The Peabody-winning pubradio program To the Best of Our Knowledge has successfully completed a $15,000 Kickstarter campaign to produce a comic book that will accompany an upcoming six-hour series. The series, Meet Your Mind: The Science of Consciousness, will air in November and December. Guests include famed brain researcher Oliver Sacks and Nobel laureates Eric Kandel and Daniel Kahneman. The comic book is intended to help illustrate Meet Your Mind. Jim Ottaviani, a writer who specializes in graphic novels about scientists, will pen the comic, and Natalie Nourigat will illustrate it. Nourigat is best known for her 304-page autobiographical Between Gears, which features a comic for each day of her senior year of college.

SAN FRANCISCO — Public media continues to earn accolades for its online innovations, as multiple outlets racked up trophies at the Online News Association’s awards ceremony Sept. 22. Hosted by PBS NewsHour correspondent Hari Sreenivasan, the gala banquet sought to honor the year’s best work in online journalism across all media outlets. Award categories reflect the size of the operation: small sites, with fewer than 25 full-time employees; medium, more than 25 but fewer than 100; and large, more than 100. With two trophies each, public broadcasting’s big winners were WNYC in New York and EarthFix, the CPB-backed Local Journalism Center focusing on environment issues in the Pacific Northwest.

NPR Digital Services is negotiating with an unidentified vendor to provide cloud-computing products to member stations, potentially transforming the ways they manage their membership programs and relationships with audiences. Bob Kempf, chief of the Boston-based NPR unit, would not identify the vendor, but acknowledges that NPR has been in close negotiations with roundCorner, a three-year-old company that specializes in designing customer relationship management (CRM) systems for nonprofit organizations. He aims to have a master services agreement with a third-party vendor in place by the end of the year, and launch a pilot program with as many as 10 stations in early 2013.

The 2013 budget approved by the NPR Board Sept. 14 projects a $5.1 million operating deficit, with expenses adding up to $185.5 million and revenues projected at $180.4 million. Management plans to cover the shortfall with working capital and operating reserves. The 2013 spending plan anticipates a 5 percent gain in sponsorship income, which fell far behind projections this year. NPR expects to close fiscal 2012, which ends Sept. 30, with a $6 million shortfall that’s primarily attributable to a decline in corporate sponsorship, according to Dana Davis Rehm, senior v.p. for marketing, communications and external relations. After hitting a new record in underwriting income in fiscal 2011, NPR overestimated sponsorship revenue for this year, Rehm said.

An audit by the CPB Inspector General’s Office of Pundit Productions, the nonprofit that operated a public radio news bureau on Capitol Hill until its shutdown last fall, found violations of several CPB grant requirements and recommended that Pundit return more than $35,000 in grant monies. At CPB management’s request, the IG examined how Pundit spent a $300,000 grant provided by CPB in 2011 for a “transition project” intended to develop a long-term business plan and pricing model. The nonprofit bureau, run by Melinda Wittstock, relied heavily on CPB’s assistance, receiving grants totalling $2.3 million since its start-up in 2003. For the 2011 grant, CPB covered slightly less than half of the $688,036 budget for the business planning.

Madeleine Brand has left KPCC “in order to pursue other career opportunities,” the station announced today (Sept. 21). Stepping in for her on Monday is Alex Cohen, the Pasadena, Calif., station’s local anchor for All Things Considered and Marketplace. In August, KPCC announced it was revamping The Madeleine Brand Show, which had premiered in September 2010, as Brand & Martinez, adding another hour and former ESPN newscaster A Martinez as co-host. The expansion was backed by CPB’s $1.8 million grant to the station in December 2011 for reporting and programming for and about Latinos and other minority listeners.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – At a forum of leading public media professionals, participants expressed mixed feelings about whether public media can, or should, replace newspapers as primary gatherers of news. At the fourth Public Media Futures forum, held Thursday at Bloomberg’s offices in San Francisco, more than two dozen public media professionals debated whether the industry’s non-broadcast capabilities are robust enough to allow it to fill the role of a daily newspaper. In some respects, public broadcasting websites have already moved into the up-to-the-minute newsgathering space. Kinsey Wilson, executive v.p. and chief content officer at NPR, said NPR.org functions much like a newspaper website, with breaking news, a story flow that shifts multiple times a day and large quantities of original content apart from radio pieces rewritten for the Web.

The fourth in a series of Public Media Futures forums exploring the next steps for public broadcasting will be streamed live from San Francisco from 8 a.m. to noon Pacific Time Thursday (Sept. 20). This meeting will focus on new research on the future of news, information and public-service media online and on mobile devices, with special attention to the technological requirements for pubcasters’ objectives over the next five years. The more than 30 participants include Kinsey Wilson, chief content officer, NPR; Carol Varney, managing director, Bay Area Video Coalition; Olivia Ma, news and politics manager, YouTube; Chris Satullo, news director, WHYY; Brant Houston, chair, Investigative News Network; Linda Fantin, director of network journalism, American Public Media; and Stephen Engleberg, managing editor, ProPublica.

The Hawaii Independent began as a small for-profit corporation five years ago. But earlier this year the news venture morphed into a co-op, offering both subscriptions and ownership benefits. “In the past two years,” Publisher Ikaika Hussey tells MediaShift, “one of our newspapers bought the other one and then it was bought by a Canadian company. So there was the feeling of a loss of a local institution. We need an institution that’s going to be here for the long haul. And I think the only way to do that is still the community-owned, truly community-owned institution — not just one that’s owned by a person of large wealth.

Todd Mundt, editorial director of NPR’s Digital Services, is concerned for the future of public radio. “I think there’s great opportunity,” he tells Nieman Journalism Lab’s Andrew Phelps, “but what I’m afraid of is that many stations won’t embrace the opportunity and they will have the emperor-has-no-clothes moment. They will be revealed as rather pedestrian repeaters of national content.”

Audio from last week’s Public Radio Program Directors conference in Las Vegas is now available on PRPD’s website, including the keynote address by June Cohen, executive producer for TED Media; a Q&A with content chiefs Kinsey Wilson of NPR and David Kansas of American Public Media; and the closing address by NPR “founding mother” Linda Wertheimer. Not all of the recordings are freely available, however — only PRPD members can access recordings of the conference’s breakout sessions. PRPD’s David Hollis has also posted photos from PRPD on Flickr. I’m sifting through my notes from the conference and will have a wrap-up coming your way soon, plus additional coverage inspired by conference conversations in weeks to come.

Independent Lens just announced that actor Stanley Tucci will be this season’s host. This year, the 11th season of the documentary showcase, now on Monday nights, also will join 62 broadcasters in 180 countries to present “Why Poverty,” a series focusing on the global problem.

Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Kogan will serve as interim host for WBEZ’s The Afternoon Shift, in the wake of Steve Edwards’ announcement he’s leaving the station, reports Time Out Chicago media writer Robert Feder. Edwards departs Friday (Sept. 21) for the Institute of Politics at University of Chicago. Kogan starts Sept. 24 and will fill in “for a month or two,” Feder says, as the pubradio station conducts a nationwide search for Edwards’ permanent replacement.