The Public Broadcasting Button Collection collects promotional buttons from public radio and TV over the years. Sample: “1980. The year NPR stops being a secret. (don’t tell anybody)”

Richard Pearce discusses his film “The Road to Memphis,” an installment in PBS’s The Blues, on the Washington Post‘s website.

Twenty-three more public TV organizations received digital conversion funding in the year’s second round of Public Telecommunications Facilities Program grants. Aid went to state networks in 10 states, Connecticut, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and West Virginia, as well as to 13 stations in other states.

Gerald Boyd, the former New York Times editor who stepped down after the Jayson Blair flap, is talking with NPR’s Tavis Smiley about becoming executive producer of Smiley’s show, reports the New York Post‘s gossip column. (Via Romenesko.)

Noncommercial radio broadcasters can apply to the FCC to reserve certain vacant FM allotments. The deadline is Nov. 21. (PDF.)

As the number of TV channels grows, the number that the average household watches grows much more slowly, illustrating the squeeze on audience size. It’s now 15 out of 102. In terms of percentage, that’s a new low of 15 percent, reports MediaPost. (Thanks to Benton Foundation for the link.)

KCET, Los Angeles, has backed out of a joint bid for the license of KOCE in Orange County, the Los Angeles Times reported. The public TV station’s licensee, Coast Community College District, is expected to choose a buyer Oct. 15. This leaves KOCE’s nonprofit fundraising arm competing against higher bids from three religious broadcasters.

“It wasn’t until I was 28 that I could write confidently,” says Ira Glass in ReadyMade. “I had been living with a woman for seven years who thought I was a moron. The day after she moved out, I wrote my first good story.”

Kentucky’s Georgetown College is going to sell WRVG, its public radio station. Since this article was published, Current has learned that a group of station members has expressed interest in buying the station.

A retired physics professor and former Republican state legislator wants license holders to clamp down on a lefty bias that he discerns in programs broadcast by Montana PBS, according to AP.

The Blues, a seven-film PBS series debuting Sept. 28, is “overreaching and uneven,” writes New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell. He faults the series for ignoring the racial shift of the music’s fans. “[T]hat Chuck D finally appears on public television at a time when Public Enemy is as safe an oldies act as B. B. King may offer a hint as to what’s in store.”

Some record labels and music publishers complain that PBS is underpaying the artists featured in its upcoming series The Blues, according to the New York Times.

Information about the upcoming Pacifica elections is online.

WABE-FM in Atlanta is standing by the classical music format, even as other public radio stations trade it in for more news, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The article sparked exchanges among news and classical fans in the AJC‘s letters pages (Sept. 14, Sept. 21). Also weighing in: a communications professor suggests Atlanta’s public stations cooperate to provide diverse formats.

“The paradox is that the thing that burns me out is the thing that keeps me going,” says NPR’s Terry Gross in the Sacramento Bee.