Mike deGruy, an acclaimed cinematographer with a love of the sea who created several Nature documentaries on PBS, was killed Feb. 4 in a helicopter crash in Australia. He was 60. His employer, National Geographic Society, said that deGruy and Australian television writer-producer Andrew Wight crashed after takeoff near Nowra, 97 miles north of Sydney. Australia’s ABC News reported that Wight was piloting the helicopter. Fred Kaufman, head of Nature at WNET in New York, told Current that he still remembers his first meeting with deGruy. “Twenty years ago, when I became the executive producer of Nature, Mike’s film Incredible Suckers, was my first commission,” he said, “and I learned something very valuable from my initial conversation with Mike — bring your ‘A’ game, because Mike was smart, persuasive and quick.

A commentary created through an experimental radio project of the New America Foundation turned a harsh spotlight on the editorial vetting process at Marketplace, which broadcast a first-person account Jan. 30 [2012] of a man who falsely claimed to be a heroic Army sniper. Whatever the editorial process at Marketplace missed, there were similar shortcomings at San Francisco’s KQED-FM, which also aired the piece, and at the big liberal foundation, whose media project was focused on inclusivity rather than excluding fakers. The two-minute piece by a man named Leo Webb, part of a commentary series titled “My Life Is True,” turned out to be largely untrue.

Despite the phrase “a face made for radio,” a blogger has started appraising crush-worthy folks in public radio. Babes Of NPR features public radio hosts, reporters and producers whose photos inspire a swoon or a snarky comment from the site’s North Carolina proprietor. Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep is “the thinking man’s David Hasselhoff.” Peter Breslow, a senior producer for Weekend Edition, is likened to actor Ted Danson. And Joe and Terry Graedon, hosts of The People’s Pharmacy, “look like they might be fun to take home from the middle-aged hippie swingers potluck.” Babes of NPR was launched after a photo of NPR reporter Ari Shapiro popped up on the Facebook page of creator Katie Herzog.

Two high-profile news nonprofits in the San Francisco area, The Bay Citizen and the Center for Investigative Reporting, will make a final decision early next month about whether they’ll merge. If they do, job losses appear certain. The two announced Feb. 7 they had signed a formal letter of intent to merge and have given their respective boards 30 days to approve or reject the merger. If the boards consent, management of The Bay Citizen will be turned over to the Berkeley-based CIR, whose board chairman, Phil Bronstein, would become executive chair of the combination, The Bay Citizen reported. Bronstein is the former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and the former boss of CIR executive director Robert Rosenthal, who was managing editor of the Chronicle until he joined CIR in 2008.

Pubcasting networks continue to deal with the uncertainties of state funding in economically and politically precarious times, closing offices, facing possible cuts and bracing for the consequences. Rhode Island: Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s latest budget, unveiled Jan. 31, proposes eliminating state funding to Rhode Island PBS by fiscal year 2014. Support would fall from around $933,000, about a third of the station’s budget, to $425,000 next fiscal year, then zero out. “He’s basically given us until Dec. 31, 2012, to figure out our independence from state funding,” Rhode Island PBS President David Piccerelli says. “With $900,000 gone, we’d have to come up with deep, deep cuts, ultimately in personnel, or a wealthy godmother or godfather in the community — probably a combination of both.”

While a local public broadcasting station traditionally romances big-donor prospects in its locality, it can occasionally find itself in a jealous spat with a national network courting prospects in its nation. It happened recently in Denver....

Matchmaking requires openness, compatibility, shared goals and maintaining a strong sense of identity. That’s the advice for public broadcasters looking to merge, as well as for doe-eyed sweethearts. CET in Cincinnati and ThinkTV in Dayton made the leap nearly three years ago, and by most accounts their union looks strong. The two stations, just 50 miles apart in separate southwestern Ohio media markets, are now incorporated as Public Media Connect and serve a region of 1.4 million households and more than 3.5 million people. Together they showed an operating deficit last year, as did many stations, but the budget gap has been shrinking and is projected to go positive this year.

Sarah Lutman, former s.v.p. of content and media at Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media, is departing her current position as president of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra to start an independent consulting practice, effective March 1. Lutman said in the local Star Tribune that she’d wanted to establish a consulting business for years. “With my adult children both due to complete post-graduate education this year,” she said, “and having been able to help the SPCO chart a clear strategic direction and plan, the timing seemed right for me to make this move.”

Three pubcasting stations have complained to the Pledge Partner Magazine Premium Program that Newsweek, one of several magazines offered as a gift in exchange for donations, has been using more vulgarities since its merger with the Daily Beast website, reports the New York Times. Zunk Buker, founder of Pledge Partner, describes it as a “minor firestorm.” Bill Sanford, g.m. of Lakeland Public Television in Bemidji, Minn., told station execs in a recent e-mail that a major donor had complained. Sanford agreed, and said he wanted the station “to offer premiums that reflect our values.” Stephen Colvin, chief executive of the Newsweek Daily Beast Co.,

Here’s a look from the Nieman Journalism Lab at what geotagging on NPR’s Facebook page did for KPLU in Seattle. In October 2011, NPR Digital Services and Digital Media launched an experiment with the member station, sharing certain KPLU.org content on NPR’s 2.3-million fan Facebook page, but making it visible only to Facebook users in the Seattle region. “Four months into this experiment, we’ve made some unexpected discoveries around Facebook communities and the power of localization on a national platform,” write Eric Athas and Keith Hopper of NPR Digital. The test drove KPLU’s site to record traffic for a single day (January 19), second-highest traffic for a single month (October 2011) and the highest traffic for a single month (January).

NPR Science Correspondent Richard Harris is suffering from unilateral vocal fold paralysis, probably due to a virus, he reveals in a post on Shots, NPR’s health blog. “It turns out this disorder is common enough that there’s a line of medical products to address it,” he writes. His specialist at Johns Hopkins used an injection of water, gelatin and sodium carboxymethylcellulose — “yes, cellulose as in the indigestible fiber that tree trunks and paper are made of” — to help align Harris’s paralyzed vocal cord with his functioning one. “Over the next six to 10 weeks, the carboxymethylcellulose will degrade in my gullet,” Harris writes.

Who loves NPR? George Clooney, reveals this photo posted by Tanya Ballard Brown, an editor at NPR.org, currently ricocheting around the Internets. UPDATE: Fishbowl LA reports that Clooney was at NPR West — surrounded by female staffers — to record a segment on All Things Considered.

KWIS-FM, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s radio station, is now on the air from Plummer, Idaho, one of more than two dozen Native stations that received FCC construction permits in 2008. KWIS, pronounced “kwee-ss,” means “to be called” in the Coeur d’Alene language, according to the Coeur d’Alene Press.

The Republican Kansas House Appropriations Committee chairman broke a 10-10 vote deadlock to reject a request for an additional $800,000 for public broadcasting, the Lawrence Journal-World reported Thursday (Feb. 9). Gov. Sam Brownback’s budget for the fiscal year starting July 1 included $600,000 for public broadcasting, down from $2 million; a House budget subcommittee added $800,000, bringing the total to $1.2 million. Rep. Marc Rhoades (R-Newton) cast the deciding vote.