WYPR in Baltimore has hired Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks to replaced talk-show host Marc Steiner. Rodricks will inherit Steiner’s noon to 2 p.m. slot on Feb. 25 and follow a similar call-in format. The station canceled its winter pledge drive in the wake of listener outcry about Steiner’s firing. Station v.p. Andy Bienstock said the station will hold a combined winter and spring drive in April, after listeners have had a chance to hear the new show, reports the Sun. Steiner, who helped raise money to buy the station from Johns Hopkins University in 2001, was fired Feb. 1.

Connecticut Public Television and WFSB, the local CBS affiliate, are creating the Connecticut Sports Network. The network will broadcast high school and collegiate sports from across the state, beginning with the state high school basketball championships in March. Games will air on the digital and primary channels of CPTV and WFSB. Video of games will be posted on a new website, www.ctsn.tv, which is yet to come. In a video realease on wfsb.org, Connecticut Public Broadcasting President Jerry Franklin said the network also hopes to do some documentary-style programming about the state’s sports. CPTV is already a major broadcaster of UConn women’s basketball.

Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher surveys the HD Radio offerings of D.C. stations and finds only two outlets–WHUR and WAMU–have made big commitments to creating “real radio” experiences for HD listeners. The majority of D.C. stations are half-heartedly programming their HD channels and barely promoting them. “HD remains a promising technology, but so far, many more people listen to the new programming via online streaming than on an HD radio,” Fisher concludes. “Listeners are voting with their ears, and they’re choosing Web-based and mobile audio, in part because most HD radio programming just isn’t compelling enough to lure people to a different gadget.”

Public TV’s top lobbyist for seven years, John Lawson, moves to a maverick commercial TV network March 14 as executive v.p., policy and strategic initiatives of Ion Media Networks, he announced today. Station reps at an Association of Public Television Stations meeting gave a standing ovation to Lawson, who had led their defense against budget cuts, negotiations for DTV carriage on cable and DBS, and creation of a new federal emergency alert net using DTV. Ion, formerly known as Paxson Communications and part-owned by NBC Universal, has more commercial TV stations than any U.S. broadcaster. Lawson, who helped develop the Open Mobile Video Coalition, will play a leading role in a new video service for mobile devices that Ion plans to put on its DTV signals next winter.

CPB filled its top TV programming vacancy today, hiring Ted Garcia, g.m. of KNME-TV in Albuquerque, N.M., as senior v.p. for television content, the corporation announced today. Garcia is also a member of the PBS Board and chairs its Interconnection Committee and the PBS Enterprises Board of Directors. He succeeds Greg Diefenbach, who leaves the job this month. Garcia joined the Albuquerque pubTV station in 2001, after 20 years at pubTV’s KETC in St. Louis, where he rose from director of operations to senior v.p. He also worked in NFL football coverage and for CBS’s St. Louis station, KMOX.

Centris, a market research firm in Los Angeles, warns that 5.9 million over-the-air digital TV receivers will lose access to at least one of the major TV networks when analog TV transmission goes away one year from today, the New York Times reported. Many will fall prey to the “cliff effect” of digital signals, which simply disappear from the screen instead of degrading with ghosts, static and snow as analog signals do. Centris said signals in Las Vegas, Philadelphia and St. Louis would peter out 35 miles from the transmitter, not at 60-70 miles as analog signals do. It’s worst in St.

PBS’s NewsHour and NPR were among the news organizations that mistakenly named Sen. Hillary Clinton the winner in the Missouri Democratic primary on Super Tuesday. For their live election coverage, both organizations relied on the erroneous Associated Press projection that Sen. Clinton had won the race, explained pubcasting ombudsmen Michael Getler of PBS and Alicia Shepard of NPR in their most recent columns. “Obviously, we wish we hadn’t been among those using the incorrect call, but we have no independent resources for checking the numbers,” NewsHour Executive Producer Linda Winslow tells readers of Getler’s column. “We talked about it on the air, saying we and other news orgs had called the state when it appeared Clinton had won with 96 percent of the vote counted,” wrote NPR’s Ron Elving, one of two political editors to sign off on the decision to call Missouri for Clinton, in an email to Shepard.

