P.O.V.’s blog has an interesting analysis of the viral phenomenon of KONY 2012, the 30-minute film on Ugandan guerrilla group leader Joseph Kony that’s been viewed more than 80 million times since it was posted on YouTube and Vimeo on March 5, written by guest blogger Heather McIntosh of Documentary Site. Invisible Children, the advocacy organization that produced the film, “labels KONY 2012 a documentary, and it is one that falls squarely into the propaganda/persuasion traditions developed in the work of Frank Capra, Leni Riefenstahl, and Pare Lorentz,” McIntosh writes. “But KONY 2012 pushes the boundaries of these traditions.

NBC turned down Downton Abbey, which is produced by NBCUniversal’s Carnival Films in London, “believing that American audiences wouldn’t have the appetite for a very British historical drama set in a country manor in Edwardian England,” reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. An NBC official told the paper that the decision was made under previous NBC leadership, and it’s pleased that sister company NBCUniversal found success with the show, which was picked up by Masterpiece on PBS. But that exec acknowledged that even the current NBC brass could have overlooked Downton’s potential. “The official said it was hard to imagine any network — including PBS — thinking Downton would become a hit,” the paper said.

The Michael Eric Dyson Show will go off the public radio airwaves at the end of the month, and its host has already left the program, reports the Journal-isms blog. “There’s something else potentially in the works, but the show as it exists now is about to end,” Carla Wills, senior producer, told the blog. “The contract was over. We didn’t do another round of funding.” Wills said Dyson was increasing his appearances on MSNBC’s Martin Bashir Show as well as continuing his speaking engagements and teaching at Georgetown University. Guest hosts will fill in for the final shows. LaFontaine Oliver, Dyson’s producer and g.m.

A media-oversight nonprofit in Seattle will hold a hearing later this month to consider an antiabortion group’s allegation that KUOW-FM, the city’s all-news pubradio outlet, aired an inaccurate report about the group last year and fell short of correcting its missteps. The complaint by the Vitae Foundation centers on an April 2011 story by reporter Meghan Walker about the foundation’s billboard advertising campaign for a website, YourOptions.com, that discusses choices available to women with unplanned pregnancies. The story began with a Planned Parenthood representative discussing the YourOptions website but did not include comment from anyone with Vitae. Deborah Stokes, Vitae’s c.o.o.,

A pre-execution interview show on death row in China, set to air as a documentary on the BBC next week and available via PBS International, has abruptly been canceled by the Chinese producer, ABC News is reporting. Legal TV, the station in Henan province that produced and broadcast the show for the last five years, confirmed to ABC News it has been canceled, effective immediately, due to “internal problems.” The program has a viewership of some 40 million.

CPB and PBS are collaborating on free educational apps that will be available at Head Start centers, member stations and other organizations in underserved communities, the two announced Thursday (March 8). The outreach is part of Ready to Learn, with funding from the U.S. Department of Education. Recent research shows that access to computers, smartphones and tablets is much less prevalent in low-income households, which limits children’s exposure to educational applications, the two said in the announcement. This program will work to increase access to educational mobile content for children from low-income families at community organizations equipped with mobile and tablet devices.

Writing on his blog, public radio consultant John Sutton argues that the inability of some stations to support themselves can be blamed on national organizations more concerned about their own priorities than those of stations. “NPR’s primary goal these days is to further grow its direct-to-listener offerings and audience,” he writes. “CPB is now primarily funding projects that will help it get funded again. Neither organization is doing much to help stations become more self-sufficient in the open marketplace. That’s what they have to want in order to help stations.” Sutton’s post was inspired by our coverage of the Public Media Futures Forum, held last month in Washington, D.C.

This is just a test…

Before his death on March 1, conservative online publisher Andrew Breitbart hinted that he had video of a 1990 speech given by then-Harvard student Barack Obama that Breitbart said was evidence of President Obama’s longtime radical political beliefs. It was posted on his site Breitbart.com Wednesday (March 7) as an “exclusive.” But it turns out the footage was shot by Boston’s WGBH and has been on the Frontline website since 2008. Frontline provides details in a web post, along with unedited footage.

Public Media Accelerator, the incubator launched in December with a $2.5 million grant from the Knight Foundation, will be led by a former Frontline producer who left the field to immerse himself in the technology start-up culture of Silicon Valley.Corey Ford earned production credits on 17 Frontline films before earning his M.B.A. at Stanford University. His interest in multidisciplinary approaches to technology innovation led him to take a fellowship at Stanford’s Institute of Design, and from there he was recruited to direct the runway for Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s venture capital fund, Innovation Endeavors. Ford is now bringing that experience back to public media as director of Public Radio Exchange’s latest initiative to spur innovation, the Public Media Accelerator (PMX).

NewsWorks, WHYY’s collaborative website covering Philadelphia-area news, has hired Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Tony Auth, formerly of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Chris Satullo, WHYY’s v.p. for news and civic engagement announced Wednesday (March 7) that starting in April, Auth will be “digital artist in residence” for NewsWorks and WHYY. Auth’s national political cartoons will not be published on NewsWorks but will continue to be available through syndication. Auth’s residency will be funded in part through a grant from the Thomas Skelton Harrison Foundation.

PBS is launching on March 14 a new series on YouTube, Idea Channel, which it calls an “irreverent, personality-driven” project that “examines the unique places where art, culture, technology and the Internet intersect.” Hosting will be Mike Rugnetta, a composer, programmer and performer who is part of  MemeFactory, a three-man performance group exploring Internet culture. Off Book, another PBS web-only series focusing on experimental and nontraditional forms of artistic expression, began its second season Wednesday (March 7). Off Book launched in fall 2011 as part of the PBS Arts initiative and over the course of 13 episodes generated more than a half million views on YouTube, PBS said.

A unique new 30-second promo for 89.7 WGBH shows a radio tuned to the Boston station sucked out of a pickup truck by aliens, a la “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Watch it online here. The spot was the most complex ever produced by WGBH, its creators say, and involved driving a truck into the studio (above) and extensive use of computer-generated imagery in post-production to create the homage to the Steven Spielberg 1977 classic. It’s currently airing on WGBH 2 and WGBH 44 and the station is negotiating a cable media buy for the New England region to begin at the end of March.

WSIE-FM, broadcasting from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is back “from its deathbed,” reports the Riverfront Times in St. Louis. The city’s only jazz station endured the loss of CPB funding in 2006, the death of a longtime broadcasting veteran, layoffs of all local hosts and a shift to totally syndicated content. However, “in the past year,” the paper says, “they have restored local music programming, added online streaming and held the station’s first on-air fundraising drive in more than 20 years.”

Joaquin Alvarado, senior vice president for digital innovation for American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio since January 2010, has been laid off, along with four members of the software development team he supervised. MinnPost reports that the move comes as APM and MPR “grapple with an unspecified end-of-budget-year deficit.” Spokesman Bill Gray told MinnPost that the shift will consolidate software jobs in St. Paul among existing staff, “taking advantage of existing technology” instead of custom development. As part of the changes, Mike Reszler was promoted to v.p. for digital media; he joined MPR in November 2007 as managing editor for online news and is a veteran journalist with experience at Knight Ridder and MediaNewsGroup.