On May 1, before its second season on the Showtime cable channel, This American Life will try a one-night-only live HD broadcast to 317 movie theaters around the country, satellite-fed through National Cinemedia. (The same company distributes live HD Metropolitan Opera broadcasts to theaters, including La Boheme, April 5.) The two-hour show will include previews of the upcoming TV season, also in HD, plus Ira Glass presenting a radio story and Q&A with the far-flung audience. Nearly 70 pubradio stations are promoting the event and using tickets as member premiums. It’ll be 8 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Central, 6 p.m.

“Caring for Your Parents leaves the impression that we all love our mothers and fathers without ambivalence or reservation” and will honorably care for them, writes Ginia Bellafonte in a New York Times review. A more realistic look, she says, would include the “ornery and selfish patriarch of The Savages, the recent fictional film that regarded the same subject with more complexity and skepticism, examining how grown children respond when they are obliged to care for parents who failed to care spectacularly for them.” The PBS doc, produced by Michael Kirk for WGBH, airs tonight.

In this Q&A, content creators talk with Current about why they decided to pursue a project and how they produced it. What: Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?, a four-hour PBS series that the network scheduled for four Thursday nights on public TV starting March 27. Who made: Larry Adelman, series creator and executive producer, co-director of California Newsreel. Production companies: California Newsreel with Vital Pictures. Presenters: the CPB-funded National Minority Consortia. Segment producers: Llewellyn Smith (co-executive producer), Christine Herbes-Sommers, Julie Crawford, Tracy Heather Strain, Randall MacLowry, Eric Stange, Patricia Garcia Rios, Maria Teresa Rodriguez, James M. Fortier, Sativa January, Ellie Lee, Kimberlee Bassford and James Rutenbeck.

The financially pinched owner of Salt Lake City news station KCPW-AM/FM has signed a letter of intent to sell its two FM licenses to a new nonprofit started by the station’s g.m., Ed Sweeney, the station reported today. If Wasatch Public Media, the new nonprofit, can’t fulfill its bargain, however, the station will be sold to a big religious broadcaster, EMF Broadcasting. Wasatch agreed to pay $2.4 million. The AM channel will go to another religious broadcaster, IHR Educational Broadcasting, for $1.3 million. The seller, based at KPCW in nearby Park City, is taking a loss on the AM station; it spent $2.5 million to buy and build it.

In his PBS ombudsman column, Michael Getler features nearly 30 of the letters he received about Frontline‘s two-part Iraq war retrospective, “Bush’s War.” One Alaska viewer writes, “Thank you for running the story about Bush’s war. I serve in the U.S. Army. I will be starting my third tour in a month.” But about half the letters are critical of the program for being either one-sided or not in-depth enough. Getler’s take is that while the doc offered a “visual and audible whole that simply does not exist elsewhere,” there were holes–more time should have been devoted to assessing the “surge,” Gen.

Boston blogger, podcaster, magician, street juggler and skeptic Rebecca Watson — one of the six finalists in the Public Radio Talent Quest, awaiting a CPB funding decision on a program pilot — now has an asteroid named after her. The rock, 2.7 miles across and orbiting between Jupiter and Mars, was officially named by the International Astronomical Union on March 21. Jeff Medkeff was entitled to name asteroid No. 153289 for Watson because he co-discovered it in 2001. “Rebecca really deserves this honor. She has provided a much-needed injection of enthusiasm and humor into science education,” Medkeff said. She reacts to the news on her blog.

PBS and Oregon Public Broadcasting have announced a new primetime series, working title Time Team, USA, to air in 2009 or 2010. Based on the UK’s Channel 4 series, the show follows a group of archaeologists who have 72 hours to unearth artifacts and other info from a dig site. Possible locations include the Indian Mounds of Mississippi and the earth pyramids near St. Louis, Mo. Producers from the UK series will team up with OPB, which produced History Detectives for PBS.

As TV viewing options explode and money for program production dries up, “small and midsize public television stations (not the rich behemoths like WGBH) that want to produce original programs of public value” have two paths to tread, writes Alaska Public Media’s John Proffitt in his blog Gravity Medium. Big productions will be few, will “mostly involve outside contractors rather than inside employees, and will draw most of their funding from external one-off granting sources.” Small, local productions will have to scale back to “one person + camera + laptop” and “must be aimed at multiplatform niche distribution rather than mass entertainment.

“Peter and the Wolf,” winner of this year’s Academy Award as best animated short film, debuts tomorrow night on PBS’s Great Performances.

Washington Post radio columnist Marc Fisher surveys the landscape of user-customized online music providers and finds that those proposing songs based on listener preferences aren’t generating “exotic and creative” playlists. On the most popular sites, “the lists of most popular songs are almost indistinguishable from what’s on most pop or hip-hop radio stations,” he writes.

Citing the growth of digital audio choices for radio listeners, the Justice Department yesterday approved the proposed merger of the XM and Sirius satellite radio companies. The Washington Post and New York Times report on reactions from opponents to the merger, and what may happen when the FCC takes up the proposal. On Hear 2.0 radio researcher Mark Ramsey describes why the merger will have minimal consequences for the radio industry.

In 2012, when NPR moves to its recently acquired headquarters site seven blocks east of its present home, it will have much more room for growth than it had after its last move, with as much as four times the floor space. In 1994, when the network moved into its present home, 635 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., it had about 400 employees. The building, with less than 150,000 square feet, could accommodate just 480, NPR said at the time. The space was soon outgrown. Since then, the NPR staff has grown by half to about 600, overflowing into rented space. The developer of the new site at 1111 N.

There was no single reason why the NPR Board ended Ken Stern’s 18-month run as chief executive officer — or at least none that any participant in the decision would describe publicly after Stern’s abrupt exit March 6 [2008].

In 2012, when NPR moves to its recently acquired headquarters site seven blocks east of its present home, it will have much more room for growth than it had after its last move, with as much as four times the floor space. In 1994, when the network moved into its present home, 635 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., it had about 400 employees. The building, with less than 150,000 square feet, could accommodate just 480, NPR said at the time. The space was soon outgrown. Since then, the NPR staff has grown by half to about 600, overflowing into rented space. The developer of the new site at 1111 N.

Conversation continues in the pages of the Monterey Herald about the failed merger between two local public radio stations,.