Wilbur Herrington, the founding station engineer of University of Georgia’s WUOG-FM, died March 29 of a malignant brain tumor. He had been involved with the station in Athens since its founding in October 1972. “I can honestly say that Wilbur was, and very much will always continue to be, the heart and soul of WUOG,” Operations Director Akeeme Martin told the student newspaper, Red &Black. “He was fiercely proud of his spotless professional record, and the fact that the FCC never had to inspect WUOG,” said Tommy McGahee, a 2009 Georgia grad who worked Herrington. “He kept that station up and running for over three decades.”

The Media Access Project, a nonprofit public interest law firm and communications policy advocacy organization, is suspending operations May 1 after nearly 40 years, reports Deadline New York. Andrew Jay Schwartzman, its longtime leader, told the site that MAP “ran out of money.” In an announcement, the MAP Board said it reached the decision “after evaluating the difficult funding environment facing MAP and other progressive public interest groups.” The organization “achieved victories and accomplishments in proceedings that affect almost every aspect of the Federal Communications Commission’s activities,” the announcement said. Media reform advocates were quick to react. Craig Aaron, president of Free Press, praised MAP’s “trailblazing work,” and noted: “MAP earned some of the greatest victories for the movement with its key role in protecting media ownership rules and in securing space on the dial for Low Power FM radio.

WFMU manager and digital music pioneer Ken Freedman will receive the National Association of Community Broadcasters’ 2012 Bader Award. The award, to be presented in June during the Community Radio conference, honors individuals and organizations for single innovations or lifetime contributions to community radio. It’s presented in memory of the late Michael Bader, an attorney who was a fierce advocate for community radio. “Ken Freedman has been well ahead of the technological curve and need for innovation in public radio long before it was ‘fashionable,’” said Sue Matters of KWSO, Warm Springs, Ore., NFCB board chair. She described Freedman as a “stunning example of the trend set in motion by Michael Bader many ‘radio dials’ ago.”

WTCI is asking the Chattanooga City Council for $250,000 to develop a multicast channel with 24/7 local programming, “Voyager.” Station President Paul Grove told Current that the station will use the sum as seed money to attract additional foundation and corporate support. He expects a council vote on the funding later this summer. On its 45.2 channel, WTCI currently runs Create, state legislature coverage and regional high-school and college sports. Grove wants to expand that to offer live coverage of city councils in the region and their committee work, host issue-oriented town-hall meetings at the station for broadcast, launch a half-hour weekly arts and culture show and run local documentaries — all in addition to the five ongoing weekly series the station already produces.

Tom Dollenmayer, former station manager of WUSF pubTV and radio in Tampa, Fla., has assumed that role at WFDD-FM at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. Denise Franklin, who had been at the station for 11 years, departed as g.m. March 22. According to the local Business Journal, Franklin had been involved in recruiting and selecting Dollenmayer to fill the spot, which is a new position at the station. A decision about whether to hire a g.m. will be made after Dollenmayer settles in, station spokesperson Molly Davis told the publication.

A consultant who evaluated the performance of seven CPB-backed Local Journalism Centers has recommended that CPB continue funding the multimedia startups for another year. But interactive-media consultant Rusty Coats advised CPB to qualify its continued support for LJCs by requiring the centers to adopt a set of best practices. These would help guide the centers through the more challenging aspects of their work, such as collaborating in multiplatform fundraising and media production. In his evaluation of the seven regional LJCs launched with CPB aid in 2010, Coats found that four are performing relatively well, but the remainder struggle with issues of collaboration and long-term sustainability.

The University of Southern California is buying San Jose-area commercial radio station KCNL for $7.5 million to add to its Classical Public Radio Network, reports Radio Survivor. Currently KCNL airs a Spanish-language paid-programming talk format. The sale is “big news” for CPRN, “which has been vocal about its desire to expand its programming into the South Bay area,” the site notes. USC hopes to begin airing classical programming on KCNL in advance of the license transfer through a lease management agreement. USC also filed a request with the FCC to change the status of KCNL from commercial to noncom after the license transfer.

