Virginia’s Community Idea Stations — WCVE Public Radio, WCVE PBS and WCVW PBS in Richmond and WHTJ PBS in Charlottesville — on Friday (April 20) announced elimination of 11 positions, about 18 percent of its workforce, before the end of June. A statement on the network’s website said the decision was in response to lack of pubcasting funding in the commonwealth’s budget. The stations had received about $700,000 this fiscal year; the General Assembly last week approved a budget that does not contain that support, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Six of the 11 positions will be lost in the Educational Services department.

Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps expresses concern for public TV stations in the upcoming spectrum auctions, in an interview on The Communicators series on C-SPAN, reports Broadcasting & Cable. “Public television is doing a really good job with multicasting and using two or three streams to do really good programming,” Copps says on the program, scheduled for broadcast at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Saturday (April 21) and available online. “And all of a sudden, if they are going to be decreasing in number or stations are going to be thrown together, is that going to mean we are going to have less programming?”

Want to get your documentary on public television? POV Series Producer Yance Ford will be on Twitter at 7 p.m. Eastern April 25 to answer questions about doing just that. Submit questions for her by posting to Twitter using the hashtag #docchat.

Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, co-hosts of PRI’s Smiley & West, hear from a surprising caller on their Friday (April 20) show: Music legend Barbra Streisand. The program is a tribute to Oscar-winning husband and wife songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Streisand was 18 years old when they met. She recorded many of their songs, including “The Way We Were” and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” Last year Streisand dedicated a tribute album to the Bergmans, “What Matters Most.”

Domestic doyenne Martha Stewart hits the PBS airwaves this fall in a weekly culinary master class, Martha Stewart’s Cooking School. The 30-minute show will be presented by WETA, premiering in October. “PBS is the perfect home for this series,” Stewart said in an announcement. “We’ll show viewers how to prepare classic dishes as well as how to use proper techniques.” The program is based on the bestselling cookbook of the same name. The New York Times reported that Stewart and execs at her Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia “believe that public broadcasting will be a better fit for her brand than daytime cable.”

WETA in suburban Washington, D.C., on June 2 will launch a new multicast channel devoted to British programming. The 24-hour WETA UK replaces Create on the station’s 26.2. “British programming has long proven popular with our audience on our principal channel,” said Kevin Harris, v.p. and TV manager of the dual licensee. The channel will feature popular Britcoms (Doc Martin, Fawlty Towers, Are You Being Served?), miniseries (MI-5, Hustle, Waking the Dead) and episodes of the original BBC Antiques Roadshow, as well as Saturday night full-length films and, beginning this fall, major British specials. Here’s a promo reel.

The Association of Independents in Radio has created a Facebook page to showcase projects in its $2 million Localore initiative (Current, Jan. 30), which pairs indie producers with pubstations on innovative community-service work.

PBS NewsHour Senior Correspondent Judy Woodruff and Ernest Wilson III, former CPB chair, have been been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The academy, an independent policy research center, was founded in 1780 in Cambridge, Mass. Woodruff and Wilson, now dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at University of Southern California, join 4,000 fellows and 600 foreign honorary members that through the years have included George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, more than 250 Nobel laureates and some 60 Pulitzer Prize winners. Other members of the 2012 Academy Fellows include U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, actor Clint Eastwood, playwright Neil Simon, philanthropist Melinda Gates and Amazon Founder Jeffrey Bezos.

Alvaro Garnica, general manager of the V-me Spanish multicast channel on pubTV, recently informed station managers that it replaced all sponsor spots on its schedule with promos while it reviewed that content with its FCC counsel to ensure the spots meet noncom requirements. HispanicAd.com, an advertising and media news site, ran a short piece on March 28 addressing the issue. The removal of the spots came after CPB Ombudsman Joel Kaplan received a note from a concerned viewer that KVIE in Sacramento was “running ordinary commercials” for L’Oreal cosmetics, Oreo cookies, Kool-Aid and State Farm Insurance, which would be an FCC violation.

Wilbur Herrington, the founding station engineer of University of Georgia’s WUOG-FM, died March 29 of a malignant brain tumor. He was 83. He had been involved with the station in Athens since its launch in October 1972. “I can honestly say that Wilbur was, and very much will always continue to be, the heart and soul of WUOG,” Operations Director Akeeme Martin told the student newspaper, Red & Black. “He was fiercely proud of his spotless professional record, and the fact that the FCC never had to inspect WUOG,” said Tommy McGahee, a 2009 Georgia grad who worked under Herrington.

The two remaining finalists bidding for KCSM, public TV in San Mateo, Calif., are local groups affiliated with Independent Public Media and Public Media Company, reports the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club (citing a report in the Palo Alto Daily Post, which is not published online). The bid amounts are not yet public. Among offers rejected by licensee San Mateo County Community College was one from another pubcaster, KMTP-TV in San Francisco, which airs multilingual, ethic programming. Jan Roecks, the college’s director of general services, will make her recommendation on the buyer to the trustees when they meet again later this month.

A public radio legend in Kansas City, Mo., is retiring at the end of the month. Walt Bodine, 91, has spent 72 years in the news business, and generations of listeners grew up hearing his trademark tagline, “What do you say to that?” His Walt Bodine Show dates to 1978, and has aired on KCUR since the early 1980s. He  launched a late-night talk show, Night Beat, on a local AM station in the 1960s. His son Tom Bodine told the Kansas City Star that his father was on the air on July 17, 1981, after two skywalks collapsed during a dance at the Hyatt Regency hotel near downtown, killing 114 persons and injuring 216 more.

Vern Coleman, 86, who worked 14 years as an audio engineer at WGBH working on such shows as The French Chef, The Boston Pops and Evening at Symphony, died March 18 at his home in Marstons Mills, Mass., after a long battle with leukemia. He was nominated for a primetime Emmy Award for best live sound in 1976, for his work on New Year’s Eve at Pops; he attended the Emmy ceremonies in Hollywood but lost to the soundman for Johnny Carson. Coleman also worked  as a contract engineer for WBUR in Boston, among other stations, and as a staff engineer of commercial WCVB.

Jane Krutz, an enthusiastic advocate for the Arkansas Educational Television Network for more than 47 years, died March 25 in Little Rock. She was 86. “It is literally true that there might not have been an AETN without her,” said Allen Weatherly, executive director of AETN, in a tribute to Krutz on the network’s website. “In fact, she was advocating for a public television station for Arkansas years before we finally made it to the air in the mid-1960s.” Krutz frequently appeared during membership drives, testified before Congress for public broadcasting in 1995, served since 1996 on the AETN Commission, and received the PBS National Volunteer of the Year award.

Stanley Harrison, a former communications director for CPB, died of cardiac arrest after a stroke on April 5 in Miami Beach, Fla. He was 81. Harrison oversaw communications for CPB from 1976 to 1985. He was born in Baltimore to Frank and Thelma Baer Harrison. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science at the University of Maryland, College Park, and his doctorate in government and public administration from American University in Washington, D.C. At the time of his death, he was teaching at University of Miami’s School of Communication. He also taught part time at American University and at the Pentagon.