Today the Knight Foundation and the FCC are sponsoring “America’s Digital Inclusion Summit” at the Newseum in Washington, and satellite locations in Akron, Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Philadelphia. Reps from an array of agencies and organizations advocating for universal broadband access are taking questions from the public at NewMedia(at)fcc.gov, or follow along at #BBPlan on Twitter. The summit is also streaming live and runs to 12:30 p.m. Eastern. Speakers include FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. (Photo: Robertson Adams, Knight Foundation) UPDATE: FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn has announced the agency’s effort to create a Digital Literacy Media Corps, a nationwide outreach of computer training for persons in communities including low-income housing, rural towns, tribal lands and areas with many racial and ethnic residents.

The dispute over music performance royalties for radio airplay is heating up again, the New York Times reports. The MusicFirst Coalition, which represents record companies and artists, and the National Association of Broadcasters are duking it out via ad campaigns and old-fashioned lobbying. Talks between supporters and opponents, initiated last fall at the request of lawmakers, appear to have stalled. Meanwhile, the Times reports in a separate article, investment bankers are aggressively courting Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora. The Internet radio service reported its first profitable quarter last year, and usage among its 48 million listeners now averages 11.6 hours a month, according to the Times.

WNET.org will discontinue Worldfocus [Word doc], its weeknight international news report as of April 2. The producing station was “a few million dollars short” of what it needed to keep Worldfocus on the air, President Neal Shapiro said in a release today. “We demonstrated that there is a demand for international news, but we had the misfortune of launching a brand new program into the teeth of the recession,” Shapiro said, adding, “… we were in the right place at the wrong time.” The station will put resources in its new weekly current affairs series Need to Know, which starts in early May, when Bill Moyers retires from his weekly show and Now on PBS ends its run.

Utah Education Network, a sister agency with KUED at the University of Utah, has received a $13.4 million federal Recovery Act grant to bring fast Internet service to 130 schools, libraries and other community institutions in the state, and it has been a partner with PBS in developing the Digital Learning Library. The state is putting in $3.5 million to match. UEN already serves 300 schools (its map). With the Utah grant announced last week, the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration had awarded grants totaling $610 million out of $7.2 billion allotted for NTIA- and Ag Department-funded broadband projects by the Recovery Act (this week’s quarterly report to the House Commerce Committee).

“I’m not a command-and-control person,” Vivian Schiller tells the Columbia Journalism Review in a feature on her first year as NPR president. “I lead by building consensus.” Schiller is addicted to her Blackberry, conducts lots of business via email and “has succeeded somewhat in piercing NPR’s infamous bureaucracy,” at least in the case of creating new business and reporting arrangements for Planet Money, the radio/online economics reporting collaboration with This American Life. CJR reporter Jill Drew also finds points of tension. Kevin Beesley, president of NPR’s AFTRA unit, questions a “larding of the management ranks” with recent hires Keith Woods, v.p.

Of all the public TV stations facing steep cuts in state funding this year, Idaho Public Television is among those in “greatest immediate danger,” CPB Senior V.P. Mark Erstling tells Stateline.org. Idaho Gov. Butch Otter has proposed to zero-out the state network’s funding over four years. For a station broadcasting to sparsely populated areas, there’s no way to make up the difference with corporate underwriting or member donations. “You can really see a potential loss of service,” Erstling says. “We don’t have enough funding to bail out all the stations that are coming to us asking for help and saying they’re in financial distress.”

PBS talk host and activist Tavis Smiley may have recently ended his annual State of the Black Union events, but this month he’s once again bringing together African Americans to press the case for a “black agenda,” reports the Associated Press. Smiley told the AP he felt compelled to organize the discussion after statements from some black leaders downplaying the need for President Barack Obama to specifically help the African-Americans community. Scheduled to speak during the March 20 panel discussion at Chicago State University are advertising pioneer Tom Burrell, professors Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, the Rev.