“On Shaky Ground,” a collaborative news report from nonprofit news organization California Watch and KQED in San Francisco, has won an IRE Medal, the highest award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. The judges called it “an extraordinary effort examining seismic safeguards in place to protect California’s schoolchildren from earthquakes,” with “astonishing breadth, depth and creativity.” Stories were published in more than 150 news outlets and translated into four languages, and video segments appeared in every major California media market. Another pubmedia collaboration, among ProPublica, NPR and Frontline, received an award for multiplatform reporting. The judges called  “Post Mortem: Death Investigation in America” a “hard-driving investigation into this little-understood part of the criminal justice system.”

PBS NewsHour will air a segment tonight (April 2) on concussions in youth football that former Dateline NBC correspondent Stone Phillips had reported and posted on his website. According to the New York Times, Neal Shapiro, president of WNET in New York, brought the report to the attention of Linda Winslow, NewsHour e.p. Phillips suffered two concussions as a high school and college football player. He paid to produce his own news report on the topic. The segment is about 14 minutes long and features on-camera interviews with researchers. It’s his first since leaving Dateline in 2007. “I did not have any plans for it to be broadcast,” Phillips said.

Pacifica Radio’s listener support is down almost 25 percent since 2006, and stations KPFA, WBAI and WPFW “have been running seriously in the red” for several years, according to Arlene Engelhardt, executive director of the Pacifica Foundation, in a column on Radio Survivor. Pacifica “as a whole” lost $5.5 million from 2007 to 2010, she said. Those three years would have included the financial contraction that came with the 2008 financial crisis and recession, when cash-strapped stations turned to the network for aid. “Stations have met their payrolls by not paying their share of network-wide expenses (Central Services) — for Democracy Now!

Three talk-show staffers at WILL-AM in Urbana, Ill., are retiring, Illinois Public Media said on its website. Departing will be David Inge, longtime host of morning show Focus; the show’s producer, Harriet Williamson; and Afternoon Magazine host Celeste Quinn, married to Inge for 24 years after the two met at the station. Inge, retiring June 30, has conducted more than 12,000 Focus interviews in his 29-plus years as the program’s host. He started at the station as a classical music announcer, then became a reporter. He also hosted WILL-TV’s pubaffairs Talking Point from 1992 until it ended in 2001.

Now on current.org, a behind-the-scenes look at the work at Oregon Public Broadcasting in the months leading up to its scheduled national GOP primary presidential debate, canceled just days before the high-profile event.

Kartemquin Films is beginning work to form a permanent advocacy group to serve as a liaison between independent filmmakers and PBS, in the wake of the controversy surrounding PBS’s rescheduling of Independent Lens and P.O.V. and their subsequent ratings and carriage woes (Current, March 12, 2012). Gordon Quinn, artistic director and founder of the Chicago documentary production house, said he is in conversations to partner with the International Documentary Association on the effort. Public television “is not just another outlet for independent producers,” Quinn told Current. “The public aspect of it is of vital importance to us.”

PBS’s fiscal 2013 draft budget, which the board today (March 30) approved to send to stations for comment, contains a 2 percent membership dues increase. At the board meeting at headquarters in Arlington, Va., Barbara Landes, PBS c.f.o., said this is the first dues increase for stations since fiscal 2009. Also at the meeting, directors unanimously approved a change in language in PBS’s common-carriage policy to align with PBS’s ongoing primetime revamp. The two-hour nightly limit was removed to accommodate three-hour programming blocks. The change does not affect total common carriage hours over the season, or station flexibility to preempt common-carriage programming.

Wisconsin Public Television will be testing a “text to pledge” model that it hopes will combine the immediacy that mobile users expect with the more nuanced interaction that stations need to establish a lasting relationship with members. David Dickinson, online manager at Wisconsin Public Television, writes in a post on the PBS Station Products & Innovation blog that the station wants to provide users the ability to text a number with a pledge for any amount, then the station will contact them to fulfill payment and become a member if they choose.That approach “may offer the best of both worlds,” Dickinson writes.