Matchmaking requires openness, compatibility, shared goals and maintaining a strong sense of identity. That’s the advice for public broadcasters looking to merge, as well as for doe-eyed sweethearts. CET in Cincinnati and ThinkTV in Dayton made the leap nearly three years ago, and by most accounts their union looks strong. The two stations, just 50 miles apart in separate southwestern Ohio media markets, are now incorporated as Public Media Connect and serve a region of 1.4 million households and more than 3.5 million people. Together they showed an operating deficit last year, as did many stations, but the budget gap has been shrinking and is projected to go positive this year.

Sarah Lutman, former s.v.p. of content and media at Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media, is departing her current position as president of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra to start an independent consulting practice, effective March 1. Lutman said in the local Star Tribune that she’d wanted to establish a consulting business for years. “With my adult children both due to complete post-graduate education this year,” she said, “and having been able to help the SPCO chart a clear strategic direction and plan, the timing seemed right for me to make this move.”

Three pubcasting stations have complained to the Pledge Partner Magazine Premium Program that Newsweek, one of several magazines offered as a gift in exchange for donations, has been using more vulgarities since its merger with the Daily Beast website, reports the New York Times. Zunk Buker, founder of Pledge Partner, describes it as a “minor firestorm.” Bill Sanford, g.m. of Lakeland Public Television in Bemidji, Minn., told station execs in a recent e-mail that a major donor had complained. Sanford agreed, and said he wanted the station “to offer premiums that reflect our values.” Stephen Colvin, chief executive of the Newsweek Daily Beast Co.,

Here’s a look from the Nieman Journalism Lab at what geotagging on NPR’s Facebook page did for KPLU in Seattle. In October 2011, NPR Digital Services and Digital Media launched an experiment with the member station, sharing certain KPLU.org content on NPR’s 2.3-million fan Facebook page, but making it visible only to Facebook users in the Seattle region. “Four months into this experiment, we’ve made some unexpected discoveries around Facebook communities and the power of localization on a national platform,” write Eric Athas and Keith Hopper of NPR Digital. The test drove KPLU’s site to record traffic for a single day (January 19), second-highest traffic for a single month (October 2011) and the highest traffic for a single month (January).

NPR Science Correspondent Richard Harris is suffering from unilateral vocal fold paralysis, probably due to a virus, he reveals in a post on Shots, NPR’s health blog. “It turns out this disorder is common enough that there’s a line of medical products to address it,” he writes. His specialist at Johns Hopkins used an injection of water, gelatin and sodium carboxymethylcellulose — “yes, cellulose as in the indigestible fiber that tree trunks and paper are made of” — to help align Harris’s paralyzed vocal cord with his functioning one. “Over the next six to 10 weeks, the carboxymethylcellulose will degrade in my gullet,” Harris writes.

Who loves NPR? George Clooney, reveals this photo posted by Tanya Ballard Brown, an editor at NPR.org, currently ricocheting around the Internets. UPDATE: Fishbowl LA reports that Clooney was at NPR West — surrounded by female staffers — to record a segment on All Things Considered.

KWIS-FM, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s radio station, is now on the air from Plummer, Idaho, one of more than two dozen Native stations that received FCC construction permits in 2008. KWIS, pronounced “kwee-ss,” means “to be called” in the Coeur d’Alene language, according to the Coeur d’Alene Press.

The Republican Kansas House Appropriations Committee chairman broke a 10-10 vote deadlock to reject a request for an additional $800,000 for public broadcasting, the Lawrence Journal-World reported Thursday (Feb. 9). Gov. Sam Brownback’s budget for the fiscal year starting July 1 included $600,000 for public broadcasting, down from $2 million; a House budget subcommittee added $800,000, bringing the total to $1.2 million. Rep. Marc Rhoades (R-Newton) cast the deciding vote.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has established a Community Lifeline Award (PDF) to recognize pubcasting stations “that have provided exceptionally exemplary service to their communities” during “local emergencies, natural disasters, and other urgent situations.” Any station that receives a Community Service Grant may apply. The station must have provided information and updates in close coordination with government agencies and first responders, presented extensive coverage of the situation, and station staff “demonstrated strong personal commitment” during the crisis through long hours or “calmness under pressure.” The number of recipients of the award will vary; CPB estimates presenting two to three annually.

The Knight Foundation is revamping its Knight News Challenge for 2012, “evolving the challenge to be more nimble and more focused,” it announced Thursday (Feb. 9), with three distinct application rounds. The first concentrates on networks, and ways entities might use existing platforms to drive innovation in media and journalism; applications open Feb. 27 and close March 17. Subsequent rounds will be an open competition, “looking for new ideas broadly,” the foundation said, and a third on a specific topic. First-round winners will be announced in June. The Knight News Challenge is part of  the Foundation’s $100 million Media Innovation Initiative, working to identify new ways to meet community information needs in the digital age.

Contributions and grants to KCET have plunged 41 percent since its departure from PBS membership in January 2011, according to the Los Angeles Times, including corporate as well as individual giving. But the station also received $28.8 million from the sale of its historic studio to the Church of Scientology; the newspaper noted that while the purchase price was $45 million, the station temporarily leased back the property). KCET also “sharply trimmed its spending on programming and production,” the paper said, down 37 percent to $21 million. “We saw an uptick in the fourth quarter 2011,” Al Jerome, the station’s president and chief executive, told the Times in an email.

Joel Kaplan, ombudsman for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, writes in a column Wednesday (Feb. 8) that information redacted from a recent CPB Inspector General’s report on Pittsburgh’s WQED, “is inconsistent with CPB’s pledge of transparency.” Kenneth Konz, the inspector general, conducted an audit of WQED Multimedia, released in December 2011, that determined that because WQED did not comply with certain CPB guidelines for reporting nonfederal financial support, CPB made improper Community Service Grants to the station in excess of $798,000. “If you read the audit report,” Kaplan writes, “you will find that it is filled with redactions about specific monetary expenditures at the heart of the audit report.”

KCET in Los Angeles will premiere several new programs beginning in March, including a four-part original documentary series on caregiving, Your Turn to Care, hosted by actress Holly Robinson Peete. A companion website officially launches Feb. 15, with tips for coping with aging family members from guest experts, including best-selling author Gail Sheehy. Classic Cool Theater premieres March 10, the first project in a $50 million production collaboration with Eyetronics Media & Studios (Current, Aug. 16, 2011). Each episode of the weekly two-hour series will include a retro cartoon, feature film, newsreel, and musical short, each from the 1930s to 1960s.

Elliott Mitchell III, who worked in public broadcasting in Florida, New York and Tennessee, died Feb. 1 in Nashville. He was 67. His obituary in the Paducah (Ky.) Sun said that during his career he produced Today in the Legislature, a statewide program from Florida Public Broadcasting in Tallahassee, as well as At The Top and other music programs at WXXI television in Rochester, N.Y. He was a member of the WPLN-FM community advisory board in Nashville, and a national and regional board member of the Alliance for Community Media, which advocates for Public, Educational and Governmental (PEG) channels. He was also a founding member of the Education Access Corporation, which programs Nashville public-access channels.