Curious George, the top-rated PBS Kids show, is having trouble selling all of its underwriting slots, according to Advertising Age. Could part of the problem be that PBS prohibits product placement in its programs?

WNYC, Public Radio International and other partners plan to produce a morning show that will go up against NPR’s Morning Edition and pursue a younger audience, reports the New York Times. “We have a vision of what we think is needed, and we think we are the right people to do it,” says WNYC President Laura Walker. (More details from WNYC, via PRPD’s blog.)

Some Friday levity: This video puts a Ken Burns spin on The War that Divided NBC’s “The Office” and its fans. (Audio mildly NSFW.)

Independent producer Barrett Golding laments the state of public radio conferences in a Web 2.0 world: “Once there was a time-honored tradition of spending conference nights genuinely interacting with real folk, i.e., chasing hookers and hootch. Nowadays, everyone runs back to their hotel rooms to blog, stream, cast, and flickr.”

Ira Glass of This American Life talks about the TV version of his radio show in a chat on the Washington Post‘s website: “This week we just finished a six-city tour . . . and in some of the cities, when I’d ask the audience ‘were you worried when you heard we were doing a TV show?’ they’d ROAR back yes. In Minnesota our director Chris Wilcha joked it’s like when Dylan went electric and a guy in the audience yelled ‘Judas!'”

Jake Shapiro has blogged the transcript of an e-mail interview with Current in which he discusses efforts to create a digital distribution system for public media. “I think some version of it will happen, and soon,” he says. “The question is whether it will be a truly collaborative venture or something just one or two players begin together.”

Sirius Satellite Radio renewed its programming deal with NPR and will carry the network’s forthcoming news show aimed at younger listeners.

A Philadelphia Weekly writer waxes poetic about public radio: “. . . [L]istening to NPR in a warm cab during winter might be the best transportation experience in existence.”

In a long article, Washingtonian magazine looks at NPR’s evolution from alternative news source to high-profile outfit that might be recovering some of its old spirit. “We’re moving away a little from this gray wash that I’ve been hearing too much of,” says Susan Stamberg. “It’s starting to breathe again in ways that remind me of the very earliest days, when we would take any chance, do any goofy thing.”

On June 4, Chicago Public Radio, news and information WBEZ-FM 91.5, will launch a new radio station by splitting off one of its repeaters, WBEW-FM 89.5 in Chesterton, Ind., just southeast of Chicago by Lake Michigan. This new radio station will refashion WBEZ’s public radio mission to a target audience formerly unreachable by WBEZ. This new station will be built on community radio sensibilities but without the characteristic schedule of special-interest shows. In fact, it will have no shows at all. It will air a continuous, seamless talk-based stream completely devoted to Northwest Indiana and Chicago metropolitan area culture, issues and selected music.

WFCR-FM in Amherst, Mass., will shift its all-news AM feed to a local station owned by Clear Channel, reports the Republican. Clear Channel will be able to sell underwriting spots on the station as part of the arrangement.

Vermont Public Radio has expressed interest in buying an FM channel from St. Michael’s College near Burlington, reports the Free Press. Trustees will consider the sale at an April 13 meeting.

Top pubradio executives have begun discussing ideas for a comprehensive “back end” digital storage and distribution system that backers say could support a wide range of services and help stations and networks advance efficiently into new media. The execs, who met for the first time in Chicago Feb. 15, are taking up a proposal for a back-end system with the working name of the Digital Distribution Consortium. The DDC would store and catalog audio content from pubcasters and feed it to nonbroadcast platforms such as websites, iPods and cell phones. Some new-media thinkers in public radio argue for building websites that aggregate online content from various sources, but talks about “front end” strategies lead to touchy subjects such as revenue sharing, business models and public radio’s web identity.

John Inman, campy star of the Britcom Are You Being Served?, died Thursday at age 71, the London Times reported. His bustling, punning, happily effeminate shopclerk character rose from background to foreground in the hit BBC comedy in the 1970s and added U.S. fans through repeated play on public TV. Inman’s stereotyped behavior appalled gay liberationists at the time, but columnist Matthew Parris salutes “that lifesaving human compromise, the open secret,” which was kept through “a dark age” by Inman, Liberace and generations of sissies and drag queens who announced that homosexuals certainly seemed to be present … and turned “what was once seen as shame into light entertainment.”

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler sifts through responses to Frontline‘s “News War”–from viewers and media critics–and provides a forum for producers to respond. He also offers his own critique of the series: as long as Frontline examined how other news organizations failed to challenge the Bush Administration’s case for invading Iraq, Getler writes, producers should have been “a little more upfront” in examining their own record in the Nov. 2001 Frontline documentary, “Gunning for Saddam.” While prescient in some respects, “this program presented the equivalent of the Full Monty in making the hardliners’ case for war.”