Bob Friedman, a Nightly Business Report correspondent back in the 1980s, left pubcasting for a life in … barbecue. And it turns out he’s still enamored of it. As Friedman tells the News & Observer newspaper in Raleigh, N.C., “I still have pig fat in my blood.” While reporting for NBR, a conversation on foreign trade with then-U.S. Rep. Don Sundquist of Memphis led to a discussion of barbecue and an idea for a restaurant, Red Hot & Blue. It eventually grew to 35 outlets when Friedman and his partners sold it three years ago. But the sale to a private equity firm wasn’t lucrative enough to retire, he says.

The Public Insight Network, a reporting tool from American Public Media that invites audience members to volunteer as sources, wants to increase the number of conservative voices in its database of some 100,000 names. So Michael Caputo, a Minnesota Public Radio analyst with PIN, wrote to the right-leaning Powerline blog for help surveying its readers. “We recognize the need to have more Republican and/or conservative citizens in this network, especially with the GOP nomination up for grabs,” Caputo writes. “So we are making a specific plea for you to become part of this network and help inform what the media sees as news.

The local City Pulse in Lansing, Mich., is reporting that sources say as many as 10 staffers have been laid off from WKAR at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Kirsten Khire, communications manager for the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, told the paper that MSU Broadcasting Services, which includes WKAR-TV and WKAR Radio, issued layoff notices Monday (Aug. 15) but declined to say how many. Khire cited “sizable budgetary challenges” at the station as the reason for the terminations. She said the cuts took place “across the organization of Broadcasting Services.” The College of Communications Arts and Sciences took over WKAR in July, and replaced former g.m.

KET in Louisville is consolidating its facilities into one downtown production center, it announced today (Aug. 18). The new space on Main Street will combine its outreach office (right) and production facility, which since 1997 has been in the basement and first floor of a building owned by the county school district. Improvements will include a high-speed fiber-optic line connecting the Louisville facility to KET’s Network Center in Lexington. The move gives KET the second street-side public television studio in the country, along with the Tisch WNET Studios at Lincoln Center in New York City. “With Main Street as a backdrop, this studio space will become a part of the community itself,” said Executive Director Shae Hopkins.

Story Exchange, a crowd-funding experiment piloted by Public Radio Exchange and Louisville Public Media, has garnered full funding for two long-form reporting projects: Erica Peterson’s three-part series on disposal of coal ash produced by electrical power plants, and in-depth coverage of the environmental effects of the Ohio River Bridge project, a reporting assignment that’s now in the works. PRX received a 2010 Knight News Challenge grant to pilot the project with LPM and Spot.us. PRX’s John Barth recently reported for MediaShift on the progress so far, and tentative plans to expand Story Exchange to additional public radio markets and indie producers.

Humorist, author and playwright Kevin Kling has signed on for a three-year residency with Minnesota Public Radio, the network announced Wednesday (Aug. 17), prompting speculation that Kling could be waiting in the wings to step into hosting duties for A Prairie Home Companion following Garrison Keillor’s retirement next spring. MPR says Kling will present original works exclusively on the Fitzgerald Theater stage (gee … that’s home base for APHC … ), conduct storytelling workshops and provide radio commentaries. He is the author of books The Dog Says How, Holiday Inn and Big Little Brother. According to his website, Kling was born with a congenital birth defect: His left arm is about three-quarters the size of his right, and his left hand has no wrist or thumb.

Shirley Gillette, who worked for more than two decades at New York’s WNET, died July 26 at her home atop Schooley’s Mountain in New Jersey, after an illness. “In her own strong and forthright way,” said a tribute Tuesday (Aug. 16) on the local Long Valley Patch website, Gillette “blazed a trail for women by earning her master’s degree at a time when only a small circle of women attended institutions of higher learning, and worked as one of the early pioneers in public television.” She spent 23 years as director of educational programming at the station. She was born in Pontiac, Ill.,

Rhode Island Public Radio is working on a three-way lease swap. WRNI currently broadcasts on 1290 AM in Providence and 102.7 FM in Southern Rhode Island. The 10-year lease would allow its news-talk WRNI AM to broadcast on Wheeler High School’s WELH 88.1 FM, and the NPR member station would lease its 1290 AM signal to Latino Public Radio, which currently leases 5 a.m. to noon on WELH. Joe O’Connor, RIPR g.m., says he hopes the switch, which will allow the station to reach tens of thousands of new listeners, can be made by Oct. 1. RIPR would pay $75,000 dollars a year for 88.1 FM as well as three percent of any additional revenues.

