Knowing Poe, a new educational website produced by Maryland Public Television, features 10 interactive activities on the life and literature of Edgar Allan Poe. [Requires Flash]

George Will lists the reasons why “televising juries’ deliberations is a terrible idea” in his Jan. 5 column.

Frontier House was the best TV show of 2002, writes Aaron Barnhart, TV critic for the Kansas City Star and publisher of TVBarn.com. Frontline‘s “Requiem for Frank Lee Smith” and P.O.V.‘s “Mai’s America” were also on his top 10 list.

A producer for Maryland Public TV tests television’s “high threshold for shit” in local arts programming, reports the Baltimore City Paper.

NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin reviews some listener gripes in his latest column.

1stperson.org, a site that includes work by independent public radio producers, has changed its name and address to stories1st.org.

Community radio pioneer Lorenzo Milam shares memories of partner-in-crime Jeremy Lansman in honor of Lansman’s 60th birthday.

“No subject is taboo” for Rhona Raskin, a radio talk show host and newspaper columnist who on Jan. 5 launches her own late-night TV show on KCTS in Seattle.

On Jan. 6, Baton Rouge pubradio station WRKF will be the latest to drop daytime music on weekdays to carry more news and info programming, the Baton Rouge Advocate reports.

Chicago Sun-Times critic Phil Rosenthal pans Austin Hoyt’s American Experience three-parter on Chicago, which he says gives the city a “4-1/2-hour thrashing,” with none of the affection of Ric Burns’s and Lisa Ades’s history of New York. [Earlier Current article.]

WHYY aired a talk show on the pitfalls of grant-funded journalism Dec. 17, but the station’s own central role in such a controversy was kept off the air, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. News Director Bill Fantini resigned Dec. 9, the day before the Philadelphia Daily News reported on a widely criticized news-funding partnership he negotiated.

Muslim-American businesses and organizations sponsored the two-hour PBS documentary “Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet,” notes Alessandra Stanley in a New York Times review, and the program has the feel of a “lengthy informercial for Islam.” But the doc is “well worth watching both as the first serious attempt to tell the story of Muhammed on television and also as a testimony to the hypersensitivity of our times.” In the LA Times, Howard Rosenberg described the program as a “candid, thoughtful, flowing, visually stunning film.”

The Seattle Weekly reports that the CPB Inspector General may launch an audit of KCTS.

USA Today looks at audience trends for financial advice programs, and declares that the competing Wall Street Week franchises both “look like losers.”

With its pockets emptier than usual and few viewers demanding high-definition pictures, PBS is moving to HD more cautiously than the commercial networks. Rather than converting its schedule overnight, as the networks seemed to have done, PBS’s HD planners suggest moving to the fine, widescreen picture as fast as viewers buy receivers capable of displaying it. For every 10,000 HD receivers purchased, the network proposes to produce one additional hour of high-def programming. PBS now broadcasts about 48.5 hours of HDTV a year. Nearly half of that—22 hours—comes from the Latino drama American Family and the rest from monthly specials. By fall 2003, PBS expects Americans will own 600,000 HD receivers, and under PBS’s formula, the network would distribute 60 high-def hours next year, says Deron Triff, v.p.