Mary Pruess, outgoing president and g.m. of WNIT Public Television in South Bend, Ind., told Current she feels “very confident that the station is in a strong position to build on for the coming years.” The local South Bend Tribune reported today that Pruess had resigned. Pruess told Current she resigned on Monday, effective immediately. Steven Funk, station vice president of development and marketing, will serve as interim executive director while the WNIT Board conducts a search for Pruess’s replacement. Pruess is immediate past president of the Affinity Group Coalition’s Small Station Association. When Pruess arrived at WNIT 10 years ago, she said, WNIT was housed in a set of trailers behind a school in Elkhart.

Two pubcasting fans in different cities who separately conceived plans for a “Million Muppet March” (later renamed Million Puppet March) in support of public broadcasting have teamed up to try to organize the event on Nov. 3 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Michael Bellavia, 42, of Los Angeles, and Chris Mecham, 46, of Boise, Idaho, were watching the presidential debate on Oct. 3 when Republican nominee Mitt Romney said that he would end subsidies to PBS if elected. Even before the debate ended, Bellavia had secured the URL millionmuppetmarch.com, and Mecham created the Million Muppet March Facebook page.

Mary Pruess, president and g.m. of WNIT Public Television in South Bend, Ind., has resigned from the station “to pursue other opportunities,” reports the South Bend Tribune. Pruess has served in the post for 10 years, and is active with the Small Station Association of the Affinity Group Coalition of pubcasting stations. Steven Funk, station vice president of development and marketing, will serve as interim executive director while the WNIT board of directors conducts a search for Pruess’s replacement.

PBS documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, whose extensive credits include The Civil War, Baseball and the upcoming The Dust Bowl, authored an editorial in Tuesday’s USA Today in which he said that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney “knows the price of things, but he clearly doesn’t know their value.” Romney has attracted the ire of the pubcasting community for frequently stating throughout his campaign that he would cut funding to CPB, and he reiterated his intent to do so during last week’s presidential debate. Burns recalled filming The Civil War in the late 1980s, during which time he visited then-President Ronald Reagan in the White House.

Veteran public radio broadcaster Madeleine Brand has joined the staff of SoCal Connected, KCET’s award-winning news magazine that is moving from weekly to daily programs for its fifth season on the independent Los Angeles pubTV station. Brand left local KPCC in September after The Madeleine Brand Show was revamped into Brand & Martinez with a new co-host, local sportscaster A Martinez, joined the program. (See Current’s story on those changes.) This is Brand’s first foray into television. Before KPCC, she spent 13 years at NPR, including as host of the national newsmag Day to Day. Bret Marcus, KCET’s chief content officer and SoCal Connected‘s executive producer, called Brand “a terrific broadcaster who has developed a loyal following among both listeners and newsmakers.”

Turn on the black light, cue up a Doors album and sink into your beanbag chair: The American Revolution, a documentary coming to public TV in August 2013, is going to transport you to a time when radio riled America’s youth.

Sesame Workshop has asked the Obama for America campaign to remove an online ad that contains a cameo appearance from its Big Bird character. The 31-second video plays off GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s statement during the recent debates that he would end funding to PBS. The spot says Romney implies that “it’s not Wall Street you have to worry about, it’s Sesame Street,” comparing Big Bird to disgraced financiers including Bernie Madoff. In response, Sesame Workshop, nonprofit home to Sesame Street, posted that it is a “nonpartisan, nonprofit organization and we do not endorse candidates or participate in political campaigns.

The series covered the 30th anniversary of the year the Centers for Disease Control reported that five previously healthy young men in Los Angeles had come down with a rare lung disease, later identified as HIV. For The California Report series, Scott Shafer interviewed medical researchers and activists involved in the early days of the epidemic. Established in 1993 to recognize excellence in journalism about issues related to the LGBT community, the NLGJA’s Excellence in Journalism Awards were presented at the UNITY 2012 Convention and NLGJA Awards Reception Aug. 3 in Las Vegas. The UNITY: Journalists, Inc. coalition consists of the NLGJA, the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Native American Journalists Association.

Presented by AAJA Minnesota, the Leadership in Diversity Award honors someone who has made great strides in promoting and demonstrating diversity in the news industry. Worthington, managing director of MPR News since 2006, received the honor based on his commitment to developing the next generation of journalists, his efforts to bring more diverse voices to MPR News and his support for groups such as AAJA, even during challenging economic times. “In my mind, a commitment to newsroom diversity and accurate coverage always starts at the top,” said Tom Horgen, AAJA Minnesota chapter president, “and Chris has shown time and again that he has a thoughtful and unwavering passion for these issues.”

DEI gives its Benchmarks Award each year to a consistently top-performing station in terms of net revenue per hour of listening. While the median station raises .95 cents in underwriting revenue per listener-hour, HPR last year sold 2.25 cents per listener-hour — all handled by HPR’s single underwriting salesperson. In presenting the award, Robin Turnau, president and c.e.o. of Vermont Public Radio and DEI treasurer, cited HPR’s peculiar challenges. “Their location is one of the top vacation destinations in the world. They deal daily with the challenges of serving a transient population, while raising funds from a permanent listenership where the local median income is only modest, while the cost of living is extraordinarily high,” said Turnau, noting that HPR’s net-revenue-per-listener-hour stat put it in the top 10 percent of DEI surveys for both membership and mid-level giving.

Since becoming WPR’s director of membership director in 2005, Rebecca Dopart has upped membership revenue by 30 percent — from $5 million to $6.5 million — and increased the number of donors from 40,000 to almost 49,000. Since she assumed the additional title of director of corporate support two years ago, sales have risen nearly 30 percent, to around $1.8 million. “She turned a team that suffered from low morale into one that has sold so many spots that their underwriting rates had to be increased and new avails created,” said Gordon Bayliss, v.p. of sales and marketing at WBFO-FM/WNED-FM/WNED-TV in Buffalo, N.Y.,

Maria Hinojosa, reporter and anchor for PBS, NPR and CNN, was selected by a panel of eight judges who cited “the courage and independence she has shown over the course of her career reporting on those whose stories might not otherwise make it into the mainstream media.” The anchor/executive producer of NPR’s long-running Latino USA and anchor of Maria Hinojosa: One-on-One from WGBH/La Plaza was hailed for more than 25 years of reporting on the marginalized and powerless in the U.S. and overseas. In 2010 Hinojosa launched the nonprofit Futuro Media Group, which produces multiplatform, community-based journalism. And in 2011, she became the first Latina to anchor a PBS Frontline report, “Lost in Detention,” which probed the issues of deportation and immigrant detention and abuse.