Columbus Neighborhoods, an engagement-focused website just launched by WOSU Public Media and the Columbus Metropolitan Library, invites visitors to explore and share stories, photos and videos of life in central Ohio. Inspired by WOSU-TV’s documentary series on local history, the site mainly features archival photographs of thirty different neighborhoods and suburbs. Next week, WOSU debuts “Short North,” the next installment of its TV documentary series, previewed here.

Kachingle, an online service designed to make it easy for online media consumers to leave thank-you gifts, officially began operation with 75 sites participating, including the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Cyberjournalist.net, the company says. Others are “queued up” to go live, including the Center for Public Integrity. Newspapers in Boulder, Colo., and Sioux City, Iowa, also have signed up so far. Their slogan has evolved from “Sprinkle change on the content you love” to “Crowdfunding sites you love” and now “Social cents for digital stuff.” See Current’s article and the Kachingle website.

Public Radio Player Version 2.1, an upgrade of the iPhone app developed by Public Radio Exchange last year, is now available for downloads in the iTunes App Store. PRX rewrote the code to improve the app’s performance and added features such as a sleep timer, alarm clock and the ability to bookmark your favorite listening selections. There’s something else very different about the latest player: PRX is introducing national banner ads on top-level pages. “CPB has encouraged us to find ways to sustain the project beyond grant support so this is our first foray into mobile advertising,” explains Executive Director Jake Shapiro on PRX.org

A few PBSers will return to the action in the National Adult Baseball Association (NABA) league this spring. KCET President Al Jerome formed the California Blue Jays in 2002, recruiting diamond stars such as the strong double-play combination of shortstop Lloyd Wright (president of WFYI in Indianapolis) and second baseman Andy Russell (senior v.p., PBS Ventures). Mel Rogers of KOCE in Huntington Beach, Calif., and Jeff Clarke of San Francisco’s KQED have also played for the team. The far-flung players practice on their own using local batting cages and, no doubt, family members drafted into playing catch. The Jays gather for a week each year to compete.

PBS today announced a new senior vice president of development, who will also head up the PBS Foundation. Brian Reddington will help expand fundraising efforts to generate new revenue for stations and content, PBS said in a statement. He will help PBS raise money from individual donors, foundations, corporations and other sources, and oversee creation of individual-giving programs and online fundraising initiatives. Reddington comes to PBS after four years as director of institutional advancement at the Smithsonian Institution, where he directed all external functions in the Central Office of Development.

Vocalo.org has hired Silvia Rivera as executive director. Rivera, former g.m. of Chicago’s Radio Arte, is chair of the Latino Public Radio Consortium board. She played a key role in the drafting of LPRC’s 2007 “brown paper.” At Vocalo, she succeeds Wendy Turner, who was promoted to v.p. at Chicago Public Radio, Vocalo.org’s parent station. Rivera began her public media career in 1998 at Radio Arte, a Chicago public radio station and media training program serving Latino youth. She rose through the ranks to become g.m. in 2006. “I look forward to helping realize the potential of Vocalo.org,” Rivera said in a news release.

Remember when policymakers referred to the Internet as the “information superhighway?” The analogy is being adapted to describe an NPR-proposed “public media platform” feeding stations’ websites and other online outlets with web-friendly content from both public TV and public radio, including NPR and three other major pubradio program distributors, stations and other producers. In this case, however, it’s not just highways but a complex, flexible road system, said Bruce Theriault, CPB’s senior v.p. for radio. “It allows us to move things around, has all the rules of a highway, with merges, exits, speed limits and business rules. Everybody — no matter what kind of vehicles they own — can drive on it.”

Los Angeles now has a full-time Triple A music station. KCSN, the 370-watt noncommercial station operated by California State University at Northridge, dumped its daytime classical music schedule today and reintroduced itself as the only L.A. radio station broadcasting contemporary music 24/7. “We’ve researched what is the best public radio format to reach the broadest audience and we’re convinced this is it. This format serves the musical interests of listeners in our region,” said Karen Kearns, interim g.m. and associate dean of the university’s college of arts, media and communication, in a news release. The station has struggled for viability in the crowded L.A.