Public Radio Capital is working to keep an FM station it owns in Tacoma, Wash., on the air after June 30, when Seattle’s KUOW will stop programming it. In six years of operating as an internationally focused alternative to KUOW, KXOT failed to attract enough new listeners to support its operations. PRC is negotiating with National Cooperative Bank, which backed the brokerage’s $5 million purchase of KXOT-FM in 2003. Payments on the loan have stopped while PRC tries to come up with a plan for KXOT. When KUOW began managing the Tacoma station in 2006, its leaders hoped to buy it.

CIR has hired ex-NPR investigative news head Susanne Reber. As senior coordinating editor for multiplatform projects and investigations for the nonprofit newsroom, Reber will lead national and international investigative and enterprise reporting projects, and guide the center’s team of health and environment reporters. Reber joined NPR in January 2010 to build and lead the network’s first investigative unit as deputy managing editor of investigations. She left NPR this month, according to a May 8 memo by NPR News chief Margaret Low Smith that was published on the Poynter Institute website. Smith put Senior National Editor Steve Drummond in charge of investigations while NPR determines “next steps for the unit’s leadership,” she wrote in the memo.

The University of Missouri-St. Louis will acquire WQUB-FM in Quincy, Ill., expanding the coverage of its St. Louis Public Radio north along the Mississippi River. UMSL paid $40,000 to buy the station from Quincy University in a deal announced May 18 [2012]. The Quincy signal will rebroadcast St. Louis Public Radio’s lineup of news and talk programming to a potential audience of 120,000 within the 60 dBu contour of the frequency, 90.3 MHz. The sale is expected to be completed within the next three to four months. WQUB will be renamed Quincy Public Radio. St. Louis Public Radio approached the Quincy school after hearing that it was considering getting out of broadcasting to redirect more money into academics, said Tim Eby, g.m.

Facing an operating deficit of $2.6 million this fiscal year due to a shortfall in corporate sponsorship income, NPR is stepping up efforts to cover the gap with additional gifts, grants and underwriting. These measures are being taken rather than “cutting deep into NPR,” a spokesperson told Current last week, after the Washington Post reported that the network had considered cutting Tell Me More, the daily newsmagazine aimed at people of color. The Post’s report cited anonymous sources describing internal discussions. NPR President Gary Knell later told media outlets that there were no plans to cancel the show. NPR hit a record high in corporate sponsorship income last year but is now struggling, with a variety of factors contributing to the slowdown in sponsorship revenue.

Wisconsin Public Radio has developed a website to accompany its upcoming broadcast of the “Open Goldberg Variations,” which is the “first fan-funded, open source, and completely free recording” of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” according to the Boing Boing website. WPR’s site will display the score, enabling listeners to “see” the music as it plays from 12:30 to 2 p.m. Central June 24, “a first-ever event, proving bleeding edge technologies,” said Robert Douglass, who launched the Kickstarter project behind the production. Partnering with WPR is MuseScore, a free music composition and notation software.

The family of Chris Ulanowski, the longtime news director of WRVO-FM in Oswego, N.Y., is speaking out about his suicide in a story in the Post-Standard at the one-year anniversary of his death. “Most people didn’t know that the confident professional they heard on the air struggled with a severe mental illness called borderline personality disorder,” the newspaper noted, “which causes unstable moods, behaviors and personal relationships. One in 10 people who have it commit suicide — more than 50 times the rate in the general population — and more than half attempt suicide at least once.”

The FCC has yet to approve the sale of University of San Francisco’s KUSF-FM, which was announced 16 months ago, reports the Bay Citizen. “It’s extremely unusual,” said Michael Couzens, an Oakland, Calif., communications attorney and former FCC staffer. “The mentality of the staff is shaped by the fact that commercial entities lose their financing if they dink and dunk around for months and years.” And because the deal isn’t finalized, federal rules prohibit KDFC from airing pledge drives, “a huge loss as it attempts to remake itself as a nonprofit,” Bay Citizen notes. “The KUSF delay has definitely impacted us, and we hope the FCC will come to a decision soon,” said Brenda Barnes, president of classical music giant KUSC.

A recent Ford Foundation grant to the Los Angeles Times highlights the heightened competition pubcasters face for philanthropic dollars in a fast-changing media world. The $1.04 million two-year grant to the newspaper, a subsidiary of the Tribune Company media conglomerate, marks the first time Ford has directly supported a major for-profit daily. The money will be used to hire staff members to cover new and expanded beats, including immigration and California’s prison system. The decision to pay for additional reporters, Ford spokesman Alfred Ironside explains in an email, resulted from the grantmaker’s exploration of “new models for sustaining quality, independent journalism that reaches more people at a time when newsrooms are under stress.”

KPCC.org, the website for the Pasadena, Calif., pubradio station, has relaunched with a responsive web design that automatically adapts to viewing on smartphones, tablets and desktops — an especially useful feature for the 17 percent of its audience that accesses the content on mobile devices. The site also features a new section specifically for video reports, a daily rotation of featured comments, and redesigned navigation and audio player. “Content silos are one of the toughest problems many news organizations face,” wrote Sean Dillingham, the station’s senior user experience designer, in a post announcing the redesign. “KPCC was/is no different: we produce radio stories, blog posts, program segments, events, videos, and more.

Sesame Workshop, parent company of Sesame Street, has laid off around 12 people, the entertainment news website Deadline Hollywood is reporting. “So far the big cuts have been in the Digital Media department,” the site said. The Workshop declined to answer specific questions on the layoffs from Current, but emailed this statement: “As a result of our FY13 strategic planning process, we have shifted some resources to better align with our strategic priorities and new opportunities. Unfortunately, this has resulted in the elimination of approximately a dozen positions.” Gary Knell, Workshop c.e.o. for almost 12 years, announced last fall that he would take the helm at NPR in January (Current, Oct.

Three high-profile organizations have announced a campaign to urge PBS and WGBH to drop the sponsor Chick-fil-A from the children’s show Martha Speaks. In a joint statement Wednesday (May 23), the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Public Citizen and Corporate Accountability International said that in 2011, 56 million Chick-fil-A Kids’ Meals were distributed in Martha Speaks co-branded bags, and those meals “can contain as much as 670 calories, 29 grams of fat, and 25 grams of sugar.” The groups also said the Chick-fil-A sponsorship “marks the first time advertising before and after a PBS children’s show has run simultaneously with an in-restaurant promotion.”

Julie Philipp, news director at WXXI in Rochester, N.Y., got out from behind her desk last week — to dangle off the side of a downtown building for an “Audio Postcard.” The adventure was part of the local Boy Scout Council’s 21 Stories for Scouts fundraising event. Participants collecting more than $1,000 get to rappel down 309 feet, or 21 stories, from the roof of the First Federal Building. The council invites members of the media to participate the day before. “I thought it would be a unique way for WXXI News to highlight the commitment we’ve made to covering issues related to at-risk youth in our community,” Philipp told Current.”I