Due to the impending arrival of yet another massive winter storm, the White House has moved a concert of civil rights music up one night, reports the Washington Post. “In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement” will now take place tonight in the East Room tonight instead of tomorrow evening. Performers scheduled to appear include Joan Baez, Natalie Cole, Bob Dylan, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, John Mellencamp and Smokey Robinson. PBS will carry the program Thursday night, or viewers can watch live streaming video here. The federal government, schools and businesses remained closed today after the first storm hit last weekend with up to 30 inches of snow.

Steven Waldman, senior advisor to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, says saving journalim “is not our job.” However, “we are looking at it in terms of preserving certain functions, in which I do include accountability journalism.” Waldman is exploring possibilities for a report to the commission on the future of news in an uncertain time, and sat down for a Q&A with Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton.

Sesame Street gets a new neighbor soon: Carrie Underworm, who looks and sounds very much like country superstar Carrie Underwood. She’ll debut Thursday. Get a sneak peek here.

Longtime public radio journalist Gregory Shanley, 49, a statewide talk host on Iowa Public Radio, died Jan. 26 [2010] in Iowa City.

If any news subject lends itself to coverage by multistation collaborations, it’s the environment of places like the Ohio River Valley, a region of 25 million people who share the river’s assets and liabilities. Louisville Public Media’s WFPL is leading plans to build a pubradio reporting consortium for the region, starting with a public conference this month.

APTS Capitol Hill Day has been canceled for now. Spokesperson Stacey Karp said that due to the blizzard, there’s a good chance that local businesses as well as Congress will be “severely disrupted for several days.” Station reps were scheduled to meet tomorrow and Monday, and visit members of Congress on Tuesday. APTS is considering rescheduling or using alternatives such as webinars or video conferences.

The White House yesterday nominated Dick Lobo, president and chief executive of Tampa PBS station WEDU-Ch. 3, to head the International Broadcasting Bureau. The federal bureau runs Voice of America and two other broadcasts aimed at Cuba, Radio and TV Marti. Lobo, 73, still must be confirmed by the Senate. Lobo recently retired after seven years heading the Tampa station and 23 in commercial TV. He had worked in overseas broadcasting earlier; President Clinton appointed him head of USIA’s Office of Cuba Broadcasting in 1994. Lobo’s wife, Caren, supervised Florida fundraising for Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election.

Text donations for disaster relief in Haiti topped $35 million earlier this week, and donors’ sudden willingness to use mobile phones for charitable contributions makes text-giving look like a promising way for pubcasting stations to raise money. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. WXPN in Philadelphia and KQED in San Francisco began experimenting with text-giving programs last year and had modest results. ‘XPN asked for text donations during its XPoNential Music Festival last July. “We didn’t make a lot of money, but we learned a ton about how to make it work,” said Melanie Coulson, a Development Exchange Inc.

The FCC announced today it is giving Native American tribes a priority (PDF) for broadcast radio licenses in their communities. The FCC statement notes that while more than a million Native Americans and Alaska Natives live on some 55 million acres of tribal lands nationwide, only 41 radio stations are currently licensed to native tribes. The new Tribal Priority gives license precedence to federally recognized Native American Tribes and Alaska Native Villages, or companies controlled by tribes on their land. Here’s the order (PDF). In a related statement (PDF), Commissioner Michael Copps explained that the current allocation priorities, intended to provide fair distribution of radio service across America, have not worked for tribal lands.

The Way We Get By, an indie doc produced in association with WGBH Lab, has won best documentary in AARP Magazine’s annual Movies for Grownups Awards. The honors recognize outstanding productions for the 50-plus audience. The film was made through the Independent Television Service’s LINCS (Linking Independents and Co-Producing Stations) initiative.

Does your station want to get in on broadband stimulus funding? The National Center for Media Engagement is hosting a webinar, the first in a series, at 2 p.m. Thursday. Joanne Hovis, president of Columbia Telecommunications Corp. and an authority on community broadband, will provide technical and strategic advice to pubcasting stations. This is the first in a series of webinars from NCME, CPB and the APTS Grant Center. Sign up at the NCME website. The next one is 2 p.m. Feb. 11.

The latest public radio offering in Apple’s iTunes App store is from This American Life. For $2.99, iPhone users gain access to the 15-year archive of This American Life radio programs; episodes of the Showtime television series can be downloaded for an additional fee. Public Radio Exchange developed the app in collaboration with producers of TAL and Chicago Public Radio. “There is no doubt: it is a high-end app,” says Jake Shapiro, PRX executive director. “A lot of ingenuity went into it, and back-and-forth about what it needs to be. It needed a lot of development time to make sure it was high-performing.”

President Barack Obama’s new budget proposal includes extending the FCC’s authority to auction spectrum “indefinitely,” according to Broadcasting & Cable. That move would free up space for wireless broadband carriers. The budget is looking for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the FCC to collaborate over 10 years “to make available significant spectrum suitable for both mobile and fixed wireless broadband use.” Many broadcasters say spectrum is not available, because it’s already being used for HDTV and muliticasting and mobile DTV. The FCC is undertaking a spectrum inventory this year, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps told the CPB Board of Directors at a meeting last week.

Two documentaries airing on POV this year are among Academy Award nominees announced this morning. “Food, Inc.,” scheduled for April 21, and the ITVS co-production of “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” also running in 2010, were both nominated for the Best Documentary Feature award. The Oscars for outstanding film achievements of 2009 will be presented at 8 p.m. Eastern on March 7 from the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. There’s a full list of nominees on the Academy’s website.

At least three public broadcasting requests for broadband stimulus funding have been turned down. The site simulatingbroadband.com, which tracks news about the effort, reports that the federal agency overseeing the grants, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), is mailing out around 1,400 rejection letters and updating its online database to reflect the nonfunded applications. Included in the rejections: Mississippi Public Broadcasting, which wanted $2.2 million for a public computer center for children and childcare providers; Florida Public Broadcasting Service, which requested $22.8 million for a HELPS (Health, Education, Local, Public Safety) Network; and PBS, asking for $8.7 million for an eight-station local and national partnership (California, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Virginia) to combine content and outreach programs to stimulate demand for educational broadband content.