“Hope for Haiti Now,” an MTV-produced global telethon for earthquake victims on the island, will run on many cable and broadcast channels including PBS on Friday. PBS will provide the show on hard feed HD01 from 8 to 10 p.m. Eastern, and HD02 from 8 to 10 p.m. Pacific. The telethon will be hosted by actor George Clooney in Los Angeles, musician Wyclef Jean in New York and CNN’s Anderson Cooper in Haiti, with other performances and appearances to be announced. Donations will go to Oxfam America, Partners in Health, Red Cross, UNICEF and Wyclef’s Yele Haiti Foundation. PBS’s primetime lineup will shift: Washington Week and Now on PBS will feed at times to be announced, Bill Moyers Journal will be pre-fed at another time, according to PBS.

Jane Austen’s Emma gets a thoroughly modern treatment from Masterpiece this Sunday: A Twitter party. During the premiere of episode one, 9-11 p.m. Eastern, Austen experts and insiders from PBS and Masterpiece will be tweeting along with fans. Participants have a chance to win a prize, too. Use hashtag #emma_pbs. The three episodes of Emma run through Feb. 7. UPDATE: And the prize will be . . . a Jane Austen action figure!

A study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation reveals that for the first time, kids ages 8 to 18 spent less time watching regularly scheduled TV. That daily total is three hours, 51 minutes, a 25-minute drop from 2004. Now they spend an average of seven hours, 38 minutes per day on all entertainment media. But all those new ways to watch TV — such as the Internet, cell phones and iPods — actually increased total daily TV viewing to four and a half hours per day, including 24 minutes of online viewing, 16 minutes on iPods and other MP3 players, and 15 minutes on cell phones.

A three-day course to help producers develop and sell preschool TV shows is coming up Feb. 13-15 in New York City. Little Airplane Productions, headed by former Sesame Street writer Josh Selig, is hosting its Little Airplane Academy that covers everything from pitching and designing a show to directing and production. Appearing will be Andrew Beecham, senior VP of programming for PBS Kids Sprout, and an exec from Nickelodeon. For more information contact Melinda Richards at 212-965-8999.

WAMC/Northeast Public Radio will open its phone banks at 8 p.m. Friday during a James Taylor benefit concert for Haiti in Great Barrington, Mass. The Albany, N.Y., station will simulcast the concert, “Help for Haiti: An Intimate Evening with James Taylor.” All contributions will go to Partners in Health, a group on the island providing medical care to victims. “We need to do everything we can to help the country recover after this tragic earthquake,” Taylor said in a station statement. “I’m grateful to do my part and hope my neighbors here in the Berkshires will join me and be as generous as possible.”

U.S. public TV’s 17 entries in the annual INPUT international public television screening showcase have been selected, including five Independent Lens and three P.O.V. docs, plus programs from Masterpiece, American Experience, Frontline and History Detectives, according to Amy Shumaker of the national secretariat at South Carolina ETV. Here’s the list. The global selection of programs to be screened at the festival in May will be selected next month from among national entries. INPUT 2010 will be held May 8-12 in Budapest, Hungary. INPUT rules require that entries be split equally among three categories—documentary, drama and other. Thirteen of the 17 entries were PBS-distributed shows.

The Federal Communications Commission will assist Haiti to provide a “continuity of service” for communications in the aftermath of the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, Broadcasting & Cable reports. Chair Julius Genachowski made the announcement after hearing from Conatel, the Haitian communications agency, that its headquarters had been destroyed and several staffers killed or injured. Genachowski also said U.S. communications companies are looking to help out as well. “Many companies have made significant offers of help, and urgent efforts are under way to coordinate and deliver assistance,” he added. Meanwhile, pubstations are also stepping up. Among projects: KQED in San Francisco has a list of links to aid agencies, as does Oregon Public Broadcasting.

