The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation today (Feb. 3) announced a four-year, $4.2 million grant to Northwestern University for the Knight News Innovation Laboratory. The Knight Lab will be the first of its type in the nation, a partnership between Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern. Journalists and computer scientists will join forces to create new digital tools, build partnerships with media organizations and expand the media innovation community. Even the historic blizzard in Chicago couldn’t stop the announcement. A formal launch at the snowed-in university was scrapped for an online question-and-answer session with Eric Newton, vice president of the journalism program at Knight Foundation, and his team.

The National Children’s Museum, opening in Prince George’s County, Md., in 2013, will partner with Sesame Workshop, the two announced today (Feb. 3). The two will collaborate on museum programming for the young visitors, and Sesame Street characters will be featured in the exhibits.

U.S. Ambassador to Greece Daniel Smith, center, was on hand Wednesday (Feb. 2) to welcome travelers accompanying co-hosts for the public broadcasting show Grannies on Safari as they arrived at the Athens International Airport from Luxor, Egypt. The group had landed in Egypt on Jan. 26, as the country began to explode into anti-government protests. They finally made it out on a U.S. State Department charter flight. First row, from left: Jessie Shropshire of Ohio, Gail Bikel of Indiana, Ann Pinkney of Illinois, co-host Regina Fraser, Smith, co-host Pat Johnson, the ambassador’s wife Diana Smith, and Julio Martinez of Illinois, the show’s photographer.

Updated, Feb. 7: Rick Lewis, c.e.o. of the fundraising group Friends of WLRN for nearly seven years, will step down at the end of February. Jorge Perez-Alvarez, c.f.o. of the Friends group, will serve as interim chief executive. Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of Miami-Dade County public schools, which owns WLRN-TV/FM, has objected to the independence of the nonprofit Friends group, which raises funds for the stations, and complained about the six-figure compensation of underwriting sales reps for the Friends group (Current, June 21). The Friends board has given Carvalho a voice in appointing Lewis’s successor, which he wanted. Friends Chair Charles Tatelbaum told Current that both he and the superintendent will appoint members of the search committee.

Public media applications for funding by the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program are due March 17. The full Funding Opportunity notice details the PTFP priorities and eligibility standards, and the FAQ has more info. A series of hourlong webinars to train applicants begins next week. Dates are Feb. 10, 14 and 23, and March 7. All begin at 2 p.m. Eastern. To reserve a spot in the webinars, write to Lynn Chadwick, lchadwick@ntia.doc.gov, before the close of business the day before. Last fall the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration bestowed about $20 million in matching grants to public stations and other nonprofit and noncommercial organizations.

Chicago public broadcasting outlets are taking a hit from local media columnist Robert Feder. In his blog post today (Feb. 3) on how the media performed during this week’s massive blizzard that crippled the city, both WTTW-Channel 11 and Chicago Public Radio WBEZ were declared losers. In fact, he writes, WTTW was the “biggest loser,” because it “declared Wednesday a snow day and shut down its entire news operation.” “Viewers who tuned in to Chicago Tonight expecting an analysis of the city’s response to the crisis or an examination of the blizzard’s political and economic impact were stunned to see a rerun of the public television station’s forum with mayoral candidates from Jan.

The Los Angeles music community will lose an important ally if  Republicans on the Hill have their way and cut back or zero out pubcasting support, reports LA Weekly. NPR affiliate KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., is a longtime source to launch new bands. “What’s at stake locally is no less than KCRW’s ability to provide its current musical programming — credited by sources across the industry for breaking L.A. bands and taking indie acts to national prominence.” KCRW librarian Eric J. Lawrence estimates that 20 percent of its programming is devoted to local bands. But rights for all of that music are covered by a license negotiated and paid for by CPB.

