One theme of TechCon 2010, PBS’s annual technical and management confab April 7-9, will be “doing more with less,” PBS’s Chief Technology Officer John McCoskey told TV Technology. Lots to cover in the meeting’s nearly 50 tutorials, sessions and panels, including: automation, multiplatform distribution, quality assurance, file-based workflow and the Next Generation Interconnection System (NGIS). One focus this year is the non-real-time file-based distribution aspects of NGIS. “It’s complex, as we need a ‘one size fits all’ solution. … unlike commercial, each PBS member station has complete autonomy over their infrastructure, workflow and subsystems, which makes it a challenging endeavor,” McCoskey said.

CPB today announced PBCore 2.0, a development project to improve pubcasting’s metadata and cataloging resource since 2005. CPB is working to expand the metadata standard to help producers and distributors better classify and describe digital pubmedia content and assist audiences in finding that content across various platforms (Current, Dec. 17, 2007). PBCore 2.0 will be managed by WGBH, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions and Digital Dawn.

Ten weeks before the air date of Need to Know, WNET announced the executive producer. Seven weeks before, the producing station named the co-anchors. On May 7 the new public affairs series debuts on PBS. A lot will be riding on the show. For PBS it’s a rare chance to start a potential “icon series” with new styles and substance, demonstrating that folks in “legacy media” can interact and innovate like digital natives. For WNET it’s an opportunity to establish an ongoing public affairs franchise with a reliable PBS time slot — an asset lacking for three canceled series: the nightly Worldfocus newscast; Wide Angle, which was “locked into” the summer season, and Exposé, which spent its third season as a monthly feature tucked inside Moyers’ show.

Jim McEachern, who was the principal technical leader for the Public Radio Satellite System for its first two decades and was a key planner of NPR’s technical facilities, died March 3 at age 71. He was one of NPR’s first employees in 1971 and worked for the network for 33 years until he retired in 2004. McEachern leaves his wife, Mary E., children Terrance, Elizabeth and Molly, and sister Janet Macidull. The family will hold a celebration of his life Saturday, April, 3, at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Rockville, Md. In lieu of sending flowers, friends may donate to their local public radio stations.

In today’s column Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal’s drama critic, laments what he terms PBS’s “slow but steady shrinkage of airtime devoted to the fine arts, and the increasing trivialization of such cultural programming as does manage to make it onto the network.” Furthermore, “any TV network that claims to be ‘public’ should be offering more than the ultrasafe programming in which Great Performances specializes.”

Now it’s South Dakota pubcasting that may face state funding reductions. The Daily Republic in Mitchell, S.D., reports that Republican state legislator Noel Hamiel suggested this week at a town forum that the state consider pulling back funding to South Dakota Public Broadcasting, which he dubbed one of the capital’s “sacred cows.” He added: “I would like to see public broadcasting wean itself from public funding.” But Democrat Frank Kloucek quickly countered, “I think that sometimes we lose sight of what is for the public good. SDPB does a lot of good for our communities.”

Public broadcasting thought leader Rob Bole declares himself an evolutionist — at least when it comes to the growth of the pubcasting system into the public media future. In a new post on his personal opinion blog, he writes: “The Rube Goldberg machine of public broadcasting is a strange creature and while it looks painful, for what we have asked of it, it has largely worked. Changing it too rapidly is a bad idea. Leaving it alone is even worse. … My framework for governing the public broadcasting transformation is grounded in the belief that changes should be evolutionary, not revolutionary.”

WNET confirmed yesterday that Alison Stewart, former cohost of NPR’s Bryant Park Project, and Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, will be co-hosts of Need to Know, the new PBS newsmag that begins May 7. The program will fill 60 of the 90 minutes that PBS has allotted to Bill Moyers’ Journal and Now on Friday evenings. Politically progressive fans of the two retiring shows flooded the in-box of PBS ombudsman Michael Getler with most of the past week’s 3,000 e-mails, Getler wrote yesterday. The e-mails seemed to be prompted, Getler said, by an alert from the liberal press watchdog FAIR tarring Meacham as “a consummate purveyor of middle-of-the-road conventional wisdom with a conservative slant,” judged unlikely to do the “hard-hitting” journalism of Now and Moyers.

