Friends and colleagues of the late Bill McCarter filled Kenilworth Union Church in the Chicago suburb “to hear tributes to the man credited with transforming WTTW-Channel 11 into one of the nation’s premier public television stations during his 27 years as president and general manager,” writes Chicago media reporter Robert Feder today (May 6). One speaker was Newton Minow, the former FCC chairman who recruited McCarter to the post. Minow recalled a visit with McCarter to the station’s transmitter atop what was then the world’s tallest building, the Sears (now Willis) Tower: “That signal is pure, it is powerful, it is innovative, it is fair, it is trusted, and above all, it stands for public service,” Minow said.

Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society has launched its new-and-improved Media Cloud. According to the site, it’s “an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to answer quantitative questions about the content of online media.” It displays what stories media sources are covering, the language various media use to report the news, and how items spread from one outlet to another. For more than a year, the site has been tracking 50,000 English-language stories daily from 17,000 media sources, including major mainstream media outlets, left- and right-leaning American political blogs and 1,000 popular general-interest blogs. “We’ve used what we’ve discovered from this data to analyze the differences in coverage of international crises in professional and citizen media and to study the rapid shifts in media attention that have accompanied the flood of breaking news that’s characterized early 2011,” the center said today (May 6) in a statement.

PBS Hawaii has hired two new staff members. Jared Kuroiwa is vice president of digital networking. He is a broadcast engineer with a background in web development, including social messaging. Roberta Wong Murray is vice president of programming and communications. She began her career as a news reporter and anchor at KRON-TV in San Francisco. She owned her own public relations firm, and was Hawaii’s media specialist for the U.S. Census in 2010.

In the run-up to Mother’s Day, StoryCorps released its latest heart-warming animated short. “No More Questions!” — featuring a strong-willed grandmother who reluctantly shared life stories with her son and grand-daughter in a StoryCorps recording booth — has topped 600,000 views since being featured on YouTube May 5. The animation is one of three to be featured on the upcoming season of P.O.V., PBS’s summer showcase for independent film.

U.S. Reps. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) and Steven LaTourette (R-Ohio) have jointly introduced the Community Access Preservation Act (H.R. 1746), which would put content, reception and signal-quality requirements on carriage of public, educational and government access channels and require cable operators to pay for them, according to the Alliance for Community Media. The bill, introduced Thursday (May 5), would amend the Communications Act to require cable operators to carry PEG channels without alteration or degradation, and make them viewable without additional equipment charges to every subscriber. American Community Television (ACT) , which advocates for PEG channel access, told Broadcasting & Cable that the bill is “critical to the survival of these important local television channels.

Former U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson is urging Florida residents to complain to the Federal Communications Commission regarding the upcoming sale of WMFE-TV, the Orlando Sentinel reports today (May 6). Grayson, a Democrat who served from 2009 to ’11, is hoping to stop the pending sale of the PBS affiliate to Daystar Television Network, a Texas-based religious broadcaster (Current, April 18). “For 46 years, Orlando, Florida has enjoyed public television and radio,” Grayson wrote in an email. “And if the Religious Right has its way, that’s over.” He urged recipients to submit comments to the FCC, which is soliciting public input on the license change.

Under a license transfer agreement announced this week, Cleveland’s commercial classical music station WCLV will become a subsidiary of ideastream, the Northern Ohio pubcaster that operates WVIZ-TV and WCPN-FM. The transfer is a donation, not an acquisition, intended to preserve the existing service and staff by sharing facilities, services and programming, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Both WCLV and ideastream are grounded in the same philosophy — that broadcasters have a great opportunity and hence a great responsibility to use the medium to enrich and enlarge the lives of the public they serve,” says Robert Conrad, WCLV president and co-founder, in Crain’s Cleveland Business.

Will Curtis, former voice of The Nature of Things on Vermont Public Radio, one of the first pubradio programs to address environmental concerns, died April 18 in his sleep at home in Woodstock, Vt. He was 94. “Amid evocations of the state’s ever popular maple syrup and fall foliage, he would slip in a lesson on how to swing a scythe,” the Boston Globe noted in a remembrance Friday (May 6). “Listening by satellite, everyone from farmers to urban dwellers thousands of miles away would marvel at how he turned the mechanics of mowing by hand into a kind of plainspoken poetry.”

