WGBH has begun distributing its monthly program guide, Explore!, in a package that brings video and audio promos along with it to iPad tablets. It can also use Wi-Fi to pull in updated “live listings” from the Web even after it’s in the viewers’ hands.

Bill Kling, former c.e.o. of American Public Media Group, admitted to the New York Times that during his time at the Minnesota-based pubradio network he realizes that he was “generally perceived as aloof.” “That’s probably accurate,” he said. “But not for the reasons you would think. It’s difficult for someone who has grown up with the company and who knows the veteran employees so well, to then find that there are so many other employees whom you don’t know well. And if you don’t know them well, you feel bad about it.” “You may feel awkward when you don’t know enough about some people to make them feel as much a part of the company as you want them to feel or know enough about what they have to offer the company,” he said.

WAMU 88.5 in Washington, D.C., has purchased two FM translators to extend its bluegrass format, reports Inside Radio. The station is paying $100,000 to religious broadcaster Family Radio for W228AM, Frederick, Md. (93.5) and W228AB, Paramount, Md. (93.5), which will be the second and third translators for WAMU’s HD2 subchannel, also airing at 105.5 FM from a Bethesda, Md., translator. [Disclaimer: WAMU and Current are both affiliated with American University.]

Civil libertarian and writer Nat Hentoff is taking on GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s comments on the campaign trail that PBS needs to run commercials instead of take federal funding. In a piece on the website of the libertarian Cato Institute, where Hentoff is a senior fellow, he writes, “If Mitt Romney and his defunding colleagues have their way and commercialize Sesame Street, Big Bird and the other puppets are going to be cajoling their young audience to keep bugging their parents to buy what Big Bird is selling.” “If Mitt Romney makes these cuts,” Hentoff adds, “he will create a dark hole in our lives that will defy James Madison’s warning — which becomes more contemporary every day: ‘A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives .

Portia Clark, a longtime personality in New York City publishing circles who began her career in public broadcasting, died Jan. 1, according to Publishers Weekly. She was 91. She started her professional life at WQED in Pittsburgh in the early days of public television. One of the shows she worked on was The Children’s Corner, where Fred Rogers developed puppets that turned into characters in Mister Rogers Neighborhood. [Editor’s Note: The Publishers Weekly obituary originally identified that program as The Children’s Hour.] She also produced TV shows at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism’s Office of Radio and Television.

Two New Jersey Assemblymen who had attempted to stop the sale of the state’s public broadcasting rights to WNET are now calling for an overhaul of the NJTV network, reports NJ.com, saying it fails to provide residents with state news coverage. Patrick Diegnan Jr. and John Burzichelli gave examples: When the governor was announcing his presidential plans, the network aired Angelina Ballerina; and during coverage of the death of an elder statesman in the Assembly, it ran Thomas the Train. “Given the gravity of the situation, NJTV has become the ultimate ‘Jersey Joke,'” Diegnan said. UPDATE: NJTV issued a statement, saying in part that “upon the death of Assembly Minority Leader Alex DeCroce, the network made the editorial decision to cover the day’s eulogy remarks as breaking news.

Potential bidders for pubcaster KCSM-TV in San Mateo, Calif., include names well known within the pubcasting system, as well as some new ones. The attendance list for a “pre-bid meeting” Tuesday (Jan. 10) includes former WNET exec Ken Devine of Independent Public Media (background: Current, Oct. 17, 2011); Ken Ikeda and Marc Hand of Boulder, Colo.-based Public Media Company;  Booker Wade, of the Minority Television Project/KMTP in San Francisco; and a rep for Stewart Cheifet Productions, which created Computer Chronicles, a personal computing show that ran on public TV for 20 years, ending in 2002. Other interested parties on the list: Ravi Potherlanka and Bill Dekay, two California wireless industry entrepreneurs; Ravi Kapur, vice president of KAXT in Santa Clara, Calif.,

Take images from Downton Abbey, pair with lyrics from Beyoncé and what do you get? Downton Abbeyoncé.

Looks like Basin PBS in Midland, Texas, may be moving downtown. According to MyWestTexas.com, the Downtown Midland Management District board has voted to provide the station with a $100,000 grant over the next four years if it purchases the Ritz Theater on Main Street. General Manager Daphne Dowdy Jackson told the board the station would need public support because the theater requires renovation work. Basin PBS anticipates needing to raise between $3.5 and $4 million, some of which it already has, to make the move. The station will operate from the Ritz Theater, as well as open the theater for public meetings and other community uses.

American Public Media and Arizona State University are announcing a new partnership to “help foster collaborative reporting and innovative storytelling in public affairs journalism.” Linda Fantin, APM’s director of network journalism and innovation, and Joaquin Alvarado, its senior vice president of digital innovation, will teach as visiting professors during the spring semester at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Phoenix, leading a class on public insight reporting for radio. The students’ resulting work will be featured on national pubradio programs. And David Brancaccio, one of the hosts of APM’s Marketplace, also will be at the school as a Hearst Visiting Professional as part of the “Must See Mondays” speaker series.

New NPR President Gary Knell, speaking on KPBS Radio in San Diego, called the pubradio network’s problems last year — including the firing of Juan Williams and resignation of c.e.o. Vivian Schiller — “self-inflicted wounds to a large degree.” Speaking on the station’s Midday Edition, he added, “I wasn’t there, I wasn’t part of the decision making process. The people who were are not there anymore, and that speaks volumes in and of itself.” Also during the half-hour call-in show, Knell possibly foreshadowed upcoming changes. “I think it’s important that we are continuously looking for new, articulate voices,” he said.

The return of Downton Abbey proved to be a ratings blockbuster for PBS, while critics  mostly heaped praise on the Emmy-winning drama’s second season. Downton’s season premiere Jan. 8 [2012] attracted an average 4.2 million viewers, not including viewing through station replays, DVRs or online streaming.  That figure was double the average primetime rating for PBS and exceeded the average rating of the first season of Downton Abbey by 18 percent, the network said. That night PBS’s audience was 64 percent larger than on previous Sundays this year, reaching an average Nielsen rating of 2.0, TRAC Media Services reported. In strong PBS cities Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and St.

WHDD, the Connecticut pubradio outlet that bills itself as “the smallest NPR station in the nation,” has been slapped with an FCC complaint for endorsing political candidates. The complaint by a local school official, reported in a pay-walled article published by the Waterbury Republican-American, alleges that station co-founder Marshall Miles violated FCC regulations barring pubcasters from endorsing or opposing candidates for office. Terry Cowgill of the blog CT Devil’s Advocate speculates that Miles will try to “weasel out” of the complaint by claiming he was speaking for himself, not the station or its licensee. “But that’s just a bunch of baloney.

Michael Soper, who spent 14 years in development at PBS and now runs his own consulting business, today (Jan. 11) launched a systemwide survey of station-based public TV professionals regarding PBS’s national online prospecting project, the centralized effort to use PBS.org to identify and cultivate new donors for member stations that it has been working on for several years now. “PBS may believe that collecting e-mails from visitors to PBS.org and launching its online initiative represented an unexploited opportunity,” Soper writes in an email to clients regarding the survey. “Yet, most stations, and certainly most large stations that already had aggressive e-mail marketing programs, now find PBS’s new practices to be competing with their existing efforts.”

Detroit Public Television is partnering with the Detroit Economic Club for online streaming coverage of U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s address today (Jan. 11) from the floor of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Chu will speak at noon Eastern time on innovation and the auto industry. UPDATE: This original post listed noon Central time.