A city official in Benton Harbor, Mich., has abandoned his efforts to sell the license to the city’s low-power FM radio station on eBay after observers pointed out that FCC approval would be needed. Joseph Harris has shut down the station and tried to sell the license for $5,000, but pulled it off eBay after getting three bids, reports Laura Conaway on the blog for MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. Harris shut down the station in January to save money, according to the local ABC 57 News, and city commissioners are protesting the move to sell WBHC-LP’s license and equipment.

A phone survey of radio listeners in the U.S. this month found that public radio listeners are more satisfied with their stations than the average listener. Research firm Mark Kassof & Co. called 649 radio listeners to ask how satisfied they were with the stations they listened to most (P1 stations, in radio parlance). Forty-eight percent overall said they were 100 percent satisfied with their P1 stations, but 61 percent of public radio listeners reported total satisfaction. That was topped only by Christian radio listeners, 77 percent of whom were completely satisfied.

In 2010, a Seattle start-up called ivi attempted to sell online access to 28 encrypted broadcast signals, including public TV stations, without informing the stations (Current, Oct. 4, 2010). It was stopped by a federal judge in New York last February and is currently trying to raise money for its ongoing legal fight. Now, a firm backed by media giant Barry Diller, Aereo, is doing much the same thing — except it’s using “proprietary remote antenna and DVR” technology “that consumers can use to access network television on web-enabled devices.” Aereo has installed miniature antennae throughout the New York City market that pull in over-the-air signals from all local broadcasters, including PBS member station WNET.

Brian Lauritzen, producer and host at Los Angeles classical music pubradio giant KUSC-FM, is venturing far and wide in order to cover the classical beat — more than 3,600 miles, in fact.  Lauritzen is accompanying conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic Orchestra on their historic trip to Dudamel’s native Venezuela, producing radio pieces and blog posts for KUSC from Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. The orchestra preformed Mahler’s Ninth Symphony on Feb. 11 to a sold-out crowd of 2,400 at the Teatro Teresa Carreño, South America’s second-largest theater. You can see rehearsal video clips, photos, and Lauritzen’s accounting of the performance in his Feb.

KCET is launching a new arts series next month, Open Call, hosted by international operatic mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzmàn, showcasing cultural institutions and other groups in Southern California. The station’s program Live @ the Ford will be folded into the new series, reports the Los Angeles Times. The station also announced on Tuesday (Feb. 14) that its local documentary series Departures is adding eight new bloggers to its Land of Sunshine blog, “dedicated to uncovering the rich diversity of Angelinos throughout time,” and based on the late 19th century journal with the same title, distributed nationwide “to promote Southern California life to tourists and potential residents.”

Miami-based Classical South Florida is expanding its service to the state’s western coast with the $4.35 million purchase of WAYJ 88.7 FM, a 75,000-watt station that broadcasts to a potential audience of nearly 1 million listeners in Fort Myers and beyond. The purchase, announced today, is part of a three-way transaction with seller WAY Media, a religious broadcast network that’s moving its Christian pop music service to 100,000-watt WSRX 89.5 FM in Naples. When the sale closes, Way Media will retain the WAYJ call letters and format for its new station. Though WSRX broadcasts at a higher Effective Radiated Power (ERP) than WAYJ, Classical South Florida is buying the better of the two channels.

Richie Plass, one of two hosts of Kalihwiyo’se on Wisconsin Public Radio, has developed a unique one-man show on the image of Native Americans, “An Indian … One Block East of Broadway,” which he’s presenting next week at the Neville Public Museum of Brown County in Green Bay, Wisc. According to the local Press-Gazette, it features “humor, music, videos and education — with a positive spin.” As Plass said, “Native American humor has many faces. I am always trying to address stereotypes, stories and/or image concerns relating to our history and even modern awareness.”

Journalist T.R. Reid, who parted ways with Frontline following a very public dustup over a controversial healthcare documentary nearly three years ago (Current, April 27, 2009), returns to PBS this week with a new film, “U.S. Health Care: The Good News.” In an interview with Healthcare Finance News, Reid said, “I think the film shows that in big towns and in small communities and urban centers you can provide high quality care at way below the national average costs. It’s definitely being done. So why don’t others do the same and therefore bring down our cost levels?

