A former Time correspondent whose reports ran on the PBS NewsHour is the new editor of the Washington Times, the paper announced today. The show carried Sam Dealey’s segments from Africa. The paper’s top management staff was recently terminated from the Times, which is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.

In a story headlined, “PETA Smacks Big Bird in D.C.,” Broadcasting & Cable writes that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has filed a complaint with the FCC against pubTV stations that air Sesame Street. Two problems, PETA says: The show is presenting a spot showing a sanitary poultry processing plant with children eating eggs and talking about their nutritive value. PETA has long contended that chickens raised for slaughter or egg production live in filthy, inhumane conditions. Also, PETA says the American Egg Board’s work is embedded in Sesame Street segments; the board is the industry promotional group created by Congress for egg producers.

PBS President Paula Kerger was on hand Saturday for the grand opening of KAET/Channel 8’s new digital media center at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, reports the State Press student paper. Arizona PBS General Manager Kelly McCullough said the move has been planned for two years. Under three hours after staffers signed off at the former station, they were on the air from the new facility. “The transition was surprisingly smooth,” McCullough said. “There was so much that really could have gone wrong. We have had some glitches and I’m sure we’ll have a few more but the important fact is, we’re on the air on three channels in high quality in nearly all of Arizona.”

As a follow-up to its recent report on public radio audience growth strategies, Station Resource Group asked 14 leading pubcasting and public media experts to react to its recommendations on new media. Which of the many activities proposed to advance pubradio in the “networked environment” should be top priority? In Proposals for Investments in New Media (PDF), an analysis and report on what the 14 respondents told SRG, two initiatives appear to have “relatively broad support”: developing a flexible local/national Internet structure for distributing all pubradio content, and exploring a coordinated online fundraising system. If you haven’t already read the final set (PDF) of recommendations from the CPB-backed Grow the Audience project, the section on new media–which is the focus of this particular discussion–begins on page 43.

The CPB Board earlier this week approved its FY08-09 affirmative action report and FY10 plan (PDF). According to the document, during FY09, total employees increased from 100 to 114; 12 staffers left during that year. Of the 26 employees hired, 13 are women and 10 are minorities. In FY 2009 CPB also hired five student interns: one male and four females, and three of the five were minorities. That brings the total staff breakdown for 2009 to non-minority, 61 percent; minorities, 39 percent; males, 45 percent; and females, 55 percent. For 2010, CPB says it will work to maintain or increase minority and female representation within executive and senior officials and managers, as well as first and mid-level officials and managers.

President Barack Obama has released a minute-long video praising Sesame Street on its 40th anniversary year — or, as he says, “this video is brought to you by the number 40.” He congratulates the show “as a parent, and as the president,” and recalls watching it with his younger sister. His two girls as well “learned a great deal” from the show. “There are many adults who can stand to learn again the lessons Sesame Street offers: Compassion, kindness and respect for our differences,” the president noted.

Frontline’s Tom Jennings is part of a team of journalists that are finalists for the prestigious Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, the Harvard Kennedy School announced today. The investigation, titled “Law and Disorder,” revealed details of police shootings of at least 10 persons in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In addition to Jennings, reporters included Gordon Russell, Laura Maggi and Brendan McCarthy of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, A.C. Thompson of public interest journalism site ProPublica, along with support from the Nation Institute, a progressive think tank supporting freedom of the press. The winner of six project finalists will be announced at a March 23 ceremony at Harvard.

Greg Shanley, 49, longtime news director, producer and show host for Iowa Public Radio, died Tuesday night at University of Iowa Hospitals in Iowa City, according to the Des Moines Register. He was hired in 1987 as a producer/reporter, and served as local host of Morning Edition before moving into the director post. Other obituaries in Current: Carlos Sena of KSUT in Colorado; Robben Fleming, former CPB Board president; and Lillie Herndon, who served on the boards of PBS and CPB.

PBS NewsHour’s “Annotated State of the Union” is being praised by the Poynter Institute’s Al Tompkins as a “remarkable analysis.” He’s the Group Leader for Broadcasting and Online at the institute, which is a school for journalists and media teachers. The feature breaks the speech into clips with links to resources for people who want to learn more. “It’s pretty brilliant,” Tompkins writes. Anne Bell, spokesperson for the show, said analysis by Mark Shields and David Brooks on YouTube also received more than 22,000 views.

Relief organizations have raised a total of more than $525 million for victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. As of Wednesday, the figures from just a few: A worldwide telethon last Friday, “Help for Haiti Now,” raised $66 million; it was carried by a multitude of channels including PBS affiliates. The American Red Cross received about $185 million, some $29 million of that via text messages. And Convio, which provides software to charities, processed more than $195 million online.

Over the next year, the Station Resource Group and the Affinity Group Coalition will be soliciting input from both inside and outside the pubcasting system for its project, “Editorial Integrity for Public Broadcasters in the 21st Century.” Tom Thomas, co-CEO of the SRG, and Ted Krichels, g.m. of Penn State Public Broadcasting, are organizing the effort. The two told the CPB Board at its meeting earlier this week that the project, expected to take about a year, is just getting under way. Both TV and radio pubcasters will be involved, as well as experts and others both inside and outside the system.

CPB and the National Center for Media Engagement are sponsoring two webinars in February to advise stations applying for broadband stimulus funding. Joanne Hovis, president of Columbia Telecommunications Corp. and an authority on community broadband topics, will offer background information on the availability of funds, explain the application requirements and answer questions from participants to help them develop and refine their applications. Sign up here for the 2 p.m. Eastern meeting on Feb. 4, and here for Feb. 11.

Congress should not only increase money to pubcasting but also use its funding mechanism as a possible model to funnel financial support to news operations, according to a new report from the USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Geoffrey Cowan, one of the co-authors, is director of the school’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, as well as a past CPB board member; David Westphal is a longtime print and wire service editor, heading up McClatchy’s Washington bureau for more than a decade. They point out the value of pubcasting: “News coverage on public radio and TV has the highest trust ratings of any American media.

CPB has become “a needless drain on the public coffers that has outlived its usefulness,” writes the Washington Times in an editorial today. Its reasoning: Pubcasting was born of the need to provide alternative programming to only three networks available in 1967; now there are a multitude of channels both on TV and the Internet. The newspaper cites demographics of viewers (mainly white, educated and older) that “reinforce the argument that public broadcasting is an upper-class subsidy. It’s highly doubtful that the urban American underclass is rushing home to catch Masterpiece Theater and the best of British comedy.” It suggests turning Sesame Workshop, “one of the most lucrative franchises to emerge from the public broadcasting system,” into a for-profit publicly traded corporation to support pubcasting.

Lillie Edens Herndon, who served on the boards of CPB and PBS, died Dec. 3, 2010, at her home in Columbia, S.C. She was 93. Herndon’s CPB appointment was one of seven by President Richard Nixon. Five of those were in August 1974, just two days before Nixon turned over power to Vice President Gerald Ford. Herndon also served on the CPB Board under presidents Ford and Carter. As chair of the CPB Board, in April 1981 she testified before Congress on the Public Telecommunications Act, which addressed a range of public broadcasting issues. Part of her statement advised on the shape of the CPB Board: “I would, however, ask you to give serious consideration to having a board of at least nine members, in order to be able to get the diversity which I believe is needed on that board.