LeVar Burton, former longtime host of pubTV’s popular Reading Rainbow, has claimed @readingrainbow, reports Huffington Post, with a little help from fellow Tweeters. On Tuesday (Jan. 31), Burton had contacted the account holder directly, who hadn’t used @readingrainbow in three years. When that didn’t work, Burton Tweeted far and wide, asking the Twittersphere for help, and sites like Gizmodo got involved. “Less than two nostalgia-filled hours and hundreds of retweets later,” HuffPost says, the Twitter account was turned over to Burton.  Despite the show’s demise more than two years ago (Current, Aug. 6, 2009), Burton remains its steadfast champion, last year even raising $3 million for his RRKidz reading app in partnership with WNED in Buffalo, Reading Rainbow’s presenting station.

Just in case you missed it, here is a photo of Lego versions of Carl Kasell and Peter Sagal of Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! Creator Dave Kaleta appeared on the WBEZ/NPR show’s Listener Limerick Challenge in September 2011. UPDATE: And leave it to intrepid media reporter Jim Romenesko to get the story behind all this.

Two public media projects are among six finalists for the prestigious Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, presented annually by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. NPR’s Elizabeth Shogren, Howard Berkes, Sandra Bartlett and Susanne Reber, along with Jim Morris, Ronnie Greene, Chris Hamby and Keith Epstein of the Center for Public Integrity, were nominated for “Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities,” which for the first time publicly revealed the EPA’s internal “watch list” of the nation’s most troublesome air polluters. “This report triggered immediate enforcement action in two states, a push for openness by the EPA and an avalanche of coverage across the U.S.,”

Eben Peck, on the staff of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the past seven years, most recently as senior director of government affairs, is the new vice president of government affairs for ASTA, the American Society of Travel Agents. At CPB, Peck was the organization’s primary liaison with the federal government. In his new position, he will be responsible for all of ASTA’s state and federal and state lobbying, as well as its political action committee, ASTAPAC.

Egad! The two-hour final episode of Season 2 of the Masterpiece megahit Downton Abbey looms, on Feb. 19. No more Crawley family and staff intrigue — well, at least until Season 3, which also brings a new and famous face to the cast, Shirley MacLaine. But there’s no doubt that fans will be feeling a tad sad after the season finale. In Philadelphia, they’re gathering to share their angst at a viewing party sponsored by WHYY. Also that day, the station is running a Downton Abbey marathon, all 10 hours of Season 2, beginning at 1 p.m. Is your station doing anything special for the finale?

A signal expansion in the lower Hudson Valley three years ago depleted WDFH-FM’s cash reserves and now the Ossining, N.Y., community radio station “finds itself in financial straits,” according to The Daily Dobbs Ferry. Executive Director Marc Sophos, who helped found the station 39 years ago as a high-school freshman, said the station faces doing dark. “There’s a short-term financial emergency right now,” he said. “It’s urgent. We do need to find this money or else the station will go under. Donations are far less than the operating expenses. We need to be raising $10,000 a month.” “Money is time and time is running out,” Sophos said.

WCVE, Central Virginia’s Community Idea Stations, is planning a unique fundraiser for this spring: A “puzzle-solving event” designed by Ravenchase Adventures in Richmond, Va. The Big Idea Challenge runs April 29 through June 2 and the station hopes to raise $250,000 to supplement its on-air pledge dollars. “With the uncertain status of government funding, we have been looking for lots of different ways to reach out beyond our traditional audiences and involve folks who peripherally know about us but may not be as close,” Lisa Tait, vice president for development at WCVE, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “We wanted something different to tie in with our mission and with the people who like public broadcasting, who are intellectually curious.”

