The Independent Television Service (ITVS) reports that seven of its productions have been chosen as official selections for the 23rd International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Nov. 17-29, the world’s largest doc showcase. Many ITVS films received critical acclaim at recent IDFA’s, including last year’s best feature length film winner, Last Train Home, and The Most Dangerous Man in America, with its special jury award to a film not in competition. Here’s a list of ITVS’s 2010 IDFA films at the Beyond the Box blog.

Planet Forward, a multimedia environmental innovation project at George Washington University, will be collaborating with Nightly Business Report to develop environmental programming, NBR has announced.   Viewers will submit ideas to tackle energy and climate challenges through PlanetForward.org, and the partners will jointly produce stories around the most interesting. The series premiered Oct. 21 with Planet Forward host Frank Sesno appearing. The first episode looked at the new 100 percent electric Nissan Leaf.

NPR President Vivian Schiller dispatched this apology Sunday evening, Oct. 24 [2010], six days after the network set off a pre-election political firestorm with its firing of news analyst Juan Williams. She stands by the decision but not the way it was handled. Dear Program Colleagues, I want to apologize for not doing a better job of handling the termination of our relationship with news analyst Juan Williams. While we stand firmly behind that decision, I regret that we did not take the time to prepare our program partners and provide you with the tools to cope with the fallout from this episode.

Ken Tomlinson, the former CPB chair who was forced off the board after campaigning secretly and successfully to get two weekly political programs of his liking onto PBS, wrote in the Washington Examiner Friday (Oct. 22) that the public broadcasting he wanted can never be achieved: “I had long believed that the many tentacles of public broadcasting should be reformed — not defunded. I now realize I was wrong. Federal funding for NPR should be eliminated — as should handouts to CPB and PBS.” NPR’s firing of Juan Williams was “outrageous, but these people did the nation a favor,” he wrote.

NPR fired news analyst Juan Williams late yesterday over comments he made about Muslims during an Oct. 18 appearance on Fox News. Williams, a news pundit and commentator who had contracts with both networks, was reacting to remarks by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly when he said: “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried.

... This is our deepest embarrassment as public broadcasters. I have heard the arguments, and I understand the imperatives, but to think that, hucksters aside, we spend more of our energy and on-air promotional time, pushing programs that have nothing to do with our mission, is shameful....

The Vegas PBS Educational Technology Campus has been awarded the Outstanding Building of the Year (TOBY) Award in the Earth category by the Building Owners and Managers Association, the station announced today (Oct. 20). The TOBY recognizes excellence in building management and acknowledges the Educational Technology Campus’ green operations and maintenance practices. The Vegas PBS Educational Technology Campus is the first television building in the United States to receive LEED Gold Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (Current, Jan. 8, 2010).

The new Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies will be recorded at WTTW, “returning to the roots of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s original Sneak Previews program,” the station announced today (Oct. 19). Production is expected to begin in January 2011 for the 26-episode season, which premieres Jan. 21. Series co-exec producers are Chaz and Roger Ebert. Former WBBM Assistant News Director Don Dupree returns to direct, after 15 years as a producer and director starting with Siskel & Ebert at the Movies.

Don’t lose this number — 712-432-6610 — because that’s yet another way to get PBS NewsHour. The show announced today (Oct. 19) that the audio is now available anytime via mobile or land line. AudioNow lets listeners hear the daily one-hour PBS NewsHour broadcast without downloads or data services.

Here’s a quirky and hilarious pledge idea. By now you may be among the millions of fans of Lolcats, the silly “kittehs” captured in photographs, craving “cheezburgers” and speaking their own abbreviated language. You see this coming, right? Lolcats + pledge = Pledgecats. WYPR in Baltimore and Cheezburger Network have come up with kittehs asking for member support. As in, “You hasn’t pledged? Srsly?”

The November issue of Extra! from FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Media) takes on public broadcasting. There are stories on how the system “is stacked against fulfilling PBS’s mandate,” and “Charlie Rose’s Elite-Meet-and-Greet.” Also, it’s the third time since 1995 it’s looked at sources on NewHour by gender, nationality, ethnicity, occupation and partisan affiliation; it also examined story choice. This time there’s also a look at the new Need to Know  from the program’s debut on May 7 through July 30. In general, FAIR cites a lack of diversity in both shows. Here are FAIR’s NewsHour findings from 2006.

Two high-profile public media analysts are enthusiastically in KCET’s corner after its decision to depart PBS membership. “KCET now has the chance to redefine what it means to be a local broadcast station in a digitally networked world,” they write in the Los Angeles Daily News today (Oct. 19). They continue: “The old hub-and-spoke, national-to-local distribution model is outdated. Digital networks create new possibilities for production and content sharing from local-to-national and even local-to-local. Wildly diverse communities also create new needs that a national program service can’t hope to meet, especially in markets like L.A.’s, which trends more multiethnic and younger.” 

There’s been no shortage of news coverage of KCET splitting from PBS as of Jan. 1. And now, a cartoon from L.A. Observed.

The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs is joining the Forum Network, a PBS and NPR free video lecture service. The Council’s page will include offerings such as scholar Michael Mandelbaum on his book, The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era; a panel discussion, “U.S. Military: Leading by Example,” in which reps from the Navy, Marines, and Army Corps of Engineers illustrate how the U.S. military is developing renewable energy sources; and journalist Eliza Griswold talking about her book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam.

What public broadcasting can do to plan for its own future and for federal policies that serve the public interest In the first part of this commentary in Current Oct. 4 [2010], Wick Rowland, an early PBS planner and now a station leader in Colorado, said that public broadcasting’s failure to put time and money into formal research and planning has left it “adrift, mute and helpless” on the periphery of federal policymaking about media and spectrum. Pubcasting was slow to respond to the journalism crisis, aloof from the Obama administration’s big commitment to give the public universal access to broadband Internet service.In