NPR is laying off 10 staffers in its member partnership and digital services divisions while creating five new positions as part of an internal restructuring. The decisions were made “after consultation with NPR and member station stakeholders” to “more closely align both divisions’ resources,” according to Member Partnership VP Gemma Hooley and Digital Services GM Bob Kempf, who outlined the changes in a memo sent Wednesday to member station A-Reps. The member partnership division will absorb seven of the layoffs. Director Marguerite Nutter’s position will be eliminated, along with those of senior managers Si Sikes, Patricia Cervini and Marc Pultuskier and associates Kristen Hartmann, Jeff Cabiness and Emily Dagger.

The New York–based outlet will add the money to its reserve fund, bringing it to more than $4.5 million.

A three-way transaction involving Los Angeles pubcasters KCRW and KUSC will bring more public radio options to listeners in Santa Barbara, Calif. Under a deal announced Feb. 18, KCRW will buy 93.7 KDB-FM, a commercial classical station for 88 years, but will not broadcast on the frequency. Instead, all-classical KUSC will move to the channel and transfer its 88.7 FM signal in Santa Barbara to KCRW. KCRW will turn its new acquisition into an outlet for its hybrid format of news and contemporary music, with localized content within NPR newsmagazines. KDB’s licensee, the Santa Barbara Foundation,  put the classical station up for sale in October after years of six-figure losses and a determination that radio fell beyond its core mission.

Maybe honey badgers do care?

• Minnesota Public Radio’s music station The Current will get its brand on a local craft beer this summer. The station is partnering with Minnesota-based brewery Schell’s on a limited-edition, Current-branded run of the brewmaker’s seasonal Zommerfest offering. Sixteen-ounce tallboys will be sold across the state, and all proceeds will support the station. • Public Radio International will make WGBH-FM’s popular weekly show Innovation Hub available for pubradio broadcast starting May 1. The show also airs at 10 p.m. Eastern time Saturdays on XMPR, SiriusXM’s channel of public radio programs. • Detroit Public Television will provide a live video stream of the Beyond the Connected Vehicle Conference, a look at the future of transportation, from 9 a.m.

• Frontline today won a George Polk Award for “League of Denial,” its investigation of the NFL’s efforts to downplay evidence linking head injuries of football players to long-term brain disorders. The nonprofit newsroom Center for Public Integrity also won a Polk for “After the Meltdown,” which explored the aftermath of economic crash caused by sub-prime mortgage lenders. A full list of Polk winners, presented by Long Island University, is here. • While CPB Ombudsman Joel Kaplan agrees with WNET’s decision to return a $3.5 million grant for its series reporting on public pensions, he remains troubled by “the lack of transparency by both WNET and PBS” in handling the controversy.

John Henson, the son of Muppets creator Jim Henson and a Muppet performer himself, died Friday of a heart attack. He was 48. Henson played the giant ogre Sweetums for decades beginning in 1987, when he took over puppeteering duties for the character from Richard Hunt, according to the Muppet Wiki. He appeared as the character in several commercial Muppets films and television shows and at Walt Disney World. As a child, Henson appeared in short films his father made for PBS’s Sesame Street. Henson was also a board member and shareholder of the Jim Henson Company. His mother, puppeteer Jane Henson, died in April.

Hackers breached the crowdfunding website Kickstarter Feb. 12 and made off with user data including passwords and email addresses, the company announced Saturday. The hackers did not obtain credit card data, according to Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler, who advised site users to change their account passwords and those of any other site accounts with the same password. “We’re incredibly sorry that this happened,” Strickler wrote in the post. “We set a very high bar for how we serve our community, and this incident is frustrating and upsetting.“ Several public media entities have used Kickstarter to solicit donations, including Roman Mars’s 99% Invisible, NPR’s economics reporting team Planet Money, State of the Re:Union and Hillary Frank’s The Longest Shortest Time.

