Friday roundup: PMP finds a home in ‘The Barn,’ Keillor talks books

• The Public Media Platform is showing more signs of life. A blog post last week on PMP’s site describes how American Public Media has been testing the platform’s features with its regional stations, uploading content into the PMP for stations to pull. But APM’s content partners, including Minnesota Public Radio, Southern California Public Radio and Classical South Florida, each use a different content management system, so APM built a centralized data hub called “The Barn” to funnel content through before it reaches the PMP. • Garrison Keillor talked to the New York Times Book Review about his literary adventures, favorite authors and the worst thing about running his own bookstore, Common Good Books. (He doesn’t get a 10 percent discount.)

• The Princeton Review is out with its annual Most Popular College Radio Stations list, notes Radio Survivor.

Keillor’s fundraiser for Obama revives complaints of bias

Like many entertainers, Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor has never tried to hide his liberal political leanings, but his decision to host an Obama re-election fundraising party in his Minnesota home last week worked the conservative blogosphere into a lather about NPR’s political bias. Yet NPR has no control over Keillor or his nationally syndicated weekly program. And there’s no guarantee that his program’s distributor, the Minnesota-based American Public Media Group, could heel its star vaudevillian if it tried to neutralize him politically. Keillor owns his production company and is responsible for the show’s content. APMG took a measured stance by endorsing Keillor’s First Amendment rights as an individual.

We get Keillor’s take on Keillor, but who’s complaining?

The series title means something, says arts documentarian Peter Rosen. If your film runs under the American Masters umbrella, it’s about an artist worth honoring.His film, “Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes,” aired in the series last week [July 1, 2009]. But Rosen would have given Garrison Keillor an admiring portrait anyway. “I’ve always thought we have a Mark Twain among us,” he says. With good access to Keillor, Rosen delivers a more detailed picture of Prairie Home Companion’s workings and the star’s personality than did the late Robert Altman’s earlier movie, which contrived to shoehorn a very successful real-life radio show into a plot about an unsuccessful one. Variety critic Dennis Harvey commented: “Portrait captures the charm of A Prairie Home Companion and its creator considerably more than Robert Altman’s star-heavy 2006 feature of the same name.”