This year’s Public Radio Development and Marketing Conference has wrapped up in San Diego. Keith York of KPBS, who covered it for his PMD site, reports that “The Skinny on Online Sponsorship” was one interesting session. In it, KPLU in Seattle/Tacoma reported it’s made $250,000 off its Around the House webpage, where listeners interact and experts lend advice to homeowners. Also successful is its Buy Local page, with five sponsors so far, that touts locally produced foods. The “advertorial” content is created by the underwriting staff. (For more on online sponsorship models, see Current’s October 2008 story.) Now that the confab is over, Current is waiting to hear who won the two free trips: Nine days on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, and a Christmas market tour of Salzburg, Linz, Vienna and Prague.

Emergency funds for pubcastingcleared an important hurdle today, as the House’s Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies subcom approved $40 million in “meaningful, urgent relief directly to local stations,” according to an APTS statement. President and CEO Larry Sidman added, “All of public broadcasting is deeply grateful to Chairman [David] Obey [D-Wisc.] and his subcommittee members for providing desperately needed support to stations battered by the most prolonged recession since World War II.” Next steps: The bill progresses to that chamber’s Appropriations Committee, and on to the House floor. The Senate also needs to weigh in. On Capitol Hill Day in February, APTS and station reps lobbied for a $211 million supplemental appropriation for FY2010, or what Sidman termed “an emergency infusion of funding” (Current, Feb.

High-end outdoor accessories retailer Smith & Hawken is going out of business. What does that have to do with pubcasting? Founding partner Paul Hawken was producer and host of the 17-part series Growing a Business that aired on PBS; it focused on owning and running a socially conscious company. According to Hawken’s biography, the program ultimately played in 115 countries and was watched by more than 100 million viewers. Ten 30-minute episodes ran from November 1987 to November 1990 on PBS.

WQED’s cutbacks are affecting not only station personnel, but also donor foundations’ confidence in the station, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “We are concerned about WQED’s future and we care about its mission,” said John Ellis, spokesman for the Pittsburgh Foundation, which has donated more than $600,000 over the past five years. “Like most public service TV stations across the country, WQED needs to develop a sustainable model for public service television in this region and we hope they’re successful in that endeavor.” WQED Multimedia President George Miles promised to present foundations with a new strategic planby July.

Carl Kasell, media elite. That’s according to the Power Grid on Mediaite.com. It ranks personalities by audience, blog entries and Twitter groupies. In all, 12 PBSers and 13 folks on NPR are there, from the expected (Tavis Smiley, Jim Lehrer, Gwen Ifill) to the slightly more unexpected, such as the longtime authoritative NPR voice Kasell — no doubt, he’s developed a whole new fan base with all those home answering-machine recordings via Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.

Think digital coupons. That’s one interesting suggestion that emerged from the Public Radio Development & Marketing Conference in San Diego. Blogging the confab is Keith York, a KPBS programmer who writes the Public Media Digest. York reports that Paul Jacobs of Jacobs Media told a packed session that use of digital coupons is surpassing printed coupons, so stations could offer listeners online coupons and discounts for sponsors. A leader in digital coupons, Safeway, added them to its loyalty card effort last month, the database marketing blog DM News reported. Forbes said some digital coupons fail to offer meaningful savings and even charge memberships to prospective users.

It’s Mailbag time for PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler and — uh oh — some letter writers found PBS’s A Capitol Fourth less than thrilling this year. In fact, they called it “meaningless,” “disappointing” and “insipid.” Writers are also still weighing in on the PBS Board’s new ruling on sectarian programming.

The Poynter Institute’s Amy Gahran is raving about NPR’s mobile web capability, from her current vacation spot in northern Michigan — which has little or no cell or broadband access. “This trip has really hammered home how poorly most news sites handle the mobile Web — and brought one shining star to the fore: National Public Radio,” she writes on the Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits column. She adds: “People want news where they are, and often their cell phone is all they’ve got. Also, they may sometimes only have a couple of bars of cell network connection. It’s up to news organizations to work with those constraints to help build loyalty with this huge market.

The head of the theater program at private Mississippi College and a former United Nations World Food Program official, Judith Lewis, starts work Aug 1. as executive director of Mississippi Public Broadcasting, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported yesterday. She succeeds Marie Antoon, who announced her retirement earlier this year and will continue to work with MPB for a transition month. Lewis is an associate professor of communications at the college in Clinton, near the state capital, Jackson. She retired about three yeares ago from the U.N. program; she was a regional director in eastern and southern Africa and has lived in Angola, Ethiopia, Uganda and South Africa, the newspaper said.

KCPT, the PBS affiliate in Kansas City, Mo., will host a one-hour forum with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke moderated by Jim Lehrer on July 26 at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. That will translate into three nights of coverage on NewsHour followed by a one-hour special. TV critic Aaron Barnhart wrote in a Kansas City Star blog, “This is a coup for KCPT, the Kansas City public TV station that continues to outperform its 31st-largest-market stature. It will be choosing the members of the local audience, who will join online participants in a national dialogue about the Fed, its power, and the state of the economy following one of the biggest government economic interventions in history.”

Here’s some happy news: Milwaukee Public Television reports that more than half the country’s pubstations are picking up its HD feed of the city’s Great Circus Parade. That means some 52 percent of Americans from Boston all the way to Hawaii have a chance to watch, according to a station release.

Ira Glass, e.p. and host of This American Life, is this year’s recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award from CPB. Board member Lori Gilbert presented Glass with the honor today at the Public Radio Development and Marketing Conference in San Diego, saying the show “has created a new aesthetic for public radio, now emulated by a new generation of producers and reporters.” TAL debuted in 1995 and is currently broadcast on more than 500 pubradio stations to a weekly audience of 1.8 million listeners. CPB has given the Murrow Award since 1977 to “individuals who foster public radio’s quality and service and shape its direction.”

Free tickets to enter the Antiques Roadshow episode in Madison, Wisc., are selling for $200 online, local WKOW-TV is warning viewers. The producers track such sales and will cancel those tickets if it identifies sellers.

One of the San Francisco Bay Area’s numerous pubTV stations has dropped PBS membership in hopes of averting its sale. Hit by budget cuts like everything else in California’s public sector, San Mateo County Community College District gave KCSM-TV/FM a chance to cut costs, the San Mateo County Times reported yesterday. It is cutting six positions, five in TV and one in radio. Dropping PBS will save $400,000 a year, almost half of the $825,000 reduction planned. KCSM also plans to lease some spectrum to make money.

Minnesota Public Radio today is the latest pubcaster to unveil a new website look and structure. While it retains some news on its home page, MPR refers news junkies to NewsQ, “Minnesota’s online source for news that matters,” with links to five blogs and its Public Insight Network at top center. Sections related to MPR’s two music services get distinct coloring and emotional tones. The calm green-accented classical section has a heading asserting “it’s alive” and is decorated with minty sprigs up top (beech leaves?). There’s a lively red-and-yellow look for 89.3 The Current, MPR’s contemporary music channel.