Here are further details on Order in the Court 2.0, the interesting Knight News Challenge Grant winner that seeks to establish best practices for reporting on courts via digital technology. John Davidow, executive editor of new media at Boston’s WBUR, is heading up the project. He writes on the Idea Lab blog that it is the first nationally funded initiative to change how courts deal with electronic journalism since video and audio recording standards were established in the 1970s.

Hearing about the McLaughlin Group makes PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler feel like “that airline cabin attendant who grabbed a beer and hit the escape chute,” he writes in this week’s Mailbag. He’s written about the show in many previous columns and has received “literally thousands” of emails, mostly complaints, about the program. In this recent batch, one viewer writes about giving up and turning the show off after two panelists on a recent segment “spouted spiels of foundationless propaganda like they had suddenly become right wing nut jobs.” Another called panelists “racists.” Compounding the problem is that some viewers consider it a PBS show, although it is not branded as such on the screen.

When listeners can find NPR programming on the Internet and via so many different mobile devices, what does the future portend for NPR member stations? The question has been increasingly on the minds of station execs this year as NPR rolled out its new iPad and iPhone apps; yesterday Vermont Public Radio’s Jane Lindholm put the question, which came from a listener, to NPR President Vivian Schiller. “No matter what we do, the audience is going to find media in the way that best suits their needs,” Schiller said during an Aug. 12 appearance on Vermont Edition. To provide NPR content exclusively for radio broadcast would be a mistake, the NPR chief added.

Susie Gharib, co-anchor of Nightly Business Report on PBS, reveals in an interview that “I don’t have Facebook, and I don’t tweet.” This comes two days after PBS talker Tavis Smiley said he doesn’t use a mobile phone. Discuss.

Several community broadcasting leaders are signatories to a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski protesting the recent Google-Verizon policy proposal that they say undermines the open nature of the Internet, a concept known as net neutrality. The signers include Maxie Jackson, president, National Federation of Community Broadcasters; Alex Nogales, president, National Hispanic Media Coalition; Loris Taylor, Executive Director, Native Public Media; and Pete Tridish of the low-power advocacy group the Prometheus Radio Project. The letter urges the chairman to reclassify Internet communications as a Title II Telecommunications Service, putting the FCC directly over broadband communications networks. Genachowski has said in the past that approach has “serious drawbacks,” such as extensive regulations for service providers.

PBS and WGBH’s Frontline are among defendants in a lawsuit filed this week (Aug. 10) in Cook County (Chicago) Court that contends a film crew “barged into a private funeral ceremony” on March 13, according to Courthouse News Service. The daughter and grandson of of the late Annie Gibson Bacon say a crew accompanied by the anti-violence group CeaseFire, another defendant in the suit, showed up at Bacon’s funeral because her son, Jeff Fort, was alleged to be the leader of a street gang. In its coverage of the suit, the Chicago Tribune refers to Fort as a “notorious Chicago gang leader.”

Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me host Peter Sagal is recovering from injuries he received when a car struck him Wednesday (Aug. 11) on his bicycle at an intersection in suburban Chicago, the Chicago Tribune reports. Sagal was hospitalized with minor injuries. He described the aftermath of the accident in a blog post: “I tried to sit up and an invisible angry dwarf with a knife stabbed me in the back. So I enjoyed a relaxing scream and lay back down, carefully, and they put me on the backboard with the neck brace and put me in the ambulance and I stared at a series of changing ceilings until I got the emergency room at a nearby hospital.”

Several public broadcasting system leaders are participating in next week’s (Aug. 15-18) 2010 FOCAS (Forum on Communications and Society) at the Aspen Institute. Meeting to discuss “News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities,” will be government officials, media and business executives, civic leaders and user representatives. Pubcasters include CPB President Pat Harrison, PBS President Paula Kerger, American Public Media President Bill Kling, Native Public Media Executive Director Loris Ann Taylor and NPR President Vivian Schiller. Click here to register as an observer — for $1,000.

“The audience brings the show. . . . I am the vessel,” says public radio host and humorist Michael Feldman in this local TV news feature on the 25th anniversary celebration of Whad’ya Know?, the weekly comedy and quiz show from Wisconsin Public Radio. “They fill me–half-full or half-empty–that’s hard to say,” he quips with typical self-deprecation. In the run-up to tomorrow night’s Silver Jubilee Celebration at Madison’s Wisconsin Union Theater, Feldman has been getting lots of media coverage. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports colorful anecdotes about its native pubradio star’s early career–including a tug-of-war with a female co-host for control over the microphone.

Virginia’s WHRO-TV/WHRV-FM and Old Dominion University are partnering on civic engagement opportunities, the university announced today (Aug. 12). Cathy Lewis, host of HearSay with Cathy Lewis on 89.5 WHRV-FM, will work with the university’s new Office for Community Engagement on projects such as a series of symposia where business, community, and government leaders and faculty experts and researchers identify challenges to the region and collaborate on potential solutions. “That initiative will utilize WHRO’s broadcasting and video streaming capabilities to further the discussion and engage a broader audience,” the university said in a statement. The station is licensed to a group of 18 local school systems and offers services to the schools including professional development for teachers.

A just-released report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project reveals that 53 percent of Americans don’t think spreading broadband availability should high on the federal priority list, and 26 percent said the government shouldn’t even be doing such work. Broadband adoption has also slowed, after several years of growth. Some 66 percent of American adults currently use high-speed Internet at home, compared with 63 percent in 2009. The one anomaly across demographic groups was African Americans users. Broadband adoption in that group is at 56 percent, up from 46 percent in 2009. The survey was conducted between April 29 and May 30 from a sample of 2,252 adults ages 18 and older, including 744 surveyed on cell phones.

The guest list for the 41st season of Sesame Street premiering Sept. 27, reads like a who’s who of Hollywood hipness. Just a few of the actors: Jude Law, Amy Poehler, Jennifer Garner, Kyra Sedgwick, Collin Farrell, Wanda Sykes and Terrence Howard. But wait, there’s more, such as music superstars Katy Perry, Usher, will.i.am and NFL players Reggie Bush and LaDainian Tomlinson. And fans of the gory/sexy HBO series True Blood, stay tuned for its Sesame parody, “True Mud.”

Tavis Smiley does not own a cell phone.

The Anchorage Daily News has confirmed that former Republican Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, 86, a longtime public broadcasting champion, died in a plane crash in southern Alaska Monday night (Aug. 9). Stevens served in Congress from Dec. 24, 1968, to Jan. 3, 2009. He was chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee from 1997 to 2005. He also chaired the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in 2005 and ’06. The Washington Post’s obituary called him “one of the most powerful congressmen of his generation.” Stevens received the 2002 Ralph Lowell Award from CPB, recognizing outstanding individual contributions to public television.

Community radio station KABF (88.3 FM) in Little Rock, Ark., currently under audit by CPB, “may be broke in a matter of weeks. KABF could cease to exist as we know it,” board member Jay Jensen told station volunteers in a recent email, according to the Arkansas Times on Aug. 5. KABF began in 1984 as an affiliate ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the controversial nonprofit remains a presence on the station’s board. An emergency KABF board meeting was convened last week to create a community advisory board for the station, which is a requirement for CPB support.