“Being on a syndicated television program was not on any life’s list that I ever had,” said Mark Vogelzang, president of Maine Public Broadcasting Network. And yet there he is, on an episode of Family Feud scheduled to air Feb. 8, alongside his son and daughter and their spouses. The Vogelzangs heard about a regional audition for the show at a furniture store in Lynn, Mass., just north of Boston, in spring 2011. Between all the kids and grandkids, “we have 16 people in the family, so we figured we could probably mount a team,” Vogelzang told Current. Finally it was decided that Team Vogelzang would consist of Mark, son Aaron and wife Alisha, and daughter Sarah and husband David Jones.

ARLINGTON, Va. — PBS President Paula Kerger told the PBS Board that 2011 was an “amazing year amidst extraordinary challenges.” Kerger, speaking Friday (Feb. 3) at PBS headquarters, sparked two rounds of applause from directors with lots of impressive numbers. According to Nielsen data, the 2010-11 season ended with a 1.33 national primetime average, up 4 percent over 2009-10. Currently, Kerger said, PBS’s primetime audience is “significantly larger” than that of several popular cable outlets: 104 percent over Bravo, 75 percent over TLC, 70 percent over Discovery. PBS’s primetime numbers for news and public affairs programming are 60 percent higher than CNN’s overall primetime average, Kerger said.

Moyers and Company, the latest offering from pubTV veteran newsman Bill Moyers, a longtime target of conservative criticism, has prompted a complaint to CPB Ombudsman Joel Kaplan from Prof. Victor Lieberman of the University of Michigan’s Department of History, who calls the program “strident, undisguised left-wing advocacy.” “I should like you to attempt to defend what seems to me to be completely indefensible programming,” Lieberman wrote to Kaplan. Moyers, contacted by Kaplan, defended the show. “Take a look at only our first three broadcasts and you’ll find guests from across the political and cultural spectrum, including President Reagan’s former budget director and a corporate CEO,” he said.

As public radio listeners gain more options for listening to and supporting their favorite shows, the value proposition that’s at the center of local station membership revenues is about to be up-ended, writes radio consultant Mark Ramsey. Listeners now can directly support programs like This American Life, and this gives them less incentive to contribute during a local station’s pledge drive, he says. The station’s role in presenting the show also changes — “from distribution partner to advertising vehicle” — because local broadcasts become a highly effective way of turning more listeners on to the program. Under a system of direct listener support of public radio programs, the fees that stations pay for national programs should be discounted, Ramsey writes, and local outlets should put more of their money into curating a unique localized listening experience for their audiences.

South Carolina ETV is closing the studio and office of its Lowcountry public TV station, WJWJ, after nearly 40 years in Beaufort County, according to The Beaufort Gazette. WJWJ will no longer produce local programming, and two staffers lost their jobs. “We have had other reductions over the past year because of our overall state funding, but there has not been another facility like this that we have closed,” said South Carolina ETV President Linda O’Bryon. The decision was made because WJWJ wasn’t paying for itself. “In other locations, we have revenues that are coming in to offset the costs, and in this area we just didn’t have the revenues and we had to make some hard decisions,” O’Bryon said.

As part of an ongoing reorganization, KUHT-TV in Houston has laid off 12 staffers. The Houston Chronicle describes it as “part of a cost-cutting move by the new general manager.” Personnel were cut in production, programming, development, technology and administration. Lisa Trapani Shumate, executive director and g.m. of Houston Public Media, said reductions were made “to bring expenses into alignment with revenue.” “You cannot build an organization when you are not operating from a strong financial position,” she told the paper. “We wanted to get things into alignment and build on our plan to achieve our objectives and provide the new media offerings we are going to have.”

An informative series of 40 interstitials on the Freedom Riders has won Mississippi Public Broadcasting and its Assistant Director of Production Edie Greene a 2012 Public Humanities Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, for preserving the state’s culture. The 30-second interstitials tell personal pieces of the larger story of the Freedom Rides, the 1961 civil-rights protest that challenged segregation in the deep South. The bus journeys culminated in Jackson, Miss., where hundreds of the activists were jailed. Greene told Current that initially MPB was considering producing a film, but soon favored the interstitial approach.

