Public Media Accelerator, the incubator launched in December with a $2.5 million grant from the Knight Foundation, will be led by a former Frontline producer who left the field to immerse himself in the technology start-up culture of Silicon Valley.Corey Ford earned production credits on 17 Frontline films before earning his M.B.A. at Stanford University. His interest in multidisciplinary approaches to technology innovation led him to take a fellowship at Stanford’s Institute of Design, and from there he was recruited to direct the runway for Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s venture capital fund, Innovation Endeavors. Ford is now bringing that experience back to public media as director of Public Radio Exchange’s latest initiative to spur innovation, the Public Media Accelerator (PMX).

NewsWorks, WHYY’s collaborative website covering Philadelphia-area news, has hired Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Tony Auth, formerly of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Chris Satullo, WHYY’s v.p. for news and civic engagement announced Wednesday (March 7) that starting in April, Auth will be “digital artist in residence” for NewsWorks and WHYY. Auth’s national political cartoons will not be published on NewsWorks but will continue to be available through syndication. Auth’s residency will be funded in part through a grant from the Thomas Skelton Harrison Foundation.

PBS is launching on March 14 a new series on YouTube, Idea Channel, which it calls an “irreverent, personality-driven” project that “examines the unique places where art, culture, technology and the Internet intersect.” Hosting will be Mike Rugnetta, a composer, programmer and performer who is part of  MemeFactory, a three-man performance group exploring Internet culture. Off Book, another PBS web-only series focusing on experimental and nontraditional forms of artistic expression, began its second season Wednesday (March 7). Off Book launched in fall 2011 as part of the PBS Arts initiative and over the course of 13 episodes generated more than a half million views on YouTube, PBS said.

A unique new 30-second promo for 89.7 WGBH shows a radio tuned to the Boston station sucked out of a pickup truck by aliens, a la “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Watch it online here. The spot was the most complex ever produced by WGBH, its creators say, and involved driving a truck into the studio (above) and extensive use of computer-generated imagery in post-production to create the homage to the Steven Spielberg 1977 classic. It’s currently airing on WGBH 2 and WGBH 44 and the station is negotiating a cable media buy for the New England region to begin at the end of March.

WSIE-FM, broadcasting from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is back “from its deathbed,” reports the Riverfront Times in St. Louis. The city’s only jazz station endured the loss of CPB funding in 2006, the death of a longtime broadcasting veteran, layoffs of all local hosts and a shift to totally syndicated content. However, “in the past year,” the paper says, “they have restored local music programming, added online streaming and held the station’s first on-air fundraising drive in more than 20 years.”

Joaquin Alvarado, senior vice president for digital innovation for American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio since January 2010, has been laid off, along with four members of the software development team he supervised. MinnPost reports that the move comes as APM and MPR “grapple with an unspecified end-of-budget-year deficit.” Spokesman Bill Gray told MinnPost that the shift will consolidate software jobs in St. Paul among existing staff, “taking advantage of existing technology” instead of custom development. As part of the changes, Mike Reszler was promoted to v.p. for digital media; he joined MPR in November 2007 as managing editor for online news and is a veteran journalist with experience at Knight Ridder and MediaNewsGroup.

There were “bodies left out on the legislative battlefield,” including TV translator stations, in the recent spectrum legislation, writes telecom attorney Scott R. Flick of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP. Those stations are not permitted to participate in the spectrum auction, are not protected from being displaced in spectrum repacking, and are not entitled to reimbursement of repacking expenses. “It is that last point that may be the most important in rural areas,” Flick notes. He uses an example of Montana, with its nearly 350 TV translators. “Moving even a third of them will be an expensive proposition for licensees whose primary purpose is not profit, but the continued availability of rural broadcast service,” he writes.

News/talk WFPL, part of Louisville Public Media, has added four reporters in the past year, “bucking a national trend that has left many news organizations with shrinking staffs amid a sluggish economy,” notes the local Courier-Journal. The WFPL newsroom has tripled from just two reporters in early 2011 to six this year. Those hires reflect a shift in priorities at the organization, said Todd Mundt, outgoing Louisville Public Media v.p. and WFPL p.d. “The goal has been to make the newsroom the center of the entire operation,” he said. Louisville Public Media President Donovan Reynolds credits recent fund drives. “When we have outlined our aspirations to the community, they have responded,” he said.

