This American Life host and public radio superstar Ira Glass continues his foray into scripted entertainment, as a producer of a new television series in development at the Sundance Channel. The project, billed as T, will follow Terrence, a transgender man who has recently undergone sex reassignment surgery, and the story will be split between his present life as a male and former life as a female college student named Thora. Fellow TAL producer Alissa Shipp will also produce T. Glass ventured into the world of independent film this summer with Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk With Me, which he co-wrote and produced.

After sustaining damage to its studio and transmitters from Superstorm Sandy, independent freeform music station WFMU has resumed broadcasts on 91.1 FM in Jersey City, NJ. The station announced Nov. 5 via its website and Facebook page that its 91.1 FM transmitter is back on the air; it had resumed webcasts on wfmu.org shortly after the storm. A transmitter licensed to 90.1 FM in Mt. Hope, N.Y., which also went dark during the storm, is still silent. WFMU launched “Hell and High Water,” an online campaign to raise funds for repairs to its electrical systems and equipment. The annual WFMU Record Fair, one of its biggest money-making events of the year, was cancelled because of the storm.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced today it will immediately give $250,000 each to New York City's most prominent public media stations.

Madeleine Brand, the longtime radio pubcaster who recently departed KPCC after the station revamped her show, is very busy these days. “There’s a lot is going on; I can’t say everything yet, but a lot going on,” she tells the Los Angeles Times. Beyond landing her first TV gig on KCET’s SoCal Connected, she’s had talks with the Oprah Winfrey Network and Disney Junior channel. Also, KCRW General Manager Jennifer Ferro has expressed interest. “When she became available, it was the clear and obvious conversation to have,” Ferro tells the newspaper. “Madeleine’s really talented and definitely belongs on the radio in Los Angeles — we’re gonna try to make that happen.”

The looming political battle over federal spending — and the possibility of across-the-board budget cuts imposed through sequestration — has prompted CPB to alter distribution of Community Service Grants to stations. The change, implemented after CPB execs negotiated an agreement with the White House Office of Management and Budget over possible sequestration of its $445 million appropriation, boosts the amount of money stations will receive in the first of two CSG checks to be issued by CPB for fiscal 2013. But the second batch of checks, to be issued in March, will be much smaller. How much smaller depends on the outcome of the Nov.

Trustees of the San Mateo County Community College District in California have rejected offers from two finalists vying to acquire KCSM-TV, a pubcasting station that was put up for sale in December 2011 after accruing an $800,000 deficit. The two bidders were San Mateo Community TV Corp., aligned with Independent Public Media and headed by former pubcasters John Schwartz and Ken Devine; and FM Media TV Inc., affiliated with Public Media Co., an independent arm of Public Radio Capital. Six entities initially bid for the station. San Mateo Community TV Corp. offered $5.8 million, and FM Media TV Inc. bid $7 million, according to public records that the Bay Area advocacy group Media Alliance posted on its website.

Nearly a decade after HD Radio went live on its first station, iBiquity Digital Corp., the company that developed and sold the technology to terrestrial broadcasters and electronics manufacturers, has yet to convince consumers that they must have HD Radio in their cars and homes.

NPR added new positions to its executive ranks with two appointments announced Nov. 1 by President Gary Knell.

To the editors: Amanda Hirsch asks if the “value proposition” for public media is different today from what it was in the 1960s, and if tax dollars are essential in support of noncommercial media (Current, Oct. 22). I was there in the 1960s, making the case along with a great number of others who believed in the “educational broadcasting” that was at that point the core of our movement. The notion of federal funding came only after all other options had been declared politically or financially impossible. Many of us continue to worry that in our treasured democracy public money in support of any mass medium is precarious at best and downright dangerous at worst.

In February 1983, Phoenix’s PBS station KAET aired the world’s first live telecast of open-heart surgery. The station marks that upcoming 30th anniversary with a pilot for its new occasional medical series, The Latest Procedure, featuring an anterior total hip replacement. For the hourlong surgery, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Ted Firestone of Scottsdale recorded the entire operation through a minicam strapped to his head. Viewers are with him as he meets with the patient, scrubs in, explains surgical tools and provides a personal tour of the operating room before surgery begins. They also observe what Firestone sees as he operates. During the show, host Jim Cissell interviews Firestone at the station’s studios at Arizona State University in Phoenix.

KEET in Eureka, Calif. — one of the smallest TV stations in the pubcasting system — has produced a unique documentary featuring woodcut animation: Searchlight Serenade: Big Bands in the Japanese American Incarceration Camps. The 58-minute film provides first-person accounts of nine detainees who played trumpet and saxophone and sang for their fellow prisoners. Their stories are animated with traditional Japanese woodcuts and drawings by local artist Amy Uyeki, whose parents had lived in the camps. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced into the holding areas during World War II. Musical performances in the camps by 20 big bands provided an important diversion.

Producer Barrett Golding said had been thinking about ending the public radio show when he learned that NPR was considering dropping its contract to distribute it. “That gave me the reason to stop producing,” Golding wrote in an email. Golding was “kinda sick of the mostly volunteer work,” he said. The weekly hourlong program compiled audio pieces from archives, independent and documentary producers, and elsewhere in public radio, usually around themes. It aired on about 100 stations.