PBS’s annual study of media technology used by teachers reveals an “insufficient capacity of computing devices and technology infrastructure to handle teachers’ Internet-dependent instructional activity,” it announced today (Feb. 2). The national research by Grunwald Associates LLC also shows that kindergarten through 12th grade teachers spend 60 percent of their time using educational resources in the classroom that are either free or paid for by teachers themselves, due to school budget cuts. The nationwide, online survey reflects views of a representative sample of 1,401 full-time classroom teachers (1,204 K-12 public school teachers and 197 pre-K teachers in public and private schools) in August 2010.

WTTW’s Grannies on Safari hosts and the tour group they’re leading just landed (3 p.m. Eastern Feb. 2) at the airport in Athens, Greece, on a U.S. State Department charter flight from Luxor, Egypt. Their spokesperson Maria Dugandzic-Pasic said Regina Fraser and Pat Johnson told her that the entire Luxor airport was full of  tourists frantic to leave. Because the travelers have no access to television or the Internet – and opted to stay on their tour boar on the Nile – they were not aware of the seriously deteriorating situation in the country as mobs demanding the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak begin to clash with pro-Mubarak crowds.

There’s a whole slew of case studies just posted on the PBCore site. What’s that? The Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary Project.

MHz Networks has extended Al Jazeera English’s live coverage of the upheaval in Egypt, the Virginia-based pubTV distributor said Tuesday (Feb. 1). Al Jazeera English newscasts on MHz Worldview reach more than 35 million households nationwide. And viewers are finding other ways to watch Al Jazeera English, the New York Times reports. Meanwhile, KSMQ in southern Minnesota received donations Tuesday from viewers specifically pleased with the additional Al Jazeera English coverage on Worldview.

The Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media gathered a group of experts Tuesday (Feb. 1) at the Erikson Institute in Chicago to begin building a framework for judging excellence in children’s digital media, reports the Early Education Initiative blog of the New America Foundation. “Today children are gaining access to media that encourages – no, requires – some interaction on their part,” writes Lisa Guernsey, director of the initiative and conference participant. “Couldn’t that interaction bring with it the potential for harnessing that media to enrich children’s learning in many promising ways, in and out of school?” The group is developing broad outlines for creators and parents trying to determine “how to define quality amid the burgeoning number of products, websites, shows, social media outlets, immersive games and apps that are designed to both engage and excite children’s learning,” Guernsey said.

NPR has hired the search firm of Spencer Stuart to identify candidates to replace Senior Vice President of News Ellen Weiss, NPR chief exec Vivian Schiller told staff in a memo Monday (Jan. 31). A search advisory committee also will consult with Schiller before her hiring decision, later this spring. Committee members include Steve Inskeep, senior host of Morning Edition; Joel Sucherman, program director for ARGO/Digital; and Sharahn Thomas, deputy director of news. Weiss resigned in January, (Current, Jan. 10) in the wake of her controversial firing of NPR correspondent Juan Williams and its subsequent political firestorm.

The Texas Watchdog combed through the paper trail on the sale of Rice University’s KTRU to Houston’s KUHF, and reported on broker’s fees and efforts to keep the deal secret. The University of Houston, which has a $9.5 million deal to acquire Rice’s student-operated KRTU pending at the FCC, signed a $200,000 contract to retain Public Radio Capital as its broker in June 2009, months after it had gone through a round of painful budget cuts, according to this report by the Watchdog‘s Steve Miller. Efforts to conceal the formative deal from public meeting notices of the University of Houston’s Board of Regents may have violated Texas Open Meetings Act, he reports.

Public Radio Capitol’s roles as broker and buyer in sale transactions that are pending in several markets are coming under increasing scrutiny by localism advocates and public radio insiders, who question whose interests are being served in the sales of Pittsburgh’s WDUQ, Houston’s KTRU, and the New Jersey Network. Keeping the Public in Public Radio, a blog that watchdogs public radio format changes and station sales, has published a round-up of recent posts that criticize PRC. It’s headlined “College Radio and the Grim Reaper” and includes excerpts from blogs by public radio news veteran Michael Marcotte and Ernesto Aguilar, programmer at Pacifica’s KPFT in Houston.