Two prominent nonprofit news organizations, The Bay Citizen, based in San Francisco, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, based in nearby Berkeley, are in merger talks, the Wall Street Journal reported. The paper quoted Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting,as saying, “There’s been no decisions made and it’s unclear where the conversations will lead, if anywhere.” The Bay Citizen produces news for its own website, but also provides San Francisco-area coverage for The New York Times. The Center for Investigative Reporting partners with major news media outlets, including public broadcasters such as Frontline and NPR.

Community licensee WTVI-TV in Charlotte, N.C., is in early merger talks with Central Piedmont Community College to keep the pubcaster on the air, reports the Charlotte Observer. WTVI President Elsie Garner and CPCC President Tony Zeiss met with Mecklenburg County Manager Harry Jones last week to see if the county would underwrite transition costs for a merger, the paper said. But Commissioner Bill James referred to the plans as “a little PBSkull-duggery,” and added: “We have defunded our PBS affiliate. Ever since then, they’ve been trying to figure out a way to get back on the government dole.” Last June, Garner asked Mecklenburg County to restore a total of $1 million in funding that was cut in recent years, saying that the station wasn’t in immediate danger of shutting down but “if you keep bleeding money, after awhile, yeah that’s the logical thing.”

Marketplace retracted a commentary by Leo Webb, an Occupy Oakland protester who described himself as an Iraqi War veteran struggling to recover from his experience as an Army sniper, after bloggers at This Ain’t Hell did some basic fact-checking and labelled his story “BS.” After looking into Webb’s story themselves, editors at Marketplace agreed. They replaced the commentary with an Editor’s note that read, in part, “Marketplace has an obligation to provide accurate information. That was not met in this commentary. It has been retracted and the text and audio have been removed from the web site.” Webb’s commentary was an installment of “My Life is True,” a series of first-person narratives by people living on the edges of the economy.

Two pubradio broadcasters are among this year’s recipients of the Studs Terkel Community Media Awards, reports Robert Feder, media writer for Time Out Chicago. Honored at March 14 ceremonies in Chicago will be Maria Hinojosa, host of  NPR’s Latino USA, and Chip Mitchell, a reporter for WBEZ-FM. The third recipient is Mick Dumke, political reporter for the Chicago Reader. The annual honors are presented by the nonprofit Community Media Workshop, a resource and advocate for grassroots local journalism that Terkel helped found in 1989. This year the awards commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Terkel, a writer famed for his oral histories of working-class Americans and a broadcaster known for his Studs Terkel Program, which aired on pubradio WFMT in Chicago from 1952 to 1997; Best of Studs Terkel still airs on the station.

David Piccerelli, president of Rhode Island PBS, said he was shocked to learn of Gov. Lincoln Chafee’s proposal to eliminate state funding for Channel 36, which provides about a third of its $3 million budget. “If this is a policy plan that the governor wants to put forth,” Piccerelli told local CBS affiliate WPRI, “then I think we should probably put together a policy plan rather than just cutting us off at the knees and telling us to go do it.” Chafee’s proposed budget cuts RI PBS’s current state support from $932,562 to $425,286 next fiscal year, and ends it altogether in 2014.

“This is NPR,” a new Facebook page, provides a peek behind the scenes at its people, headquarters and stations nationwide. There are links to events, job opportunities, photos of folks who stop in for studio interviews, pictures by NPR White House Correspondent Ari Shapiro on the campaign trail.

Pubradio WTMD at Towson University in Maryland has a unique new ad campaign that came into being after “a crazy night of flashing lights and creativity,” and probably will make you giggle. Or blush. Or both. A local photographer and ad agency both donated their services for the work, which shows what happens to ears that become aroused by all that great music on WTMD.

WCNY-TV in Syracuse today (Feb. 1) announced two new hosts for its longest-running local show, Financial Fitness, while the local Post-Standard is reporting that host J. Daniel Pluff, who started the program in 1992, has left following an ongoing disagreement. Pluff said the station wouldn’t let him decide on guest hosts for the investment advice show, which he produced on a volunteer basis. WCNY President Robert Daino told the newspaper that the station has to maintain editorial control over the program, which regularly scores better ratings than national PBS offerings. New hosts are Jim Burns, a columnist for the Post-Standard and president of J.W.