Sesame Street wants to introduce Big Bird and his friends to the Gaza Strip, according to Agence France Presse. The area is ruled by Hamas, one of two Palestinian factions. “We know that it’s an extremely volatile area, but we also feel that it’s really important that we take these step forward to promote self esteem for Palestinians,” said Gary Knell, president of the Sesame Workshop. A Palestinian version of the series titled Sharaa Simsim is already shown in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The latest column from Michael Getler, PBS ombudsman, focuses on two Frontline programs: “Obama’s War,” which continues to draw mail after its Oct. 13 premiere, and its more recent offering, “The Warning,” about “the smart, courageous but unheeded former chief of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born,” and her attempts in the 1990s to draw attention to the potential for financial collapse.

Rather than going independent, the Quad Cities’ fiscally distressed pubTV station, WQPT, will move its license to a different higher-ed institution. Now it’s expected to be licensed to four-year Western Illinois University, which recently won state capital funding to start building a larger campus in Moline, on the Mississippi almost 100 miles north of WIU’s home campus in Macomb. More on current.org.

It’s safe to say this isn’t your typical FCC official: Yul Kwon, winner of the reality show Survivor: Cook Islands in 2006, was appointed Wednesday as deputy chief of the FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, reports The Washington Post’s Reliable Source column. The Yale law grad’s wedding was covered by the TV Guide Channel, and he co-hosted Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week.”

A hybrid news organization committed to public service journalism will begin producing coverage of the Chicago region next month. The Chicago News Cooperative, announced today by veteran newspaper editor James O’Shea, sealed a deal to produce coverage for Chicago editions of the New York Times twice a week. WTTW, a public TV station with a longstanding tradition of producing local news coverage, is a founding partner in the cooperative and will provide a home to the nonprofit during start-up. WBEZ, Chicago’s dominant public radio station, may also join the partnership. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is providing major funding to CNC during start-up; business plans call for the cooperative to solicit donations from individuals and other foundations, and to earn revenues through its partnership with the Times and other potential outlets [via Romensko].

An editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican this week salutes community radio station KSFR-FM “for the stroke of inspiration that brings some added class” to the city’s 400th anniversary celebration. News Director Bill Dupuy and reporter Dan Gerrity wrote new words for a monumental old tune, and 28 members of the New Mexico Men’s Camerata recorded it under the baton of Kenneth Knight. Listen online and you can follow these lyrics, ending with a crescendo and sonorous plug for one particular set of call letters: “The sounds of the city in old Santa Festir echoes of history with each passing day.

Arizona Public Media is offering viewers a rare event: A chance to witness two sitting Supreme Court justices talking about the Constitution. The one-hour discussion, “Principles of Constitutional and Statutory Interpretation,” between Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Stephen Breyer, will air live Monday (2:30 Eastern) on PBS World and also stream on the On Demand page at the Arizona Public Media website. Moderating will be NBC News Correspondent Pete Williams, from the Tucson Convention Center.

Big Bird and his Sesame Street buddies are taking to the skies on Australia’s largest airline, Qantas. From Dec. 1, 2009, through Nov. 30, 2010, six Sesame Street videos will be offered free to transpacific passengers.

Choosing from 482 submissions from 82 countries, the Independent Television Service (ITVS) has selected six doc projects for funding, according to Screen Daily. The winners: 74 Square Meters (Chile) by Tiziana Panizza and Paola Castillo Iselsa; The Last White Man Standing (Kenya) by Justin Webster; The Team (Kenya) by Patrick Reed Kenyans; Teacher (Vietnam) by Leslie Wiener; This Is My Picture When I Was Dead (Jordan) by Mahmoud Al Massad; and The Rodriguez Project (South Africa) by Malik Bendjelloul.

PRISA (Promotora de Informaciones), a 22-country Spanish language multimedia corporation, has purchased a 12 percent stake in V-me, reports Billboard magazine. That percentage should increase to a majority position in the next year. “PRISA is a perfect partner for V-me,” president and CEO Carmen M. DiRienzo said in a statement. The nearly three-year-old V-me (Current, Feb. 12, 2007) is a partnership with pubTV, reaching almost 80 percent of Hispanic households in the United States.

The Public Media Innovation Fund today announced Round Four funding. Total grants of $205,000 for economic and financial literacy projects went to KQED in San Francisco; WPSU in University Park, Penn.; Maryland Public Television; KNBA in Anchorage; Wisconsin Education Communications Board; KUEN in Salt Lake City; and North Country Public Radio in Canton, N.Y. Details on their project here.

Where is the arts programming on PBS? So asks Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, on Huffington Post. He laments that arts programs are costly, and “come only from stations that can afford to create this programming, meaning those with strong fundraising operations. And far too few of the local stations do have strong fundraising operations.” He favors a fundamental change for PBS: “Why can’t the parent organization determine the best in American arts and fund its broadcast across the nation? And, he adds, CPB has the clout to make that happen. A PBS arts initiative was mentioned at Showcase in May (Current, May 29, 2009), which would create a weekly arts night of shows.

NPR unveiled the first-ever Internet radio to offer an exclusive menu of NPR stations and programs. The “NPR Radio,” modeled on an earlier WiFi radio by Livio that optimizes Pandora’s music streaming service, allows NPR fans to switch between over-the-air broadcasts of local stations, online streams of more than 1,000 NPR outlets across the country, and on-demand content from NPR.org. More than 16,000 Internet radio stations not affiliated with NPR also are accessible on the device, offered for $199 from the NPR Shop and Livio Radio. Gadget reviews by Wired and CNET poke fun at the radio’s accessibility features for the technology averse.

Another report on the future of American journalism takes aim at public broadcasting for failing to develop the local news gathering capacity that would enable it to deliver on its mission to inform the public. The study, distilled over the weekend by David Carr of the New York Times, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, and Poynter’s Rick Edmonds, recommends a new mechanism for supporting local journalism and calls for an overhaul in how resources are allocated within public broadcasting. Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and co-author Michael Schudson of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism collaborated on “The Reconstruction of Local Journalism,” commissioned by the j-school.

The House Energy Commerce Committee yesterday unanimously approved the Local Community Radio Act of 2009, a bill revising channel spacing requirements in the licensing of new low-power FM stations. H.R. 1147, expected to be taken up quickly by the full House, eliminates third adjacent channel protections for full-power broadcasters with one exception: LPFMs cannot be licensed within three channel spaces of noncommercial full-power FM stations that operate radio reading services, nor can they be adjacent to their FM translators and boosters. Other provisions in the legislation lay out new procedures for dealing with interference complaints and order the FCC to address concerns about potential interference between LPFMs and FM translators of full-power broadcasters.