Newsman Bill Moyers could be be returning to PBS, the New York Times is reporting. The Carnegie Corporation of New York’s board apparently approved a grant to Moyers’ production company of $2 million for a show titled Something Different With Bill Moyers — but then Moyers’ name was removed from the announcement on the Carnegie website. Moyers confirmed to the Times that his production company is in talks on a series. “But,” he said, the announcement “is premature because we are in conversations with other funders which take time to conclude. We have discussed various possibilities with PBS as one potential source of distribution, but have no idea about a possible airdate, if in fact we proceed.”

Pubcasters won 18 of the 39 George Foster Peabody Awards announced this morning by the University of Georgia. PBS led the field of 2010 Peabody winners with ten awards — two of which were presented to American Masters, the documentary series produced by New York’s WNET. Four Peabodys awarded to NPR honor international and investigative reporting, including a collaboration with Youth Radio and the Huffington Post. Three additional winners for pubradio were RadioLab, The Promised Land, and The Moth Radio Hour. Two docs produced by or in collaboration with local stations — “Lucia’s Letter” from WGCU-FM in Fort Myers, Fla.,

South Dakota Public Broadcasting will reduce local programming and educational services and lay off seven of 57 employees as a result of budget cuts exceeding $750,000, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Decisions are still being made, and details cannot be released until staff members are told about layoffs, SDPB Executive Director Julie Andersen said Wednesday (March 30). In the fiscal year beginning July 1, SDPB faces losses of more than $537,000 in state funds and $220,000 in other support, mostly money it has received from the Education Department to run overnight educational programs.

KCET is in negotiations to sell its Sunset Boulevard studios to the Church of Scientology, the Los Angeles Times is reporting. Real estate brokers tell the newspaper that the station plans to move to a smaller location, and officials have been touring potential sites. The historic 4.5 acre site has been assessed at $14.1 million. Both KCET and Scientology officials declined comment to the paper. KCET’s lot is at 4401 W. Sunset Blvd.; the Church of Scientology Los Angeles is four blocks away, at 4810. Meanwhile, LA Weekly’s Media blog quotes a KCET insider as saying that its top execs are “going to leave the station burning and destroyed and walk away with money falling out of their pockets … It’s a scandal … They only thing they’re not dismantling is their own salaries … this is really sad.”

A South Dakota Public Broadcasting video has gone viral with more than half a million views, thanks to a spectacular heave-ho, half-court basketball shot during a fifth-place playoff game between Pierre and Sturgis high schools last week. Yahoo! Sports proclaims that it deserves consideration for “basket of the year” honors.

Sandie Viquez Pedlow takes over as executive director of Latino Public Broadcasting on July 6, according to an announcement today (March 30). In February, Patricia Boero, who led the group for three years, announced she needed to return home to Uruguay this month. Pedlow has been director of station relations for PBS Education since 2004, leading the training of pubTV station staff in the promotion and marketing of PBS online and digital media products and services. She also worked at CPB for 10 years, as director of programming strategies; associate director of cultural, drama and arts programming; and senior program officer.

The debate over federal funding to public radio isn’t really about how the money is distributed, and how much local stations depend on it, as so many of public radio’s own reporters have recently explained, according to this unsigned editorial by the Economist. It’s a targeted partisan attack that capitalizes on conservatives’ long running campaign to discredit mainstream media.

How’d pubcasting fave Red Green come up with that name, anyway? “I was making fun of a guy who had a TV show in Canada, Red Fisher,” Green’s creator Steve Smith tells the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “Green seemed like the dumbest last name to go with Red. Now they tell me I’m a genius because every stoplight’s a promo.” Green is still selling out stops on his latest tour, promoting his book, How to Do Everything. And when he’s not touring, he’s tinkering. His most recent project: “I put in an outside electrical outlet,” he said. “It’s functional, it’s crooked and it’s on the side of the house my wife never walks by, so everybody’s happy.”

