When KCET announced in October 2010 that it would quit PBS after four decades as its primary Los Angeles affiliate, the task facing PBS was enormous: Find a local outlet to step into the breach, establish new branding, arrange for cable carriage, find homes for orphaned shows, and, most importantly, change long-term tuning habits so 16 million-plus potential viewers could find their favorite programs. All in less than three months. The outlet that stepped up was Orange County’s KOCE, a second-string station still recovering from a costly, drawn-out legal battle with religious programmer Daystar Television Network several years earlier. KOCE became PBS SoCal and, with extensive effort and CPB aid, the PBS program schedule began broadcasts on a new channel Jan.

Progressive radio talk-show host Lynn Samuels, 69, who began her career on public radio, was found deceased in her apartment on Christmas Eve, the New York Daily News reports. When Samuels didn’t show up for her Sirius XM show on Saturday (Dec. 24), reps for the satellite radio company asked the police to investigate. Officers found her body in the apartment in Queens. Samuels began her radio career in 1979 at Pacifica Radio’s WBAI in New York City. In the 1980s she moved to WABC, where she was fired a total of three times — once for calling for the assassination of President George H.W.

And now for an annual seasonal treat, a few ho-ho-ho-horrible holiday tunes courtesy of the ever-amusing Annoying Music Show from Chicago Public Radio.

Edwin G. Burrows, a public radio pioneer who was instrumental in getting federal aid to public radio — when CPB’s founding legislation initially planned only the Corporation for Public Television — died Nov. 20 in Edmonds, Wash. He was 94. His public radio career began in 1948 as program director at WUOM, Ann Arbor, Mich., according to the National Public Broadcasting Archives at the University of Maryland Libraries, where Burrows’s papers reside. He helped create WVGR in Grand Rapids in 1961, and in 1966 he was made manager of WUOM and WVGR. While at WUOM, Burrows helped charter National Educational Radio, the radio division of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB).

A man attempting to parachute off the Maryland Public Television tower in Crownsville, Md., was injured after his chute didn’t properly open, reports local ABC station WJLA. Robert Scott Morgan, 25, of Fairfax, Va., was hospitalized. Morgan and Sean Michael Bullington, 34, of Draper, Utah, were charged with trespassing. This was the second BASE (buildings, antennas, spans and earth) jump incident recently in the area. Five persons were charged with trespassing at WETA’s radio tower in Arlington, Va., Dec. 14.

Judy Jankowski, who held top management positions at several public broadcasting stations, died Dec. 17 at Kindred Hospital in Westminster, Calif. She was 61. She started her long pubcasting career as a traffic manager at WOUB in Athens, Ohio. She worked as general manager of WDUQ in Pittsburgh, Pa., from the mid-1980s until 1994; she retired as general manager of KKJZ in Long Beach, Calif., in 2005. She also held executive positions at stations in Birmingham, Ala., and Houston. “I first knew Judy when we both worked in Texas in the early 1980’s, and from then on she was a friend, colleague and collaborator,” said Scott Hanley, another former g.m.

After using a line-item veto this spring to trim state funding for Virginia’s public broadcasting stations, Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell has proposed to completely eliminate the subsidies. McDonnell’s first biennial budget, unveiled on Dec. 19, would cut $3.6 million in annual appropriations for Virginia’s public television and radio stations and their educational telecommunications services. The total reduction over two years, 2013-14, would be $7.2 million. David Mullins, president of WVPT in Harrisonburg, plans to appeal to state lawmakers to reject McDonnell’s proposal. “[W]e will make our case with the General Assembly for funding the unique and valued services WVPT and our public broadcasting partners throughout Virginia provide,” he said in a statement provided to the Washington Post.