CPB next Thursday announces a major news initiative to help stations produce more in-depth local journalism. CPB President Pat Harrison will detail the project, joined by the PBS President Paula Kerger and NPR President Vivian Schiller (via live video feed). Following will be a panel discussion on the role of pubmedia in reporting, with Hari Sreenivasan, PBS NewsHour correspondent; Tom Rosenstiel, director of PEW’s Project for Excellence in Journalism; Nishat Kurwa, news director of Youth Media International; Tom Karlo, general manager of KPBS TV-FM; and Kinsey Wilson, NPR’s senior v.p. and general manager of Digital Media. The event will be streamed live from the Newseum in Washington.

This month the bracket brouhaha emerges once again, but forget all that March Madness b-ball boredom. This year, try a little Muppet Madness. It’s brought to you by MuppetCast, the weekly podcast of all things Jim Henson and Muppets. Who will win in Miss Piggy vs. Pepe? Oscar vs. Big Bird? Bert & Ernie vs. The Count? (Hey, that’s two against one …) You may vote in all the matches each 12 hours until April 5.

In reaction to the new National Broadband Plan, the Open Mobile Video Coalition told a teleconference of reporters today that mobile DTV is superior to broadband to deliver mobile video, reports TVNewsCheck. Brandon Burgess, CEO of Ion Media and coalition chair, said broadcasting can simultaneously deliver video to millions of viewers without overworking Internet and cellphone networks. “No other solution out there can really do that,” he said. The coalition is made up of more than 800 private and public television stations in America, as well as PBS, CPB and APTS.

The Leading Gen!, currently carried by some 120 PBS affiliates, seems to be on a publicity roll. Last month Daily Variety TV critic Brian Lowry described the 13-part series on aging, introducing readers to neurosurgeon James Ausman and wife Carolyn, producers, and adding that for PBS, ” … catering to those over 50 — the people who are predominantly watching public TV anyway — isn’t just good business; it’s a no-brainer.” Last week the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, Calif., wrote that producing station KVCR-DT in San Bernardino calls it “the ultimate reality show,” and it’s won two Telly Awards.

KOCE in Huntington Beach, Calif., is joining the Orange County Local News Network (OCLNN), owned by the for-profit web journalism chain United States Local News Network. OCLNN reporters will file stories for KOCE’s Real Orange news program, and its digital OC Channel. Some KOCE-produced content will also be at OCLNN.com. The two will also work together on local public affairs projects.

As the South by Southwest Music festival keeps getting bigger and bigger, the potential for bands to break through to commercial success diminish, observes New York Times ArtsBeat blogger Ben Sisario. He points to last night’s opening showcase, sponsored by NPR Music and headlined by Austin’s own Spoon, as a case in point: “It was a plum gig, reflecting not only Spoon’s preeminence but also the emergence of NPR as a major force in independent music. . . . [T]he band was received as heroes, symbolizing the best of what South by Southwest is about: artistic credibility, insouciant cool, left-of-the-dial independence.

NPR and the Washington Post are offering an unusual joint fellowship honoring two sons of an NPR journalist. The six-month program, split between the two newsrooms, is seeking applicants by April 30 and will begin in the fall [more information]. The Stone & Holt Weeks Fellowship was created in memory of Stone Weeks, 24, and his brother Holt, 20, sons of Linton Weeks, an NPR reporter who formerly wrote for the Post, and Jan Taylor Weeks, an artist and teacher. The young men were both research assistants at Rice University in Houston. They were returning to their parents’ home in the Washington area July 23 when their car was struck by a truck in Virginia.