NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin lays bare the "dibs" system by which the network's programs claim interviews with authors and musicians. Scott Simon, host of Weekend Edition Saturday, argues that the setup is unfair to weekly shows such as his.

Former Pacifica host Marc Cooper delivers a tirade against his former employer and points out that Greg Guma, recently hired as the network's executive director, has endorsed arguments that the widely accepted account of what happened on 9/11 is untrue. "Look forward, if you can, to more programming and fund-raising that would be better suited for a UFO cult than for a serious or credible political and cultural opposition," Cooper writes. Meanwhile, the g.m. of Pacifica's KPFA-FM in Berkeley has resigned. In a letter on KPFA's website, he says, "This past year has provided me with a memorable introduction to KPFA/Pacifica's complex and challenging environment." (Coverage in the Berkeley Daily Planet.)

Showtime has ordered six episodes of a television version of public radio's This American Life to air this fall at the earliest. The new gig doesn't endanger the radio version of TAL, promises Ira Glass, host and e.p. The show's website features a brief announcement of the news.

The Boston Globe profiles Gather.com, the blogging and social-networking website backed by the parent company of Minnesota Public Radio. "We think of Gather as doing for user-driven content what eBay did for user-driven retail," says Gather founder Tom Gerace. "Today, the problem in the blogosphere is finding what you want." The startup announced last week that it received another $6 million in equity financing, some from Southern California Public Radio, a sibling to MPR.

Nearly all Poynter Institute staffers surveyed say they listen to NPR as part of their daily news diet.

"In the radio business, if someone's not criticizing you for something, you're probably not doing your job," says Gerry Weston, who has stepped down as president of the Public Radio Partnership in Louisville, Ky. A Louisville Courier-Journal article presents a host of speculations about why Weston has resigned, reportedly under pressure from his board of directors. "It's a complex situation," says a former employee.

"[NPR's leaders] still believe it is the responsibility of the journalist to focus the attention of the listener on issues that are important," says Ted Koppel in a Wall Street Journal article about network TV reporters recently hired at NPR. NOTE: New host Michel Martin will have to adjust to a lower salary. "I'm going to save a lot of money on haircuts," she says.

Does "a maze of twisty little roads, all alike" ring a bell? To some alert geeks, it did, and NPR science reporter David Kestenbaum has 'fessed up to slipping that reference to an early text-adventure computer game into a recent story on Morning Edition.

The Radio Research Consortium has commissioned Audience 2010, a study led by researchers George Bailey and David Giovannoni that seeks to understand public radio's recent decline in audience and to recommend tactics for reversing it.

Louisiana Public Broadcasting Executive Director Beth Courtney and her husband paid a $10,000 fine after the state ethics board determined that TV production subcontracts involving Bob Courtney's company violated conflict of interest laws, reports the Baton Rouge Advocate. (The ethics opinion is posted here.) Accuracy in Media, a right-wing media watchdog group that endorsed Kenneth Tomlinson's campaign to balance public broadcasting, issued a news release calling for a federal investigation into whether Beth Courtney, a CPB Board member who opposed Tomlinson, violated CPB's ethics code.