Jesse Thorn of The Sound of Young America has a subversive new strategy to win airtime on public radio stations: he’s offering free t-shirts to anyone who works at a station and likes his show. The catch: all recipients must agree to wear their t-shirts to work and “talk about the show when people looked at them funny,” Thorn writes on his blog. The t-shirt campaign is already underway at one unnamed major market station. “Hopefully, the program director is noticing,” he writes.

Two pubTV shows and a pubradio program were honored with James Beard Awards in the past week. Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie topped the Television Food Show contest. The program is produced by Ruth Reichl and distributed by American Public Television. WGBH’s longrunning The Victory Garden won in the Television Food Segment category. The James Beard Foundation credited host Michel Nischan and producers Laurie Donnelly, Hilary Finkel Buxton, Deborah Hurley, Craig Rogers, Cheryl Carlesimo and John McCally. In the Radio Food Show competition, the jurors picked American Public Media’s The Splendid Table. Host: Lynne Rossetto Kasper. Producers: Sally Swift and Jennifer Russell.

Sometime within the next week, New York’s WNYC will begin broadcasting from its new headquarters in lower Manhattan. The New York Times marks the occasion with a feature recounting the station’s history in city Municipal Building.

Although listeners contributed a total of $278 million to public radio stations in fiscal 2006, when adjusted for inflation the impressive sum was less than the year before, according to a report just published by Station Resource Group. The report, “Individual Giving to Public Radio: Analysis, Theory, Proven Practices and Good Ideas to Raise More Money,” is a call to arms and tactical guide for public radio stations to improve their fundraising performance, combining analysis of the latest available financial data with shared wisdom of the field’s development leaders and researchers.

At the National Conference for Media Reform last weekend in Minneapolis, O’Reilly Factor producer Porter Barry confronted keynote speaker Bill Moyers in the hallway about coming on Bill O’Reilly’s show (see video of the encounter). Moyers had a few things to say about Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch: “I will come on the O’Reilly show first when Rupert Murdoch has explained why we’re not getting $20-a-barrel oil…the Iraq war he said would deliver.” Moyers asks Barry, “Why doesn’t Bill do his own reporting?…Bill is not a journalist, he’s a pugilist…I like to honor the people who do the real work in journalism, and that’s producers and reporters.

Recent audience gains for KUSC-FM in Los Angeles have boosted its weekly listenership to 525,800, bigger than all other public radio outlets in the market, according to diary-based Arbitron ratings reported in the Los Angeles Times. The Times attributes the growth to the live and local element of KUSC’s drive-time broadcasts and the demise last year of K-Mozart, its one-time commercial classical competitor. KUSC plans to add more live-hosted time slots next month, after the syndicated Classical Public Radio Network goes dark.

“This could be one of those things where we slap our foreheads and say, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,'” says PBS program exec John Wilson in the Boston Globe. “Or it could be the start of something big.” He’s describing the prospects for Click & Clack’s As the Wrench Turns, an animated series debuting on PBS next month. The cartoon spin-off of NPR’s Car Talk, which fictionalizes the personal lives of stars Tom and Ray Magliozzi, has been in the works for nearly seven years, and the Magliozzis are skeptical about whether the show will be a hit for humor-challenged PBS, according to the Globe.

Wasatch Public Media, a new nonprofit established just 10 weeks ago to buy KCPW-FM in Salt Lake City and keep it a public radio news station, now has the signed contract.

Patty Wente tells the St. Louis Business Journal that she is considering her legal options after the University of Missouri-St. Louis ended her employment this week as g.m. of its public radio station, KWMU. “There has been no financial mismanagement at KWMU, and the university knows everything that has transpired,” she said. Wente also spoke with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “I’m a tough manager, and managers have to make tough decisions. When you make decisions, some people will be happy and some will not be happy.”

Exxon Mobil is returning to PBS as a national sponsor, four years after the company ended its 32-year sponsorship of Masterpiece Theatre (see Current story on loss of funding here). This time around, Exxon will be partially underwriting Nightly Business Report and NOVA, beginning June 9.

Ira Glass’s Public Radio International program This American Life usually gets five to 10 comments per show, but after “Giant Pool of Money,” a May 9 special on the housing crisis produced in partnership with NPR’s All Things Considered, the program received nearly 100 listener comments, reports NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard. ATC was also flooded with comments. Shepard lauds the producers for telling the story–13 minutes on ATC and a full hour on TAL–in a “fascinating, compelling way that anyone can understand.” The reporters “take you, the listener, along on their reporting journey where you meet (and in some cases may even like) the people who did the borrowing, the bundling, the loaning, the deceiving and the profiting–until it becomes clear that everyone involved is culpable,” she says.

To help employees save money on gas, West Virgina Public Broadcasting’s Beaver station (WSWP-TV Grandview/Beckley) is experimenting with a four-day work week, reports the local NBC affiliate. If it works out, WVPB may institute the schedule at other stations across the state.

After seven years as president of North Carolina Public Radio (WUNC-FM), the Raleigh News & Observer reports, Joan Siefert Rose is moving out of public radio to run the Council for Entrepreneurial Development, a long-established nonprofit that encourages “high-impact, high-growth” companies in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill region. Rose came to WUNC in 2001 after four years as p.d. of Michigan Radio in Ann Arbor.

WHYY’s new weekly arts show On Canvas, which premieres tonight on its digital arts channel, is “just the kind of thing the big public station in the nation’s fourth-largest TV market should be doing: a showcase of the variety of performing arts in the region,” writes Philadelphia Inquirer TV critic Jonathan Storm. He lauds the program for not crowding performances–a banjo gathering, classical Arab music, a Native American flute player, a local singer-songwriter–with interviews and explanation.

Public broadcasters have devoted millions of dollars and plenty of angst to prepare for digital broadcasts that will put more channels and HD pictures on big living-room screens. But another DTV transition that’s even more exciting to some pubTV vets is arriving in viewers’ pockets. Mobile digital TV will use slices of stations’ broadcast spectrum to beam live and prerecorded programming directly to cell phones and other handheld screens on the go. Stations will be able to multicast to this new audience while maintaining HD and standard broadcasts to steadfastly stationary sets. “Moving from analog to digital, viewers can use the same system and the same habits watching TV—it’s still a lean-back kind of situation,” says Jim Kutzner, PBS chief engineer, who serves on several industry committees working to develop the platform.