WCAI Cape and Islands NPR, the only public radio station for coastal communities in southern Massachusetts, has boosted its signal from 1,200 to 12,500 watts. WCAI Managing Director Mindy Todd noted in Tuesday’s announcement, “Now, more than 200,000 additional listeners — plus millions of fish in Cape Cod Bay, Nantucket Sound and the Atlantic Ocean — will have a clear signal and clear access to the region’s only locally-produced and locally-broadcast public radio station.” Starting Friday, CCTV Children’s Channel in Shanghai, China, is airing a special “Happy New Year” series marking the first time its hosts are interacting with Sesame Street‘s Muppets.

Washington, D.C., philanthropist and financier David M. Rubenstein has established a $1 million fund at WETA in suburban Arlington, Va., for producing programs about American culture, history and public affairs. Announcing the donation Tuesday, Rubenstein said he believes in “the power of public media to be a force for education, sharing the vibrant culture and rich history of this country.” Rubenstein is co-founder and co-c.e.o. of the Carlyle Group, a global private equity investment firm. He has been a station member since 1988, according to WETA spokesperson Mary Stewart. Sharon Rockefeller, WETA president, called the gift “truly inspiring.” She noted that Rubenstein’s investment “will meaningfully expand our ability to create programming of consequence and bring innovative, important ideas to life on behalf of the public.”

Two Los Angeles television stations, one commercial and the other public, will pilot the first television channel-sharing project in the country, CTIA — The Wireless Association announced today. The noncom KLCS, licensed to the L.A. Unified School District, and bilingual KJLA are voluntarily participating in the experiment. CTIA, an international organization representing the wireless communications industry, is supervising the initiative in conjunction with the Association of Public Television Stations. “APTS has been involved in the development of this pilot in support of our member station KLCS,” Lonna Thompson, APTS c.o.o., told Current. “We support this pilot project because we think it will provide valuable information to our member stations considering whether to engage in their own channel-sharing effort.”

Episode four of the new season of Portlandia, starring Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, will feature A Prairie Home Companion tailgating. The sketch is also being spun off into a series of four webisodes, which can be viewed online before the season premiere.  Season four of Portlandia premieres Feb. 27 at 10 p.m. on the Independent Film Channel. If an avid blogger can’t leave a comment on your website, he’ll write about it. That’s what tech-savvy journalist Doc Searls did when he encountered issues with a story from WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station. Radio personality Madeleine Brand returned to the airwaves yesterday with a new show, Press Play on KCRW-FM in Los Angeles.

The next CPB Board meeting, Feb. 10, will take directors on a field trip. While the morning session will be at headquarters in Washington, D.C., the board will head to WETA in suburban Arlington, Va., in the afternoon for a look inside PBS NewsHour. Also on the agenda: updates on diversity work, spectrum issues and American Graduate activities. If you thought ratings for the Season 4 premiere of Downton Abbey were high, wait until you read these numbers: PBS and WGBH announced Monday that the Jan. 5 Masterpiece episode had an average audience of 15.5 million viewers, 52 percent more than the 10.2 million average audience initially reported in Nielsen Fast National data.

The Knight Foundation and the Investigative News Network (INN) are teaming up to award $1 million in microgrants for innovation at public media and nonprofit news operations. The INNovate Fund is one of several initiatives totaling $5 million that Knight has planned in response to its 2013 in-depth study of nonprofit news sustainability. Knight will provide the funding, while INN will manage the two-year grant program and select recipients. Online applications will open March 1 and are open to all nonprofit and public media news organizations. Successful applications should meet three criteria, according to INN CEO Kevin Davis. Organizations should deliver fully formed proposals with detailed line-item budgets.

Public radio leaders are discussing how and whether NPR can give stations more freedom to reuse its newsmagazine segments and more opportunities to insert local news into All Things Considered.

Moss Bresnahan, former president of KCTS in Seattle, is one of three finalists for the position of executive director and general manager of KBTC Public Television in Tacoma, Wash., according to licensee Bates Technical College. The three were interviewed Jan. 24 for the post. Bresnahan exited KCTS in August 2013, citing family issues in an email to fellow executives. The two other finalists are Karen Olstad, chief operating officer of WOSU Public Media in Columbus, Ohio; and Ed Ulman, development director and interim g.m. of KBTC.

A new study from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center finds that while 2- to 4-year-olds spend 78 percent of their screen-media time with educational content, that figure drops to 39 percent among 5- to 7-year-olds and to 27 percent for 8- to 10-year-olds. The research, “Learning at Home: Families’ Educational Media Use in America,” also found that children spend an average of 42 minutes a day watching educational television compared with five minutes each day with educational content on mobile devices and computers and just three minutes per day with educational video games. The children of parents surveyed also read an average of 40 minutes per day, which includes 29 minutes with print, eight minutes on computers, and five minutes using e-readers and tablets.

Two high-profile public broadcasting personalities recently landed on late-night television. In case you missed their appearances, here is PBS NewsHour‘s Hari Sreenivasan on The Daily Show, and Frontline‘s David Fanning on The Colbert Report.

Larry Monroe, a longtime DJ with Austin’s KUT-FM, died Jan. 17 from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 71.