Newsweek’s Jesse Ellison reports on the power of women at NPR in a piece headlined, “How stuffy old NPR became a hotbed for female journalists.” Ellison points out that at NPR, women hold the top editorial position at five of seven news programs and make up nearly half the overall staff. Longtime NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg said that’s most probably a result of the days when NPR had no choice but to hire women because salaries were so low that few men wanted to work at the fledgling network.”The inadvertent result was a roster of young female talent now considered among the most respected names in radio: Totenberg, Cokie Roberts, Linda Wertheimer, and Susan Stamberg, a group affectionately known as the ‘Founding Mothers,'” who have since mentored many other NPR newswomen, Ellison says.

Citing “resource constraints,” WGBH is ending production of Maria Hinojosa: One-on-One, the Boston station announced today (March 5). The five-year partnership between the station and Hinojosa, a journalist, author and longtime pubcaster, produced more than 100 interviews with artists, activists, writers and civic leaders, and won an Imagen Award, which recognizes positive portrayals of Latinos in media. Nationwide, the show ran in 35 markets, and was also broadcast in Spanish on V-me through Season 3. WGBH said it is in “early development stages” of a new local Latino lifestyle program, and past episodes of One-on-One will remain available on WGBH’s digital World channel.

An investigation of a mine accident in Idaho by the Northwest News Network has prompted a federal agency to change how it handles documents regarding mine safety. Last year the network learned that a federal geologist’s report about unstable rock conditions at the Lucky Friday Mine in Mullan, Idaho, had never been sent to the mining company. In April 2011, a miner died in a tunnel collapse at Lucky Friday. After a congressman took the Mine Safety and Health Administration to task for the oversight, the head of the agency has announced that it will take additional steps to make sure that such studies are delivered to mine operators.

NPR has hired Todd Mundt as editorial director for NPR Digital Services, starting April 2. In his new position, Mundt will help stations develop digital content strategies and oversee news training for stations. He now serves as v.p. and chief content officer at Louisville Public Media in Kentucky, where he also serves as p.d. of WFPL, the news/talk station in LPM’s portfolio, and hosts Morning Edition. Before joining LPM, he was director of content and media at Iowa Public Radio and chief content officer for Michigan Public Media in Ann Arbor. He previously hosted a talk show distributed by NPR.

When it comes to explaining the relationship between NPR, its stations and the federal government, “part of me wants to do like a Schoolhouse Rock video of ‘how a bill becomes law,’” says NPR President Gary Knell in a Q&A with the Nieman Journalism Lab. Knell argues that federal support for public broadcasting serves the public interest by educating the public “so that we can make correct decisions and our political leaders can make correct decisions.” The interview also covers NPR’s promotion of Kinsey Wilson to chief content officer, the network’s development of in-car apps for Ford and other subjects.

A Chinese show featuring interviews with death-row prisoners just before execution has become a hit in that country, with 40 million viewers each Saturday night. Now scenes from the show, titled Dead Men Talking (available via PBS International), will be shown in Britain for the first time in a new BBC 2 documentary, reports The Daily Mail. The show has made a celebrity of interviewer Ding Yu. “Some viewers might consider it cruel to ask a criminal to do an interview when they are about to be executed,” she told the paper. “On the contrary, they want to be heard.

PBS has made an interesting selection for hosts for its first-ever Online Film Festival, reports GigaOm, two newbies “who have between them one mustache and barely six months of YouTube experience.” Yet despite their lack of expertise, Stephen Dypiangco and Patrick Epino have managed to create a popular YouTube channel, called the National Film Society, get press credentials to cover Sundance and cement a partnership with Filmmaker Magazine. “We were looking for someone with a really unique voice, someone you wouldn’t necessarily associate with PBS,” Jayme Swain, senior director of PBS Interactive, told GigaOm. The duo’s YouTube presence is “still a nascent channel, but have a reputation and a following, and they brought in a new perspective for us.”