“Neglected to Death,” an investigative reporting series launched by WLRN-FM and the Miami Herald this week, uncovered problems in the regulation of Florida’s assisted living facilities, including questionable deaths and cases of abuse and neglect of the elderly and mentally ill. The investigative team built a database that expanded upon incomplete and missing records from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration;the computer-assisted reporting allowed the team to piece together detailed histories of assisted living facilities and identify the most troubled homes. The Herald reports details of how the investigative reporting was done in this story; its multimedia reporting package is here.

Henry Becton, whose employer co-produced a lot of television programs with British broadcasters, is now an Honorary Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE). The CBE, issued by order of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, was presented by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales at an investiture ceremony May 5 at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., in recognition of Becton’s “extraordinary service to the arts and entertainment industry,” the embassy said in a statement. Under Becton’s leadership, from 1984 until his retirement in 2007, “WGBH was the American co-producer of some of the most prestigious British dramas and documentaries made during that time,” the embassy said.

In a first-time collaboration, WGBH Boston and New Hampshire Public Television are coordinating their television broadcast schedules to air “Freedom Riders,” the highly anticipated American Experience documentary commemorating the 50th anniversary of the famous civil rights effort “This is the first feature-length film about the Freedom Rides, a pivotal moment in the American civil rights movement, and we wanted to maximize viewers’ opportunity to see it,” Maria Bruno-Ruiz, WGBH associate director of programming, said today (May 5) in a statement. “By coordinating the WGBH and NHPTV schedules, we better serve audiences in our region.” “Our stations reach viewers in both states, so we’re essentially creating a joint schedule that is complementary and extends the broadcast of this powerful film,” said Dawn DeAngelis, NHPTV chief content officer.

Pubcaster Tavis Smiley, host of shows on both PBS and Public Radio International, receives WHYY’s Lifelong Learning Award today (May 5). “I was a bit shocked actually that WHYY called me and said they wanted to honor me,” Smiley told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “in part because I was disappointed years ago when I made the switch from NPR to PRI and WHYY did not pick my radio program back up. So I was a bit shocked when they called to ask me to receive an award. I’m like, ‘Y’all don’t even carry my radio show.'” However, “I’m grateful for the honor,” he added.

Native Public Media has hired policy analyst Traci Morris as its director of operations, it announced today (May 5). She’s the founder of  Homahota Consulting, which provides research on Internet use and development of broadband in Indian Country. Morris was co-author of the first quantitative and qualitative broadband study commissioned by Native Public Media, “New Media, Technology and Internet Use in Indian County.” She is a member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, and has a doctorate in American Indian studies and comparative culture and literary studies from University of Arizona. Morris has taught for more than a decade there, at Arizona State University and East Central Oklahoma University.

Public broadcasters in Minnesota could lose millions in state support for arts and cultural heritage programs under a proposal floated by Republicans in the statehouse. The Minnesota Legacy Fund, financed through a sales tax increase that Minnesota voters approved in 2008, awarded $11.6 million to the state’s public broadcasters and community radio stations in its first two years. Republican lawmakers in the House want to end direct Legacy funding to specific organizations such as Minnesota Public Radio and adopt a competitive grant-making process. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that conservative lawmakers object to monies earmarked for MPR, which received $2.6 million in the last biennial funding cycle.

When I first started working in public radio 30-plus years ago, I was a college dropout and my day job was butchering fish on the docks in Sitka, Alaska. That’s the village where I grew up. That little public radio station was about as rural and rooted as you could want. Sure, there were jazz shows, and you could sometimes smell a little pot in the air room. But there were also shows about hunting and fishing. At night, we broadcast “muskeg messages” to trollers and long-liners anchored out near the commercial fishing grounds. And they let me, a local guy in rubber boots and Carhartts, start volunteering.