Merrill Brockway, a producer and director of several PBS arts programs who was best known for his work on the Great Performances spinoff Dance in America, died May 3 in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 90. Brockway was born in Indiana and began a career as a piano teacher and accompanist before entering TV at the age of 30. He wrote and directed for CBS affiliates in Philadelphia and New York before leaving commercial TV for PBS in 1975, when Dance in America launched. He worked on the program, produced by New York’s Thirteen/WNET, from 1975–88, capturing some of America’s most renowned dancers and choreographers on film.

Variety is reporting that PBS has ordered a pilot script for a drama series, Alta California, from Dennis Leoni, e.p. and writer of Resurrection Blvd., which ran on Showtime 2000-02. The entertainment mag notes that the program was “the first and longest-running Latino dramatic skein in the history of American television.” Alta California will be set in the mid- to late 1800s and focus on an arranged marriage between two families, one Mexican-Californian and the other European American. Carrie Johnson, PBS spokesperson, declined to provide further details to Current, as PBS is still in contract negotiations for the project.

The WFMT Radio Network has unveiled a premium subscription service that provides access to hundreds of hours of archived programs from Exploring Music with Bill McGlaughlin. The internationally syndicated classical music series airs on 55 stations and draws a weekly audience of more than 400,000 listeners. “It’s a unique show and Bill is a great host,” said Steve Robinson, g.m. of the Chicago-based WFMT Radio Network and WFMT-FM. “Since the show started we’ve gotten something like 10,000 emails and this has been one of the things people have repeatedly asked us to do.” At launch, the new streaming service offers 500 hours of content selected from the show’s 10-year archive.

George Walker, the host of local broadcasts of All Things Considered on West Virginia Public Radio for nearly 12 years, was found dead in his Charleston home over the weekend, local authorities announced May 6. Details of his death are awaiting an autopsy. He was 60. Walker joined WVPR in 2002 as a part-time announcer. In addition to  hosting ATC, he produced the station’s weekly program Music from the Mountains until host Joe Dobbs retired in 2008. Prior to joining public radio, he worked for the privately held Bristol Broadcasting Corporation and Charleston’s V100 commercial station. He also did narrative and voiceover work through his own Walker Productions.

Moyers & Company has become the first American Public Television-distributed program to be presented on the PBS COVE online video player and PBS mobile apps. The weekly public affairs show, hosted by veteran public TV journalist and independent producer Bill Moyers, has been offered on COVE on a test basis for several weeks, according to spokesperson Joel Schwartzberg. With today’s announcement, PBS and APT signaled their intention to collaborate to bring more APT titles to PBS’s online video player. The arrangement helps to make Moyers & Company more easily accessible for public TV viewers. The series, which launched in August 2010, is the first from Moyers to be distributed by APT.

The All-Star Orchestra, made up of top professional musicians from across the country, will produce eight pubTV programs of classical masterworks. The one-hour shows, titled All-Star Orchestra and set for broadcast on New York’s WNET over eight Sundays this fall, will feature performances of classics by American composers as well as guest interviews and commentary by the group’s Music Director Gerard Schwarz. American Public Television will distribute the programs nationally. In last month’s announcement, WNET programming exec Stephen Segaller said the project is “in the tradition of Leonard Bernstein’s celebrated programs that popularized classical music on television,” such as the critically acclaimed Omnibus, 1952–61, and Young People’s Concerts, which Bernstein led from 1958–72, the first series televised from Lincoln Center.

The “particularly mellifluous” names of NPR correspondents have inspired songs as well as namesakes including a turtle, chihuahua, goat, cow — even a restaurant in Salem, Ore. The Atlantic takes a look at NPR’s interesting on-air nomenclature, and whether their names are more unusual than most. The answer: Not really. “It’s simply that you don’t hear the staff at Kinko’s saying their names over and over again, out loud,” says the ordinarily named Robert Smith of Planet Money. “Kinko’s was founded by Paul Orfalea. If he had said, ‘Paul Orfalea, NPR News, Los Angeles,’ you’d think, what a perfect NPR name.”

CPB has laid off 12 employees and eliminated three vacant positions in a downsizing prompted by the federal budget sequestration and other cuts to its appropriation. The job cuts, announced today, extend across all departments and range from administrative to vice president levels, said Michael Levy, executive v.p. of corporate and public affairs. Taken together, the downsizing reduces CPB’s workforce by 11 percent. CPB will also trim its payroll by requiring all senior vice presidents and executive officers to take one-week furloughs before Sept. 30, the end of CPB’s fiscal year. Levy cited personnel privacy issues in declining to discuss which employees were leaving CPB, but two sources inside the corporation identified six employees who had received severance packages: Terry Bryant, chief content officer for TV and digital media; Nicole Mezlo, director of media and public relations; Robert Winteringham, deputy general counsel; Angela Palmer, director of TV program development and producer relations; Doug McKenney, director of CPB’s Public Awareness Initiative; and Chuck Roberts, facilities coordinator.

Orlando pubcaster WMFE-FM has hired LaFontaine Oliver as its new president and g.m., replacing José Fajardo who left in December 2012. Oliver comes to the station from WEAA-FM in Baltimore, a jazz and NPR news station licensed to Morgan State University. He joined WEAA in 2007 and, while there, created the nationally syndicated Michael Eric Dyson Show. Oliver has also held management positions with SiriusXM in Washington, D.C., and Radio One, an urban-oriented, multimedia company based in Silver Spring, Md. “We are very excited to bring LaFontaine into this very important role,” said Derek Blakeslee, chair of the Board of Trustees of Community Communications Inc.

The Pacifica radio network rarely enjoys a drama-free moment, but with two of its five stations on a tight schedule to find new studios, tensions among network leaders and local volunteers are even higher than usual. Last week Summer Reese, interim executive director of Pacifica, took a redeye from the West Coast, where Pacifica is headquartered, to appear in court in Washington, D.C. The landlord of WPFW, Pacifica’s Washington station, is selling the building that houses the station’s studios to a developer who has plans for a new hotel on the site and needs WPFW to move out of the way.

When the Spokane Public School District was considering selling its PBS station, KSPS, it did not have to look far to find an interested party. On April 10, the school board voted to sell the station for $1 million to the Friends of KSPS, its partner in raising funds for the station since its founding in 1972. The transaction is expected to close in September pending FCC approval. The two groups had been discussing a possible license transfer for about six years, said Mark Anderson, assistant superintendent for the school district. Dwindling state support over the past year expedited a final decision, he said.