American Public Media and Arizona State University are announcing a new partnership to “help foster collaborative reporting and innovative storytelling in public affairs journalism.” Linda Fantin, APM’s director of network journalism and innovation, and Joaquin Alvarado, its senior vice president of digital innovation, will teach as visiting professors during the spring semester at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Phoenix, leading a class on public insight reporting for radio. The students’ resulting work will be featured on national pubradio programs. And David Brancaccio, one of the hosts of APM’s Marketplace, also will be at the school as a Hearst Visiting Professional as part of the “Must See Mondays” speaker series.

New NPR President Gary Knell, speaking on KPBS Radio in San Diego, called the pubradio network’s problems last year — including the firing of Juan Williams and resignation of c.e.o. Vivian Schiller — “self-inflicted wounds to a large degree.” Speaking on the station’s Midday Edition, he added, “I wasn’t there, I wasn’t part of the decision making process. The people who were are not there anymore, and that speaks volumes in and of itself.” Also during the half-hour call-in show, Knell possibly foreshadowed upcoming changes. “I think it’s important that we are continuously looking for new, articulate voices,” he said.

The return of Downton Abbey proved to be a ratings blockbuster for PBS, while critics  mostly heaped praise on the Emmy-winning drama’s second season. Downton’s season premiere Jan. 8 [2012] attracted an average 4.2 million viewers, not including viewing through station replays, DVRs or online streaming.  That figure was double the average primetime rating for PBS and exceeded the average rating of the first season of Downton Abbey by 18 percent, the network said. That night PBS’s audience was 64 percent larger than on previous Sundays this year, reaching an average Nielsen rating of 2.0, TRAC Media Services reported. In strong PBS cities Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and St.

WHDD, the Connecticut pubradio outlet that bills itself as “the smallest NPR station in the nation,” has been slapped with an FCC complaint for endorsing political candidates. The complaint by a local school official, reported in a pay-walled article published by the Waterbury Republican-American, alleges that station co-founder Marshall Miles violated FCC regulations barring pubcasters from endorsing or opposing candidates for office. Terry Cowgill of the blog CT Devil’s Advocate speculates that Miles will try to “weasel out” of the complaint by claiming he was speaking for himself, not the station or its licensee. “But that’s just a bunch of baloney.

Michael Soper, who spent 14 years in development at PBS and now runs his own consulting business, today (Jan. 11) launched a systemwide survey of station-based public TV professionals regarding PBS’s national online prospecting project, the centralized effort to use PBS.org to identify and cultivate new donors for member stations that it has been working on for several years now. “PBS may believe that collecting e-mails from visitors to PBS.org and launching its online initiative represented an unexploited opportunity,” Soper writes in an email to clients regarding the survey. “Yet, most stations, and certainly most large stations that already had aggressive e-mail marketing programs, now find PBS’s new practices to be competing with their existing efforts.”

Detroit Public Television is partnering with the Detroit Economic Club for online streaming coverage of U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s address today (Jan. 11) from the floor of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Chu will speak at noon Eastern time on innovation and the auto industry. UPDATE: This original post listed noon Central time.

The ratings for Sunday night’s (Jan. 8) Season 2 premiere of “Downton Abbey” on Masterpiece Classic are in, with PBS doubling its average primetime rating as well as topping last season’s numbers for the popular Edwardian costume drama by 18 percent, PBS announced. According to Nielsen, the premiere averaged 4.2 million viewers, or a 2.7 household rating, excluding station replays, DVRs or online streaming. Fans were provided with a sneak preview on PBS’s Facebook page for two weeks leading up to the first episode; that received 100,000 views. In a press release, Rebecca Eaton, series e.p., said “Downton Abbey” “officially takes its place among the best of Masterpiece titles since the series began in 1971.”

