“Four jam packed days, dozens of films, discussions, debates, brutal honesty, humor mixed with painfully serious subject matter, and a delirious evening of Korea’s top musical acts in an eclectic concert in our honor and broadcast live.” That’s how Judy Erlich, director of the critically acclaimed Most Dangerous Man in America doc, describes the recent pubTV INPUT Festival in Seoul on ITVS’s Beyond the Box blog. “INPUT is all about culture clash and aesthetic variance,” Erlich writes. “What works in Denmark may be completely inappropriate in Indonesia. The Islamic young woman sitting next to me literally covered her eyes during the opening event, which included a rather explicit sexual how-to sequence.”

ORLANDO — Masterpiece Executive Producer Rebecca Eaton is this year’s “Be More” Award recipient. Eaton has increased the icon show’s audience by 54 percent over last year, and was named one of Time magazine’s 2011 100 most influential people in the world. During the presentation at its national meeting here, PBS President Paula Kerger said Eaton “has committed herself to the highest standards of excellence and artistic expression for public broadcasting and has shepherded in a new generation of loyal viewers.” Previous recipients include docmaker Ken Burns, Sesame Workshop founder Joan Ganz Cooney, newsmen Jim Lehrer and Bill Moyers and children’s champion Fred Rogers.

PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O’Brien will conduct a live interview with Commander Mark Kelly and the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour at 6 a.m. Eastern Thursday (May 19). Questions are coming from the public via YouTube, Twitter and Google’s Moderator service. So far 2,254 people have submitted 1,839 questions and cast 13,421 votes for which to ask. The interview will run live on the NewsHour’s website and YouTube channel. Inquiring minds (well, at least one Current reporter) want to know: Will O’Brien ask, ahem, that infamous question, whether astronauts fool around in space? “Negative,” he replies.

KCET in Los Angeles has received a waiver from the Federal Communications Commission to air a live pledge show for Japan earthquake and tsunami relief. A spokesperson for the FCC said about a dozen such waivers have been granted. The fundraiser is from 8 to 11 p.m. Pacific May 24. It will feature guests from the Japanese-American community including actor George Takei, and a pre-taped interview with Gene Otani, lead anchor for Newsline, NHK’s weeknight English-language newscast. Also, on May 18, Otani will answer live questions via Ustream moderated by KCET’s editor-in-chief of blogs Zach Behrens that will run on KCET.org

ORLANDO — PBS and WGBH today announced PBS LearningMedia, the next generation of the PBS Digital Learning Library. It’ll be a digital media platform to “help re-imagine classroom learning, transform teaching, and more creatively engage students,” the network said in a statement. “Digital media content – so pervasive in the lives of children – has the potential to dramatically change the way students learn and participate in a global society,” PBS President Paula Kerger said. Including content from more than 55 member stations, independent producers and public institution partners, the first phase of development will combine existing infrastructure models from the PBS Digital Learning Library (formerly EDCAR) with local services from WGBH’s Teachers’ Domain and its partners, WNET/New York and Kentucky Educational Television (KET).

Ready to Learn is safe. On Monday (May 16) the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS expressed appreciation to Congress and the U.S. Department of Education for providing $27.3 million in continued funding for the initiative, which helps public television stations develop educational resources on-air, online and on the ground that provide young children – especially those from low-income backgrounds – with fundamental reading and math skills. The project was endangered in recent budget rounds.

ORLANDO — PBS’s intention to insert underwriting spots into programming on a test basis beginning this fall, creating major buzz at its National Meeting here this week, comes just as an Australian newspaper is editorializing against new commercial breaks in PBS NewsHour on that country’s SBS network. Those interruptions, which began earlier this month, prompted The Australian to write, “Not only is NewsHour now being interrupted with totally inappropriate advertising, but SBS appears to be amateurishly clipping its editorial segments in order to accommodate the ads.” The paper also called NewsHour SBS’s “most valuable program.”

The professionals who work to engage public media groups in their communities are still learning what it takes. In a series of articles, associates of the Wisconsin-based National Center for Media Engagement will lay out what they’ve learned. Executive Director Charles Meyer begins the series. I’ve always been blessed with a fast metabolism. Sadly, I’ve reached an age at which my metabolism has decided to slow things down. So I have to choose: stay the course and accept the consequences or change a lifetime habit of eating anything I want. Intellectually, it’s easy. I know what I need to do: eat less, exercise more.

A proposal by Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) to zero-out nearly $2 million in annual funding for the Maine Public Broadcasting Network prompted hearings in the statehouse today. Citizens who testified before the Senate appropriations committee overwhelmingly opposed the measure. According to local news accounts, LePage’s proposal surprised even top Republican lawmakers when it landed last week. The governor is offering to restore public funding of gubernatorial campaigns, which he targeted in an earlier version of the two-year budget, by completely eliminating MPBN’s annual subsidy. The Times Record of Brunswick, which published an op-ed today slamming the governor’s trade-off, describes it as a “double-dare: Squawk too much about my MPBN cut and I’ll simply go back to Plan A and reinstate my proposed Clean Elections funding cut.

Programmers got a look at PBS’s new fall primetime architecture at the Public Television Programmers Association meeting taking place today (May 16) in Orlando, Fla., just before the PBS National Meeting. PBS’s John Wilson, s.v.p and chief programmer, and Shawn Halford, senior director of program scheduling, said the changes are taking place to better serve viewers looking for similar shows, build a larger potential membership base, create a stronger selling proposition for audience-focused underwriters and better leverage marketing and promotion. Schedule changes include transitioning Nature from Sundays to Wednesdays, moving Frontline later on Tuesdays after December pledge and shifting Independent Lens and P.O.V.

PBS’s budget for next year reflects a harsh reality: Revenues from member stations are flat for a third straight year, and scant other income opportunities lie ahead. The all-important annual program budget, as projected for fiscal year 2012, will remain at about $200 million, where it’s been stalled for a decade. For the first time in the past five years, there will be no new children’s series. The News and Public Affairs Initiative is on hold. PBS is retooling its primetime schedule to attract more viewers and underwriters and negotiating to push down program production costs per hour. “We are finding ourselves focused more and more on what we can do,” PBS President Paula Kerger said in an interview with Current.

PBS has postponed the rollout of an online news aggregation site called PBSnews.org that it had planned to start in January or February. ... Plans for the news site had grown out of the PBS News and Public Affairs Initiative and a report filed almost two years ago by Tom Bettag, a network news veteran ...

Jim Lehrer, who has reported the news of the day for more than 50 years, became part of it May 12 when he announced that he will step away from the weeknight anchor desk at PBS NewsHour in June. A big Washington Post story the next day, dominating the feature section, lauded him as “one of America’s most respected newsmen.” It estimated that come June 6, when Lehrer cuts back to once-weekly appearances, he will have anchored some 8,000 broadcasts “and a few zillion newsmaker interviews.” This week (May 19) Lehrer turns 77. “I feel good about this,” Lehrer told Current May 13.