PBS has chosen thePlatform, an online video publishing and management company, to provide the backend of a pubTV online video distribution system, Jason Seiken, senior v.p. for interactive announced today at PBS’s Showcase conference in Palm Desert, Calif. Local stations will also be able to use thePlatform’s publishing system to post locally-produced video on their own websites and make it available to other stations’ sites. ThePlatform provides online video services for BBC, Gannett/USA Today and PBS KIDS Sprout, among other media companies.

Scottish actor Alan Cumming will host Masterpiece Mystery!, the summer season of WGBH’s imported drama series, PBS announced today. (In January, Gillian Anderson started hosting the winter season, Masterpiece Classic.) Cumming has played roles from Chekhov and Euripides, as well as in X-Men and a James Bond flick, and won a Tony as the emcee in Cabaret. Cumming’s website. He’ll introduce a season that includes the conclusions of Foyle’s War and the Inspector Lynley series and a spinoff of Inspector Morse.

Not specifically pubcasting-related but perhaps of interest to station webmasters: Google’s new Friend Connect aims to enable even small websites to incorporate social networking aspects by pasting some code into their pages. The tool offers free access to social apps. It also makes it possible for site users to import profile and friend information from established social networks such as Facebook.

NPR’s Melissa Block recorded a live account of yesterday’s earthquake in central China and later reported from the scene of a collapsed middle school where parents grieved over the bodies of their dead children. Raw audio of both scenes, as well as coverage from yesterday’s edition of All Things Considered in which Block describes being surrounded by an angry mob and forced to leave the middle school, are posted here. The ATC reporting team, including co-host Robert Siegel, were on assignment in a city near the quake’s epicenter, gathering material for a series of special broadcasts planned for next week.

The BBC has signed a new distributor for the nightly half-hour BBC World News newscast for public TV stations — KCET in Los Angeles. New York’s WLIW, which has syndicated the show for nearly 10 years, will produce a new evening newscast for pubTV. Your World Tonight (working title) will debut in October when the BBC contract ends. Marc Rosenwasser, a former CBS Evening News senior producer, will produce the new show. The British pubcaster — which increasingly uses its own platforms, notably its BBC America cable channel, to distribute its productions beyond the sceptered isle — acknowledges it doesn’t want the pubTV newscast knocking heads with its new 60-minute cable newscast.

Slate has stirred up a new controversy over improper editorial influence in pubradio programming: a recent edition of The Infinite Mind is under fire for failing to reveal that four mental health experts contributing to “Prozac Nation: Revisited” have financial ties to drug companies that manufacture anti-depressants. The recent episode, in which host Fred Goodwin and all three interviewed guests agreed that the media overplays the link between violent behavior and antidepressants, is portrayed as an example of medical reporting that is “in a class by itself for concealing bias,” according to Slate. Producer Bill Lichtenstein responds here and additional commentary, including a response from Slate’s writers, is here.

He put San Francisco’s KQED on the air in 1954 — with Jon Rice, the station’s legendary first program director — and in 16 years demonstrated much of what “public television” could become, years before the Carnegie Commission put forth the new name for educational TV.

John Jay Iselin, ebullient president of New York’s WNET from 1973 to 1987, died of pneumonia May 6, the New York Times reported today. He presided as the station matured and developed such major PBS series as Nature, Live from Lincoln Center and the NewsHour. The former Newsweek reporter went on to head Cooper Union, the free-tuition arts-architecture-engineering college in Manhattan. Iselin’s predecessor, James Day, died less than two weeks earlier at age 89.

WTTW and performers from Chicago’s Second City and the comedy troupe Schadenfreude have produced IL-Informed, a comedy show that satirizes local issues–and the pubTV public affairs format. “The pilot is pretty funny, and that’s more than I can say for most, if not all, public television,” writes Time Out Chicago blogger Madeline Nusser. But “it doesn’t quite live up to its potential,” according to a Chicago Sun-Times review: “Interviews and investigative segments don’t really follow the standard TV news format, and some of the news being spoofed is dated.” The show features sketch comedy, newsmaker interviews and music. “Think the Daily Show meets Saturday Night Live–only completely local,” says WTTW on the IL-Informed website. 

At The Police’s farewell show in New York this summer, every breath they take will be for trees and public TV. Proceeds from the concert will go to WNET and WLIW’s arts programming and to MillionTreesNYC, the city’s project to plant one million trees by 2017 and reduce The Big Apple’s carbon footprint. The rockers pledged $1 million to the tree fund–no word yet on how much pubTV will garner. Tickets for the event will be available nationally via the WNET and WLIW websites.

TV anchor Elizabeth Sanchez is the new host of A Place of Our Own, KCET’s English program for parents and caretakers of young children and sister program of the Spanish-language Los Ninos en Su Casa. Sanchez, a Los Angeles native, most recently anchored for the ABC affiliate in San Diego, where she received three regional Emmys. She is the mother of a three-year-old and 17-month-old and joins two other hosts on the show.

At the History Channel, home of Ice Road Truckers, the host of the new weekly series Tougher in Alaska, premiering Thursday, May 8 (10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific), is Geo Beach, 225-pound public radio producer, whose publicity photos support the network’s press release: “It wouldn’t be a tough show without a tough host, and … Geo Beach is just that. Since moving to Alaska, Geo has worked as a logger, firefighter and medic, and commercial fisherman — including winter crabbing on the Bering Sea.” This week, Geo hunts for gold; next week, salmon. On July 31, the series gets around to waste disposal, also tough in Alaska.

Real estate developer Edward H. Kaplan, chairman of the Maryland Public Broadcasting Commission, and his wife, Irene, will give MPT $1 million over the next four years to develop new programming. The gift is the largest in the state network’s history.

In his latest column, PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler takes note of some positive aspects of Bill Moyers’ interview with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., but goes on to say, “…I do feel that there were not enough questions asked and some that were asked came across as too reserved and too soft, considering the volatility of the charges.” Viewers shared some stronger words with Getler.

Talk shot host Diane Rehm tells a Michigan TV station that she expects to continue hosting her show for at least another five years. “[A]s long as my voice holds out, I’ll be there,” she says. (Via the PRPD blog.)