The Milwaukee Area Technical College Board of Directors voted Tuesday (Dec. 20) 7-0 to place the fundraising operations of the MPTV Friends group under the management of Milwaukee Public Television. The Journal Sentinel reports that the Friends group has raised $100 million over several decades to support public TV stations WMVS-TV (Channel 10) and WMVT-TV (Channel 36). Ellis Bromberg, general manager of Milwaukee Public Television, refers to the agreement as a “merger”; a former Friends board member and president, John Bernaden, calls it a “hostile takeover.” The agreement now proceeds to the Friends board.

PBS NewsHour gave viewers more than one-third more coverage of international events over the last year than other TV outlets, including cable, morning and network evening news, according to “The Year in the News,” the annual analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report says that 39 percent of time on the NewsHour was spent on foreign events and U.S. foreign policy, compared with 28 percent on television in general, 23 percent on cable news programs, 24 percent on network morning news shows and 24 percent on network evening broadcasts. NewsHour also spent a third more time covering government than its direct competitors, commercial network evening newscasts (12 percent vs.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, “Hey girl. I heart NPR” on Tumblr is pretty amusing, with its hunky-dude photos and accompanying come-on lines like, “Wait, wait . . . don’t tell me you’re busy Friday night.”

What’s the most important innovation necessary for public media in the new year? That’s what pubmedia thinker/blogger/advocate Amanda Hirsch wanted to know, so she asked around. “According to some,” she writes on the Integrated Media Association blog, “what’s needed more than anything — more than any individual innovative approach — is a shared, collective vision of where public media needs to go next.” She said several respondents agreed with Ian Hill, community manager at KQED, who said, “I think what’s still needed most is a change in the culture so that innovation and risk-taking are supported and encouraged.”

Jean Feraca, an on-air host on Wisconsin Public Radio since 1983, told listeners on Tuesday (Dec. 20) that she’s retiring in March 2012. Feraca declined to talk further with a reporter from the State Journal newspaper, saying only, “I lost everybody in my team earlier this year, and it’s been difficult,” referring to two producers who moved on from the station. In her letter, Feraca jokes about her small stature, saying that listeners often say they thought she was taller — to which she replies, “I’m bigger on the radio.” “And this is true,” she writes. “I am bigger on the radio.

Pubcasters won three of the 2012 duPont-Columbia Silver Baton Awards announced this morning by Columbia University: Nova, the PBS science series produced at WGBH in Boston, won for “Japan’s Killer Quake”; WNYC reporter Alisa Chang, for her two-part investigative series on the New York Police Department, “Alleged Illegal Searches by the NYPD”; and Detroit Public Television, for “Beyond the Light Switch,” a documentary series produced and directed by Ed Moore and reported by David Biello of the Scientific American. The duPont jury presented a Finalist Award to WNYC’s Radio Rookies for “Coming Up in 2011,” a collection of “unflinching self-portraits” by teenagers from Staten Island.

PBS NewsHour has a new political editor. Christina Bellantoni of CQ Roll Call takes her post on Jan. 2, 2012, to oversee all political coverage on air and online, including political analysis, elections and personalities. NewsHour’s previous political editor, David Chalain, departed to lead the Washington bureau of Yahoo News in November. Bellantoni has spent more than a decade covering national political and business news in Washington, D.C., and California. She has worked as associate politics editor at CQ Roll Call since October 2010, appearing as a political analyst on Hardball, Countdown, On the Record w/ Greta Van Susteren, Reliable Sources, TopLine, The Rachel Maddow Show and The Daily Rundown.

Don’t miss Whiteout Christmas, this year’s annual seasonal story by WHYY’s Chris Satullo and Tony Auth, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. They’ve created a serialized, illustrated Christmas story together nearly every year since 1996. The first 12 appeared in the newspaper; since 2009, they’ve been online at WHYY.org and NewsWorks.org, as well as broadcast on WHYY-FM as radio plays. Four of the stories also were collected in their 2004 book, A Christmas Quartet. This year’s radio version — starring Satullo, Auth and a slew of WHYY staffers — will be broadcast on 90.9 FM in Philadelphia at 8 p.m.