Sesame Street is closing in on a truly remarkable achievement: 1 billion YouTube video views. So today it’s asking for a bit of help to put it over the top. The number reflects a “rarified digital milestone,”  according to The Associated Press. It will be a first on YouTube for a nonprofit or U.S. children’s media outlet, and “reflects the increasingly multimedia nature of kid entertainment. Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch are now about as likely to be watched on an iPad, phone or laptop as they are on PBS,” the story notes. Sesame Workshop launched the Sesame Street YouTube channel in 2006; so far, the most popular video is “Elmo’s Song,” watched some 86 million times since being uploaded in 2009.

A pair of documentaries to be released for public TV broadcasts next month focus on two of the most difficult aspects of the nation’s dropout crisis — under-performing schools and at-risk youth. 180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School will be presented in conjunction with Tavis Smiley Reports: Education Under Arrest as part of CPB’s American Graduate initiative. Both premiere in late March, and were previewed during a Jan. 30 webinar from the National Center for Media Engagement. For 180 Days, “our goal was to share the perspective of students, how they view the things they have to go through,” Alexis Phyllis Aggrey, production manager of National Black Programming Consortia, told webinar participants.

NPR announced today that this summer it will move production of Weekend All Things Considered to NPR West, its production center based in Culver City, Calif. “Moving the show west will broaden and deepen our coverage and allow us to bring strong geographic diversity to our programming,” said Margaret Low Smith, senior v.p. of news, in a press release. “In addition, this plan gives us a new level of business and editorial continuity. By having a full team stationed at NPR West, we will be able to respond quickly if weather or a major news event incapacitates NPR headquarters.” NPR said the move will give the show access to the Los Angeles area’s pool of program guests in the fields of science, technology, entertainment and international trade.

The FCC is urging all broadcast stations to make immediate changes to prevent unauthorized users to take over the Emergency Alert System, writes telecom attorney Scott Flick of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. “The haste with which these instructions have been generated is demonstrated by the fact that they are not even on FCC letterhead, nor formatted for such a release,” Flick writes. “It is also worth noting that they are not described as ‘recommendations’ or ‘guidelines,’ but as actions EAS Participants ‘must’ or ‘are required’ to take.” What’s all the fuss about? A hacker accessed the EAS system Monday and informed viewers at several stations — including pubcasters WNMU-TV, in Marquette, Mich.,

The project solicits questions from listeners about Chicago to investigate on-air.

Updated Feb. 13 at 4 p.m. to add KNME-TV among stations impacted. Management at WNMU-TV, a Marquette, Mich.-based pubTV broadcaster, said it had identified the hacker behind a zombie hoax that compromised the Emergency Alert System on that station as well as others in the Upper Peninsula, Montana, New Mexico and parts of Wisconsin. Viewers expecting to see news programming around 4 p.m. on Monday on WNMU were instead treated to an emergency ticker warning that the dead had risen and had begun attacking the living. Another pubcaster, KENW in Portales, N.M., was also hit by the hoax. Pubcasters weren’t the only ones hit, an ABC affiliate in the area also  had its system hacked during the evening broadcast of The Bachelor.

A PBS NewsHour report on population growth and food scarcity in the Philippines prompted an increase in donations to the PATH Foundation Philippines Inc., an organization with a pilot program promoting family planning in rural areas of the Southeast Asian country. The report explored the foundation’s community-based approach of making contraceptives accessible to villagers who want to limit the size of their families. The story, which aired in January 2012, was produced as part of the public media collaborative project Food for 9 Billion, and has also been used by educators to set up discussions of the links between population and the environment.

Unedited interviews with the subjects in Rock & Roll, the acclaimed 1995 PBS series from WGBH and the BBC, are now available online as streaming video, with support from the Grammy Foundation and WGBH Media Library and Archives. More than 26 million viewers watched Rock & Roll when it originally aired over five nights, according to the station. The programs examined rock’s evolution from the 1950s through the ’90s. In a February 2008 update to its 1995 story, Current wrote that the series “contained so many musical clips that the producers apparently didn’t want to spend what it would take to extend their broadcast rights.

KPCC Program Director Craig Curtis is departing Southern California Public Radio after 12 years, according to a station memo posted online by LA Observed. Russ Stanton, KPCC vice president of content, said in the memo that Curtis “oversaw the transformation of KPCC’s programming from its music [and] news format into the 24/7 news and information programming we deliver today.” Curtis’s last day is Friday. Update: Curtis confirmed the news of his departure for Current, saying that the decision to leave was his and that it was “time for a change” at KPCC. “I feel good about where KPCC has come and where it’s headed, and I feel good about me heading out now,” he wrote in an email.

The FCC has “quietly revealed” the methodology it will use for repacking television channels after upcoming spectrum auctions, reports TV Technology. The agency just released a new version of its OET-69 software, called TVStudy, which will perform interference analyses for repacking. OET-69 is based on the Longley-Rice signal propagation model — also known as the irregular terrain model — which TV Technology refers to as “an analog-era methodology that yielded shortcomings when applied after the DTV transition.” And according to Broadcasting & Cable, the National Association of Broadcasters this week expressed concern to the FCC over a proposed change to the Longley-Rice model, which the FCC may update to reflect 2010 Census population data.

As one of the most popular podcasts of all time, Public Radio International’s This American Life has had to deal with its fair share of imitators and parodies over the years, and many other podcasts have appropriated the “This American…” moniker to draw attention to their own audio. On Feb. 5, SF Weekly spotlighted one such effort that was reportedly getting heat from Glass and his attorneys over trademark violation: This American Whore, a podcast covering sex workers’ issues, created in November 2012 by Siouxsie Q, a San Francisco sex worker. Siouxsie Q first tweeted on Feb. 1 that she had been instructed by TAL‘s lawyers to change her podcast’s name within five days.