“Downton Abbey”, premiering this week on Masterpiece, will be a slightly shortened version of the British Edwardian hit. Its original episodes, which aired across the pond on commercial channel ITV, have been edited to six from eight to ensure the character of Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) arrives at the stately home in the first episode rather than in the second, the Brit paper Daily Mail reports. It adds: “PBS also believes its audiences will need an American to outline the key themes of the show. So before the first episode, actress Laura Linney will explain the inheritance principle.” (Linney is a regular host of Masterpiece Classic.)

Chicago-based blogger Ignatiy Vishnevetsky will be Christy Lemire’s co-host of Roger Ebert Presents at the Movies, which debuts Jan. 21 on nearly 200 PBS stations. He fills the opening created by the still-mysterious departure of Elvis Mitchell, host of KCRW’s The Treatment. Vishnevetsky founded the alternative-cinema site Cine-File.

Barry University has applied to the FCC to transfer its pubcasting station WXEL in West Palm Beach, Fla., to American Public Media’s Classical South Florida in Fort Lauderdale, reports the All Access Music Group website (third item). Deal price: $4.05 million. APM owns adjacent-market noncom Classical WKCP in Miami. The agreement is the culmination of several years of negotiations for WXEL, which was nearly sold to New York City’s WNET five years ago (Current, March 6, 2006) and, more recently, a local community group and school district.

Ohio University pubcaster WOUB is welcoming a journalism professor as its interim director and g.m., as part of a push to integrate the college with the station in Athens, Ohio. Tom Hodson served as the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism’s director from 2003 to 2010. He is replacing outgoing Director and General Manager Carolyn Bailey Lewis, who will retire this month. The station is a nonacademic unit of the college and broadcasts PBS and NPR content as well as student-produced programming to Southeast Ohio and neighboring states. It’s run by student volunteers and full-time technical employees and editors.

The Open Mobile Video Coalition has expanded its membership to firms other than broadcasters for its new OMVC Mobile DTV Forum. Dell, Harris, LG Electronics and Samsung Mobile are among the first companies to join. “By expanding our membership beyond broadcast companies, we hope to bring greater resources to the task of perfecting the Mobile DTV consumer experience, while bringing an exciting new class of digital mobile devices to the American public,” coalition CEO Vince Sadusky said in a statement. The voluntary association of television broadcasters works to accelerate development of mobile digital television. Its 900 members include the Association of Public Television Stations, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and PBS.

OK, we just could not resist sharing this, although longtime staffers at WOUB in Athens, Ohio, may be annoyed. Or mortified. This very groovy Dec. 19, 1977, WOUB signoff was posted on YouTube in March 2010 by broadcast graphic designer John Christopher Burns. Now it has migrated to Boing Boing (the comments there are pretty amusing). We can’t decide which is cooler: the hair, the music, the equipment or the fashions.

Sarah Spitz, producer of Left, Right and Center at KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., is leaving the show after 15 years. “This was a decision I came to on my own, no one is shoving me out the door,” she writes in a post on her blog. “But between us, I’ll tell you in all sincerity, I hate the way politics is played now. I want our elected officials to do the business the people sent them to Washington, to city councils, to state legislatures, to do. That’s not the way they play and I no longer want to be part of the process that perpetuates a broken system.

It’s 2011, and you know what that means: KCET is on its own, formally untethered from the pubTV mothership PBS. Here’s a look at its logo and new tagline: Rethink TV. Check out the station’s Facebook page for viewer reactions so far.

KCTS in Seattle now says that WETA producer Jeff Bieber will not be coming on as vice president of content, as it had announced in November. The city’s Crosscut blog reports that Bieber “apparently changed his mind for personal and professional reasons, and now KCTS must begin a search for his replacement just days before Bieber was supposed to start” on Jan. 3. Bieber would have overseen all KCTS broadcast, production, interactive and community engagement activities. Bieber, WETA’s v.p. of news and public affairs programming, wants to stay at the Arlington, Va., station to complete several programs, he said in a statement released by KCTS.

The TV critic for the Denver Post has selected Wick Rowland, president of KBDI/Colorado Public Television, as the local 2010 television person of the year. Joanne Ostrow also called KBDI “the little station that could,” and a “feisty outlet” that “routinely stands up to the Public Broadcasting Service bureaucracy.” “When more timid station managers caved on matters of censorship or politics,” she says, “Rowland hangs tough.”

In 2011, KCET in Los Angeles will replace PBS’s famous children’s programming with a new digital family channel, as well as a daily lineup that includes Busytown Mysteries, a Canadian animated series with feline characters; and Peep and the Big Wide World, a cartoon that teaches children about nature and science. The station’s Peabody Award-winning series A Place of Our Own/Los Niños en Su Casa will remain part of the station’s morning programming. The moves come as the station nears its Jan. 1, 2011, drop from PBS membership (Current, Oct. 18). The station is also revamping its digital channels.

The documentary “New York Street Games” snagged a spot for PBS in the top 10 TV shows of 2010 as complied by New York Daily News critic David Hinckley. “This fairly modest production is a documentary shown on local PBS stations, which confirms again the value of PBS,” he writes. “It’s an unpretentious, straightforward and thoroughly charming look at the games New York kids used to play on New York streets —presented not as nostalgia, but a vivid, riveting snapshot of growing up in the melting pot that was early and mid-20th-century New York.” Other shows on the list include HBO’s miniseries “Boardwalk Empire”; AMC’s Mad Men series and TBS’s late-night Conan O’Brien.

2010 Knight News Challenge winner Retha Hill attended the Online News Association gathering in October in Washington, D.C., and found it valuable. However: Where were the minority participants? “The lack of diversity at ONA ’10 was the subject of a brief but heated conversation between some National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) members, a few of whom wanted to ‘do something’ about it, like call ONA’s leadership out,” she writes on today’s (Dec. 28) MediaShift. “Was it an oversight? A slap?” Hill mulls. “Or was it a reflection of the lack of diversity in the country’s online newsrooms? Maybe it is the echo chamber effect of the online news types whose definition of who is innovating is limited to the people they hang with.”

The Hampton Roads Virginia Voice, a service of dual licensee WHRO in Hampton Roads, Va., uses more than 90 volunteer readers to bring newspaper stories (even grocery ads), magazines and online publications to blind listeners. A story in today’s (Dec. 28) Virginian-Pilot highlights the program, which uses a closed circuit signal via a specially modified radio; about 1,000 of the devices are in use. Live broadcasts are also streamed over the Internet.

“I think comparing NPR to the BBC is like comparing Champale to Champagne,” writes actor, satirist and KCRW’s Le Show host Harry Shearer in a comment in response to a lengthy analysis of the past year at NPR on Radio Survivor. He adds: “The days when the former would ‘go long’ on a story of prime importance have long since been superseded by the era of the unbreakable, predictable format.” Perhaps Shearer is still upset with the network because it didn’t cover his Cine Golden Eagle award-winning Katrina doc “The Big Uneasy,” and wouldn’t let him buy underwriting to promote the film.