At NPR’s blog, Robert Smith is sizing up the competition: the new Washington Post radio station that launched this morning. “You want to take this outside for a debate over globalization? I didn’t think so.”

“National Public Radio recently issued a testy note to Boston Acoustics, complaining about reception problems with a radio NPR had bought in huge numbers for giveaways,” reports the Philadelphia Daily News.

Public radio reporter and producer Kathy McAnally died March 24 of cancer. She was 55. This remembrance aired on San Francisco’s KQED-FM, where McAnally worked for many years.

Rebecca Roberts, daughter of Cokie, will host a new local talk show on WETA-FM in Washington, D.C., starting this summer. (Second item.)

PBS ombudsman Michael Getler addresses viewer complaints about pledge programming and posts letters from pledge-weary pubTV fans in his most recent column. “PBS needs to change its name!” writes a viewer in Grand Rapids, Mich. “My suggestion is to call PBS the ‘Please Buy Something’ network.”

CPB is accepting applications for another round of digital conversion grants to public radio stations.

Reverbiage is “a news feed aggregator featuring NPR News Headlines.”

CPB plans to launch a Station Renewal Project for pubradio stations that could fall short of new audience service criteria for Community Service Grants. A recent Request for Proposals seeks a pubradio professional to serve as a consultant on the project.

See Chicago Public Radio’s Torey Malatia get all Glengarry Glen Ross at his station’s pledge drive. Also, the station is offering a This American Life 100th Anniversary mug as a premium (that’s right, 100th anniversary).

The San Mateo County Community College District will appeal the $15,000 indecency fine the FCC levied against KCSM-TV for naughty words uttered in an March 2004 installment of PBS doc, The Blues. KCSM was notifed of the commission’s decision last week. Washington, D.C.-based law firm Morrison and Foerster will represent the district on a pro bono basis.

The University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., has taken its public radio station off the market. The university was not satisfied with the proposals it received for KUOP-FM but will put the station back on the market within a year. Capital Public Radio in Sacramento will continue to operate the station.

The Columbia Journalism Review looks at the case of Clark Parrish, a religious broadcaster whose companies snapped up hundreds of FM translators from the FCC a few years ago only to turn around and sell them. “Based on the average sale price for one of their translators, their remaining spectrum holdings, which the FCC granted free, could be worth as much as $8.7 million,” CJR says. (Earlier coverage in Current.)

New York’s WNYC-AM/FM is moving from the city’s Municipal Building into larger digs in lower Manhattan that will include a 3,700-square-foot performance space.

The Los Angeles Times reports that on April 17 Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre will show free continuous screenings of The Armenian Genocide, the controversial documentary debuting on PBS stations that night. Filmmaker Andrew Goldberg rented the theatre after KCET in Los Angeles declined to broadcast both the film and the panel discussion that PBS commissioned to follow it.

Consultant Robert Paterson has been working with NPR on its series of systemwide meetings, New Realities. On his blog, he shares conversations with WBEZ’s Torey Malatia, KCRW’s Ruth Seymour and Bill Buzenberg of Minnesota Public Radio.