A lone radio station is joining the massive pubTV outreach surrounding Ken Burns’ National Parks: America’s Best Idea. KNAU, Arizona Public Radio in Flagstaff, is partnering with the National Park Service to produce features about sites in the state including Canyon De Chelly, Wupatki, and Hubbell Trading Post. Segments will air in September along with the Burns series, according to g.m. John Stark, who is also board chair of the Grand Canyon Association. The station is producing the programming independent of NPR with funding from the National Park Foundation and Western National Parks Association. See the May 11 issue of Current for more on the $6 million PBS outreach, one of public TV’s most expensive ever.

Pubradio outlets in New York and the Carolinas are kicking off special musical performance series for local and worldwide audiences, beginning tonight with a live performance by Grizzly Bear from New York’s WNYC. The show launches WNYC’s American Music Festival, which concludes May 27 with a live concert featuring the world premiere of new work by acclaimed jazz drummer Dafnis Prieto. Tomorrow, on the opening day of the Spoleto Festival USA, South Carolina’s ETV Radio and WDAV in Charlotte, N.C., co-present Spoleto Today and Carolina Classics, special series to be presented weekdays during the 17-day festival of music, theatre and dance performances in Charleston, S.C.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will introduce the doc Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think, at its premiere June 3 in Washington. The film will also travel to think tanks, Capitol Hill and several universities before airing on PBS this fall. Produced by Michael Wolfe and Alex Kronemer for Unity Productions Foundation, the film explores the results of the Gallup Organization’s first-ever opinion poll on the Muslim world. Gallup polled about 1,000 people in each of 21 countries, mostly in mid-2007.

Acting FCC Chair Michael Copps sees building a national broadband network as similar to past work on rural electrification, universal phone service and interstate highways. In an interview Wednesday for for C-SPAN’s The Communicators series, Copps added that such massive projects require cooperation between government and industry. “That’s the way we’ve always built infrastructure in this country – working together.” The interview is set to air at 6:30 p.m. Saturday.

The Wall Street Journal reports that 1.7 million Sirius XM subscribers dropped the satellite radio service in the first quarter of 2009. With 1.3 million new customers signing on, the net loss of 404,000 listeners knocked the recently merged satellite company’s subscriber base down to 18.6 million. “Company officials blamed the bad economy and poor car sales and said they expected another hit to subscribers in the current quarter,” the Journal‘s Sarah McBride reports. But, she found another cause: “Many of the dropped customers were disgruntled after the company dropped several stations after the merger. Chris Ross, who had three separate XM radios, says he canceled them in March when his favorite stations were dropped.

The Wiggles, the Aussie musical quartet that’s a megahit with the preschool set, are coming to Sprout TV this summer. The bouncy band’s television show runs in more than 110 countries and ends a seven-year contract with the Disney Channel in June. The program will premiere on Sprout on Aug. 24. Sprout President Sandy Wax said this is the largest acquisition thusfar for the channel, which is a partnership of PBS, Comcast, Sesame Workshop and HIT Entertainment.

Receiving public radio around Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., got a lot easier today, thanks to another big university. Kansas Public Radio (KANU), based at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, turned on two new repeaters nearby, bringing both of its services to town: its main news/classical/jazz service on 99.5 MHz and its KPR2 news/talk service on 98.3 Mhz. Manhattan hasn’t had its own pubradio station since Kansas State gave up on its rare shared-control role in KKSU-AM seven years ago. Manhattan got spotty service from the nearest KPR signal, 91.3 broadcast from Junction City.

KAET at Arizona State University in Phoenix will receive about $25,000 annually through a planned giving donation from a longtime fan. The new Melvina C. Killion Charitable Endowment is named for “a really fine supporter” of the station, Gary McMahan, Channel 8’s associate director of development, told Current. Killion died Jan. 6 at age 91. The size of her estate is still being determined, but is estimated at between $1.6 million and $1.9 million, he said. Three other organizations will share the funding. Killion came on as a station member in 1987, McMahan said, by donating $100. Her annual giving over the years increased to $5,000.

An as-yet unannounced number of staffers will be losing their jobs during the next month from WNET-Thirteen, PBS’ flagship station in New York, and sister station WLIW-21. Neal Shapiro, president and CEO of WNET.org, broke the news to employees at an all-station meeting this morning. Shapiro later denied published reports of 50 affected positions, saying only that the number will be fewer than the 85 laid off in January. World Focus staffers will be furloughed, and the company is mulling additional unpaid voluntary furloughs. In addition the company will make “significant budget reductions,” according to The New York Times.

In his latest column, PBS ombudsman Michael Getler (right) focuses on controversies surrounding the recent American Experience miniseries on Native Americans, “We Shall Remain.” Getler addresses what he calls a “detailed, non-stop, frontal attack on the program” that arrived in the form of a May 10 letter to PBS head Paula Kerger from a small group calling itself the Wounded Knee Victims and Veterans Association. Kerger had earlier responded to another letter from three tribes in Massachusetts also voicing complaints on the programs.

Don’t forget to register for the National Parks: America’s Best Idea StorySharing webinar tomorrow. Join the National Center for Media Engagement (formerly NCO) and WETA online at 2 p.m. Thursday for a tutorial on how to use the StoryShare tool on your station’s site. Here’s what Rocky Mountain PBS is doing with it.

The theme from Sesame Street is one of the tunes used to psychologically pressure detainees in U.S. custody. The revelation emerged in a Reuters story on the work of the Zero dB (for zero decibels) project that’s part of the British legal charity Reprieve. It represents dozens of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The project is working toward a ban on the use of loud music on detainees, which it characterizes as torture.

The city manager of Morgantown, W.Va., is proposing a resolution asking Comcast to restore West Virginia PBS to its original channel location. The station recently shifted from an analog to a digital tier as part of a 2005 agreement between APTS and the cable industry. Similiar moves also prompted complaints in states including Illinois, Maryland, Virginia and Delaware. Current is following the story.

Broadcast hardware technologists are considering standard specs for a “wrapper” for digital video files to give producers an archive-friendly video production workflow, says Nan Rubin of WNET in her paper “Preserving Digital Public Television: Is There Life After Broadcasting?,” published in International Preservation News this month. As an example of a streamlined workflow, she cites the procedures developed for WNET’s new five-days-a-week Worldfocus. Rubin coordinated a pubTV preservation planning project for the Library of Congress.

Rick Bayless, chef and host of Mexico — One Plate at a Time on PBS, tweets recipes on Twitter. Yes, 140 characters at a time. So when The Chicago Tribune interviewed Bayless, it seemed fitting to stick with that format. An example of a Bayless recipe tweet: “wrap papaya n serrano ham. Grill fish; baste: puree cnd chipotle+honey. Fry garlic in OO, mash in bl beans. Grill #cake+ van ice crm+cajeta.” Yum.