This item has been updated and reposted with additional information. A former volunteer at Houston’s jazz format NPR affiliate KTSU has been jailed for allegedly stealing credit card information from listener pledge sheets and using the information to buy electronics and gift cards, which he would then sell for cash. Michael Whitfield, whom the Houston Chronicle reports has a history of financial crimes, was charged Jan. 9 with the fraudulent use and possession of identifying information for more than 50 people, a third-degree felony. Investigators say there are more than 20 confirmed cases but there could be as many as 300 potential victims.

PBS was nominated in four categories at the 70th Golden Globe Awards Jan. 13, but only Dame Maggie Smith of Downton Abbey earned a win from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Smith won for Best Supporting Actress in a TV Series for the show’s second season. The awards, which celebrate both film and television, had also nominated Downton Abbey for Best Drama, while star Michelle Dockery had been nominated for Best Actress in a Drama. The Showtime series Homeland won in both categories. Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch had been nominated for Best Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie, but lost to Kevin Costner for his work in History’s Hatfields & McCoys.

The State Educational Broadcasting Authority of West Virginia voted Jan. 10 to hire Scott Finn as the new executive director of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, the Associated Press reports. Finn previously served as a reporter and the news director of the network, but left in 2009 to become news director at WUSF in Tampa, Fla. He will replace Dennis Adkins, who is retiring on Feb. 1 and had been fighting the board for months over financial concerns. In August 2012, Adkins had proposed around $200,000 in funding cuts to the network in the wake of a looming 7.5-percent cut in state funding.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), today announced that he will not seek re-election in 2014. Joining him for his appearance in Charleston was his wife, Sharon Rockefeller, who is president of WETA in Arlington, Va., and a past CPB chair. Sen. Rockefeller chaired the Commerce Committee, which oversees CPB and FCC funding. “As I approach 50 years of public service in West Virginia,” he said at the announcement, “I’ve decided that 2014 will be the right moment for me to find new ways to fight for the causes I believe in and to spend more time with my incredible family. Serving West Virginia in the U.S.

FM tuners on smartphones could soon be a reality. On Tuesday,  at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, representatives of Sprint Nextel said that some phone models could soon come equipped with FM chips. Sprint said it had entered into a preliminary agreement with radio industry representatives that will let its customers listen to local FM stations. “FM radio could be delivered through the NextRadio tuner application or other radio apps or services,” the company said, in a release. “This is a great development for the radio industry, one which will help us bring the content and services that only radio can provide to the wireless system,” said Bob Pittman, c.e.o.

Homicide Watch, a crowdfunded community reporting site that tracks city murder victims, will launch its third site in Chicago by the end of the month through a partnership with the Chicago Sun-Times, reports the New York Times. The startup is the brainchild of Laura and Chris Amico, who manage the site’s flagship Washington, D.C., edition. They’ve kept the site — which they started in September 2010 and most recently relaunched in August 2011 — running with help from crowdfunding campaigns on platforms like Kickstarter and Spot.us. Despite financial struggles, including their inability to find a local news organization to partner with, the Amicos have reaped many journalistic accolades for their data-driven reporting, including the 2012 Knight Public Service Award from the Online News Association.

Four years after the first iteration of PRX’s Public Radio Player iPhone launched, a complete, “ground-up rewrite” is ready, with features including a prominent “donate” button and the ability to download content for listening off-network. PRX announced the features of the newest version of its app during a conference call with stations Jan. 10. Director of Technical Projects Matt MacDonald said the overhaul’s goal was to continue to make the app one that individual stations without resources to build their own would continue to view as theirs. The Public Radio Player app, which is only available for Apple iOS devices, offers up thousands of stations streams, programs and podcasts from PRX, NPR, PRI and APM.

Will the FCC meet its self-imposed deadline of 2014 for completion of broadcast spectrum auctions? That’s still to hard to say, according to several experts speaking on panels at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, reports TVNewsCheck. Rick Kaplan, executive vice president of strategic planning for the National Association of Broadcasters, sounds doubtful. One sticking point: Spectrum complications along the Canadian and Mexican borders. “Border issues are enormous,” he said. “Does the FCC want to go forward with 2014, and potentially leave Canada and Mexico out? Some of that spectrum currently extends as far as New York City.

