If you missed it last week, the NewsHour’s Jim Lehrer’s appearance on The Colbert Report is now online. As the intro on the website reads, “It takes real courage for Jim Lehrer to be boring five nights a week on television.”

Officials from three Native American tribes are signatories to an open letter to PBS concerning the American Experience series “We Shall Remain.” In a piece published in the Indian Country Today newspaper, they contend their tribes, the Wampanoag, Mashpee Wampanoag and Narragansett, were overlooked. “Our ancestors are central to the events following the Mayflower landing, yet our historical guardians … were avoided by this PBS production,” they wrote. ” … We have not struggled to maintain our tribal cultural identities for nearly 400 years since colonization to be disrespectfully ignored and dismissed or to have our history misrepresented for the purpose of entertainment.”

Longtime broadcaster Jane Pauley told an audience at DePauw University Friday what the NewsHour means to her. “I depend on the NewsHour on PBS,” reports the university’s website. “I pray that Jim Lehrer lives forever, because what they do is journalism, and in broadcast journalism it is, in my opinion, the absolute best and I absolutely depend on it. I gotta say the network shows are, to me, I watch them but they’re optional. The NewsHour is not optional.”

New Hampshire Public Television laid off five employees this week, citing the bad economy. Four vacant positions also will not be filled. “We tried in every way we could to reduce expenditures in other areas,” spokeswoman Grace Lessner told Foster’s Daily Democrat. “It’s a very unhappy thing to let people go.” The paper added that last year, NHPTV became a wholly owned nonprofit subsidiary of the University System of New Hampshire after over 40 years of the University of New Hampshire having the authority for the station’s day-to-day operations.

Red, White and Blue, a Houston political pubTV show, is back on the air at KUHT after a months-long controversy. The show, one of the few on local politics, featured one Republican and one Democratic host. It had been suspended after last year’s election. Politicians got involved, asking for the show to be reinstated. And now it has been. The first of the new weekly episodes runs at 8 p.m. tonight, and again at 5 p.m. Sunday.

Audience engagement is the buzz word for Web 2.0 media and Jesse Thorn of The Sound of Young America describes his approach to it in part three of his interview with Nieman Journalism Lab. For Max Fun Con, a June 12-14 retreat for TSOYA fans, Thorn invited his audience to meet and be entertained by his friends from the world of comedy (and a guy named “Dr. Cocktail”) at a retreat center in Lake Arrowhead, Calif. The event, which sold out when 155 people registered in less than two weeks, is “all my favorite things in this place,” Thorn says.

NPR management and representatives of its technicians’ union yesterday reached tentative agreement on a one-year contract that will furlough employees for up to five days and eliminate NPR contributions to union members’ retirement plans until September 30. NPR tentatively agreed not to lay-off any bargaining unit members for the term of the contract; in exchange, the union will temporarily suspend rules of jurisdiction that define the jobs performed by its broadcast engineers and technicians. Members of the bargaining unit will vote on the proposed contract next Wednesday, April 22. A summary and full text [PDF] of the agreement are posted on the NABET Local 31 website, along with details about a membership meeting tomorrow afternoon for bargaining unit members.

The American Film Institute is seeking media pros to volunteer as mentors for project developers in its annual AFI Digital Content Lab. AFI is looking for people into video, games, hardware, software, mobile devices and other aspects of media who would work with selected project teams while they develop digital applications in this year’s round. More info and application form are online. Here’s AFI’s roster of past projects. You also can connect with the Lab on Facebook (AFI Digital Content Lab group) or Twitter (follow AFIDCL). Meanwhile, the Lab plans its Digital Hollywood Content Summit May 5 in Santa Monica, Calif.

Madison, Wisc., filmmaker Andy Beversdorf has received death threats over his latest doc, “Here Kitty, Kitty,” airing Saturday on Wisconsin Public Television. The subject: Whether the state should allow killing of feral cats. “It was a big fight between the bird people and the cat people that produced a lot of characters who were very passionate about the whole thing, so it made for good cinema,” Beversdorf told the Wisconsin State Journal. The “bird people” include a professor whose study blames cats for the deaths of millions of birds. More in the Chicago Tribune via The Associated Press.

CPB added new-media and public-interest experience yesterday, announcing the hiring of Robert Bole, v.p. of digital media strategy and investments, formerly v.p. of media for One Economy Corp., a D.C.-based nonprofit that developed the Beehive, a national website with localization that provides practical living advice and information services to millions of low-income families, as well as an online video platform Public Internet Channel; a community forum device, 24/7 TownHall; and an education site for families, ZipRoad.

Wisconsin Public Television and the national series Now on PBS received two of this year’s 10 Walter Cronkite Awards for political reporting on TV. The awards were announced yesterday by the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Wisconsin Public Television won its fourth Cronkite for real-people stories that “went above and beyond what many come to expect from public television,” the judges said. They cited the Now on PBS program “New Voters in the New West” for showing the party’s rush to capture first-time voters.

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler’s new column tackles the recent Fox News report on the use of Al Jazeera English television reporting on Worldfocus. Fox quoted a member of Congress that pubcaster PBS should not be airing the Middle East-based network reports. One point Getler makes: “Al Jazeera does view things through an Arab world prism because that is its main audience. And it also focuses heavily on the civilian costs of war — whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Gaza. So its filming and reporting became valuable from these regions, even if, at times, they are hard to look at. Yet it is better to know this as part of the mix of reporting, in my view, and to absorb it in context with all the ways we get information, than to have only the often sanitized version of warfare that one gets on American network television.”

“My situation is that if I had to choose between losing my stations and losing my direct podcast fundraising, I’d pick the one that would allow me to continue to pay my rent and . . . lose the stations,” says Jesse Thorn, host of the The Sound of Young America, a comedy podcast and weekly public radio show from PRI, in a two-part interview with the Neiman Journalism Lab. Thorn describes how efforts to attract younger and more diverse audiences with shows such as Day to Day, News and Notes, Bryant Park Project and Fair Game failed because they were expensive to produce and didn’t gain the station carriage needed to cover their costs.

Unemployed folks in Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire are producing and appearing in The New England Job Show on 26 public access channels in the two states. The half-hour program was created by “a group of people who didn’t even know each other a few weeks ago,” according to its website. The current show is available on its blog, and the Elevator Pitch page features short videos from job seekers.

An upcoming theatrical production will be the first time longtime Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie will be portrayed by humans instead of Muppets. Bert & Ernie, Goodnight! will have its world premiere in September at the Children’s Theatre Co. in Minneapolis, according to a Sesame Workshop statement on the Animation World News website. Sesame Workshop spokeswoman Lauren J. Ostrow confirmed to Current that yes, this is indeed the duo’s first performance as humans, “with the exception of one short, comical segment performed by actors from The Sopranos as part of a larger project.” And yes, she’s serious!