NPR is mounting a second pilot performance of Scott Simon’s Wonderful Town, a variety show featuring the Weekend Edition Saturday host. The live taping will take place Jan. 22 at the Bell House in Brooklyn, N.Y., where NPR’s trivia show Ask Me Another also tapes. It will feature appearances from comedians and musicians including Eugene Mirman, Nellie McKay and Daily Show contributor Aasif Mandvi. This is the second Wonderful Town pilot to be taped; the first was in February 2013. The program has a “progressive couch” format, said NPR programming VP Eric Nuzum. Guests arrive on the show’s couch one at a time and stick around to chat with each other and Simon.

PBS has created its latest augmented-reality app, this one based on the television math series Cyberchase. The development of Cyberchase Shape Quest was funded with a Ready To Learn grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The free app, announced Jan. 9 and offering three games, uses a tablet’s camera to combine real-world images with digital content. Users follow characters Buzz and Delete through various environments, applying spatial memory, visualization and modeling skills to solve problems by taking apart and putting together two- and three-dimensional shapes. It’s aimed kids ages 6–9. The app launched exclusively for iPads and should be available for Android devices within the next month.

The operator of KMBH-TV in Harlingen, Texas, announced Tuesday that it will pursue a local management agreement (LMA) with a commercial entity as part of the station’s sale. The PBS member station serves the Rio Grande Valley in the southern tip of the state. The board of RGV Educational Broadcasting Inc., a nonprofit formed by the Catholic Diocese of Brownsville in 1983, oversees the station. Directors authorized Washington, D.C., attorney Larry Miller to petition the FCC to convert the station to a commercial broadcaster. Because the station does not operate on a channel reserved for noncommercial use, it is eligible for such a conversion, Miller told Current.

Southern California Public Radio/KPCC in Los Angeles has bulked up its news department in recent months, adding eight staffers to its team and promoting several employees. Since mid-October the station has hired Stephen Gregory as science and environment editor; Doug Krizner, business and emerging communities editor; Dorian Marina, reporter and producer for Take Two, a locally produced weekday newsmagazine; Kristen Lepore, digital producer for social media; Jed Kim, environment reporter; Adrian Florido, community health care reporter; Jeremy Hoffing, software developer; and Joel Withrow, project manager for mobile news experience. KPCC has also promoted Steve Profitt to program developer for broadcast, Molly Peterson to environment correspondent and Stephanie O’Neill to health care correspondent.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced today $2 million in new grants to 18 documentary film projects, including some from frequent collaborators with public TV. Individual grant amounts range from $50,000 to $225,000. The latter amount goes to the film 500 Years, which follows the genocide trial of former Guatemalan President General Efraín Ríos Montt. The film is a follow-up to co-director Pamela Yates’s previous film about the Guatemalan genocide, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, which became a 2012 episode on PBS’s POV. A couple of the projects incorporate multiplatform outreach, according to the release: Immigrant Nation is “a multi-platform project that explores the interconnectedness of U.S.

Several news organizations’ Twitter accounts, including some public media accounts, emitted a deluge of cryptic messages reading “f gwenifill” today. The tweets trace to social media strategist Kate Gardiner, who has consulted for public media and nonprofit news organizations and has access to many of their Twitter accounts through TweetDeck, a Twitter client. Gardiner initially tweeted that she had been hacked but told Current that the tweets were a mistake on her part, caused when she was “cleaning up” her TweetDeck account. “f gwenifill” was a test tweet she had created for PBS NewsHour when she worked for the program as its first social media desk assistant, and she accidentally sent it via all the accounts she still has access to. 

Chris Kohtz is no longer in a position to tell you about portfolios of programs available for airing on public radio stations. But he’s definitely your guy if you’re craving a good cheddar or Camembert. After 25 years in broadcasting, Kohtz has shifted careers to pursue his dream of opening a cheese shop. The Wedge & Wheel opened for business Jan. 2 in Stillwater, Minn., on the outskirts of Minneapolis, offering a selection of domestic and foreign-made cheeses to an enthusiastic bunch of cheese connoisseurs. And Kohtz is taking wholeheartedly to the labor of love. “I wanted to do something fun,” he says about his 2012 departure from the St.

A localized version of Curious City, the Localore-backed participatory journalism initiative that assigns reporters to research questions submitted by listeners, launched at WYSO in Yellow Springs, Ohio, last month. WYSO Curious is the first version of the multimedia project to launch beyond its home station, Chicago’s WBEZ. In its new incarnation, listeners submit questions online, and WYSO produces stories each month about the answers. Curious City and its project manager, Jennifer Brandel, began developing an open-source platform that could be replicated at other stations with the help of a June 2013 prototype grant from the Knight Foundation. Lewis Wallace, a reporter at WYSO, interviewed Brandel and Curious City editor Shawn Allee at the launch of WYSO Curious in December.

A second member of the Vermont Public Television board has resigned. VPT remains under investigation by the CPB Inspector General’s office after an anonymous complaint that the board broke CPB’s open-meetings rules. The board accepted Jim Wyant’s resignation after a Jan. 8 meeting. Wyant continues as chair of the Montreal-based Public Television Association of Quebec, a Canadian nonprofit that supports VPT. Wyant told local NBC affiliate WPTZ that he is “deeply troubled” by the reasons for the CPB inquiry but noted that those issues “relate solely to the activities of some members of the board and not to those of the management and staff of the organization.”

Having faced the disruptive threats posed by cassette tapes, CDs, satellite radio and even the iPod, public radio strategists are increasingly looking for a beachhead into the emerging “connected car” and its Internet-powered suite of entertainment options. Gains in auto technology were a highlight of last week’s 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: Carmakers, including General Motors, Jaguar, Tesla and Audi, unveiled new or beefed-up versions of dashboards that use broadband Internet to power apps offering news, music, weather and other services to motorists. Both NPR and American Public Media announced new partnerships that will get their content into these “connected cars.”

Former KPCC host Madeleine Brand’s new show on competitor KCRW in Los Angeles now has a name and launch date, according to the blog LA Observed. The blog reported that Brand’s new show, Press Play, will debut Jan. 27. It will air from noon to 1 p.m., which means that it will not air opposite Take Two, the successor to Brand’s former KPCC show. Brand left KPCC in September 2012 and started developing her new KCRW show in September 2013. She told Current in July that the show would be a host-driven, “news-based cultural show,” much like the one she hosted on KPCC.

Television broadcasters, commercial and noncommercial, succeeded in securing a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court in their bid to strike down Aereo, the startup service that allows subscribers to view and record television broadcast programs via the Internet. The court will hear the case later this year after granting a writ of certiorari Friday in the case of American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., et al., v. Aereo, Inc. To date, broadcasters have been unable to secure an injunction against the company that uses banks of dime-sized antennas to capture broadcast signals and convert them into streaming video distributed over the Internet. Subscribers “rent” the antennas and have the option to watch TV programs live or on demand via a device similar to a digital video recorder.

The Metropolitan Opera agreed to tone down indecent language in its Jan. 11 broadcast after radio station leaders warned that they would not risk airing a performance that would violate FCC standards. Met staffers informed stations in a Jan. 7 email that Saturday’s broadcast of Die Fledermaus would contain profanity. An off-stage tenor, singing in his jail cell, would prompt a jailer to answer, “No opera! That stuff won’t last. Nobody’s gonna pay good money to hear that shit!” The Met planned to advise listeners of the strong language in an announcement at the start of the act. Alan Chartock, president of WAMC in Albany, N.Y.,