WNET will return a $3.5 million grant it received for a series of reports on public pensions after facing questions about the funder’s involvement with the issue. In a joint statement, PBS and WNET announced Friday that the grant to support the Pension Peril series would go back to the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, whose co-founder John Arnold has supported efforts to reduce public pensions. “While PBS stands by WNET’s reporting in this series, in order to eliminate any perception on the part of the public, our viewers, and donors that the Foundation’s interests influenced the editorial integrity of the reporting for this program, WNET has decided to forego the Arnold Foundation support and will return the gift,” the statement said.

Oregon Public Broadcasting has asked New York’s WNET to demonstrate that no “improper influence” was exerted by the primary funder of its special news series covering public pensions. OPB said in a Feb. 13 statement that it is “seeking assurance from WNET” that its Pension Peril series was not subject to improper editorial influence. In a PandoDaily article published earlier this week, reporter and columnist David Sirota called attention to a major funder of the series, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. According to Sirota, co-founder John Arnold has supported political efforts to reduce retirement benefits for public employees. Sirota argued that Arnold’s support for the WNET production calls its impartiality into question.

• Nothing spells love quite like This American Life. For a Valentine’s Day Doodle, Google has enlisted the Public Radio International program to present five love-themed stories from the series, complete with animations. Host Ira Glass provides an introduction. Time has a behind-the-scenes video of how the Doodle came together. • Veteran pubcasting exec Chet Tomczyk, currently managing Illinois stations WTVP-TV in Peoria and dual licensee WILL in Urbana in a unique agreement, announced yesterday that he is retiring, although he hasn’t set a date. Tomczyk has worked in the system for nearly 50 years, beginning in 1965 as associate producer of The Week in Michigan, a weekly travel and outdoor show produced at WKAR-FM in East Lansing, Mich.

New York’s WNET issued a statement responding to a PandoDaily article that scrutinized funding for its topical reporting series, The Pension Peril.  In the article, published Wednesday, reporter and columnist David Sirota argued that the WNET production was ethically tainted by undisclosed funding provided by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, which has a political agenda promoting public pension reform, the topic examined in its series. WNET rebutted Sirota’s criticism that it sought to obscure the funding relationship. The Arnold Foundation’s support for the series was “clearly disclosed” on the PBS NewsHour Weekend broadcasts that have featured the Pension Peril segments, according to the station’s Feb.

• Less than a week after the maker of the wildly popular mobile game Flappy Bird announced he would pull the plug on his creation, Sesame Workshop has introduced the browser game Flappy Bert. The gameplay, where players control a bird as it navigates Sesame Street‘s Bert among obstacles, draws heavily on the original. It’s one of several Flappy Bird clones on the market but the only one starring Bert in an 8-bit sheen. • Today marks the premiere of a series of web video specials co-produced by PBS NewsHour and Al-Monitor, a news site featuring reporting and analysis by journalists and experts from the Middle East.

Charges that a public TV reporting initiative about pensions is ethically compromised by its funding sources led to a fiery exchange today between the funder in question and reporter and columnist David Sirota, who leveled the claims in an article for the Silicon Valley news site PandoDaily. Sirota pointed out in his story that The Pension Peril, a two-year reporting initiative produced by New York’s WNET, receives most of its funding from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. Co-founder John Arnold, a hedge-fund manager and former trader for Enron, has contributed to political campaigns urging state lawmakers to reduce pension benefits for public employees, according to Sirota.

Betsy Gerdeman, former senior v.p. of development at KLRU-TV in Austin, Texas, has been named PBS’s senior v.p. of development services. She replaces John Wilson, a veteran PBS program executive who resigned Jan. 3. PBS President Paula Kerger announced the hiring Wednesday. “For much of the last 20 years, I have considered public television my home and its employees my family,” Gerdeman said in a statement. “I have dedicated much of my career to helping PBS member stations remain sustainable, so that together we can further our mission to educate, inform and inspire all Americans.” Gerdeman worked for KLRU from 2009-2013 and also served as an officer of the station’s board of directors.