Todd Mundt shares the list of winners of the Public Radio Program Directors’ Awards for Creative Excellence, announced today at the PRPD conference in Hollywood. Todd also blogged the keynote address by Bruce Theriault, senior v.p. of radio at CPB.

Houston’s KPFT, a Pacifica station, has been off the air since sustaining damage from Hurricane Ike. In an update Chief Engineer Steve Brightwell describes the situation: “While it is possible for KPFT to get 50 watts on the air and operate a minimal daytime schedule with a portable generator (which we don’t yet have), it will require a massive expense of manpower and gasoline, only to serve a small neighborhood in Northwest Houston, with the overwhelming majority of regular listeners being left out.”

Like a modern-day presidential candidate, WETA-FM classical deejay Nicole Lacroix spoke in a vast stadium Sept. 13, though the crowd had not really come for her. The spectators had come for Washington National Opera’s opening night free telecast of La Traviata to the Jumbotron at the city’s new baseball park. Lacroix was “charming and knowledgeable” as emcee, according to critic Micaele Sparacino on Concertonet.com, an international website that covers classical music. He noted that the audience was full of 20-somethings, some with their kids. A press report said the opera filled about 15,000 seats, just over one-third of the stadium’s capacity.

ABN Radio, the largest farm radio network in Ohio, will relocate its headquarters to Ohio State University, where it will share a building with WOSU Public Media next year. It will renovate space recently vacated by WOSU, which opened its new digital radio facility in the building. Tom Rieland, WOSU’s g.m., says the partnership “could lead to many interesting programming collaborations.” ABN, heard on 65 stations, is run by a small, owner-operated company that runs BARN (Buckeye Ag Radio Network), according to WOSU. (Correction: It is not operated by the trade publishing company DTN, whose name appears at the bottom of ABN’s website.)

Three new nominees for CPB Board seats plus two nominated for reappointment came down decisively in favor of public broadcasting during a Senate hearing yesterday. The genial give-and-take is captured in a video webcast of the hearing on the Senate website (drag the cursor past 31 minutes, to avoid dead air). New nominees, as reported in Current, are Hollywood attorney Bruce M. Ramer, educator and APTS Board member Liz Sembler and Nevada broadcast journalist Loretta Sutliff (known in Elko as Lori Gilbert), who spoke up for local reporting. Coming back for second terms are Republican activist and former CPB Chair Cheryl Halpern and former Democratic senator and governor David Pryor.

Charges against Amy Goodman, two producers of her program Democracy Now! and other journalists arrested by St. Paul police during the Republican National Convention will be dropped, Mayor Chris Coleman said today, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. The city had already dropped felony charges, including those against the program’s two producers,leaving only misdemeanors on Wednesday, the program announced.

When Congress adopted the Public Broadcasting Act 40 years go, it put its contribution to public TV and radio into the hands of the nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting with a structural characteristic and two mandates that have caused conflict and inertia ever since. The law has the President nominate the CPB Board and the Senate confirm the CPB Board. Rather than keeping political appointees off the board, it splits them almost equally. The majority are chosen by the White House from its own party and the minority of board members named, in practice, by Senate leaders of the other party.

“Sid the Science Kid is a great show for teaching science to little kids, but not so great for the adults watching with them,” writes Wired blogger (a.k.a. “geekdad”) Matt Blum about the new PBS Kids show from the Jim Henson Company. Sid, which is geared toward kids 3 to 6, doesn’t have those jokes only parents would get, he says–such as Cookie Monster introducing himself as Alistair Cookie.

Cindy Browne never promised them a rose garden. In fact, the founding executive director of Iowa Public Radio repeatedly promised the network’s 50-some staffers a long passage through anger, grief and confusion, before things would get the least bit rosy. Over the past three years, events delivered some of the expected benefits of combining the public radio operations at Iowa’s three big state universities, as well as the promised discomforts for both listeners and staffers. The next steps are up to a new set of executives. In coming months, IPR will hire, besides an executive director, a content director, a music director, a development director and a Cedar Rapids reporter.

NPR has agreed to let CBS Entertainment make a pilot for a TV show based on Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, according Media Bistro’s Fishbowl DC blog. CBS will finance the pilot and decide whether to commission a TV series, says a Sept. 4 NPR memo published by the blog.

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman writes of her arrest this week at the Republican National Convention: “Behind all the patriotic hyperbole that accompanies the conventions, and the thousands of journalists and media workers who arrive to cover the staged events, there are serious violations of the basic right of freedom of the press.”

KCLU-FM, based in Thousand Oaks, Calif., has bought an AM station in Santa Barbara to improve its reach up the Pacific Coast, the Ventura County Star reported last week. The news station now simulcasts in Santa Barbara on a weaker FM signal. KIST-AM changed hands for $1.4 million. Its owner, Rincon Broadcasting LLC, bought seven stations from Clear Channel Communications last year and was required by the FCC to sell one of the stations. KCLU covered the purchase with funds raised in its $7.5 million capital campaign. Lance Orozco heads KCLU’s prizewinning news effort.

NPR’s Andy Carvin describes the social networking applications powering the Hurricane Information Center, which launched last weekend in anticipation of Gustav’s landfall and broadened in scope as a community-powered forum for information and user-generated content about Hanna and other storms of the 2008 hurricane season. The site is built by some 500 volunteers who have the technology skills to pull together an “amazing array of tools and resources that can be useful to the public in times of crisis,” Carvin tells Poynter Online columnist Al Tompkins. “With this volunteer effort, people are coming out of the woodwork to drop everything and work on hurricane-related mashups, collect information for our wiki, develop text-messaging interfaces, etc.”

“Democracy Now! radio host Amy Goodman and two producers were arrested yesterday while covering demonstrations at the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn.,” reports the Washington Post. “Goodman was released after being held for over three hours, but is still waiting to hear when Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar would be released.” A release from Democracy Now! says Goodman was arrested “while attempting to free two…producers who were being unlawfully detained.” According to the release, the producers were arrested “while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the Republican National Convention.” Both stories include video of Goodman’s arrest. 

An extensive study by NPR Labs points to significant trade-offs between the audience reach of digital HD Radio and the amount of interference to analog FM. Even though its transmission power is just 1 percent of analog FM’s, its range for listeners in cars comes close to equaling analog,  the CPB-funded study found. But HD reaches areas including little more than one-third as many indoor listeners. To extend its range, the National Association of Broadcasters in January joined other industry groups advocating an optional power boost for HD Radio, permitting stations to emit digital signals at 10 percent of analog transmitters’ power.