The departure of the entire four-person faculty from Maine’s small but influential Salt Institute for Documentary Studies has caused concern among the school’s alumni, many of whom found their way into public radio via Salt’s unique classes in audio production. The teachers who left have either declined to discuss their resignations publicly or said their reasons for leaving were personal and unrelated. The executive director of the Portland-based school and its board of trustees echo those accounts. That has done little to assure alums, however, who fear that the close timing of the departures suggests problems behind the scenes. “It’s a pretty clear picture that there’s an underlying issue and a reason they all decided to leave,” says Jen Dean, a photographer and Salt grad who has represented alumni in meetings with Salt leadership.

John Kaplan was scared. He’d been diagnosed with not one but two types of lymphoma, and chemotherapy had begun to ravage his once-thick head of hair. So he did what came naturally when confronted with human drama: Kaplan, a photographer and teacher of photography, picked up a camera and began to shoot. “For me initially, it was a way to cope with fear,” Kaplan says. He assigned the story to himself and went to work. That simple self-portrait in his bathroom mirror — a haggard-looking man holding a camera above his shedding pate — became his first work on a triumphant personal documentary that has won more than 20 awards, including a Cine Golden Eagle.

A Dutch government proposal to scale back activities of its overseas broadcaster, Radio Netherlands Worldwide, is unlikely to affect its most widely carried English-language programs on U.S. public radio stations, according to editors and managers behind the shows. The subject areas of The State We’re In and Earth Beat both would fit well within reorganization plans outlined by Dutch policymakers this month — to focus the service on freedom of expression in countries where such rights are suppressed. The Dutch cabinet also proposed to operate RNW as an arm of the Foreign Ministry. The change — set to be debated by the Dutch Parliament this week — is part of a fiscal-austerity plan that would strip some 20 percent of RNW’s government funding.

The Knight Foundation awarded $420,000 last week to support the development of Zeega, an open-source HTML5 platform co-created by independent public radio producer Kara Oehler, a creator of the Mapping Main Street project. Zeega will enable the creation of “participatory multimedia projects on web, tablet and mobile devices,” according to its website. The platform will allow creators to combine web-based media including audio, maps, photos, video and text. Oehler and her collaborators, Jesse Shapins and James Burns, were inspired to create Zeega after producing the multimedia Mapping Main Street project, according to an article in the Harvard Gazette. (The three are affiliated with the university.)

New Jersey’s lower legislative house last week voted down the plan by Gov. Chris Christie (R) to turn over the channels and role of the NJN television network to New York’s WNET, and the state Senate is expected to follow if it votes Monday, June 27, according to observers on NJN’s Reporter’s Roundtable. NJN may disappear even if the Senate concurs with the Assembly, however. Last week Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Paul Sarlo (D) raised the option of extending NJN funding for a few more months but predicted that the governor would veto it. The issue has been fully partisanized.

The new report to the FCC about the state of the media and the future of American journalism estimates that filling gaps in local reporting would cost from $265 million to $1.6 billion a year. It also suggests various ways in which the government could help nonprofit media afford to bridge that chasm. “The main focus of government policy should not be providing the funds to sustain reporting but helping to create conditions under which nonprofit news operations can gain traction,” the report advises. But observers point out that the FCC has no power to make many of those changes, which include adjusting tax laws for pubmedia organizations, getting foundations to fund more journalism, and rethinking CPB’s legislated spending proportions to allot more money to nonbroadcast and multimedia innovators.

One of the Knight News Challenge winners announced last week was Zeega, an open-source HTML5 platform co-created by independent public radio producer Kara Oehler, a creator of the Mapping Main Street project, which received $420,000. Zeega will enable the creation of “participatory multimedia projects on web, tablet and mobile devices,” according to its website. The platform will allow creators to combine media web-based media including audio, maps, photos, video and text. Oehler and her collaborators, Jesse Shapins and James Burns, were inspired to create Zeega after producing the multimedia Mapping Main Street project, according to an article in the Harvard Gazette.

LulzSec, the hacking group that saw itself as pirates on the Web seas, has disbanded and ceased all activity, according to its final statement posted on Sunday (June 26). Its 50-day run of Internet security breaches included targeting PBS.org (Current, June 13) to protest Frontline’s “WikiSecrets” report; its six members also hit Sony, the U.S. Senate, the FBI and Britain’s X Factor TV show. What was it all about? ” … [W]e truly believe in the AntiSec movement. … We hope, wish, even beg, that the movement manifests itself into a revolution that can continue on without us.

