Blues great James Cotton stopped in to the WGBH studios Wednesday for an interview with Greater Boston‘s Jared Bowen, and showed off his legendary harmonica talents. Also in the Fraser Performance Center for the show was Huey Lewis of Huey Lewis and the News. Bowen’s interview and Cotton’s WGBH performance will air tonight. Also tonight, the bluesman is being honored in a “Live Tribute to James Cotton” at Boston’s House of Blues. (Photo: WGBH)

The National Association of Black Journalists questions NPR commitment to diversity in this letter to Vivian Schiller, network president. The Oct. 16 firing of Greg Peppers, executive producer of newscasts, is the second dismissal of a producer of color in NPR management ranks this year. “Of the 68 members on your corporate team and behind the scenes staff, only eight are people of color,” NABJ’s top leaders write. “You told the National Press Club that NPR doesn’t need programming for communities of color but diversity needs ‘to be represented in the fabric of everything that we do.’ It is NABJ’s belief that actions speak much louder than your words.

Is it fair use for opponents of Maine’s same-sex marriage law to excerpt an NPR news story in a political ad? NPR said “No!” and demanded that the political action committee Stand for Marriage pull the ad from television and the Internet. But lawyers for the group rejected NPR’s request. The PAC’s use of the “very short audio segment” is noncommercial and is protected by the First Amendment and U.S. Copyright law, attorneys wrote in an Oct. 20 letter to NPR’s deputy general counsel. Last week, NPR objected publicly. “It is critical for us to protect our credibility and the trust the audience has in us,” says Dana Davis Rehm, NPR senior v.p.,

A new research report says combining a traditional book with video conference technology and video segments bolsters “family literacy over distances,” according to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. The study, funded by the Cooney Center and Nokia Research Center, looked at grandparents, parents and their children using the Storyplay concept system together. The interface enables children to initiate calls using icons on a touch screen. Then Elmo listens in, offering comments and questions when the screen is touched. The full report (PDF) is available here.

Learn how to use audio and video tools, blogs, widgets, maps and apps to improve your station’s economic coverage in today’s Webinar from the National Center for Media Engagement and Public Radio International. It’s a peer-to-peer workshop at 2 p.m. (Eastern) today to introduce the Knowledge Network, a CPB-funded site to assist stations with their coverage of the economy. Sign up here for the Webinar.

Larry Strickling, head of the National Telecommunications & Information Administration, told a congressional subcommittee that the announcement of winning bids for the broadband stimulus program will be delayed by about a month, according to Broadcasting & Cable. “We’re going to take a few more weeks here to get this right,” he told members of the Senate Commerce Committee’s Communications Subcommittee on Tuesday. Many pubcasters have applied for money from the broadband stimulus program (Current, Sept. 21, 2009).

Pubradio talker Tavis Smiley’s name is being dropped from one institution, but added to another. The Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs will name its new atrium after Smiley, an alum, according to the Indiana Daily Student. He recently donated $50,000 for a scholarship fund for students in that school, in Bloomington. However, Texas Southern University will strip Smiley’s name from its communication school, reports the Houston Chronicle. Smiley had promised in 2004 to donate $1 million and to raise another $1 million, so the university subsequently created the Tavis Smiley School of Communication. But Smiley made one $50,000 donation in mid-2005, and brought in $250,000 from three corporate donors.

A free saddle each month for the next year is coming from Saddle Up with Dennis Brouse. That’s the pubTV series that “celebrates the storied relationship between horse and human,” as it says. Your horse need a new saddle? Sign up for Brouse’s email newsletter to qualify to win a custom saddle from Bronco Billy’s.

WFUM TV in Flint, Mich., may get a new owner: Central Michigan University, according to Central Michigan Life, the university newspaper. The school’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday approved a $1 million bid for the station. It’s currently owned by University of Michigan and broadcasts from Bay City to metro Detroit. CMU Public Broadcasting will draft a purchase agreement and interim management agreement to take over the station as soon as possible. The station has lost money since 2005 (Current, April 27, 2009).

A great-grandmother in Rockford, Ill., received a surprising appraisal from Antiques Roadshow and has decided to auction off her treasure: A antagonistic letter from crooner Frank Sinatra to rabble-rousing Chicago columnist Mike Royko, according to the Chicago Tribune. In the letter, Sinatra said the columnist was a “pimp,” and suggested the two have a hair-pulling duel (Sinatra was upset at a Royko column that accused Ol’ Blue Eyes of wearing a hairpiece). Vie Carlson purchased the letter back in 1976 for $400. At a Roadshow taping on July 11, appraiser Simeon Lipman told Carlson she might be able to get $15,000 or more for the letter, so she’s selling it next spring through Freeman’s Auctioneers in Philadelphia.

Stephen Moss, an online marketing executive with a background in print media, is the new president and c.e.o. of National Public Media, the New York-based corporate sponsorship firm representing public radio and television. He succeeds Bob Williams, who founded NPM’s predecessor company National Public Broadcasting in 1997 and served as c.e.o. after its 2007 acquisition by NPR and Boston’s WGBH. Moss joins NPM from Evri, a web technology company where he served as v.p. of business development. Previously, he was v.p. of sales for Microsoft, Inc., where he launched the MSN video service and led its rollout to major advertisers.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, along with several partners, is sponsoring a Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age forum today and Wednesday to develop ideas for using digital media in education. Participants will develop a plan to use new technologies to “revitalize a school system that has fallen behind,” according to the center. If you’d like to listen in on the Web, you may register online.

The Media Access Group at WGBH will be creating special captioning and narrative material for several movies from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment and Sony Pictures, according to the Boston Globe. The Media Access Group provides not only closed captioning but also Descriptive Video Services, or DVS, which provides descriptive audio narration of what is happening in a film.

A multimedia news organization committed to public service journalism will begin producing regional coverage of the Chicago area and Illinois for The New York Times next month.

Fawlty Towers — the 1970s BBC show that still runs on 24 pubTV stations nationwide — is now available in a DVD box set, reports Scripps Howard News Service. The three-disc “Fawlty Towers Remastered” includes all 12 episodes plus commentaries by star and Monty Python alum John Cleese. Of course this is not to be confused with Fawlty Towers Revisited, offered as a pledge special to SIP (Station Independence Program) stations back in December 2005.