Pubradio’s Marketplace has altered its music for “The Numbers” segment of the business program, during which listeners learn if the stock market is up or down. If it’s down, it’s “Stormy Weather.” If it’s up, it used to be “We’re in the Money.” But even when the market is up, who’s really in the money these days? So a composer was commissioned for a new version, which, according to the show, “better reflects the ‘cheeriness’ investors may be feeling when the markets tick up only a few points at a time when the Dow is hovering around 7,000 points.” Hear both versions here.

In September pubTV stations will have access to Healthy Minds, an award-winning show on mental health from WLIW in New York. The American Psychiatric Foundation has announced it will contribute $50,000 to fund national distribution of the 13-episode 2008-09 season, and three episodes from the show’s first season. “My hope for the show is to encourage people who may have a psychiatric condition to seek help and not to suffer in silence,” host and psychiatrist Jeffrey Borenstein told Psychiatric News. “I end each show by saying, ‘With help, there is hope.'” The show has won several Tellys and a Folio Award.

Chicago’s WBEZ is asking its listeners to make donations of $20 in an innovative fundraising campaign running on WBEZ20.org. The website combines goofy videos, half-serious quizzes, and donor testimonials–along with a great big orange button soliciting contributions. Videos starring Carl Kasell, Peter Sagal, and Kai Ryssdal predict dire outcomes if individuals who don’t pony up, with titles such as, “Without your $20 . . . Carl Kasell’s voice is wasted on youth.” The campaign, created to help the station meet its fiscal-year-end fundraising goals, is designed to keep pledge drives and program interruptions to a minimum, says WBEZ’s Cindy Hansen.

Online fundraising among 32 nonprofits is up 26 percent over 2008. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is the average donation decreased by 21 percent. So says the 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, co-authored by M+R Strategic Services, a nonprofit advocacy group, and the Nonprofit Technology Network. Other findings: Email response rates held steady this year, compared with previous declines. The average online gift was $71, down $15. And email lists continue to grow, but more slowly.

NPR News chief Ellen Weiss has reassigned members of her senior management team to adjust for recent job losses in the newsroom, according to a memo leaked to Mediabistro. “The painful cuts and sacrifices by everyone at NPR have sharpened our focus on how best to secure NPR’s and public radio’s future in terms of journalism, audience and revenue,” Weiss says in the memo. “And News plays a central role: our ability to create and present the highest quality journalism and storytelling on all platforms is what defines NPR’s distinctive value. To support these priorities I am restructuring the senior leadership of News.”

CPB is requesting quotes for a person or group to compose a final report summarizing the activities and outcomes of its Ready To Lead in Literacy initiative. Anyone intending to submit proposals must notify CPB by May 22, deadline for proposals is June 5.

PBS leads the network pack in Daytime Emmy nods, announced today in Los Angeles by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. PBS has 56; ABC, 50; syndicated programming, 49; CBS, 30; and NBC, 20. Included are PBS nominations for Sid the Science Kid, Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie, Equitrekking, This Old House and Mama Mirabelle’s Home Movies. Also, Sesame Street will receive a special Lifetime Achievement Award for its 40 years on the air. See a complete list of nominations here.

Now is the time for NPR to think about “becoming our own disruptor,” said President Vivian Schiller during a webinar on how media companies can and must adapt to the dissolution of their traditional business models. During a one-hour talk and Q&A hosted today by the Microsoft-sponsored blog FASTforward, Schiller pointed to the big audience gains that NPR booked last fall as the reason for an aggressive push into the digital media sphere–“this is exactly the time you’ve got to think about cannibalizing yourself”–and said it’s no longer good enough for NPR.org to be a companion to the NPR radio news service.

Filmmaker Henry Louis Gates is the latest recipient of the Ralph Lowell Award from CPB. Gates was presented with the honor, pubTV’s most prestigious, Wednesday evening at the PBS Showcase in Baltimore. His body of work for the network includes Wonders of the African World, America Beyond the Color Line, and Looking for Lincoln. He made news in 2006 and ’08 when he hosted and co-produced African American Lives and African American Lives 2, in which he uses DNA testing to track the lineage of notable African-Americans. His next project was previewed at PBS Showcase: Faces of America, which will follow the ancestry of two Jewish-Americans, two Arab-Americans, two Latino-Americans, two Asian-Americans, two West Indian-Americans, two Irish Americans and an Italian-American.

Acting FCC Chair Michael Copps thinks America needs ways to address market failures in media businesses. “For example, should we find a way adequately to fund PBS or some other group that is actually interested in doing the job?” In a speech before the “Free Press Summit: Changing Media,” today at the Newseum, he also said that perhaps that would be “a PBS-S, Public Broadcasting System on Steroids. That can’t be done on the cheap, and we’ll hear laments that there’s not a lot of extra cash floating around these days. But other nations find ways to support such things.

There’s been a “changing of the guard” at New York’s WBAI, the Pacifica station that has been hemoraging money for years. General Manager Tony Riddle was offered a reassignment and Program Director Bernard White was escorted out of the building on Friday, the New York Daily News reported. “This is a termination,” White wrote in a letter to his supporters. Steve Brown, a member of the WBAI local station board, told the Daily News that the changes are intended to revive the station, but White’s supporters see it differently. An alternative view from Berkeley, Calif., home to the Pacifica Foundation that owns WBAI and Pacifica community radio stations in four additional markets, comes from former KPFA listener board chair Richard Phelps, who has either attended or listened online to many Pacifica National Board meetings.

Jim Shelton is not only the Assistant Deputy Secretary of the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement. He’s also, as he told a ballroom full of pubcasters at the PBS Showcase, “one of millions and millions of parents” who entrust their children to the network. “There is no place I’d rather send my son than PBS,” he said of his 6-year-old. “PBS has the opportunity to be the most effective, trusted brand in education in the country. To be transformative for our children, young adults, and adults in transition in particular. It’s in your hands, and I trust you with it.”

Joaquin Alvarado, who joins CPB on June 30 as senior v.p. for diversity and innovation, led a wide-ranging, fast-moving discussion on “Public Service Media 2.0” at Wednesday’s PBS Showcase. One issue: Pubcasting, he said, is “woefully absent” from the conversation about the educational possibilities of video games. “We have all these kids at the console spending four, five hours a day playing games. How do we use that as an opportunity to address challenges in education?” Alvarado cited as an example the nonprofit Games for Change, which, according to its website, “seeks to harness the extraordinary power of video games to address the most pressing issues of our day, including poverty, human rights, global conflict and climate change.”

At PBS Showcase yesterday, APTS President Larry Sidman joked that there was scant coverage — OK, none — of his first 100 days in office. But he was busy indeed, and will continue to be during the coming months. Sidman and his legislative team updated pubcasters on the lobbying group’s ongoing efforts on Capitol Hill. “We feel our job is to try to get access to as much federal funding for stations as we possibly can,” Sidman said, because all stations are suffering shortfalls in “almost every nonfederal funding source.” The group also is trying to assist individual stations that aspire to stimulus grants.

Next week Sesame Workshop and partner KOCH Records will re-release on CD “Sesame Street: Silly Songs,” a classic album currently out of print. Remember these? “Monster in the Mirror,” “Captain Vegetable” and “The Honker-Duckie-Dinger Jamboree.” Should be in stores around May 19.