The world population of flat panel displays appears to be growing much faster than the world population of people. Worldwide, manufacturers’ shipments of panels, from tiny ones in phones to huge ones in HDTVs, have passed 3 billion a year and will pass 5 billion a year in 2015, according to DisplaySearch, a market research company. Even with the considerable assistance of the human sexual drive, the people population is growing just 77 million a year, having accumulated just 6.65 billion, the Census Bureau estimated. In the United States, 2.4 million HDTV sets were expected to be bought in time for the Super Bowl, the Consumer Electronics Association crowed.

ABC News will collaborate with New York’s WNET-TV to produce a Feb. 26 broadcast of the New York Philharmonic from North Korea, reports the New York Times. The broadcast will be distributed via PBS as well. “I didn’t want to just show a concert,” said Neal Shapiro, WNET’s president, about the collaboration with ABC. “It was a historic place at a historic time.”

NPR’s Alison Stewart, host of the Bryant Park Project, talks with the New York Observer about leaving commercial TV for public radio. She says she appreciates being free from the emphasis placed on appearance in TV: “[T]here was a certain element of like, wow, NPR is a place where I could grow old gracefully.”

Anthony Brandon, president of WYPR in Baltimore, went on the air yesterday to explain the firing of host Marc Steiner. Brandon said the ratings for Steiner’s local public affairs show were declining, and the host’s refusal to make changes in the program left management with no choice, reports The Baltimore Sun. A pre-taped interview with Marc Steiner preceded the Brandon segment, during which Steiner said he and management have different ideas about the role of public radio in the community. Later on his blog, Steiner wrote that Brandon “has constantly attempted diminish what I and our listeners did six years ago in raising funds to purchase what was then WJHU” and the station has been “hijacked.”

Pubcasters may not be as successful at fighting off federal budget cuts as in the past, says NPR head Ken Stern in a New York Times article about the Bush administration’s proposed budget. “I worry that this gets lost in a whole lot of other issues,” he said. John Lawson, president of the Association of Public Television Stations, was confident next week’s pubTV lobbying day in Washington would help fend off cuts.

The Bush Administration budget includes an extra $20 million for DTV education, Broadcasting & Cable reports. The money would go to the FCC for DTV awareness efforts. In its original DTV transition bill, Congress only set aside $5 million for consumer education, to be administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The total $25 million federal outlay “is far too little to educate a nation of 300 million people,” said John Dingell (D-Mich), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The government “should not be attempting this transition on the cheap.”

KCPW-FM/AM in Salt Lake is up for sale. The board of Community Wireless of Park City, licensee of Park City’s KPCW and sister KCPW, voted unanimously to “spin-off” its Salt Lake stations “in order to better focus its attention on serving its KPCW listeners in Summit and Wasatch Counties,” according to a statement issued on Sunday. The board authorized Ed Sweeney, KCPW g.m., to form a new non-profit that would raise money to purchase KCPW’s AM and FM outlets, but it will accept offers from other interested nonprofits. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that KCPW has been losing money since 2006.

More on the Bush Administration’s proposed cuts to CPB’s appropriations: Pubcaster advocate Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) told Broadcasting & Cable that “the Administration’s proposal to slash funding is short-sighted and I fully expect Congress to reject it. ” Ken Stern, NPR c.e.o., calls for “renewed support” from the more than 2 million citizens who called lawmakers to complain about the last real funding fight in 2005, citing a recent Pew report that highlighted NPR’s growing news offerings. Not all cultural programs fared as poorly as pubcasting–the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Kennedy Center, among others, are slated to receive slight funding bumps, the Washington Post reports.