Public Radio News Directors Inc. presented its Leo C. Lee Award to former NPR producer Doug Mitchell. The award, which honors distinguished contributions to public radio journalism, recognized Mitchell’s work to “encourage young people – and particularly young people of color – to get into public radio,” PRNDI announced on its website. Mitchell, who left NPR in lay-offs announced in December, is a 20-year veteran of NPR News, and he worked for over a decade to establish a public radio journalism program for young people. Through Next Generation Radio, as the training program was called, “Doug did what a trainer is supposed to do–encapsulate the best values of the organization and transmit them intact to a new generation,” wrote former NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin, in a blog posting about the loss of present and future talent with Mitchell’s exit.

PubTV’s Saddle Up with Dennis Brouse has a new website. It’s designed to be an educational tool for horse enthusiasts. Brouse said in a statement he hopes the site will show users “how to develop a strong connection with their horses.”

Uh-oh. First young man Michael Kinsell alleged a link to PBS to advance his plans to become the next Mister Rogers. Now comes word that a staffer for the infamous comedian Sacha Baron Cohen mentioned a potential affiliation with PBS in the lead-up to filming of his latest project about a gay fashion designer, Bruno. A California woman, Richelle Olson, has filed suit saying she was duped by a call from a fake corporation linked to Cohen. A rep asked her if a “celebrity” could announce numbers at a charity bingo game Olson runs, and told her that his appearance would be taped for “a television station such as Discovery Channel or PBS.”

More than 317,000 calls came into the FCC’s toll-free DTV help line yesterday (PDF), the agency reported, as stations said farewell to analog signals. The FCC termed that number “extraordinarily high.” Total calls in the runup: Nearly 700,000 between June 8 and 12. Almost 30 percent of callers asked technical questions about their digital converter boxes. “Most” of those, said the FCC, were taken care of with directions for rescans of the boxes to receive channels that had moved to new frequencies. Check out Current‘s story from this week’s issue on the 2.7 percent of American households that were unprepared for the switchover.

WFUV’s Rita Houston will present special coverage of the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival on tonight’s edition of The Whole Wide World, airing 7-10 pm. Online listeners can catch her live show here (choose the ‘FUV branded streams). Houston, music director for the NYC station, will produce live broadcasts, video podcasts and other online coverage through out the weekend.

Reporter John Eggerton of Broadcasting & Cable decided to see for himself how things were going at the FCC’s DTV call center. He tried three times. First, call demand was too high; “goodbye,” a voice said. Next, Eggerton said he was put “on hold with music that recalled the funky jazz of 1970’s detective show soundtracks.” Third time — nope, didn’t make it through to speak with a human then either. The FCC doesn’t yet have call totals. But in a statement today it “hails a new era in broadcasting” (PDF).

How did your station celebrate today’s milestone DTV transition? At PBS affiliate WGVU-TV in Grand Rapids, Mich., “dignitaries, photographers and reporters jammed into the … control room for a live broadcast counting down the final seven minutes of the station’s analog signal,” reports The Grand Rapids News. Two local bigwigs – including Grand Valley State University President Emeritus Arend D. Lubbers, who welcomed viewers when the station started broadcasting in 1972 – did the honors at 10 a.m. and switched off the power to Channels 35 and 52. “I thought it would hurt, but it didn’t,” Lubbers reported. As analog monitors went gray, applause erupted outside the door.

This week the House Appropriations Committee okayed its subcommittee discretionary allocations for FY2010, reports APTS in its weekly legislative update. That’s the amount each subcommittee has to draft its spending bill. The subcommittee that funds most pubcasting programs (Labor, HSS and Education) received $7.5 billion more than FY2009, for a total of $160.65 billion. “Although this is a welcome increase,” APTS noted, “key elements of President Obama’s ambitious domestic agenda will likely account for much of this increase, making funding in the Labor-HHS bill extremely competitive.” The bill should hit the House floor for a vote July 22. The House Appropriations Committee also this week retained PTFP’s $20 million in the House Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Subcommittee’s bill.