Public broadcasters are among journalists receiving grants from the Knight Foundation as part of its Reporting on Religion and American Public Life initiative. The USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism announced the recipients of the awards, between $5,000 and $20,000, on Monday (Aug. 15). Included are reporter/producer Matt Ozug, known for his StoryCorps work on NPR, who will co-produce “The Sacred in the City,” a website on religious communities of immigrants; Christopher Johnson, whose reporting has run on NPR, will produce radio stories on Ifa, an ancient Nigeria-based religion now practiced in America; and Monique Parsons, another NPR contributor, will examine a new generation of mosque builders in the United States.

Cliff Mass, the colorful local weather guy whose non-weather opinions got him booted off Seattle’s news channel KUOW in May, soon will have a regular spot on jazz station KPLU in Tacoma, according to the Seattle Times. Mass, a University of Washington professor of atmospheric sciences, was featured weekly on KUOW’s morning show, Weekday, to discuss weather. But sometimes he would veer off onto other subjects, including a controversy over which textbooks to use in local schools. Station management asked him to stop; he refused. And so Steve Scher, host and executive producer of Weekday, removed Mass from the unpaid spot.

Fred Newman, who does all those cool sound effects for A Prairie Home Companion, is pretty in sync with host Garrison Keillor, he tells the Hampton Roads news site. “I can anticipate what he’s going to do from watching his eyebrows,” Newman says. Newman, 59, was raised near LaGrange, Ga. “His grandfather’s farm, right across the street from Newman’s house,” the story notes, “was home to whinnying horses, boc-boc-bocking chickens and mooooing cows.”

Loris Ann Taylor, executive director of Native Public Media, appears in one of a dozen videos on the Information Stories website, which features short narratives about what happens when local news and related information doesn’t flow to all members of a community equally well. The project was created by Ohio State University law professor Peter Shane and Columbus, Ohio-based filmmaker Liv Gjestvang, who recruited participants nationwide to share their experiences during a digital storytelling workshop last summer. Taylor discusses how her dedication to bringing broadband to Indian country is rooted in her childhood experience of media impoverishment. Shane and I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, an academic journal he helped to found at Ohio State, are hosting a symposium next March, “The Future of Online Journalism: News, Community and Democracy in the Digital Age,” to further explore the capacity of new media to serve the information needs of a democracy.

KQED is embarking on two new collaborations, with Networked Journalism and the Huffington Post. It’s the first pubcasting organization to join the Networked Journalism program, which connects broadcast and print news outlets with local online news sites. KQED will collaborate with San Francisco-area news outlets Berkeleyside, Oakland Local, NeighborWebSJ and the San Francisco Public Press to cover community news. Jo Anne Wallace, vice president and general manager of KQED Public Radio, said in a statement that the initiative gives the station an opportunity to offer “a more diverse, more in-depth news service for our respective online news readers and radio listeners.”

John Crosby, who plead guilty in April to sending violent threats to two NPR hosts through the network’s website, was sentenced on Aug. 12 in Portland, Maine, to 46 months in a prison facility that offers mental health treatment. In January, Crosby sent more than 20 messages containing anti-Semitic and misogynistic terms targeting All Things Considered hosts Melissa Block and Guy Raz. In court last Friday, Crosby described being unemployed, worried about his newborn twins and sleeping in his car. He said he felt NPR was not doing a good job covering the economic situation. “I am not alone. I’m obviously alone in being someone who dealt with my anger and stress in an odd way,” Crosby said.

Latino Public Broadcasting was honored with the prestigious Norman Lear Award at the 26th Annual Imagen Awards gala on Aug 12 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. The honor is presented annually to a Latino writer or entity that has “excelled creatively to dispel negative stereotypes and perceptions of the Latino community,” LPB said in a statement. Latino Public Broadcasting Executive Director Sandie Viquez Pedlow and LPB founder and Chairman of the Board Edward James Olmos accepted the award. A complete list of Imagen Award winners is here.