Chris Ulanowski, a former news director at WRVO in Oswego, N.Y., died May 30. He was 51. Ulanowski spent 27 years at the station, winning the Syracuse Press Club’s career achievement award in 2008. During his tenure as news director, the station won three national awards in two years for “Talk of the Nation: Religious Bricks,” on issues of church and state in the Mexico, N.Y., school district. It took first-place awards from the Public Radio News Directors Inc. Awards in 2000 and won first- and second-place PRNDI awards in 1999. Ulanowski is survived by his wife, Rochelle Manley of Fulton; three daughters; and four siblings.

Jim Sweenie, a four-decade staffer at Pittsburgh’s WQED-FM and host of its Saturday Night Requests, died June 4 after complications from surgery the previous day. He was 76. The station will broadcast a special Saturday Night Requests: Jim Sweenie Tribute on June 18 at 8 p.m. Eastern, with memories and dedications, including condolences from listeners. Sweenie got into radio in the early 1950s by hanging around WMCK-AM in McKeesport, Pa. The station paid him $10 a week for putting away records and reading a sign-off. As he used to say, he was “fired several times.” He loved the theater and began his life on stage at age 17 at the local White Barn Theater starring as a French-speaking taxi driver opposite Colleen Dewhurst.

George Leigh Hall, 82, a public television leader in North Carolina, Illinois and Virginia, died June 5 at a retirement home in Fuquay-Varina, N.C. His wife of 60 years, Katherine Waddington Hall, had died six months earlier. After starting in radio during the 1940s in his hometown of Reidsville, N.C., north of Raleigh, Hall joined Capitol Broadcasting Company’s WRAL-AM in Raleigh and advanced to program manager; helped the company acquire a television license and served as the TV station’s first program manager. In 1960, Hall became g.m. of North Carolina State University’s Raleigh studios of the state educational TV network, UNC-TV.

Stanley S. Neustadt, 87, a longtime communications lawyer for public stations, died May 30 in suburban Virginia. He had lived with Parkinson’s disease for the past 12 years. “Anyone who appreciates public radio and TV should give him some credit because he had a large role in preserving and reserving the frequencies for them,” said a friend and law school classmate Herbert Schulkind. Not long after receiving his law degree from Columbia University in 1948, Neustadt found himself near the center of an unprecedented disturbance at the FCC. He joined the FCC staff as legal assistant to Frieda Hennock, the first female member of the commission and a flamboyant, persistent advocate for reserved educational channels.

“Blessed Be the Ties that Bind” may be music to churchgoers, but many station leaders find it discordant. No matter how much CEOs welcome the blessings of major gifts, they tend to start doubting if they find strings attached. Increasingly, big donors do attach conditions. Not all want to see their name on a building or a room, but they do want to see their gifts used for purposes that matter to them, even when giving to the operating fund. Donors give for their own reasons; the fact that a station needs “to pay the power bill,” as one CEO put it, tends to be less compelling than content about topics that matter to them.

Los Angeles Public Media, the CPB-backed startup that hoped to serve a new generation of minority listeners in one of the nation’s most competitive and ethnically mixed media markets, shuttered its operations June 15 after failing to acquire an FM station and secure renewed support from CPB. Radio Bilingüe, the Fresno-based public radio network that oversaw LAPM, disbanded the staff of five and stopped adding material to its website, LA>Forward, launched last fall. Like a number of other forward-looking CPB projects, LAPM became an aftershock casualty of the House-Senate conference committee’s agreement to cut $30 million of CPB’s requested $36 million add-on appropriation for digital projects.

See Current‘s story.

NJN’s nonprofit fundaising arm and the NJN staff proposed separate alternatives among the five bidders and one alternate plan for managing the TV network being divested by the state, Michael Symon of the Gannett New Jersey newspapers blogged last week. NJN Foundation (formally, the Foundation for New Jersey Public Broadcasting) proposed a lower-cost approach that it described as “C-SPAN New Jersey.” NJN staffers, under the name New Jersey Public Media Corp., proposed an alternative plan, which wasn’t eligible as a bid. It proposed that the state maintain aid for a transition period and establish the network as a more independent state authority.

A section of the PBS website was hacked Friday (June 24), according to the Associated Press. PBS spokesperson Anne Bentley said a “very small number” of administrative user names and encrypted passwords were stolen from the section of the site for the program Becoming American. Here’s a look inside the first hack, which occurred over Memorial Day weekend.

The New Jersey Assembly, half of its state legislature, has voted down Gov. Chris Christie’s plan to turn over management of the New Jersey Network’s TV management to WNET, the Star-Ledger reports. By 45 to 30 the Assembly on Thursday (June 23) voted to block a five-year contract that would allow Public Media NJ, a nonprofit subsidiary of WNET/Thirteen, to be incorporated in the state to operate the TV network. The Senate may vote on a similar resolution on Monday, but that must pass by Tuesday to prevent the WNET deal from going through. No one seems to agree on what may happen.

The Public Broadcasting Service (“PBS”) is committed to serving the public interest by providing content of the highest quality that enriches the marketplace of ideas, unencumbered by commercial imperative. Throughout PBS’s history, four fundamental principles have guided that commitment. Editorial integrity: PBS content should embrace the highest commitment to excellence, professionalism, intellectual honesty and transparency. In its news and information content, accuracy should be the cornerstone. Quality: PBS content should be distinguished by professionalism, thoroughness, and a commitment to experimentation and innovation. Diversity: PBS must be responsive to a diverse public and has a responsibility to explore subjects of significance and the marketplace of ideas.

The latest analyses from public radio’s Grow the Audience project examine the performance of public radio news stations, revealing two top predictors of these stations’ ability to attract sizable audience shares within their markets: the percentage of core listeners in their listenership and the educational level of the market. The new studies, co-authored by Station Resource Group and Walrus Research, also focus on the relationship between audience and listener support and the size of local news staffs.

WYES in New Orleans finally broke ground for a new headquarters Wednesday (June 22), nearly 20 years after General Manager Randy Feldman had first hoped to do so. “WYES staffers aren’t likely to miss the old building, an unheated cave with shaky air conditioning and lots of exposed wiring,” the Times-Picayune notes. Phase one is a new 20,000-square-foot, $7 million new building right behind the old; that should be done by March 2012. Phase two, to raze the original building, doesn’t yet have a start date.

The former NPR chief reflects on her two years at the helm of public radio’s top news organization, including the stormy final months of her presidency, in the latest edition of American Journalism Review. Leading NPR through the political crises that began with the Juan Williams dismissal strengthened her as a chief executive, Schiller says: “You develop a certain toughness and clarity of thinking about what matters and what is just a lot of noise. It would have been easy for me to get distracted, but too many people were depending on me for leadership. And so I discovered a strength I didn’t even know I had.”

The 2011 class of Knight News Challenge winners were announced today (June 22) — the last recipients of the initial five-year program that the Knight Foundation Board committed to in 2006, points out Jeff Sonderman, digital media fellow at the Poynter Institute. He examined the four ways the initiative is shaping the future of news through its 63 projects funded by $22 million. Ideas popular with the Knight Foundation funders include crowdfunding, the “hacker-journalist,” data as news and citizen journalism. But fear not, thought leaders. “We won’t officially announce the next iteration of the News Challenge anytime soon … [but] we are thinking critically about how to continue to do this and do it better,” John Bracken, Knight’s director of digital media, told Sonderman.