The American Film Institute is seeking media pros to volunteer as mentors for project developers in its annual AFI Digital Content Lab. AFI is looking for people into video, games, hardware, software, mobile devices and other aspects of media who would work with selected project teams while they develop digital applications in this year’s round. More info and application form are online. Here’s AFI’s roster of past projects. You also can connect with the Lab on Facebook (AFI Digital Content Lab group) or Twitter (follow AFIDCL). Meanwhile, the Lab plans its Digital Hollywood Content Summit May 5 in Santa Monica, Calif.

Madison, Wisc., filmmaker Andy Beversdorf has received death threats over his latest doc, “Here Kitty, Kitty,” airing Saturday on Wisconsin Public Television. The subject: Whether the state should allow killing of feral cats. “It was a big fight between the bird people and the cat people that produced a lot of characters who were very passionate about the whole thing, so it made for good cinema,” Beversdorf told the Wisconsin State Journal. The “bird people” include a professor whose study blames cats for the deaths of millions of birds. More in the Chicago Tribune via The Associated Press.

CPB added new-media and public-interest experience yesterday, announcing the hiring of Robert Bole, v.p. of digital media strategy and investments, formerly v.p. of media for One Economy Corp., a D.C.-based nonprofit that developed the Beehive, a national website with localization that provides practical living advice and information services to millions of low-income families, as well as an online video platform Public Internet Channel; a community forum device, 24/7 TownHall; and an education site for families, ZipRoad.

Wisconsin Public Television and the national series Now on PBS received two of this year’s 10 Walter Cronkite Awards for political reporting on TV. The awards were announced yesterday by the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Wisconsin Public Television won its fourth Cronkite for real-people stories that “went above and beyond what many come to expect from public television,” the judges said. They cited the Now on PBS program “New Voters in the New West” for showing the party’s rush to capture first-time voters.

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler’s new column tackles the recent Fox News report on the use of Al Jazeera English television reporting on Worldfocus. Fox quoted a member of Congress that pubcaster PBS should not be airing the Middle East-based network reports. One point Getler makes: “Al Jazeera does view things through an Arab world prism because that is its main audience. And it also focuses heavily on the civilian costs of war — whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Gaza. So its filming and reporting became valuable from these regions, even if, at times, they are hard to look at. Yet it is better to know this as part of the mix of reporting, in my view, and to absorb it in context with all the ways we get information, than to have only the often sanitized version of warfare that one gets on American network television.”

“My situation is that if I had to choose between losing my stations and losing my direct podcast fundraising, I’d pick the one that would allow me to continue to pay my rent and . . . lose the stations,” says Jesse Thorn, host of the The Sound of Young America, a comedy podcast and weekly public radio show from PRI, in a two-part interview with the Neiman Journalism Lab. Thorn describes how efforts to attract younger and more diverse audiences with shows such as Day to Day, News and Notes, Bryant Park Project and Fair Game failed because they were expensive to produce and didn’t gain the station carriage needed to cover their costs.

Unemployed folks in Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire are producing and appearing in The New England Job Show on 26 public access channels in the two states. The half-hour program was created by “a group of people who didn’t even know each other a few weeks ago,” according to its website. The current show is available on its blog, and the Elevator Pitch page features short videos from job seekers.

An upcoming theatrical production will be the first time longtime Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie will be portrayed by humans instead of Muppets. Bert & Ernie, Goodnight! will have its world premiere in September at the Children’s Theatre Co. in Minneapolis, according to a Sesame Workshop statement on the Animation World News website. Sesame Workshop spokeswoman Lauren J. Ostrow confirmed to Current that yes, this is indeed the duo’s first performance as humans, “with the exception of one short, comical segment performed by actors from The Sopranos as part of a larger project.” And yes, she’s serious!

Pacifica Radio went on the air 60 years ago today at KPFA in Berkeley. Founder Lewis Hill had been working toward that first day on the air since 1946, according to the station’s website. The station says it is the first listener supported noncommercial radio broadcaster in America. But now KPFA is “bogged down by behind-the-scenes bickering,” according to The San Francisco Chronicle. Pacifica recently announced severe financial problems.

“Public broadcasters need to get over themselves, [they’re] as bad or even worse than many of the print journalists about the high-priesthood thing.” So says Persephone Miel, head of the Media Re:Public and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. She was interviewed on the website of Reclaim the Media, a grassroots media reform group. Miel thinks that the public media movement should be led by the existing structures of CPB, PBS and NPR. One suggestion: “Maybe what we really need to do is expand the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s charter, so that they can fund online-only resources.”

Several minority advocates who received the report said they appreciated PBS’s effort, but they found it wanting.

NPR leads public broadcasters in nominations announced this morning for the 13th annual Webby Awards, the international competition for “Best of the Web” recognition. NPR Music, Podcasts, and NPR.org each received nominations in the Web division; Project Song, a video series presented online by All Songs Considered, and the NPR iPhone application were nominated in divisions for online film and video and mobile Web divisions, respectively. For PBS, Frontline/World garnered three nods (here, here and here). Also in the running for Webbys are P.O.V., Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, WNET.org and the public radio series America Abroad.

Melissa Harvey, a graphic designer for WETA, has triumphed in The Washington Post’s annual Peeps diorama contest. Her entry, “NightPeeps,” placed marshmallow Peeps bunnies into the famous painting by Edward Hopper (extra credit for that wordplay!). “I wanted to re-create the bleak urban landscape and the fluorescent light, and add a little pink and yellow,” Harvey said. The work took 45 hours over two weekends. Judges were enthusiastic: “A work of staggering genius . . . a technical triumph . . . cinematic . . . artistic and moody . . . [with] seriously sick and twisted detail . .

North Carolina’s public television network would be overseen by the University of North Carolina’s School of the Arts if a state senator has her way. The provision, inserted into the state budget by Democrat Linda Garrou, surprised pubcasters at the TV network as well as school officials, reports The Winston-Salem Journal. Currently, UNC-TV is an 22-station network licensed to UNC but reporting directly to the board of governors that oversees the university system.

The controversy surrounding Frontline’s “Sick Around America” doc is the subject of PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler’s latest column. He reports receiving notes from viewers complaining that the show failed to discuss, or even mention, the “single-payer system” of national health insurance, which some activists say is a solution to the nation’s health-care crisis. Those critical comments “escalated and then exploded, producing another round of critical mail and a serious journalistic dispute.” Journalist and author T.R. Reid, who did reporting for the program and was to be its on-air correspondent, dropped out of the project before it aired March 31 in a dispute over the content.