Extended plans announced with Henry Louis Gates, Ken Burns

CPB, meeting with station leaders this week near Washington, announced extended funding for two pubTV stars, Ken Burns and Harvard's Henry Louis Gates Jr. PBS joined CPB in announcing three new Gates series: for 2010, The Faces of America, a four-parter about the ancestry of famed Americans; for 2011, the eight-part Searching for Our Roots: The History of the African American People, and for 2012, African American Lives III: Reclaiming Our Past. They will be produced by WNET in New York, Kunhardt Productions and Inkwell Films. New Ken Burns projects under consideration for the next decade include a joint bio of Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt and a series on the Vietnam War, according to CPB, which announced a funding agreement with Burns that runs through 2017. Also under consideration: the previously announced series on Prohibition, plus an update of Baseball called The Tenth Inning, which follows the sport from 1994 through 2009 against the social change of the period.