Robben Wright Fleming, former president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, died Jan. 11 at age 93 in Ann Arbor, Mich., reports numerous media outlets including the Capital Times of Madison, Wisc. During his CPB tenure from 1979 to ’81, he secured the original Annenberg Project funding vital to the growth and stability of CPB and its programs, the newspaper notes. He also was president of the University of Michigan during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, when student protests of the Vietnam War shook the campus.

Really. Check out the Austin, Texas, station’s blog for the wacky video. Guess what song accompanies it?

The National Black Programming Consortium is hosting a webinar on its Public Media Corps initiative at 2 p.m. tomorrow. The social media project hopes to expand the reach and relevance of public media to underserved groups, a statement says. Speaking at the webinar will be Jacquie Jones, executive director of the consortium; Kay Shaw, director of the corps; and Nonso Christian Ugbode, the consortium’s digital media director. (Ugbode recently wrote a column for Current on the project.) They’ll detail the goals of the national initiative, its use of digital tools and its local residency program. Register online for the event.

The Sundance Film Festival today announced that Jeffrey Brown, a senior correspondent with PBS NewsHour, is on the 2010 jury. Brown will help judge the World Cinema Documentary category. His specialty on NewsHour is reporting on on culture, arts and the media, and created Art Beat, the show’s culture blog. The festival runs Jan. 21-31, in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah. Awards will be announced Jan. 30 at ceremonies hosted by actor David Hyde Pierce.

In anticipation of its opening night showcase at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, NPR Music is offering an advance stream of the next release by Spoon, the band headlining the March 17 event. Transference, the third album by the Austin-based band, can be heard in its entirety, for free, through Jan. 18. Additional bands are to be added to the bill for NPR Music’s Stubbs showcase, which will be produced as a live broadcast and webcast here. Spoon’s set will kick off the band’s U.S. tour supporting the new album. More details here.

CPB is pumping more funding into its ongoing pubradio Leadership for Philanthropy effort, it announced today. The project, managed by Development Exchange (DEI), has trained 20 station general managers and boards to connect more with communities and work to increase gifts. The $1.5 million infusion will help 10 stations to continue work, and 30 more to get in on the next phase. “By the end of its first year, the participants raised over $1.4 million despite challenges presented by a failing economy,” CPB noted in the announcement.

Alaska’s three largest pubcasting stations are moving toward a formal partnership. General managers from dual-licensees KUAC in Fairbanks, KTOO in Juneau and Alaska Public Telecommunications in Anchorage are meeting today to brainstorm ways to share administrative costs and content production, reports the Fairbanks Daily News Miner. Those talks began last summer but have been “dormant for several months,” the paper says. “We’re still talking about whether this makes sense and how it would work,” KUAC general manager Keith Martin told the publication. A plan could be finalized within a month.

“For nearly two months, the animated political cartoon sat on NPR.org virtually unnoticed. And then someone discovered it, was disgusted and launched it into the blogosphere — making it a raucous rallying point for conservatives,” writes NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard in her column on “Learn to Speak Tea Bag” by cartoonist Mark Fiore. The 90-second animation caricatures activists aligned with the conservative Tea Party movement and uses a sexual reference that was lost on Ellen Silva, the NPR editor who approved the piece, and many others, apparently. ‘[T]here are problems with the Tea Bag animation,” Shepard writes. “Chief among them is it doesn’t fit with NPR values, one of which is a belief in civility and civil discourse.

Maryland Public Television and NPR affiliates WEAA and WYPR in Baltimore were part of the study “How News Happens” by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The research looked at all media that produced local news in one week. Eight of 10 stories either repeated or repackaged previously reported information, it found. “As the economic model that has subsidized professional journalism collapses, the number of people gathering news in traditional television, print and radio organizations is shrinking markedly,” it notes.

When it comes to new media, Jessica Clark blogs, “the [pubcasting] system as a whole can barely make it onto the mat. The problem is an increasingly urgent mismatch between current infrastructure investments, and those needed to keep pace with the volatile digital media ecosystem.” Clark directs the Future of Public Media project at American University’s Center for Social Media. Her entry on MediaShift draws on a recent presentation by pubcasting consultant and former Alaska Public Telecommunications veep John Proffitt (that video is included on the post). In addition to infrastructure issues, Clark writes, pubcasting needs investments to create contexts for public participation through partnerships with existing social media platforms or open-source customized tools and interface development.

Chicago Public Radio’s board, staff and executives didn’t mince words in their latest strategic plan about their bold experiment known as Vocalo. “As a website Vocalo must be seen as unsuccessful so far.”

They busted down newsroom walls, adding some space but much more humanity, doubling the number of desks, adding new editing stations and a fixed camera for quick shirt-sleeves standups. The broadcast and website now carry the PBS NewsHour title and they come from the same combined staff.

Duquesne University is looking to sell Pittsburgh’s WDUQ, an NPR News and jazz station. “Over the years, DUQ has evolved into a station that is virtually independent of the university,” a university spokeperson tells the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “This could be an opportunity for Duquesne to reallocate assets for the enhancement of our educational enterprise and for the station to thrive on its own. We believe that DUQ will be even stronger under ownership that focuses on radio.”

Nearly all of the year’s major public broadcasting conferences have been dated up. Latest to be announced was the Music Personnel Conference, April 21-23 in New York City. Two have changed their names: PBS Showcase reverts to “the PBS Annual Meeting” as it consolidates with the PBS Development Conference, which was postponed from last fall, and DEI’s Public Radio Development & Marketing Conference, which changes its first name to “Public Media . . .” A quick rundown: Jan. 12-15 — NETA Conference, Henderson, Nev.; Feb. 7-10 — APTS Capitol Hill Day and Members Meetings, Washington, D.C.; April 7-9 — PBS Technology Conference, Las Vegas; before the big National Association of Broadcasters NAB Show, April 10-15; April 8-10 —Public Radio Engineering Conference, Las Vegas, sponsored by the Association of Public Radio Engineers, ditto;April 21-23 —Music Personnel Conference, New York City, sponsored by the Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio; May 17-20 — PBS Annual Meeting, Austin, TX; June 1-4 — Public Broadcasting Management Association, Tampa;June 9-12 — National Federation of Community Broadcasters, St.

So. Will the George W. Bush Institute “co-produce a public television show . . . in a rare convergence of public broadcasting and a partisan research organization,” as reported by the Huffington Post? Nope. That and more in this week’s PBS Ombudsman column.