Antiques Roadshow embarked on a first-ever effort for the show in Denver last Saturday: Appraisers examined pieces of government-held unclaimed jewelry. The Colorado State Treasurer’s unclaimed property division contains some $450 million of objects or cash. There’s even a Great Colorado Payback website for residents to search. As with all of the tour stops, the action was taped for consideration as part of Antiques Roadshow’s 2010 season. At one recent appraisal session, Roadshow scored its first million-dollar appraisal.

Ben Bernanke is in the news with remarks made during a NewsHour town meeting. During the discussion in Kansas City, Mo., the fed chair said government bailouts by the Central Bank and other moves were necessary to avoid “a second Depression.” Anchor Jim Lehrer moderated the event, set to run in several installments on the show this week. Here’s the transcript.

For several months Alaska’s pubcasters have been working with Livingston Associates, a public media strategic planning firm, on the possibility of merging the largest outlets in the state, according to Anchorage Daily News. Steve Lindbeck, president and g.m. of Alaska Public Telecommunications Inc., said the managers of APTI (the Alaska Public Radio Network, KAKM-TV and KSKA-FM in Anchorage) have been meeting with KUAC in Fairbanks and KTOO in Juneau to share ideas. The new merged network could begin as early as next July, Lindbeck added.

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee has scheduled Patricia Cahill’s nomination hearing for the CPB Board for 2:30 p.m. July 29. If approved, Cahill, g.m. of KCUR-FM in Kansas City, Mo., will be the first active public radio station manager on the board.

New York’s WNET.org and a Brooklyn company Tierra Innovation Inc. announced this week they’re making available to other nonprofits a content management system based on the open-source WordPress Multi-User blogging platform. WNET says on a WordPress site that the CMS enabled it redo 5 to 10 websites a month instead of one or two without the CMS, at a quarter of the cost. Efficiency was necessary because the station had to do 16 national program sites and 27 sites related to the sister stations WNET and WLIW. With the redesign and its big doses of on-demand video, WNET sites have more than doubled their usage.

WGBH will have a smaller production volume for fiscal 2010, President and CEO Jon Abbott told staffers in a letter yesterday. Which means overhead and employee benefits paid by the productions will be “considerably reduced.” That’s one factor contributing to the station’s projected discretionary budget gap of $6.9 million dollars for FY 2010 “that we must and will close,” he wrote. An initial round of cuts requested that departments cut 5 percent of nonpersonnel budget costs; that reduction request is now up to an additional 8 percent. The station is reconsidering infrastructure improvements, negotiated employee benefit savings, and has approached its union leadership to ask for concessions.

Sesame Workshop President and CEO Gary Knell joined other broadcast industry insiders testifying before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Wednesday on the 1990 Children’s Media Act. It established the three-hour weekly minimum of educational children’s programming, and set advertising limits. Committee chair Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) called the hearings to address children’s programming in the digital age. In his address to the committee, Knell advised incentives be used to encourage creation of more cross-platform educational content. He also singled out childhood obesity as an important focus.

Philadelphia’s WXPN kicks off its three-day XPoNential Music Festival this afternoon, bringing a lineup of musical acts in the Triple A vein to Wiggins Park on the scenic Camden Waterfront. From two main stages and a Kids Corner, more than 50 artists will perform blues, rock, surf, R&B/soul and music that defies easy categorization. For those of you in Mid-Atlantic region: tickets are still available! But if you can’t make the Fest, tune your browsers to the WXPN stream here, where the station’s live broadcast coverage will be offered as a webstream throughout the weekend.

The Jim Henson Co.’s Henson Digital Puppetry Studio has received an Engineering Emmy Award for its system used in the PBS Kids series Sid the Science Kid. The technique allows performers “to puppeteer and voice digital characters in real time on a sound-stage setting with multiple virtual cameras and a real time viewer, generating a high yield per minute and cutting both animation time and costs exponentially,” according to a statement from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. It’s one of four Engineering Emmys to be presented at an Aug. 22 ceremony in Los Angeles.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood will only be available one episode per week beginning this fall, PBS has informed member stations. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that Kevin Morrison, CEO of Fred Rogers’ Family Communications Inc., cited ongoing economic woes. “PBS is operating under very tight budget constraints and it already has a full program lineup to support Monday through Friday,” Morrison said. “If it was offering Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on a daily basis it would only be as an option to the existing full lineup of programs, and that option is an expensive option for them and the financial situation prevents them from making that an option.”

A project highlighting the quite different economic fates of various U.S. communities, developed by the NewsHour and the Christian Science Monitor, was cited for Special Distinction in the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism announced today by the J-Lab at American University. For Patchwork Nation, producers crunched data from more than 3,100 counties. The $10,000 Knight-Batten Grand Prize went to the New York Times, which is working overtime not to go extinct, developed Represent, a feed for constituents to follow city officials’ activities; Custom Times a prototype personalized multiplatform report; Debate Analysis Tool, which provided a searchable scrolling text of the ’08 Presidential debates, and more.

“People who do what I do get paid a lot more than that,” says Mike Harding, a media consultant who is earning $10,000 a month to lead a restructuring of the University of Florida’s media properties, including WUFT-TV/FM in Gainesville. The Gainesville Sun reports that Harding, a commercial TV turn-around specialist, is being paid with funds drawn equally from the university’s four broadcast stations and its College of Journalism and Communications. Paul Gordon, a veteran media ad sales exec also retained by Dean John Wright, earns $69,000 annually as interim director of WRUF-AM, a struggling sports/talk outlet, and WRUF-FM, a rock station.

NPR unveils the “brand new NPR.org” in this YouTube video featuring Scott Simon’s first test-drive of the website launching July 27. The Weekend Edition Saturday host finds that the redesigned site is easier to read and navigate and features a Google-powered search engine and nifty interactive visuals. “We want NPR.org to be your source for NPR news, analysis, arts & life stories and music that is always fresh and up-to-date, a source of unexpected delight and most important, a site that always upholds NPR’s highest standards,” write NPR Digital chief Kinsey Wilson and NPR News Executive Editor Dick Meyer, in an accompanying note to the NPR Community.

Two lucky pubcasters heard their names called for prizes at the recent Public Radio Development and Marketing Conference in San Diego. And they received pretty primo prizes indeed: Two free international trips from Collette Vacations. Sarah Steinberg of KNPR, Las Vegas, won two tickets for a Christmas Market Tour of Salzburg, Linz, Vienna and Prague. Steinberg, a development associate at Nevada Public Radio, told Current she was especially surprised, seeing as she’d already won two items at the confab, an iPod Touch and a solar charger. Luanne Valentin, development director at KRCL, has donated her Mexico vacation for two to the Salt Lake City station to be used as a special thank-you gift for some “very loyal listener,” she said.

CPB today announced funding for new statewide Ready to Learn projects. Six pubTV stations will work with state education agencies to provide early childhood education resources and services, according to a CPB statement. Funds will foster those partnerships to integrate RTL digital media resources into pre-K through second grade classrooms and other learning environments, such as child-care settings and after-school programs. Efforts will especially target children from low-income families. Included are KQED, San Francisco; Georgia Public Broadcasting; Iowa Public Television; KTWU, Topeka, Kan.; Maryland Public Television; and WMHT, Troy, N.Y.