Los Angeles public TV station KCET is bringing back weekly series SoCal Connected after a yearlong hiatus, this time as a mix of hard news and features. The award-winning show will start its sixth season May 14. In previous seasons, SoCal earned a reputation for hard-nosed journalism, along with 17 local Emmys, by covering corruption at the Los Angeles Housing Authority, sweetheart deals involving electronic billboards and the dire consequences of climate change. But after the station dropped its PBS affiliation, it went into an economic tailspin that resulted in the layoffs of 22 employees, including Bret Marcus, SoCal’s executive producer.

Tomlinson, a former Reader’s Digest editor and CPB Board chair who mounted a behind-the-scenes campaign to balance what he saw as a liberal bias in PBS programming, died May 1 in Winchester, Va., after a long hospitalization.

Plus: An Atlanta-based fake news site really dislikes pledge drives.

After This American Life parts with longtime distributor Public Radio International July 1, it could become public radio’s most widely carried show without a major distributor representing it. That’s if the show pursues that option. Program host and creator Ira Glass has hinted in interviews with the New York Times and Chicago media reporter Robert Feder that he’s considering self-distribution. But there may be good reasons that few shows have gone that route. Self-distribution poses challenges that few resource-strapped program creators are willing to take on, including handling their own billing, marketing and station relations. Interfaith Voices, a weekly program about religious issues, is among public radio’s few self-distributed programs with significant carriage.

Plus: A libertarian op-ed calls on pubradio listeners to open their wallets, and Pacifica faces yet another lawsuit.

Jacquie Jones, executive director of the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC) since 2005, has resigned, effective immediately, but will continue to produce for public media. Stepping in as interim is Leslie Fields-Cruz, programming director, who has supervised distribution of programs to PBS since 2001. NBPC, a 35-year-old nonprofit that is affiliated with the CPB-backed National Minority Consortia, develops, produces and funds public media content focusing on the African American experience, such as the Peabody-winning documentary, 180 Days: A Year Inside An American High School. The 2013 film, which Jones directed and produced, portrayed day-to-day challenges of students and educators at an alternative high school in in Washington, D.C.

Plus: Vermont Public Radio spies a threat to its Montreal listeners, and another film draws from This American Life.

Plus: NPR explains its analytics dashboard, and the Knight Foundation's interest in digital storytelling.

The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative newsroom, has hired William Gray and Eleanor Bell. Television producer Gray joins as media relations specialist, focusing on increasing the visibility and impact of CPI’s journalism. Gray previously worked at C-SPAN as an operations producer handling breaking news and live and overnight coverage for the cable broadcaster’s three networks. He also created and curates the Floor Charts archive, which tracks and tags props, charts and posters used by politicians. Bell joins as multimedia editor. A native New Zealander, she spent several years reporting for Australia’s public broadcaster, ABC, where her 2011 multimedia investigation about at-risk children in disadvantaged communities won the country’s highest journalism honor, the Walkley Award.

Plus: Kansas threatens to eliminate state pubcasting funding, more on Chip Rogers' exit from GPB, and pubmedia's 2015 Nieman Fellows.

Plus: A consortium plans an initiative for Latino pubmedia professionals, and a PBS Digital Studios star takes a friendly quiz.

Idea Channel, PRX Remix and Religion & Ethics Newsweekly are among the winners.

PBS’s fiscal year 2015 draft budget includes the launch of a Membership Video on Demand service that will generate revenue by drawing on the network’s expansive library of content. MVOD members will get exclusive access to on-demand PBS videos, according to a budget document acquired by Current. “This is a critical product to help stations drive membership of the growing digital audience,” it said. The service will be integrated with PBS’s COVE video platform, and the public broadcaster anticipates hiring additional staff for the project. The budget proposal, now awaiting comment from stations, also requests a 2.5 percent increase in assessments from stations.

Plus: A columnist sounds off on Slate's pubmedia-esque membership program, and NPR unearths its Internet beginnings.