Nightly Business Report has entered a content partnership with several top business schools for its new NBR-U initiative. The Miami-based weeknight financial program is working with Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Vanderbilt University for online and broadcast pieces. Articles supplied by the partners will run on the NBR-U website, and professors will appear in video segments each Monday. Tom Hudson, NBR’s managing editor and co-anchor, said the video reports and articles will “provide the depth that leads to real understanding, without hype and conjecture.”

Sesame Workshop voiced concern Wednesday after a North Korean government-owned trade publication highlighting a toy company’s apparent offerings came to light that appear to include unlicensed Sesame Street characters. The photos appeared in the latest issue of Foreign Trade of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a quarterly publication highlighting manufacturers of products ranging from plush toys and “Gold Liquor” to “cornhusk shoes.” On page 13 of the publication is a profile of Kyonghung Trading Corp., a 7-year-old manufacturer of plush toys, some bearing the likenesses of Cookie Monster, Big Bird and Elmo. In an email to Voice of America, which ran the story, Sesame Workshop said “we believe the toys pictured are unauthorized.”

Two documentaries on PBS received Academy Award nominations at the 5:30 a.m. Pacific announcement today from Los Angeles. Honored in the documentary feature category were The Invisible War, an examination of rape of soldiers within the U.S. military, on Independent Lens; and 5 Broken Cameras, which looks at the reaction of one village to a separation barrier, on P.O.V.  Winners will be announced during the live Oscar telecast on Feb. 24.

Kathy Merritt, senior director of radio program investments at CPB, has accepted a position as vice president, content strategy and development at Public Radio International. Merritt will identify new talent, production and business partners, and work with producers on content development, audience research and new business opportunities, the Minneapolis-based PRI said in today’s announcement. She will report to Chief Content Officer Melinda Ward. “Kathy’s wide range of experience in public broadcasting,” Ward said, “including leadership positions at stations, industry associations like SRG [Station Resource Group] and Public Radio News Directors Association, and her most recent tenure at CPB, uniquely qualify her for her role in developing PRI’s content strategy, working with producers and ensuring that our content meets station and digital needs.”

Larry McDaniel, known for decades on public radio in Detroit as “The Arkansas Traveler,” died Jan. 4 after a lengthy illness, reports the Detroit News. He was 72. He was a fixture on WDET-FM from 1977 to 2009, with his bluegrass show that was part of a block of American roots music on Saturdays. A 2002 press release marking the program”s 25th anniversary noted it was one of the station’s most popular offerings, and one of the longest-running bluegrass shows in the country. “Larry was such an amazing host,” former WDET host Matt Watroba, now on WKSU in Kent, Ohio, told the newspaper.

Three nights after 7.9 million people tuned into the third-season premiere of PBS’s Downton Abbey, WGBY in Springfield, Mass., will broadcast an interview tonight with Lady Carnarvon of Highclere Castle, the filming location of the BBC-produced series. The interview is being shown as an episode of the program Connecting Point and is not available for national carriage, so only those New Englanders lucky enough to receive the WGBY signal will be able to watch this evening. “I got in touch with Lady Carnarvon’s personal assistant last fall for a different reason,” WGBY spokesperson Myrna Flynn told Current regarding how the station landed the exclusive. 

Robert Bednarek, a technology expert at CPB in the early 1980s, has died at age 55 after a battle with cancer, reports Space Policy Online. Bednarek was CPB’s deputy chief scientist. SatNews, which covers the satellite industry, said that while at CPB, he “managed the research, development and application of new telecommunications and information technologies.”  Following his tenure at CPB, Bednarek founded a D.C.-based technology consulting firm, Rubin, Bednarek and Associates, and then joined PanAmSat (now Intelsat) as chief technology officer, overseeing operation of its fleet of communications satellites. From there he joined Dutch satellite operator SES, rising to president and c.e.o.