In the conclusion of an interview on Huffington Post, Bill Siemering, a founding father of NPR, talks about how the network now reflects his original goals. He tells University of Chicago Professor David Galenson about the importance of a good story, saying that although “personal storytelling is less common within the news magazine programs,” This American Life and Radio Lab “excel” at it. “In the very first All Things Considered,” Siemering recalls, “the first voice for the ‘teaser’ in the program was a nurse, who had been a drug addict, talking about when ‘Harry’ comes knocking on your door.

Humorist and essayist David Rakoff, a regular contributor to Public Radio International’s This American Life since the program’s inception, died Aug. 9 after a fight with cancer that dated to his 20s. He was 47. Rakoff worked in publishing before becoming a full-time writer. He appeared dozens of times on TAL to recite his essays, which often balanced pessimism with a wry sensibility. During a live performance of TAL staged in May, Rakoff spoke frankly about the latest battle with the disease. He has also guest-hosted for the show on occasion, filling in for Ira Glass. In a statement on TAL’s website, Glass described Rakoff as “my friend, our friend here at the radio show and our brother in creating the program, making it into what it’s become.

Ken Messer, who served as general manager of PBS affiliate KYVE in Yakima, Wash., from March 2008 through his retirement in June, died Aug. 21 at the age of 70 after a long battle with cancer. Messer was a prominent broadcaster in Yakima. Before joining KYVE, he spent 38 years at Yakima’s CBS affiliate, KIMA-TV, beginning in sales and working his way up to g.m. He was voted Broadcaster of the Year by the Washington Association of Broadcasters in 2005, and by the Yakima Advertising Federation in 2002. “As our friend, colleague and a tremendous community advocate in Yakima, Ken’s loss will be deeply felt,” said Moss Bresnahan, president and c.e.o.

MontanaPBS will launch a fifth full-power station in the state this fall, according to KUSM-TV General Manager Eric Hyyppa. KUKL-TV will offer all five of the station’s digital multicast channels. The new station will serve the area around Kalispell, or some 85,000 residents in the northwestern corner of Montana. “It’s really the last major community in the state that hasn’t had great over-the-air service,” Hyyppa said. “It’s had translators, but no full-power coverage.” With the new station, MontanaPBS will reach nearly three-quarters of the state’s population, up from around two-thirds. MontanaPBS has been working on plans for the station for more than a decade, Hyyppa said.

Roger Fisher, a Harvard law professor who developed the Emmy-and Peabody Award–winning public TV program The Advocates, died Aug. 25 in Hanover, N.H. He was 90. His son Elliott told the New York Times that the cause of death was complications from dementia. Fisher proposed The Advocates in 1969, as a co-production of WGBH in Boston and KCET in Los Angeles. The show was one of the first projects at WGBH for Peter McGhee, who went on to become an influential head of national productions at the station. Fisher served as executive producer for the weekly debate-style public affairs program through 1974, and again for its bi-weekly revamp from 1978 to ’79.

The man behind Sesame Street’s Count von Count, Jerry Nelson, died Aug. 23 at age 78. Nelson, who worked with Muppets creator Jim Henson early in his career, also played Gobo Fraggle on Fraggle Rock, a Henson TV series from the 1980s. Nelson “imbued all his characters with the same gentle, sweet whimsy and kindness that were a part of his own personality,” said Lisa Henson, c.e.o. of  Jim Henson Co., in a statement. “He joined the Jim Henson Co. in the earliest years, and his unique contributions to the worlds of Fraggles, Muppets, Sesame Street and so many others are, and will continue to be, unforgettable.”

Efforts to build political support for continued federal funding of public broadcasting have gained little or no traction on Capitol Hill, a parade of speakers told the CPB Board during its Sept. 10 and 11 meeting in Washington, D.C. Two members of Congress, a CPB staffer and heads of three national pubcasting organizations encouraged CPB’s leaders to do more to convince lawmakers that public broadcasting would be irreparably harmed by the loss of CPB’s $445 million appropriation. Dire warnings from this summer’s report on scant alternative funding sources haven’t swayed lawmakers who’ve pledged to defund CPB. The Booz & Co. financial analysis, requested by Congress in December 2011 and delivered in June, concluded that withdrawal of aid would have a “cascading debilitating effect,” starting first with stations serving rural areas and ultimately leading to the collapse of the public broadcasting system.

Robert Kotlowitz, a pioneering public broadcaster at New York’s WNET who developed several public television series that became signature PBS programs — including a half-hour evening news show featuring Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil in 1973 — died Aug. 25 at his home in New York City after battling prostate cancer. He was 87. The New York Times described Kotlowitz as “a novelist and editor who reluctantly became a public television executive in 1971 and went on to help shape a lineup of homegrown and imported shows — including The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, Live at the Met, Dance in America and Brideshead Revisited — that represent a high-water mark in American television.”

The Peabody-winning pubradio program To the Best of Our Knowledge has successfully completed a $15,000 Kickstarter campaign to produce a comic book that will accompany an upcoming six-hour series. The series, Meet Your Mind: The Science of Consciousness, will air in November and December. Guests include famed brain researcher Oliver Sacks and Nobel laureates Eric Kandel and Daniel Kahneman. The comic book is intended to help illustrate Meet Your Mind. Jim Ottaviani, a writer who specializes in graphic novels about scientists, will pen the comic, and Natalie Nourigat will illustrate it. Nourigat is best known for her 304-page autobiographical Between Gears, which features a comic for each day of her senior year of college.

SAN FRANCISCO — Public media continues to earn accolades for its online innovations, as multiple outlets racked up trophies at the Online News Association’s awards ceremony Sept. 22. Hosted by PBS NewsHour correspondent Hari Sreenivasan, the gala banquet sought to honor the year’s best work in online journalism across all media outlets. Award categories reflect the size of the operation: small sites, with fewer than 25 full-time employees; medium, more than 25 but fewer than 100; and large, more than 100. With two trophies each, public broadcasting’s big winners were WNYC in New York and EarthFix, the CPB-backed Local Journalism Center focusing on environment issues in the Pacific Northwest.

NPR Digital Services is negotiating with an unidentified vendor to provide cloud-computing products to member stations, potentially transforming the ways they manage their membership programs and relationships with audiences. Bob Kempf, chief of the Boston-based NPR unit, would not identify the vendor, but acknowledges that NPR has been in close negotiations with roundCorner, a three-year-old company that specializes in designing customer relationship management (CRM) systems for nonprofit organizations. He aims to have a master services agreement with a third-party vendor in place by the end of the year, and launch a pilot program with as many as 10 stations in early 2013.