Beginning early next year, American Public Media in St. Paul, Minn., will produce public radio’s Performance Today and SymphonyCast. NPR will end production of the shows as it prepares an online music service, which will include the classical music shows and other offerings from APM. (Coverage in the Washington Post.)

The New York Times reviews recent research findings on what toddlers learn from television while Slate speculates on whether there’s a link between autism and TV watching in early childhood.

WNIT in Elkhart, Ind., plans to move to downtown South Bend in 2009, taking over a building to be vacated by the local CBS affiliate.

Of the two documentaries airing tonight that recall the fiery collapses of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, New York Times Critic Virginia Heffernan prefers Spike TV’s program over PBS’s. “Once you give in to the program’s pointy-headedness, though, the pedantry is not worthless,” she writes of Nova’s “Building on Ground Zero.”

Brent Bozell will step down as president of the Parent’s Television Council, the group that led the charge against broadcast indecency after Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction.” His successor is Tim Winter, a former NBC executive who wants to work collaboratively with broadcasters, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Researchers in Switzerland say they’re developing a nano technology that will allow future TVs to present every color the human eye can see, or roughly double the range offered by current plasma, LCD and projection screens, Wired reports. It will likely take at least eight years to get the technology, which uses an elastic, rather than fixed, diffraction grating that can be tuned to present additional colors, into commercial products.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Parents Television Council filed an FCC complaint over obscenities uttered by two actresses during the Aug. 27 live telecast of the Primetime Emmy Awards.

Viewers aren’t complaining much about PBS’s online advertising practices, writes PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler, but criticisms leveled by media activist Jeff Chester are healthy. The objections are forcing “an airing about how this very important, and unique, public broadcasting service is gliding into a new source of revenue,” Getler writes.

Writing for The Nation, Amy Alexander examines the impact of Tavis Smiley’s The Covenant with Black America. “One doesn’t just read The Covenant With Black America,” she says. “Rather, to read this nonfiction manifesto-cum-workbook is to become part of a multimedia movement aimed at increasing black political and economic power.”

AOL and Microsoft video services are deep linking to public TV content, reports Dennis Haarsager via his Technology 360 blog, which allows users to access pubcasters’ video while bypassing their home pages (and sponsor messages). The search engines generate much more traffic than sites can attract on their own, but “the desire to control content we produce runs deep within the television industry, so it’s bound to stir things up as more people realize . . . how some video sites are accessing content,” Haarsager writes. In addition, “bandwidth costs are going to be impacted by links you don’t control.”

A Senate panel is tabling President Bush’s re-nomination of former CPB chair Kenneth Tomlinson to the Broadcasting Board of Governors in the wake of a damning probe into his actions as U.S. broadcast chief, Reuters reports (via the Washington Post). The BBG oversees government international programming like Voice of America, Radio Sawa and Radio and TV Marti. Tomlinson’s current term as BBG chair ends when Congress adjourns later this year, but President Bush could re-install him without opposition with a recess appointment. Elsewhere, a Bloomberg columnist wonders “Why do preachy Republicans behave so badly?“

Journalism thinkers hope WNET’s “AIR: America’s Investigative Reports” gives “the profession a badly needed image boost,” reports the New York Times. The weekly public affairs show, which debuts Friday, will showcase notable news investigations.

Calling all citizen journalists: Jay Rosen, NYU journalism professor and media blogger, may have an assignment for you. His NewAssignment.net, an experimental project partially funded by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, aims to use both media pros and amateurs to develop a new, collaborative form of investigative journalism. Have an idea for an investigation? Rosen is looking for suggestions. See also PBS.org’s Mark Glaser and other examples of collaborative civic journalism initiatives, such as the Sunlight Foundation’s “Exposing Earmarks” project.

Kenneth Tomlinson responds to the report by State Department investigators on his activities as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors: “I believe it will become clear that this investigation was inspired by partisan divisions,” he says.

A State Department probe found that former CPB Chair Ken Tomlinson improperly gave a job to a friend in his continuing role as chair of the board that oversees Voice of America, the New York Times reported today. Investigators also allege that he supervised his horse racing stable from a government office. A two-page summary of the report said Tomlinson billed the government for more days of work than permitted, including days when he also billed hours to CPB. Three members of Congress, alerted by a whistleblower, asked for the probe in July.