Longtime music hosts Paul Ray and Larry Monroe lost airtime when Austin’s KUT revamped its evening schedule, and their fans are mighty upset about it. Cleve Hattersley of the Greezy Wheels, a quintessentially Austin band from the 1970s whose influence lives on, organized a public forum last week for listeners to discuss ways to reverse KUT’s programming changes. “At least 100 people attended Hattersley’s town hall meeting, where suggestions for action included cutting off donations to KUT, a position not endorsed by everyone,” reports the Austin American-Statesman. Meanwhile, the Facebook group Support Larry Monroe and Paul Ray at KUT, “two of the best DJs ever to spin a record,” has 940 members.

Long Island University is looking to sell WLIU, an NPR News and jazz station broadcasting from its campus in Southhampton, N.Y. The station “currently runs at a deficit that the university can no longer afford to subsidize,” said Robert Altholz, Long Island University’s vice president for finance and treasurer, in a news release. The Southhampton Press reports that LIU covers roughly 54 percent of the station’s $2.4 million budget. Under orders of the university’s trustees, all subsidies for the station are to end on October 3. Wally Smith, WLIU manager, learned about the university’s plan in April; efforts to find another public institution to take over the license and preserve the service have failed.

Public Radio Today 2009, Arbitron’s analysis of public radio listening patterns and demographics, digs into Fall 2008 diary and Portable People Meter ratings and sifts out details about the performance of the eight different public radio formats. Driven in large part by interest in the 2008 presidential elections, news/talk stations increased their weekly share of all public radio listening to 48 percent, a 10 percent increase from Fall 2006, the period covered in Arbitron’s last report on public radio. Led by the emergence of KUSC in Los Angeles and WETA in Washington, D.C., as the only all-classical stations in their markets, the classical music format boosted its average quarter hour share of pubradio listening to 13.7 percent.

Patricia Cahill was approved by the Senate Friday to serve on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s board. She’s g.m. of KCUR-FM in Kansas City, Mo., and will serve through 2014.

PBS has compiled a nifty list of all 30 or more interviews its rep conducted with TV producers, stars and other bigwigs during the recent Television Critics Association tour in Pasadena, Calif. Videos include Paula S. Apsell, senior executive producer of NOVA; actor Jonny Lee Miller of Masterpice Contemporary’s “Endgame” (and Angelina Jolie’s ex-husband) and doc legend Ken Burns. Most popular, with nearly 3,000 hits, is David Tennant, the new Masterpiece Contemporary host and former star of BBC’s Doctor Who.

Austin City Limits in October will be designated an historic rock and roll landmark site by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Rock Hall President and CEO Terry Stewart and ACL Executive Producer Terry Lickona made the announcement today at the KLRU-TV studio, home of the series. “Austin City Limits represents one of the most unique archives of modern American music,” Stewart said. The Rock Hall will unveil a historic marker Oct. 1 to celebrate the premiere of the 35th season of ACL on PBS. The Rock Hall’s Landmark Series designates historic rock and roll landmarks around the United States that are essential to tell the story of rock and roll music.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting will pay nearly $2.9 million in webcasting royalties to SoundExchange under an agreement approved yesterday by the CPB board. The payments will cover the royalties for the digital music streams of some 450 public radio stations from 2011-2015. The new agreement was negotiated under a deadline set by the Small Webcasters Settlement Act and alters the reporting requirements that pubcasting stations must meet under the current contract, according to Jeff Luchsinger, CPB director of radio system investment. Census reporting, which syncs audience data with music titles being webcast, will be required of only those stations with the largest web audiences.

When NPR political correspondent Mara Liasson compared the government’s Cash for Clunkers program to a “mini-Katrina,” her poorly chosen words violated NPR’s ethics policy, according to NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard. Liasson was wearing her FOX News punditry hat on Aug. 4 when she made the remarks on live television (video here), but e-mails complaining about the inappropriate comparison poured into Shepard’s office at NPR. “I said something really stupid, which I regret,” a contrite Liasson tells Shepard in her latest column. If Liasson had said something this regrettable on NPR, the network’s journalists would have re-recorded the interview and apologized on-air for the misstatement, says Ellen Weiss, senior v.p.

Ed Walker, locally famous deejay and now host of WAMU’s Sunday night nostalgic The Big Broadcast, was elected to the National Radio Hall of Fame in online voting. In the national personality category, however, conservative Atlanta broadcast Neal Boortz [his website] appears to have trounced nominee Ira Glass’s This American Life. Walker joins former WAMU stars Susan Stamberg and Bob Edwards, earlier inductees in the Hall of Fame. Walker teamed for many years with Willard Scott (later the Today weatherman) as a drivetime comedy duo. See this rare video from their last day as WRC’s Joy Boys.

PBS head Paula Kerger said it’s considering shifting that well-known phrase ” … and viewers like you … ” to the front of underwriting acknowledgments, something Pittsburgh’s WQED has already done. “The truth is the majority of our support comes from individual philanthropy and I do think we need to do a better job of making sure people recognize that,” Kerger told assembled television critics at their tour in Pasadena, Calif., this week. As for WQED, “I know we’ve been talking to them about the implementation. Obviously, part of the reason we’re interested is to help stations signal value in their own communities.”

As promised, PBS Engage forwarded reader questions to folk legend Pete Seeger, and now presents the 90-year-old’s answers. Here he explains his famous quote that “it’s not always enough to sing”: “I’m increasingly doubtful about marching, but of course communicating can be done with all the arts, including cooking and cleaning, carpentry, humor and sports.”

Big changes at WNED in Buffalo, N.Y., effective immediately. Dick Daly, former senior v.p. of broadcasting, is now senior consultant reporting to President and CEO Donald Boswell. Michael Sutton, former CFO and senior v.p. of Finance and Administration, moves to executive vice president and COO, overseeing the Finance & Administration, Education & Outreach, Engineering & Technology, Information Technology, Human Resources, and Building Services departments. Former Controller Nancy Hammond is taking over Sutton’s former post. Director of Education and Outreach John Craig will head that department due to the departure of Education and Outreach v.p. Pamela Johnson, who is moving to CPB to head up Ready to Learn initiative.

PBS comes to the end of the Rainbow Aug. 28 when broadcast rights for one of the system’s longest-running kids’ programs expire and Reading Rainbow leaves the network’s satellite feed. Only Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood have had longer PBS kidvid careers. In 26 years, Reading Rainbow won 24 national Emmys, including 10 for best children’s series. “Its real core support has always been in the education community,” says John Grant, chief content officer of Buffalo’s WNED, co-producing station for the show since its debut in July 1983. Grant is talking with PBS about extending the life of the popular spinoff Reading Rainbow Young Writers & Illustrators Contest.

On a personal visit to the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, CPB Ombudsman Ken Bode sat in on a live call-in show produced by WYSO-FM, an NPR News and contemporary music station located on the campus of Antioch College. The station broadcasts to a west-central region of Ohio that has been designated by the Treasury Department as among those critically affected by the mortgage crisis, Bode reports, and has received special assistance from CPB and NPR to ramp up its reporting on housing foreclosures. “This is our Katrina,” Neenah Ellis, a veteran pubradio producer who took over as WYSO manager in February, tells Bode.

Did you know that Jerry Carr, now president and CEO of WXEL in Boynton Beach, Fla., years ago broke his elbow falling out of a coffin he had been nailed into, and reinjured it tumbling from an elephant?