Worldfocus to leave the air next month

WNET.org will discontinue Worldfocus [Word doc], its weeknight international news report as of April 2. The producing station was “a few million dollars short” of what it needed to keep Worldfocus on the air, President Neal Shapiro said in a release today. “We demonstrated that there is a demand for international news, but we had the misfortune of launching a brand new program into the teeth of the recession,” Shapiro said, adding, “… we were in the right place at the wrong time.” The station will put resources in its new weekly current affairs series Need to Know, which starts in early May, when Bill Moyers retires from his weekly show and Now on PBS ends its run. The station announced last week that Shelley Lewis, a former CNN and ABC executive producer, has that role for Need To Know. Lewis comes from Howdini.com, a how-to video website for women that she co-created; she also co-created Air America Radio and was its senior v.p. of programming. She was previously e.p. of CNN’s American Morning with Paula Zahn and Greenfield at Large, and before that was e.p. for ABC News Productions.