San Francisco’s KALW-FM launched a new website today that combines local news, arts and culture coverage and community engagement. KALWNews.org features reporting from the station’s drive-time newsmagazine Crosscurrents and provides links to reporting by other local news organizations. It also invites users to share their stories, report on their communities and submit comments or commentaries. One of the five reporting beats carved out by the KALW newsroom–criminal justice coverage–will expand under NPR’s Argo Project, a national-local pilot testing station-based approaches to online news coverage, according to Holly Kernan, news director. KALWNews.org was developed in collaboration with Margaret Rosas of Quiddities, the Santa Cruz-based company that received a Knight Foundation grant to develop an open source web publishing system for public radio stations.

The long-running weekly pubaffairs series Think Tank With Ben Wattenberg is ceasing production at the end of the month, according to a press release. “It is no secret that it is very hard to raise money for any kind of media underwriting or advertising now, public or private,” Wattenberg said in the statement. “But I hope that when the economy turns around, which I believe has already begun, we will be back not only with our weekly public television program, but with some exciting specials which are already in development.” Over the past 15 years guests have included legal scholar Robert Bork, economists Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith former ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and congressman Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Public radio needs to completely re-engineer itself for the networked environment, writes Hearts of Space producer and host Stephen Hill, in a critique of public radio’s Grow the Audience project final report. The recommendations “are mostly bland reiterations of the core values of the public media catechism . . . , cautiously extending a toe outside the box while continuing to view the world from inside it,” he writes. “This approach cannot work, because innovation is not needed at the level of the public radio value system. Nor will modest, incremental online innovations be sufficient. What is needed is a new set of incentives and structural relationships between the major elements of the system and the audience that will enable and fuel an expanded set of digital services with their own logical business models” [Emphasis in original].

David Stewart, one of CPB’s original employees and later a writer and Current contributing editor, sent this letter after the death of Robben Fleming, a former president of CPB. To the editors: I was very sad to learn of Robben Fleming’s death in the Feb. 28, 2010, issue of Current newspaper. He served as CPB’s president from 1979 to 1981 — sadly, one of the shortest tenures for, in my view, one of the best presidents in the organization’s history. Predictably, his obituary described a number of important decisions that provided CPB with considerable prestige, as well as new audiences for public television.

“Real Stories, Real Impact” is the subject of this year’s Making Your Media Matter confab sponsored by the Center for Social Media at American University. The meeting, In Washington on Feb. 11 and 12, will examine “methods for assessing various elements that contribute to high-impact public media projects,” according to the center. Register online.

Tim Graham, a blogger with the conservative site Newsbusters, was upset during a recent drive-through visit to Chick-fil-A. Included in his daughter’s kid’s meal was a Between the Lions CD, with logos of WGBH and Mississippi Public Broadcasting. “This underlines how blurry the line is between public broadcasting and private-sector merchandising,” he writes on the site that calls itself “the leader in documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias.” The “Hypocrisy!” in the headline refers to PBS President Paula Kerger’s comments at the recent winter press tour that children’s programming on commercial stations is built mainly around opportunities to sell toys to kids.

Frontline has delayed its Dancing Boys of Afghanistan documentary due to concerns over the safety of a boy in the film, Broadcasting & Cable reports. It’s about the custom of “Bacha Bareesh,” in which boys are sold to men who keep them as concubines. In the film, an Afghan journalist infiltrated one of the rings and spoke with several boys and their “masters.” It was schedule for Jan. 19; a repeat of A Death in Tehran will air instead.

The deal to start up a local nonprofit news organization in San Francisco (Current, Oct. 13, 2009) has fallen apart, according a BNET blog report quoting anonymous sources. KQED, the public radio and TV outlet that was to partner with the journalism school of the University of California in Berkeley to launch the organization with backing from philanthropist Warren Hellman, is beset by internal turmoil, reports David Weir, a journalist/blogger and former KQED exec. “Sources have told me that the various parties to the negotiations have not been able to come up with a consensus over how to run the new news organization, and as of today, financier Hellman’s patience has apparently run out.”