...Like Planet Money, the as-yet-unnamed unit will establish its brand on multiple platforms, through reports for NPR’s radio shows, a blog and other facets...

Detroit Public TV has received a $250,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for a national program increasing public understanding of the Arab-American community. The project builds on the station’s 13-part series, Arab-American Stories. For the initiative, “Arab-American Stories — A National Dialogue,” Detroit PTV will partner with PBS member stations, libraries and community centers to host forums. The station worked with the Arab American Institute in Washington, D.C., to identify library systems in the top Arab-American populated communities nationwide, which include Boston, Houston, Los Angeles and Miami. The station also plans a website and curriculum for middle- and high-school students.

One of public radio’s biggest split-format stations, Austin’s KUT, is pursuing a signal expansion that follows a familiar playbook for strengthening audience service: buying a new channel to air music while dedicating its flagship signal to news programming. But for this station serving a city that makes weirdness a point of civic pride, there’s a distinct difference to its ambitions to become a dual-station operator. It will put rock and alternative music, not classical, on its new signal; 90.7 MHz, the FM channel that has served KUT’s news and music audiences for decades, will go all-news. That’s if and when the University of Texas Board of Regents, the governing board of KUT’s licensee, approves the proposed $6 million purchase of 98.9 MHz, a commercial frequency that’s now broadcasting classic rock hits under the call letters KXBT.

Public broadcasters face multiple and serious uncertainties on Capitol Hill over the next few months. A spending bill approved by the House subcommittee with oversight of CPB’s appropriation proposes to phase out CPB funding over the next three years; it includes language restricting public radio stations from spending their CPB aid to support NPR in any way. Another election-season threat comes from GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, who has repeatedly cited CPB as one of five agencies he’d extinguish. Sequestration, a byproduct of Congress’s inability to reach consensus on debt-reduction measures last summer, could also hit pubcasting, slicing 8 percent or more from the $445 million in federal funding that pubcasters anticipate for 2013.

WNET in New York City is collaborating with NYC Media, part of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, to share content “highlighting different aspects of the city,” the two said in a press release. The partnership “allows us to mine our incredible archives for new platforms,” said Neal Shapiro, WNET president. First up, the NYC life channel will broadcast episodes of WNET’s Treasures of New York and MetroFocus,  and WNET and WLIW will run NYC life’s special about city parks.

In an editorial today, the Birmingham News is asking Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley and legislative leaders to “get to the root cause” of the “continuing upheaval” at Alabama Public Television. “APT and its educational and informative programming are too important to the state not to warrant an investigation into what is going on with the commission that oversees it,” the editorial board wrote Monday. The sudden termination on June 12 of APT Executive Director Allan Pizzato and his deputy, Pauline Howland, by the Alabama Educational Television Commission threw the state network into chaos. Within days, nine members of two fundraising boards resigned in protest; the station’s longtime chief operating officer, Charles Grantham, also just resigned, effective Aug.

CPB is providing a $1.5 million grant to NPR to increase the diversity of its journalism ranks. The announcement of the two-year grant came on Aug. 2 the UNITY 2012 Convention in Las Vegas, an annual gathering of media professionals. The funding will help NPR create a diverse team of reporters and editors guided by a senior online journalist overseeing the creation and curation of original, multiplatform content daily. The team will provide coverage of local communities nationwide, the issues that affect them and the people of many backgrounds and opinions who make those communities unique. CPB said this grant builds on the success of the CPB/Knight Foundation-funded Project Argo, which helped NPR serve new broadcast and online audiences by focusing on specific subject areas.

The FCC has dismissed a challenge to license renewal for WCQS-FM in Asheville, N.C., reports the local Citizen-Times. The petition was brought late last year by a group headed by retired pubradio exec and producer Fred Flaxman. He said that he had volunteered to serve on the station’s community advisory board but learned that it didn’t have one, a violation of the Public Broadcasting Act. Once station management did establish a board, it was “tightly controlled to make sure that no critics of the station or its policies are allowed to serve,” Flaxman contended. He also complained in the petition that WCQS didn’t carry programs by local independent producers, including himself.

A Minnesota public-access TV studio serving five cities will shut down this month, “an example of accessible, hyper-local television being forced to refocus in an era of instant, free video uploads to YouTube and Facebook,” reports the Star Tribune.  Comcast no longer wants to run the studio, and the Southwest Suburban Cable Commission says  equipment needs updating and the facility produces too few programs for Edina, Eden Prairie, Hopkins, Minnetonka and Richfield. “You need a studio that provides gravitas for the cancer survivor, the politician, the minority group,” Jeff Strate, who has produced a show at the studio, told the newspaper.