PBS President Paula Kerger announced details of PBS’s long-planned arts initiative at a Town Hall Los Angeles meeting yesterday, according to the website for Miller McCune, an academic news firm. The effort includes a shift in the primetime schedule to allow for one evening per week devoted entirely to the arts, beginning probably next fall or winter; an online arts portal on PBS.org coming in April; and new materials for the PBS Teachers website to help them better incorporate arts into their classrooms. “To be candid, over the last years, we haven’t done as good a job [with cultural programming] as we could,” Kerger told the audience.

Update, Friday, Jan. 15: WNET will discontinue two other public affairs series, Expose and Wide Angle, while starting up production of Need to Know, the new Friday-night series announced by PBS this week, production chief Stephen Segaller told Current. Bill Moyers’ Journal and Now will remain on the schedule until Need to Know begins in May, PBS President Paula Kerger said at the NETA Conference in Las Vegas yesterday. The New York Times reported earlier that PBS has green-lit a new public affairs series from WNET. Need to Know, a one-hour show that launches in May, will originate from the New York station’s new studios in Lincoln Center.

The Television Critics Association winter press tour is under way in Pasadena, Calif. Tomorrow is the big day for PBS, with 12 previews and an executive session (schedule here, Word document). Highlights: Actress Jamie Lee Curtis will be onstage for Dirt! The Movie; she’s the narrator. Also, John Densmore, drummer for the Doors, will appear as a panelist for When You’re Strange: A Film About the Doors from American Masters. Director Jonathan Demme talks about Tavis Smiley’s upcoming specials. And Daniel Ellsberg will be on hand Saturday for POV’s preview of The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

For public radio’s field of independent producers, 2009 was a year of both retrenchment and movement, writes Sue Schardt, executive director of the Association of Independents in Radio, in an AIRmuse feature story assessing the state of affairs from the perspective of indies. Network shows that had been platforms for the creativity of AIR members were canceled, but a new CPB-funded initiative to experiment with multi-platform production, Makers Quest 2.0, took flight and garnered support from both stations and networks. “The ability of public radio to retain and cultivate its talent pool remains compromised, and there is no clear resolution in sight,” Schardt writes.

Idaho Gov. C.L. Otter is looking to end funding for the Idaho Public Television statewide network over the next four years starting with fiscal 2011, reports the New West Boise news site. IdahoPTV, affiliated with the state board of education, gets about $1.5 million yearly for the network, about $1 million for salaries for 11 administrative and technical positions and $350,000 to lease of the station’s Boise facility. The governor told the Spokesman-Review newspaper he thought IdahoPTV could survive loss of the funding. “They really do have an opportunity to bring in outside money and to become self-sufficient,” Otter said.

Robben Wright Fleming, former president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, died Jan. 11 at age 93 in Ann Arbor, Mich., reports numerous media outlets including the Capital Times of Madison, Wisc. During his CPB tenure from 1979 to ’81, he secured the original Annenberg Project funding vital to the growth and stability of CPB and its programs, the newspaper notes. He also was president of the University of Michigan during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, when student protests of the Vietnam War shook the campus.

Really. Check out the Austin, Texas, station’s blog for the wacky video. Guess what song accompanies it?

The National Black Programming Consortium is hosting a webinar on its Public Media Corps initiative at 2 p.m. tomorrow. The social media project hopes to expand the reach and relevance of public media to underserved groups, a statement says. Speaking at the webinar will be Jacquie Jones, executive director of the consortium; Kay Shaw, director of the corps; and Nonso Christian Ugbode, the consortium’s digital media director. (Ugbode recently wrote a column for Current on the project.) They’ll detail the goals of the national initiative, its use of digital tools and its local residency program. Register online for the event.

The Sundance Film Festival today announced that Jeffrey Brown, a senior correspondent with PBS NewsHour, is on the 2010 jury. Brown will help judge the World Cinema Documentary category. His specialty on NewsHour is reporting on on culture, arts and the media, and created Art Beat, the show’s culture blog. The festival runs Jan. 21-31, in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah. Awards will be announced Jan. 30 at ceremonies hosted by actor David Hyde Pierce.

In anticipation of its opening night showcase at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, NPR Music is offering an advance stream of the next release by Spoon, the band headlining the March 17 event. Transference, the third album by the Austin-based band, can be heard in its entirety, for free, through Jan. 18. Additional bands are to be added to the bill for NPR Music’s Stubbs showcase, which will be produced as a live broadcast and webcast here. Spoon’s set will kick off the band’s U.S. tour supporting the new album. More details here.

CPB is pumping more funding into its ongoing pubradio Leadership for Philanthropy effort, it announced today. The project, managed by Development Exchange (DEI), has trained 20 station general managers and boards to connect more with communities and work to increase gifts. The $1.5 million infusion will help 10 stations to continue work, and 30 more to get in on the next phase. “By the end of its first year, the participants raised over $1.4 million despite challenges presented by a failing economy,” CPB noted in the announcement.

Alaska’s three largest pubcasting stations are moving toward a formal partnership. General managers from dual-licensees KUAC in Fairbanks, KTOO in Juneau and Alaska Public Telecommunications in Anchorage are meeting today to brainstorm ways to share administrative costs and content production, reports the Fairbanks Daily News Miner. Those talks began last summer but have been “dormant for several months,” the paper says. “We’re still talking about whether this makes sense and how it would work,” KUAC general manager Keith Martin told the publication. A plan could be finalized within a month.

“For nearly two months, the animated political cartoon sat on NPR.org virtually unnoticed. And then someone discovered it, was disgusted and launched it into the blogosphere — making it a raucous rallying point for conservatives,” writes NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard in her column on “Learn to Speak Tea Bag” by cartoonist Mark Fiore. The 90-second animation caricatures activists aligned with the conservative Tea Party movement and uses a sexual reference that was lost on Ellen Silva, the NPR editor who approved the piece, and many others, apparently. ‘[T]here are problems with the Tea Bag animation,” Shepard writes. “Chief among them is it doesn’t fit with NPR values, one of which is a belief in civility and civil discourse.

Maryland Public Television and NPR affiliates WEAA and WYPR in Baltimore were part of the study “How News Happens” by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The research looked at all media that produced local news in one week. Eight of 10 stories either repeated or repackaged previously reported information, it found. “As the economic model that has subsidized professional journalism collapses, the number of people gathering news in traditional television, print and radio organizations is shrinking markedly,” it notes.

When it comes to new media, Jessica Clark blogs, “the [pubcasting] system as a whole can barely make it onto the mat. The problem is an increasingly urgent mismatch between current infrastructure investments, and those needed to keep pace with the volatile digital media ecosystem.” Clark directs the Future of Public Media project at American University’s Center for Social Media. Her entry on MediaShift draws on a recent presentation by pubcasting consultant and former Alaska Public Telecommunications veep John Proffitt (that video is included on the post). In addition to infrastructure issues, Clark writes, pubcasting needs investments to create contexts for public participation through partnerships with existing social media platforms or open-source customized tools and interface development.