Will Los Angeles viewers looking for news coverage on KCET really be interested in “traditional Korean wedding ceremonies, the finer points of conveyor-belt sushi, Japanese trade policy or men in diapers wrestling over a large ball”? That’s what Los Angeles Times media reporter James Rainey is wondering in a column today (Jan. 5). Those stories ran one recent evening on Newsline from NHK, which KCET substituted for PBS NewsHour. Now that the station is independent from PBS, its main programming, particularly its news, comes from different sources, including the Japanese broadcaster. Rainey sees that as an “attempt to fob off Asia- and Euro-centric news of the day on an audience that may be interested in a worldwide reach, but would much prefer it delivered by known personalities.”

Two Florida newspapers, an indie filmmaker and WPBT2 in Miami are joining to present “Nou Bouke: Haiti’s Past, Present and Future,” an hourlong documentary that provides a comprehensive overview of the ongoing challenges to the island nation following the devastating earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010. The Miami Herald used its online video footage to create the TV program, said WPBT2 spokesperson Neal Hecker. “This might represent a new model for public media in print and broadcast to work together in a less traditional way,” Heckler told Current. A videographer for the El Nuevo Herald, the Miami Herald’s Spanish-language publication, is director of photography for the film.

KQED is enlarging its coverage area to include San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria, Calif. In a statement, the station said the expansion will reach viewers lost by the departure of KCET from PBS on Jan. 1.  The residents will receive both analog and digital; KQED also has plans to also provide HD in the future.

Lonna Thompson has been promoted to executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Association of Public Television Stations, APTS announced today (Jan. 5). She had been general counsel, and served as interim president and c.e.o. during the advocacy group’s recent presidential search. The promotion is effective immediately. Thompson also serves on the Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council of the Federal Communications Commission, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Community Service Grant Review Committee, the CPB Digital Funding Advisory Committee and the PBS Interconnection Committee.

This American Life, the wildly popular pubradio show hosted by Ira Glass, is going international: It will be heard on CBC Radio One this season.

Marketplace from American Public Media and KCET’s SoCal Connected are partnering on a program that will run simultaneously on radio and TV. The special report, “Lot 354: A Tale of America’s Housing Meltdown,” will premiere on Jan. 13. Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal traces that specific property over several years. He speaks with the couple who bought the home for a bargain in 2002, improved it, and sold it four years later at almost triple the price; the couple who then bought the home at a high price but lost it to foreclosure; and the couple who recently purchased it at a fraction of that high price.

Two California cable systems have shifted Los Angeles’s KCET from its VHF position into the harder-to-find digital tier, now that the station has departed PBS. Charter Communications and Cox Cable made the move to keep PBS’s new primary station, PBS SoCal/KOCE, “in the more trafficked VHF band,” according to Variety (free registration required to view story). KCET President Al Jerome said it made “a strategic decision to retain its digital multicast channels … This has impacted our channel positions with some cable services.” The move affects around 377,000 Charter viewers; Variety did not list the number of Cox subscribers. Jerome said the channel remains the same on other cable outlets, including Time Warner and Comcast.

“Downton Abbey”, premiering this week on Masterpiece, will be a slightly shortened version of the British Edwardian hit. Its original episodes, which aired across the pond on commercial channel ITV, have been edited to six from eight to ensure the character of Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) arrives at the stately home in the first episode rather than in the second, the Brit paper Daily Mail reports. It adds: “PBS also believes its audiences will need an American to outline the key themes of the show. So before the first episode, actress Laura Linney will explain the inheritance principle.” (Linney is a regular host of Masterpiece Classic.)

Chicago-based blogger Ignatiy Vishnevetsky will be Christy Lemire’s co-host of Roger Ebert Presents at the Movies, which debuts Jan. 21 on nearly 200 PBS stations. He fills the opening created by the still-mysterious departure of Elvis Mitchell, host of KCRW’s The Treatment. Vishnevetsky founded the alternative-cinema site Cine-File.

Barry University has applied to the FCC to transfer its pubcasting station WXEL in West Palm Beach, Fla., to American Public Media’s Classical South Florida in Fort Lauderdale, reports the All Access Music Group website (third item). Deal price: $4.05 million. APM owns adjacent-market noncom Classical WKCP in Miami. The agreement is the culmination of several years of negotiations for WXEL, which was nearly sold to New York City’s WNET five years ago (Current, March 6, 2006) and, more recently, a local community group and school district.

Ohio University pubcaster WOUB is welcoming a journalism professor as its interim director and g.m., as part of a push to integrate the college with the station in Athens, Ohio. Tom Hodson served as the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism’s director from 2003 to 2010. He is replacing outgoing Director and General Manager Carolyn Bailey Lewis, who will retire this month. The station is a nonacademic unit of the college and broadcasts PBS and NPR content as well as student-produced programming to Southeast Ohio and neighboring states. It’s run by student volunteers and full-time technical employees and editors.

The Open Mobile Video Coalition has expanded its membership to firms other than broadcasters for its new OMVC Mobile DTV Forum. Dell, Harris, LG Electronics and Samsung Mobile are among the first companies to join. “By expanding our membership beyond broadcast companies, we hope to bring greater resources to the task of perfecting the Mobile DTV consumer experience, while bringing an exciting new class of digital mobile devices to the American public,” coalition CEO Vince Sadusky said in a statement. The voluntary association of television broadcasters works to accelerate development of mobile digital television. Its 900 members include the Association of Public Television Stations, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and PBS.

OK, we just could not resist sharing this, although longtime staffers at WOUB in Athens, Ohio, may be annoyed. Or mortified. This very groovy Dec. 19, 1977, WOUB signoff was posted on YouTube in March 2010 by broadcast graphic designer John Christopher Burns. Now it has migrated to Boing Boing (the comments there are pretty amusing). We can’t decide which is cooler: the hair, the music, the equipment or the fashions.

Sarah Spitz, producer of Left, Right and Center at KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., is leaving the show after 15 years. “This was a decision I came to on my own, no one is shoving me out the door,” she writes in a post on her blog. “But between us, I’ll tell you in all sincerity, I hate the way politics is played now. I want our elected officials to do the business the people sent them to Washington, to city councils, to state legislatures, to do. That’s not the way they play and I no longer want to be part of the process that perpetuates a broken system.

It’s 2011, and you know what that means: KCET is on its own, formally untethered from the pubTV mothership PBS. Here’s a look at its logo and new tagline: Rethink TV. Check out the station’s Facebook page for viewer reactions so far.