President Barack Obama released his fiscal 2013 budget Monday (Feb. 13), which contains $445 million in advance funding for fiscal 2015 for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He also proposes consolidating pubTV’s Ready to Learn, an ongoing funder of PBS Kids programming, with other education efforts, and wants to zero out the $3 million Rural Utilities Service Public Television Digital Transition Grant Program, which provides capital funding to stations. The budget slightly boosts, from $1.501 billion to $1.576 billion, funding to cultural organizations that support pubcasting, including the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. “We are grateful to the president for providing level funding for CPB and for continuing the advance funding mechanism so important to our stations and producers,” said Patrick Butler, president of the Association of Public Television Stations, in a statement.

Jeffrey Kaye, an experienced media-industry journalist who recently joined Current as senior editor, died Feb. 11 of a heart attack in Bethesda, Md., where he and his family had recently moved. He was 57. Kaye had finished work on his third issue of Current the night before. He had taken a number of adventurous leaps in his life, moving from his home state of New Jersey to San Francisco before college, to Paris as a young writer, to Los Angeles, and to London, where he lived 20 years before returning to the States. Instead of studying psychology at Berkeley as he planned, Kaye switched to journalism at San Francisco State University.

Gerald Poulsen, known in radio as bluegrass music host Jerry Gray, died Feb. 2 in Roanoke, Va. He was 78. His son Mark Poulsen told the Washington Post that his father had health complications from a heart transplant that he received after suffering a heart attack on the air in 1989. Poulsen started in 1971 at Washington’s WAMU-FM  at American University and for 30 years hosted The Jerry Gray Show on Saturday afternoons, featuring traditional country music, featuring stars such as Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, Roy Rogers and Patsy Montana. In 1978, he began co-hosting Bluegrass Country, a weekday drivetime show and later became its host.

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 f.om Florida Public Broadcasting in Tallahassee, as well as At The Top and other music programs at WXXI in Rochester, N.Y. In Nashville, he was a member of the WPLN-FM community advisory board 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 Corp.,

Mike deGruy, an acclaimed cinematographer with a love of the sea who created several Nature documentaries on PBS, was killed Feb. 4 in a helicopter crash in Australia. He was 60. His employer, National Geographic Society, said that deGruy and Australian television writer-producer Andrew Wight crashed after takeoff near Nowra, 97 miles north of Sydney. Australia’s ABC News reported that Wight was piloting the helicopter. Fred Kaufman, head of Nature at WNET in New York, told Current that he still remembers his first meeting with deGruy. “Twenty years ago, when I became the executive producer of Nature, Mike’s film Incredible Suckers, was my first commission,” he said, “and I learned something very valuable from my initial conversation with Mike — bring your ‘A’ game, because Mike was smart, persuasive and quick.

A commentary created through an experimental radio project of the New America Foundation turned a harsh spotlight on the editorial vetting process at Marketplace, which broadcast a first-person account Jan. 30 [2012] of a man who falsely claimed to be a heroic Army sniper. Whatever the editorial process at Marketplace missed, there were similar shortcomings at San Francisco’s KQED-FM, which also aired the piece, and at the big liberal foundation, whose media project was focused on inclusivity rather than excluding fakers. The two-minute piece by a man named Leo Webb, part of a commentary series titled “My Life Is True,” turned out to be largely untrue.

Despite the phrase “a face made for radio,” a blogger has started appraising crush-worthy folks in public radio. Babes Of NPR features public radio hosts, reporters and producers whose photos inspire a swoon or a snarky comment from the site’s North Carolina proprietor. Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep is “the thinking man’s David Hasselhoff.” Peter Breslow, a senior producer for Weekend Edition, is likened to actor Ted Danson. And Joe and Terry Graedon, hosts of The People’s Pharmacy, “look like they might be fun to take home from the middle-aged hippie swingers potluck.” Babes of NPR was launched after a photo of NPR reporter Ari Shapiro popped up on the Facebook page of creator Katie Herzog.