Limor Tomer, executive producer for music at New York Public Radio’s classical station WQXR, is leaving to head up the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Concerts & Lectures series, the Met announced Tuesday (March 29). In addition to her work at WQXR, Tomer also serves as adjunct curator for performing arts at the Whitney Museum. She takes up her new duties on May 1. During her time at the public radio station, she oversaw the transition to fully digital music broadcasting and the launch of Q2, an all-digital radio stream devoted to the music of living composers. She also served on the transition team during the acquisition of WQXR by WNYC (now operated jointly as New York Public Radio).

Robert MacNeil, co-founder of PBS NewsHour, is returning to the show to present Autism Today, a six-part series on the disorder that affects 1 in 110 children. MacNeil’s 6-year-old grandson, Nick, has been diagnosed with autism. “I’ve been a reporter on and off for 50 years, but I’ve never brought my family into a story — until Nick, because he moves me deeply,” MacNeil said in a statement today (March 29). MacNeil and producer Caren Zucker, who has a 16-year-old son with the disorder, introduce the series on April 18. In the first episode, MacNeil brings viewers to meet his daughter and grandson in Cambridge, Mass.,

OK, so your station has some cool videos online. Now what? Get ideas for using them to pull in more eyeballs during a National Center for Media Engagement webinar at 1 p.m. Eastern Wednesday (March 30). Your electronic hosts will be Kevin Dando, PBS’s head of digital and education communications and YouTube channel guru, and Greg Jarboe, president of SEO-PR, an expert in search engine optimization. Register online here.

NPR is suspending its search for a senior vice president for news until it hires a permanent c.e.o., according to an email obtained by The Hill newspaper Monday (March 28). In the memo, NPR interim chief exec Joyce Slocum told staff that the decision was made to stop the search for Ellen Weiss’s replacement after consulting with members of the search advisory committee. Weiss was forced to resign in January over her role in the firing of senior correspondent Juan Williams (Current, March 9). NPR President Vivian Schiller resigned after conservative activist James O’Keefe’s undercover video sting of network fundraiser Ron Schiller (Current, March 21).

Frontline today (March 29) provided NPR’s Morning Edition portions of its reporting on the private life of Army Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the soldier who stands accused of leaking the largest cache of classified documents in U.S. history to the WikiLeaks website. It’s part of the newsmag’s ongoing collaborative efforts to provide breaking news to a wider audience through pubmedia partners. Portions of Frontline correspondent Martin Smith’s exclusive interview with Manning’s father that ran on PBS NewsHour on March 10 sparked national headlines, when the elder Manning alleged his son was being mistreated in detention. “That strategic public media partnership allowed both Frontline and PBS NewsHour to benefit from the immediate release of breaking news,” Frontline senior series producer Raney Aronson-Rath told Current in a statement.

PBS today (March 28) announced that documentarians Ken Burns and Lynn Novick will produce and direct a 10- to 12-hour series about the Vietnam War, to be aired on PBS in 2016. Burns said the series “will shed light both on the history of the war, and on our inability to find common ground about it.” The project will also include a website, a  multi-platform educational initiative, community engagement grants for station outreach and a companion book to be published by Alfred A. Knopf. In an interview with Current in October 2009, when Burns was just beginning research on the project, he termed it “a major, major history” of the conflict in Southeast Asia.

New South Carolina ETV President Linda O’Bryon (formerly of KQED and Nightly Business Report) tells the Anderson Independent Mail that she’s simultaneously working to develop ETV’s revenue base and content initiatives as well as educate the state’s entirely new public broadcasting commission on the value of the network. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley recently announced the replacement of every member of the ETV Commission. The move came after her State of the State speech, during which she also urged lawmakers to cut all funding to the network, about $9.6 million. The paper notes that the network has earned $10 million for the state from a 30-year, $142 million spectrum lease to two national companies inked in 2009.