Three national pubcasting organizations are encouraging the FCC to exempt pubTV licensees from any new public interest reporting requirements, in a Jan. 27 filing with the commission. The Association of Public Television Stations (APTS), Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) prepared the filing in response to the FCC’s notice of inquiry in November 2011 soliciting input on a proposal “to replace the issues/programs list that television stations have been required to place in their public files for decades with a streamlined, standardized disclosure form that will be available to the public online.” “We support the commission’s effort to standardize information about their public interest programming and activities,” said Lonna Thompson, APTS c.o.o.,

The stations are here so they can understand and illuminate a community’s aspirations and concerns, engage people in the life of their community, and help people reengage and reconnect with one another. — Richard C. Harwood and Aaron B. Leavy1 The remark above reflects a way of thinking strategically about the institution of public broadcasting at this point in our history. Today, public media boards and executives face such strategic questions as: What can we do to be a more significant and engaged institution in our community? What should be our focus, and what does that mean for redeploying resources from current activities?

Nothing comes easily to public radio, not even a good idea. About 30 years ago, Wisconsin Public Radio veteran Jack Mitchell came up with the concept of banding together small stations throughout Wisconsin into a centralized system, within which a mothership would handle overhead and distribution, thus freeing up resources for stronger local content. Today, Wisconsin Public Radio operates 33 stations that benefit from strength in numbers – some of which might not exist today were it not for a centralized system. Each station is tied to one of two statewide networks, one featuring the NPR newsmagazines and classical music and the other mostly state-oriented talk programming.

The evaporation of the Commerce Department’s Public Telecommunications Facilities Program and the dwindling of other funding sources have created a critical situation at stations needing to purchase or update equipment for broadcasting. PTFP had provided public stations more than $233 million in capital funds since 2000. The congressional budget ax fell in April 2011, zeroing out PTFP’s annual $20 million allotment for matching grants. Compounding the problem is the parallel fall-off of state money, which also helped some stations cover equipment costs. At the same time, hardware for the first digital TV installations in the early 2000s is slowly approaching replacement time.

With this package of articles, Current begins publishing a series of articles on Public Media Futures, appearing in conjunction with a two-year series of quarterly forums starting this month. The forums are co-sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy and American University’s School of Communication, which publishes Current. Both the articles and the accompanying forums are planned to amplify and contribute to conversations already underway in the field about serious issues facing public service media companies in the 21st-century. The recession and trends in media technology are shaking the structural and financial foundations of public media, suggesting that some of the system’s major operating assumptions will have to change.

A former top editor of the Los Angeles Times, Russ Stanton, has joined APM’s Los Angeles station KPCC in Pasadena, Calif., announced a major hire last week: Former Los Angeles Times Editor Russ Stanton has joined the station as its new v.p. of content. Stanton’s arrival “is part of an aggressive effort by the nonprofit news organization to become the preeminent regional source for both broadcast and online news — with deeper, more enterprising and investigative coverage,” KPCC declared on its website. Stanton had left the newspaper last month in what was announced as a “mutual decision” with Times President Kathy Thomson.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — At the packed “Looking Ahead with the Pubcasters” session at Monday’s (Jan. 29) Realscreen Summit, PBS President Paula Kerger once again spoke of the potential the PBS Foundation holds for the future of the organization. “It’s just starting to ramp up,” she said of the foundation. “It isn’t the full answer for us because the amounts of money are reasonably low, but it has given us a little more flexibility to do some things relatively more quickly.” One example: PBS was able to acquire a film on Steve Jobs soon after the Apple founder’s death on Oct.

Iowa Public Radio has completed launch of its new all-classical service in Des Moines. IPR Classical now airs on two commercial FM frequencies — KICP 105.9 and KICL 96.3 — that were purchased last summer for $1.75 million. The signal expansion gives IPR Classical a broadcast footprint of more than 400,000 potential listeners and improves the outlook for membership and underwriting income. WOI 90.1 FM, IPR’s flagship channel in Des Moines, continues to split its broadcast day between NPR News and classical music, but that could change soon. IPR looks to expand the reach of its Studio One format, which combines news and alternative music programming, and is evaluating format switches for its other Des Moines area stations.