John F. Gregory, an early general manager at KPCC-FM in Pasadena, Calif., died May 9 at his Los Angeles home. Gregory led the station at Pasadena City College in the late 1970s and early ’80s, longtime KPCC newsman Larry Mantle wrote on a station blog. During that time Gregory professionalized the station, establishing it as one of the first NPR-member stations and hiring a full-time staff of five to qualify for CPB funding. He hired Mantle as news director in 1983. After the college separated from the Pasadena city public school system, the station went with the college and changed its call letters from KPCS to KPCC in 1979.

Bob Paquette, senior news producer and local host of Morning Edition at WFCR-FM in Amherst, Mass., died unexpectedly May 28 of an apparent heart attack. He was 55. For many listeners, Paquette was “the voice of WFCR every morning,” station General Manager Martin Miller said in a release. “There are no words to express our shock and grief over the loss of our colleague and friend Bob Paquette. Our heartfelt condolences and sympathies go out to Bob’s husband, Michael Packard, and to their families, friends and colleagues.” “Believe it or not, getting up at 4 a.m. is not such a bad gig,” Paquette said in his profile on the station’s website.

Chris Ulanowski, a former news director at WRVO in Oswego, N.Y., died May 30. He was 51. Ulanowski spent 27 years at the station, winning the Syracuse Press Club’s career achievement award in 2008. During his tenure as news director, the station won three national awards in two years for “Talk of the Nation: Religious Bricks,” on issues of church and state in the Mexico, N.Y., school district. It took first-place awards from the Public Radio News Directors Inc. Awards in 2000 and won first- and second-place PRNDI awards in 1999. Ulanowski is survived by his wife, Rochelle Manley of Fulton; three daughters; and four siblings.

Jim Sweenie, a four-decade staffer at Pittsburgh’s WQED-FM and host of its Saturday Night Requests, died June 4 after complications from surgery the previous day. He was 76. The station will broadcast a special Saturday Night Requests: Jim Sweenie Tribute on June 18 at 8 p.m. Eastern, with memories and dedications, including condolences from listeners. Sweenie got into radio in the early 1950s by hanging around WMCK-AM in McKeesport, Pa. The station paid him $10 a week for putting away records and reading a sign-off. As he used to say, he was “fired several times.” He loved the theater and began his life on stage at age 17 at the local White Barn Theater starring as a French-speaking taxi driver opposite Colleen Dewhurst.

George Leigh Hall, 82, a public television leader in North Carolina, Illinois and Virginia, died June 5 at a retirement home in Fuquay-Varina, N.C. His wife of 60 years, Katherine Waddington Hall, had died six months earlier. After starting in radio during the 1940s in his hometown of Reidsville, N.C., north of Raleigh, Hall joined Capitol Broadcasting Company’s WRAL-AM in Raleigh and advanced to program manager; helped the company acquire a television license and served as the TV station’s first program manager. In 1960, Hall became g.m. of North Carolina State University’s Raleigh studios of the state educational TV network, UNC-TV.

Stanley S. Neustadt, 87, a longtime communications lawyer for public stations, died May 30 in suburban Virginia. He had lived with Parkinson’s disease for the past 12 years. “Anyone who appreciates public radio and TV should give him some credit because he had a large role in preserving and reserving the frequencies for them,” said a friend and law school classmate Herbert Schulkind. Not long after receiving his law degree from Columbia University in 1948, Neustadt found himself near the center of an unprecedented disturbance at the FCC. He joined the FCC staff as legal assistant to Frieda Hennock, the first female member of the commission and a flamboyant, persistent advocate for reserved educational channels.

“Blessed Be the Ties that Bind” may be music to churchgoers, but many station leaders find it discordant. No matter how much CEOs welcome the blessings of major gifts, they tend to start doubting if they find strings attached. Increasingly, big donors do attach conditions. Not all want to see their name on a building or a room, but they do want to see their gifts used for purposes that matter to them, even when giving to the operating fund. Donors give for their own reasons; the fact that a station needs “to pay the power bill,” as one CEO put it, tends to be less compelling than content about topics that matter to them.