“If PBS only had a sense of humor and encouraged more independent creativity and originality, its programs would serve audiences far better,” writes Lawrence Grossman, in the latest Columbia Journalism Review. The ex-PBS and NBC News president reviews two recent books on public TV, and offers his own prescription for fixing it.

“I am not a well-read or a well-educated person,” WNYC’s Steve Post tells the New York Times. “But I have a deep voice, which makes me sound authoritative.” Post is back on WNYC as host of The No Show.

NPR’s Terry Gross is working with California-based producer Margaret Pick, formerly of A Prairie Home Companion, on a book that will compile transcripts of Fresh Air highlights, according to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune.

You can hear samples from the new Public Radio Weekend service on the show’s website.

Also online from PRPD: the results of Walrus Research’s focus groups with classical music listeners.

Audience researcher David Giovannoni’s speech from last week’s Public Radio Program Directors’ conference is online.

NPR promoted New York Correspondent Melissa Block to co-host of All Things Considered with Robert Siegel, the Los Angeles Times reports.

I know more than a few public radio listeners who, while admiring the news reports on Morning Edition and All Things Considered, reserve their most ardent enthusiasm for what Bob Edwards once called “ornaments” — short, revealing commentaries scheduled between the “important” stories. A master of the form, Alice Furlaud, has been supplying commentaries for nearly as long as NPR has been broadcasting, first from Paris and more recently from her home on Cape Cod. Like another of my favorite NPR commentators, the psychiatrist Elissa Ely, Furlaud is a uniquely gifted, acerbic writer with a New England plainspokeness that adds considerable authority to what she says.

Lakota radio engineer Alex Lookingelk rides the highways of Wyoming, Montana and North and South Dakota, covering as many as 5,000 miles a month in his Chevy S-10 pickup. In the past seven years, Lookingelk has become known as a circuit-riding engineer for the public radio stations on the reservations and an all-around advisor to the stations. “He’ll say, ‘I have to go over to KGVA in Montana’ — that’s about a 12-hour drive,'” says Frank Blythe, executive director of Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT), based in Lincoln, Neb. “He handles most of the Upper Plains’ technical problems and he also gets involved in the politics.”

The Washington Post profiles Diane Rehm and her husband, John, who have written a new book about their difficult 45-year marriage.

Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute praises the “gravitas” of NPR’s Sept. 11 coverage.

NPR’s “Present at the Creation” series gets some ink in a New York Times story about backward-looking arts coverage in the media.

If you watch just one show about the anniversary of Sept. 11, Frontline‘s “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero” ought to be it, says Thane Peterson of BusinessWeek.

Currency, car air fresheners and gerbil shields: just some of the uses Car Talk listeners are suggesting for Tom and Ray’s hoard of yogurt lids, the leftovers from a bungled anti-SUV campaign.

NPR commentator Cokie Roberts tells USA Today that she has received over 1,000 letters, mostly from strangers, since she told the media that she has breast cancer.