Rocky Mountain PBS suffered a server failure at 10:15 p.m. Sunday night — right in the middle of the “most anticipated show on the schedule in years,” the Denver Post notes, Masterpiece’s “Downton Abbey.” “We deeply regret this happened and for the rest of ‘Downton Abbey’ will go back to a prior tape based technology as backup,” Doug Price, head of RMPBS, told the paper in an email. Price added that the station “can’t express our frustration enough with losing 45 minutes of our franchise program for the year. We had a problem about three weeks ago that our technical vendor assured us they had never seen but had none the less resolved.”

Ratings at KPLU, a jazz and news station based in Tacoma, Wash., are “up sharply” since the Labor Day weekend, according to Seattlepi.com, when the station brought aboard University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor Cliff Mass, who had been fired from rival KUOW (Current, Aug. 29, 2011) for speaking out on topics other than weather. “I would have to say that has had an influence,” said KPLU’s Joey Cohn. KPLU and KUOW are now tied for fourth place in the Seattle market, which represents a “significant gain for KPLU,” the news site notes.

Alabama Public Television is reviving its Capitol Journal program, which had ended last summer as part of a network-wide downsizing of 19 layoffs in response to state funding losses. The political roundtable resumes Jan. 27 with a smaller staff, reports the Birmingham News. “We always intended to bring it back,” said station public information director Mike McKenzie, “we just had to find a different way to put the program on the air given the resources that were available to us, sharing the news of the state and what’s happening at the Legislature.” An Alabama Public Television reporter based in Birmingham will report on education issues at the statehouse, and two reporters from pubradio WVAS-FM in Montgomery will cover the Legislature for Capitol Journal as well as WVAS.

Drivers of some 2012 model Fords will be able to listen to on-demand and streaming public radio programs by voice activation, using a new “NPR News” app debuting at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Spoken commands such as “Hourly News,” “Stations” and “Topics” trigger playback of segments and programs via the automaker’s SYNC AppLink system, which was developed to allow drivers to control smartphones by voice. NPR is the first news organization to develop a dedicated app for its programming. Users of the app can also create playlists and listen to stations across the country, not just within range of their FM receivers.

Immense Possibilities, Southern Oregon Public Television’s weekly hybrid local-national community affairs show in Medford, Ore., has invited two right-wing Tea Party activists and two members of the left-wing Occupy movement for an on-air, online “groundbreaking dialogue” at 7:30 Pacific on Tuesday (Jan. 10). “To explore the path to a healthier political community,” said the Occupy Ashland website, “we decided to take up a question that has been brewing for months across the country: When the bumper-sticker slogans are brushed away, how much do these very different-looking movements have in common? Is the time ripe for an alliance that would shake politics and economics at their roots?”

Tony Blankley, who spoke as a conservative voice on KCRW’s weekly Left Right and Center roundtable, died Jan. 7 after fighting stomach cancer. He was 63. “Tony was a gentleman, a thinker, and a fiercely intelligent voice for KCRW,” said Jennifer Ferro, g.m. “Tony believed in the concept of the show and proved that dialogue between differing views is not only possible but can be productive. We will miss his insight, his wit, his intelligence and his willingness to listen as well as talk.” Blankley was also a regular on The McLaughlin Group, and provided political analysis on NPR.

James A. Fellows, 77, an advocate of high ideals and strategic planning for public television, died in his sleep Friday, Jan. 6, at a nursing home in Millville, N.J. Fellows represented stations on the national scene for 40 years, serving as the last president of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, founding Current as a service of NAEB, remaining its publisher for more than 20 years, and working to establish a strategic planning unit for the famously fractured and decentralized public TV field. In 1979, CPB honored him with its highest award for achievement in public television, the Ralph Lowell Medal.

Since Bill Moyers’ new Moyers & Company isn’t going to be distributed by PBS, he’ll have his own independent website and “we don’t have to worry about somebody at PBS losing sleep over the fact that David Stockman says the Republicans have lost their minds on taxes,” the veteran newsman tells the New York Times. His latest program premieres Jan. 13, as public-affairs shows on public TV are waning, the paper notes. However, Moyers pointed out, PBS recently announced a companion to Antiques Roadshow just after the Census Bureau revealed the number of people living in poverty had risen to more than 46 million.