Officials in Montgomery County, Md., have made a pitch to lure NPR to the city of Silver Spring, reports the Gazette. NPR has narrowed its search for 400,000 square feet of office and studio space to Silver Spring and two sites in D.C. The network has said it will choose a location by the end of May.

Kirk Browning, who directed 185 Live from Lincoln Center telecasts and other performance programs for PBS, died Feb. 10 at the age of 86, reports the New York Times. “Kirk contained the entire history of cultural television in our country,” said John Goberman, series producer of Lincoln Center.

Public TV traveler Rick Steves is host of Marijuana: It’s Time for a Conversation, a new 30-minute DVD produced by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington State. The group has launched a multimedia campaign to question the fairness of U.S. policies regarding marijuana use and possession. “I’ve traveled throughout Europe and seen how they handle marijuana use and enforcement. I’ve learned that more thoughtful approaches can work,” Steves said in an ACLU release. “We need the understanding to go beyond ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ on drugs and find a policy that is ‘smart on drugs’.”

“I usually find out about breaking news on Twitter faster than any other network – broadcast or otherwise,” says NPR’s Andy Carvin in a Christian Science Monitor story on the micro-blogging application. Pubcasting consultant Rob Paterson, also a source in the Monitor story, has proposed that pubcasters set up Twitter Clubs to cover the March 4 Ohio primaries.

Andres Viestad, host of pubTV’s New Scandinavian Cooking with Andres Viestad, launched a new monthly column for the Washington Post today. The column, called “The Gastronomer,” is about “the science of everyday cooking,” according to the editor’s note. “Kitchen science tends to forget the enjoyment part of gastronomy; it can be far too demanding when it suggests how we can improve the way we cook,” writes Viestad in his first installment. 

NTIA is seeking station chief execs and other senior management as volunteer reviewers for grant applications in March and April. The agency said it needs 20 or more, working in teams of three, to review stations’ funding requests to the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program between March 24 and April 11. “PTFP has an engineering staff, so it also cannot use station engineers as reviewers,” said a memo circulated by program officer Walter Sheppard. Contact Sheppard at 202-482-1949 or wsheppard -at- ntia.doc.gov. Volunteers won’t be reviewing apps from their own or related stations, of course. PTFP grant applications are due Feb. 22.

WYPR in Baltimore has hired Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks to replaced talk-show host Marc Steiner. Rodricks will inherit Steiner’s noon to 2 p.m. slot on Feb. 25 and follow a similar call-in format. The station canceled its winter pledge drive in the wake of listener outcry about Steiner’s firing. Station v.p. Andy Bienstock said the station will hold a combined winter and spring drive in April, after listeners have had a chance to hear the new show, reports the Sun. Steiner, who helped raise money to buy the station from Johns Hopkins University in 2001, was fired Feb. 1.

Connecticut Public Television and WFSB, the local CBS affiliate, are creating the Connecticut Sports Network. The network will broadcast high school and collegiate sports from across the state, beginning with the state high school basketball championships in March. Games will air on the digital and primary channels of CPTV and WFSB. Video of games will be posted on a new website, www.ctsn.tv, which is yet to come. In a video realease on wfsb.org, Connecticut Public Broadcasting President Jerry Franklin said the network also hopes to do some documentary-style programming about the state’s sports. CPTV is already a major broadcaster of UConn women’s basketball.

Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher surveys the HD Radio offerings of D.C. stations and finds only two outlets–WHUR and WAMU–have made big commitments to creating “real radio” experiences for HD listeners. The majority of D.C. stations are half-heartedly programming their HD channels and barely promoting them. “HD remains a promising technology, but so far, many more people listen to the new programming via online streaming than on an HD radio,” Fisher concludes. “Listeners are voting with their ears, and they’re choosing Web-based and mobile audio, in part because most HD radio programming just isn’t compelling enough to lure people to a different gadget.”

Public TV’s top lobbyist for seven years, John Lawson, moves to a maverick commercial TV network March 14 as executive v.p., policy and strategic initiatives of Ion Media Networks, he announced today. Station reps at an Association of Public Television Stations meeting gave a standing ovation to Lawson, who had led their defense against budget cuts, negotiations for DTV carriage on cable and DBS, and creation of a new federal emergency alert net using DTV. Ion, formerly known as Paxson Communications and part-owned by NBC Universal, has more commercial TV stations than any U.S. broadcaster. Lawson, who helped develop the Open Mobile Video Coalition, will play a leading role in a new video service for mobile devices that Ion plans to put on its DTV signals next winter.

CPB filled its top TV programming vacancy today, hiring Ted Garcia, g.m. of KNME-TV in Albuquerque, N.M., as senior v.p. for television content, the corporation announced today. Garcia is also a member of the PBS Board and chairs its Interconnection Committee and the PBS Enterprises Board of Directors. He succeeds Greg Diefenbach, who leaves the job this month. Garcia joined the Albuquerque pubTV station in 2001, after 20 years at pubTV’s KETC in St. Louis, where he rose from director of operations to senior v.p. He also worked in NFL football coverage and for CBS’s St. Louis station, KMOX.

Centris, a market research firm in Los Angeles, warns that 5.9 million over-the-air digital TV receivers will lose access to at least one of the major TV networks when analog TV transmission goes away one year from today, the New York Times reported. Many will fall prey to the “cliff effect” of digital signals, which simply disappear from the screen instead of degrading with ghosts, static and snow as analog signals do. Centris said signals in Las Vegas, Philadelphia and St. Louis would peter out 35 miles from the transmitter, not at 60-70 miles as analog signals do. It’s worst in St.

PBS’s NewsHour and NPR were among the news organizations that mistakenly named Sen. Hillary Clinton the winner in the Missouri Democratic primary on Super Tuesday. For their live election coverage, both organizations relied on the erroneous Associated Press projection that Sen. Clinton had won the race, explained pubcasting ombudsmen Michael Getler of PBS and Alicia Shepard of NPR in their most recent columns. “Obviously, we wish we hadn’t been among those using the incorrect call, but we have no independent resources for checking the numbers,” NewsHour Executive Producer Linda Winslow tells readers of Getler’s column. “We talked about it on the air, saying we and other news orgs had called the state when it appeared Clinton had won with 96 percent of the vote counted,” wrote NPR’s Ron Elving, one of two political editors to sign off on the decision to call Missouri for Clinton, in an email to Shepard.

The world population of flat panel displays appears to be growing much faster than the world population of people. Worldwide, manufacturers’ shipments of panels, from tiny ones in phones to huge ones in HDTVs, have passed 3 billion a year and will pass 5 billion a year in 2015, according to DisplaySearch, a market research company. Even with the considerable assistance of the human sexual drive, the people population is growing just 77 million a year, having accumulated just 6.65 billion, the Census Bureau estimated. In the United States, 2.4 million HDTV sets were expected to be bought in time for the Super Bowl, the Consumer Electronics Association crowed.

ABC News will collaborate with New York’s WNET-TV to produce a Feb. 26 broadcast of the New York Philharmonic from North Korea, reports the New York Times. The broadcast will be distributed via PBS as well. “I didn’t want to just show a concert,” said Neal Shapiro, WNET’s president, about the collaboration with ABC. “It was a historic place at a historic time.”