Ira Glass toiled at humdrum radio stories for eight years before he showed any sign of developing a unique voice, he tells the Los Angeles Daily News.

An aggressive ad campaign touts WEIU, a tiny public TV station in eastern Illinois, as “your new choice for PBS.” The slogan annoys its northern public TV neighbor WILL to no end, according to the Campaign News-Gazette.

The PBS broadcast of Shroud of Christ?, presented April 7 on Secrets of the Dead, has drawn complaints from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. The presentation was “a study in pseudoscience, faulty logic, and the suppression of historical facts,” writes a CSICOP senior researcher. “The intellectual incompetence or outright dishonesty of the show’s producers is matched only by that of the PBS executives who foisted it on a credulous Easter-season audience.”

The Washington Post tries adding some perspective to the reassignment of Bob Edwards, but makes little progress in untangling the PR web behind it. (Reg. req.) “We have all heard of people rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” writes a Louisville Courier-Journal columnist. “[NPR’s Jay] Kernis is throwing deck chairs overboard from the company flagship.” (More in the San Francisco Chronicle.)

The cry from a distraught public rang out: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” After announcing the reassignment of Morning Edition host Bob Edwards March 23, the network struggled to explain itself amid a coast-to-coast NPR-bashing in the media and a record influx of listener complaints. Some public radio managers joined the attack on NPR brass. Even those who supported the network’s aim — to strengthen Morning Edition with a two-host setup — criticized it for poor timing and lack of public-relations finesse. Many stations were scheduled to begin on-air fund drives shortly after the announcement and feared repercussions. The network will reassign Edwards as a senior correspondent at the end of April, removing him from the high-profile post he held for almost 25 years.

NPR reassigned Morning Edition host Bob Edwards to make way for a two-host setup intended to strengthen the show's news coverage, said Jay Kernis, NPR's senior v.p. of programming.

Was Emma Goldman a fraud, a killer or a real revolutionary? PBS viewers won’t find the answer in tonight’s American Experience, writes a New York Times reviewer. By ignoring the question, the film “forgoes an opportunity to illuminate the link between idealism and terrorism and to gauge the relevance of Goldman to our accursed world.”

Just five weeks after filing his last Letter from America for the BBC, Alistair Cooke died March 30 [2004] at his home in Manhattan. He was 95 and had heart disease. Cooke had delivered the Letter for 58 years, far exceeding his 26 years as a U.S. correspondent for Britain's Guardian newspaper or the mere 22 years he hosted Masterpiece Theatre.

Louis Schwartz, an attorney active in public broadcasting for three decades and a partner in Schwartz, Woods & Miller, died March 31. His family is holding a memorial service Saturday, April 10, at the River Road Unitarian Church in Bethesda, Md.

WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C., has received the largest donation in its history, a $250,000 bequest from late journalist and communications professional Ellen Wadley Roper.

An editorial cartoonist imagines mornings without Bob.

New BBC Chairman Michael Grade doesn’t have an easy choice of a man to fill the director general post, reports David Cox in London’s New Statesman. The job might go to a woman for the first time. (May require subscription.)

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that an anonymous “friend” of KCTS is lending the station $7 million to pay off its creditors, including PBS.

Listeners remain steamed about losing Bob Edwards, says NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin, and NPR has erred by not reporting more extensively on the departure of the Morning Edition host. Cokie Roberts tells the Philadelphia Inquirer that NPR goofed: “When you have 10,000 listeners saying it’s a mistake, it’s probably a mistake.” (Req. req. Via Romenesko.) One general manager says in the Houston Chronicle that NPR’s claim that stations pushed for the change could be called “a bald-faced lie.”

Pittsburgh’s WQED announced today that it will lease out its second channel to HSN’s America’s Store shopping network for three years, retaining the right to air some public TV programs and promos on the channel. Rumbles of a new deal were heard in March by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which said the station has tried several plans to “unload” the station and bolster its revenues since 1996. The station signed to sell it to a California broadcaster in 2001, but the deal fell through in 2002.