Support for easier licensing standards for Low Power FM stations is growing in Congress and at the FCC, according to reports [here and here] on yesterday’s House subcommittee hearing on the Local Community Radio Act of 2009. The FCC’s extensive experience in FM licensing “refutes the claim that elimination of third-adjacent channel protection requirements would result in pervasive interference,” Peter Boyle, chief of the commission’s Audio Division, told lawmakers in his written testimony. “In fact, the potential for interference would be limited to areas immediately adjacent to LPFM transmitter sites.” NPR has long opposed proposals allowing more flexibility in channel-spacing rules for LPFM stations.

An “essay to read and keep“: Margaret Low Smith of NPR describes the basic ingredients needed for public radio to “become essential in the lives of more Americans.” In the final commentary commissioned by the Station Resource Group’s Grow the Audience project, the network’s top programmer calls upon the field’s creative talents to go beyond the classic “driveway moments” and learn what it takes to create “harddrive-way moments.” Smith boils it down to traditional elements of public radio journalism–good story-telling, engaging guests and vibrant personalities, “great tape,” and versatility in the crafts of reporting, producing and editing. She also sets the bar high for the content being produced in any medium for any platform.

Now that the absolutely final DTV transition is really here, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) is looking back over the long, laborious process leading up to this point, reports Broadcasting & Cable. Markey is former chair of the House Telecommunications (now Communications) Subcommittee. “When I held the first Congressional hearing on then-high definition TV (HDTV) in the early fall of 1987, ” he wrote in an e-mail, “I never imagined that it would take almost 22 years to reach this moment.” He said he “aggressively advocated for such a switch and successfully convinced the FCC in 1990 to begin pursuing a digital standard.”

PBS today announced job cuts and other cost reductions during a staff meeting at headquarters in Arlington, Va. It faces a $3.4 million deficit in next fiscal year’s budget, spokesperson Jan McNamara told Current. A total of 45 positions, or about 10 percent of the staff, are affected, including elimination of vacancies. A six-month salary reduction of 3.85 percent for all nonunion employees starts July 1. On Jan. 1, 2010, company retirement contributions will fall from 8 percent to 6 percent; those will resume by July 2010, McNamara said. A hiring freeze currently in place will continue, and other cuts including travel will be made.

The NewsHour unveiled two of its collaborative reporting projects on-air and online this week. Generation Next, a follow-up to Judy Woodruff’s 2006-07 series on young Americans, began its month-long run with reports airing on the NewsHour and NPR on Monday. Patchwork Nation, a multimedia project examining how the recession is affecting different types of communities, also launched with feature reports by the Christian Science Monitor and KWMU in St. Louis. The Monitor created Patchwork Nation as a reporting project for the 2008 election; as part CPB‘s big intiative backing collaborative multimedia projects dealing with the recession, it teamed up with the NewsHour and 14 pubcasting stations to focus the coverage on economics reporting.

A team of runners from WNET participated in yesterday’s J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge run in Central Park. Led by Stewart Roberts of the underwriting department, participants (above) included Janice Fuld, Ashlinn Quinn, Samantha Gibb, Arielle Altman, Kristin DiQuollo, Kathryn Minas, Corey Nascenzi and Maura Thompson. The JPMorgan Chase Foundation has donated more than $1.75 million to nonprofits from runs in six countries on five continents during the past three years, according to its website.

During a recent appearance in Seattle, Anthony Bourdain had an odd question for fellow celeb chef Mario Batali about actress Gwyneth Paltrow: “Why would you go to Spain with the one b*tch who refuses to eat ham?” Paltrow is co-host of Batali’s PBS show Spain … On the Road Again. But Bourdain asked it with a wicked grin, so it’s all in good fun. Paltrow, an avowed macrobiotic eater, has a website, GOOP, that raves about the virtues of the diet. Paltrow has another link to pubcasting: She was a guest on Food Matters with Mark Bittman, part of CPB’s Public Radio Talent Quest.