journalists are already doing around the state,” Roger Duvall, g.m. at WEKU, told the Herald-Leader in Lexington. Greer added that “we know there’s interest” in the project among the other five public radio stations in Kentucky. So far, 23 of the 62 newspapers contributing their reporting to the News Content Service have agreed to allow pubradio stations to use their work, Greer said.

Marfa Public Radio General Manager Tom Michael told the Odessa (Texas) American that he hopes to re-launch public radio in Midland and Odessa by spring. In December 2011, Marfa finalized its purchase of KOCV-FM radio from Odessa College for $150,000 and another $150,000 in sponsorships over 10 years (background, Current, Aug. 8, 2011). Michael said the tower will be moved from the college campus to Gardendale, to bring back listeners who have seen the signal fade since the 1980s. “We’ve begun the construction phase of the project,” he said. “It took us a lot to get to this stage and I’m looking forward to get this up and running.”

Milwaukee Public Television and MPTV Friends, which had previously operated as two independent organizations, have merged, the groups announced Monday (Jan. 23) in a press release. Under the agreement, Friends will phase out operations in 2012, and many of its employees will join the MPTV staff  to continue coordinating fundraising events including the popular Great TV Auction. “We’ve always shared the goal of bringing the community the best in public television programming,” said station G.M. Ellis Bromberg in the statement. “This agreement strengthens our relationship and makes our stations even better by allowing us to devote more resources to present new and exciting entertainment and educational offerings.”

Three shows on PBS scored awards from the Producers Guild of America in ceremonies Saturday (Jan. 21) in Los Angeles. Masterpiece Classic’s hit Downton Abbey continues its string of honors with the David L. Wolper Award for Outstanding Producer of Long-Form Television, beating out Cinema Verite, Mildred Pierce and Too Big to Fail on HBO and The Kennedys on Reelz Channel. The outstanding producer of non-fiction television award went to Susan Lacy and Julie Sacks for American Masters. Also, Sesame Street won for children’s television, a new category in the 23-year-old awards.

Jan. 20 was Gary Eichten Day in Minnesota, proclaimed by Gov. Mark Dayton to honor the retiring Minnesota Public Radio host and producer after a 45-year career. The proclamation noted that Eichten began his career at MPR as a student announcer at KSJR, Minnesota’s first public radio station, in 1967. Over the years he has served as news director, special events producer, and station manager; for the past 20 years he’s been host of Midday. A “Heckuva Farewell” for Eichten took place Jan. 19 at the Fitzgerald Theater. For his last Midday show, Gary interviewed Vice President Walter Mondale.

Les Anderson, longtime metro news reporter for KSKA in Anchorage, Alaska, is retiring after a career in which he “once stood by a wet mule in a Wisconsin parking lot, wearing hillbilly clothes and promoting a new citrus pop for a commercial radio station,” reports the Anchorage Daily News. Anderson came to public radio in an interesting way, beginning as a college professor at University of Wisconsin. Decades ago, an English composition student asked him what can be done with an English degree; Anderson went to his office and pondered the question. “Then he decided to see if he, with a master’s degree in English, could make a career in radio,” the paper said.

A legal fight may be brewing between the BBC version of Sherlock Holmes, which airs on PBS as part of Masterpiece Mystery, and an upcoming CBS version of the detective stories. According to the UK newspaper The Independent, the Beeb producers feel that CBS’s Elementary, which also places the character in a modern setting using laptops and cellphones, may be too much like their version. Sue Vertue, Sherlock e.p., said that CBS “approached us a while back about remaking our show. At the time, they made great assurances about their integrity, so we have to assume that their modernised Sherlock Holmes doesn’t resemble ours in any way, as that would be extremely worrying.”

After receiving and investigating an 11-page complaint from a former Antiques Roadshow appraiser (Current, Dec. 12, 2011), producing station WGBH is revising how it handles contact information for experts on the Roadshow website, and making changes in its Appraisal Event Participation Agreement. In a letter to Gary Sohmers, who had raised concerns over what he saw as “illogically restrictive” clauses in the contract signed by all the experts — who are not compensated for their work — WGBH Corporate Counsel Eric Brass said the station, as part of an ongoing review process of production-related practices, would make contact information available online for past appraisers, and change the participation agreement “to focus more clearly any restrictions on an appraiser’s activities and statements regarding Antiques Roadshow to those that WGBH believes are important for protecting the series’ trademark and other legal rights, and its image.”

Here’s more from Jake Shapiro, founding c.e.o. of Public Radio Exchange, on why PRX and the Knight Foundation created the Public Media Accelerator, which was announced in December 2011. First, the concept: “Accelerators are organizations focused on early stage investment in technology startups, providing a mix of financing, mentorship and other support to help launch new companies with the potential for explosive growth,” he writes on MediaShift. “It’s clear that public media needs its own accelerator — attuned to the needs and assets of the industry and connected to the talent and energy in the broader technology and media world.”

A two-hour documentary examining the impact that conservative talk radio has had on the political climate in Wisconsin — a state currently roiled by an impending gubernatorial recall — will premiere on Milwaukee Public Television on Jan. 30. Conservative Talk Radio: Liberty or Lies was produced, written and directed by Brien Farley, a Waukesha County radio, video production, marketing and public relations professional, as a graduate-level independent study project through Marquette University’s College of Political Science, and began as a six-part series based on 17 hours of interviews. “There’s little question that conservative talk radio has had a significant impact on political conversation and results in Wisconsin over the past few years,” said Ellis Bromberg, general manager of MPTV, in a press release.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is giving PBS NewsHour a $420,000 grant to enable volunteers to translate its 2012 election coverage into dozens of languages, as well as caption it for viewers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. NewsHour Open Election 2012 will use crowd-sourcing technologies developed by the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation and open-source Web tools creator Mozilla. “These technologies will make election news, speeches and debates more accessible for diverse audiences, helping to increase their understanding of, and engagement in, the political process,” CPB said in a press release Thursday (Jan. 19). NewsHour has used the technology twice before. The first was a translation of the president’s 2011 State of the Union Address, which was converted via open-sourced captions into seven languages and partially translated into 16 more.

Blackbaud, a software provider for nonprofit organizations including public broadcasters, has agreed to purchase Convio, another firm that helps pubcasters with fundraising. Both boards of directors have unanimously approved the transaction, structured as a cash tender offer followed by a merger, according to an announcement on NASDAQ.com.”Blackbaud noted that the acquisition of Convio will combine both companies’ strengths to provide a comprehensive and compelling set of multi-channel supporter engagement solutions to nonprofit organizations of all sizes,” the announcement said. Blackbaud had acquired Target Analytics, another public broadcasting station vendor, in 2007.

“NPR has always been a curiously insular institution,” according to a long look at the network in the latest Vanity Fair, “a place where people with common backgrounds congregate, stay around forever, live near and sometimes marry one another (at one point Susan Stamberg actually kept track of how many such matches there had been).” “It’s a self-involved and self-defining culture,” an NPR insider told writer David Margolick. “I suppose it’s only a matter of time before an NPR couple produces the first NPR baby who becomes an NPR reporter.” As an outsider, new NPR President Gary Knell, former head of Sesame Workshop, “seems well suited to pop NPR out of its Beltway bubble,” Margolick writes.