The Public Radio Exchange has received a MacArthur Foundation Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, an annual $500,000 grant awarded only to previous MacArthur grantees with budgets of less than $2.5 million. “By gathering and distributing new programming and using technological innovation to expand content choices, PRX is leading public radio to become more interactive, diverse, and participatory,” the foundation said today in its release. PRX explains that it will use the money to upgrade its web service, encourage the development of new PRX content and create a capital reserve that will support the creation of an independent board of directors.

Public TV’s lobbying unit, the Association of Public Television Stations, said today it expects to hire a new president by September. The Boston-based search firm of Issacson, Miller, which specializes in nonprofit leadership posts, will conduct a nationwide hunt. Jane Gruenebaum, a onetime congressional staffer who was executive director of the League of Women Voters and c.o.o. of the Center for Policy Alternatives, is heading the search, working with Gail Gregory. In March, John Lawson left APTS after leading it for seven years.

This year’s slate of Webby nominees includes thirteen different public broadcasting websites and mobile services, as well as PBS Kids Sprout, the pubTV- affiliated digital channel. NPR Music’s Project Song received three nominations in the online film and video division, and Frontline/World received three. Nominees in the Web division include Seattle music station KEXP, World Without Oil, and political coverage on NPR.org. Voting for the Webby People’s Voice Awards closes on May 1; winners will be announced May 6.

A documentary about David Newell, who played Mr. McFeely on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and continues to makes in-character appearances 40 years later, premieres tomorrow in Pittsburgh. The doc, made on $4,000 by a 26-year-old who forged a friendship with Newell three years ago, follows the speedy delivery man–in and out of costume–through a summer of engagements, including one on a Mr. Rogers’ replica set in Baltimore.

Adobe has released its new, free Flash-based video player, which includes content from PBS and the Bay Area’s KQED. Viewers can stream or download video, and they can watch while online or offline. The current business model relies on ads attached to videos, but Adobe may develop other models, such as paying to download or rent, reports CNET. Other content partners include CBS, MTV and Scripps Networks.

Frontline‘s “Bush’s War” has garnered more than 1.5 million online views of all or part of the program. The website features an interactive timeline of the “war on terror” that incorporates 175 embedded video clips. Frontline recently built a new, full-screen video player with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. [See New York Times story on the website here and Current’s story on Frontline‘s war coverage here.]

PubTV’s government-relations unit, the Association of Public Television Stations (APTS), will move its offices this weekend from downtown Washington to the same building across the Potomac where PBS is headquartered. As of Monday, April 7, APTS’ address will be 2100 Crystal Drive, Suite 700, Arlington, VA 22202. Phone and fax numbers won’t change.

Maria Thomas, builder of NPR’s web services since 2001, will return to cutting-edge e-commerce in May, PaidContent.org reported Tuesday. She’ll be chief operating officer of Etsy.com, a three-year-old Brooklyn-based online marketplace for handmade craft objects that recently sold more than 400,000 items worth $5.6 million in March. She came to NPR from Amazon.com. “It is about an opportunity for me, and not much to do with NPR,” Thomas told PaidContent. See press accounts of Etsy.com.

Yesterday’s announcement that WYPR founder and former host Mark Steiner won a Peabody Award coincided with the station’s on-air fundraising drive and reinvigorated the protesters camped outside its studios, according to the Baltimore Sun. “I called and told them there’s no way I’m giving them any money,” said Anita Lingan, a Steiner supporter who used to be a dollar-a-day WYPR member. “I want them to feel this.”

Of the 35 George Foster Peabody Awards announced today, 14 went to programs produced and/or aired by public broadcasters. Winners, chosen by the Peabody Board as the best of electronic media in 2007 include: Design Squad, a reality TV show of engineering challenges for older kids; The MTT Files, a pubradio series featuring San Francisco Symphony Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas; and Just Words, created by former WYPR-FM host Marc Steiner to bring the voices of Baltimore’s most under-privileged citizens to the air. Three of PBS’s winning programs, including Design Squad, were produced by Boston’s WGBH.

On May 1, before its second season on the Showtime cable channel, This American Life will try a one-night-only live HD broadcast to 317 movie theaters around the country, satellite-fed through National Cinemedia. (The same company distributes live HD Metropolitan Opera broadcasts to theaters, including La Boheme, April 5.) The two-hour show will include previews of the upcoming TV season, also in HD, plus Ira Glass presenting a radio story and Q&A with the far-flung audience. Nearly 70 pubradio stations are promoting the event and using tickets as member premiums. It’ll be 8 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Central, 6 p.m.

“Caring for Your Parents leaves the impression that we all love our mothers and fathers without ambivalence or reservation” and will honorably care for them, writes Ginia Bellafonte in a New York Times review. A more realistic look, she says, would include the “ornery and selfish patriarch of The Savages, the recent fictional film that regarded the same subject with more complexity and skepticism, examining how grown children respond when they are obliged to care for parents who failed to care spectacularly for them.” The PBS doc, produced by Michael Kirk for WGBH, airs tonight.

In this Q&A, content creators talk with Current about why they decided to pursue a project and how they produced it. What: Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?, a four-hour PBS series that the network scheduled for four Thursday nights on public TV starting March 27. Who made: Larry Adelman, series creator and executive producer, co-director of California Newsreel. Production companies: California Newsreel with Vital Pictures. Presenters: the CPB-funded National Minority Consortia. Segment producers: Llewellyn Smith (co-executive producer), Christine Herbes-Sommers, Julie Crawford, Tracy Heather Strain, Randall MacLowry, Eric Stange, Patricia Garcia Rios, Maria Teresa Rodriguez, James M. Fortier, Sativa January, Ellie Lee, Kimberlee Bassford and James Rutenbeck.

The financially pinched owner of Salt Lake City news station KCPW-AM/FM has signed a letter of intent to sell its two FM licenses to a new nonprofit started by the station’s g.m., Ed Sweeney, the station reported today. If Wasatch Public Media, the new nonprofit, can’t fulfill its bargain, however, the station will be sold to a big religious broadcaster, EMF Broadcasting. Wasatch agreed to pay $2.4 million. The AM channel will go to another religious broadcaster, IHR Educational Broadcasting, for $1.3 million. The seller, based at KPCW in nearby Park City, is taking a loss on the AM station; it spent $2.5 million to buy and build it.

In his PBS ombudsman column, Michael Getler features nearly 30 of the letters he received about Frontline‘s two-part Iraq war retrospective, “Bush’s War.” One Alaska viewer writes, “Thank you for running the story about Bush’s war. I serve in the U.S. Army. I will be starting my third tour in a month.” But about half the letters are critical of the program for being either one-sided or not in-depth enough. Getler’s take is that while the doc offered a “visual and audible whole that simply does not exist elsewhere,” there were holes–more time should have been devoted to assessing the “surge,” Gen.