Blog chooses CPB's Harrison for weekly honor

CPB President Pat Harrison was recently selected as "People's Hero of the Week" by the Broadband and Social Justice Blog from the Minority Media and Telecom Council. Harrison was praised for leading CPB's strategic focus on the three D's: digital (investments in innovation and technology), dialogue (investments in local community engagement, partnerships and service) and diversity (investments and commitment to diversity of content, talent, and service), and its creation of the Diversity and Innovation Fund for public media.

"New U" entrepreneur fellowship program opens

Applications are now being accepted for the latest round of the New U: News Entrepreneurs Working Through UNITY fellowship, a competitive program funded by the Ford Foundation for journalists of color who want to become entrepreneurs. Participants will attend a “startup camp” in October in Las Vegas, get one-on-one mentoring, and compete to win $10,000 in start-up funding. Fellowship winners will be announced in September.

Arizona PBS teams with Nightly Business Report for Phoenix bureau

Nightly Business Report has opened a Phoenix bureau in partnership with Eight, Arizona PBS. Ted Simons, host of the station's Horizon current-events show, will lead the coverage. NBR now has bureaus in Silicon Valley and Denver, and in May launched a weeknight broadcast on SiriusXM satellite radio. The show was acquired in August 2010 by former educational video salesman Mykalai Kontilai.

Sprout channel plans "Kindness Counts" anti-bullying effort

Sprout, the children's TV partnership of Sesame Workshop, PBS, NBC Universal and HIT Entertainment, is launching a multiplatform initiative in August, "Kindness Counts," to "support the development of empathy in preschoolers," the channel said in a press release Thursday (July 7). The campaign will include public service announcements, digital and social media components, programming tie-ins and local extensions targeting parents and caregivers of preschoolers on the subject of bullying. Sprout said 83 of parents it surveyed are concerned about their preschoolers potentially being bullied or bullying others.

KEET scores grants for unique doc that uses Japanese woodblock animation

KEET-TV in Eureka, Calif., one of the smallest stations in the pubTV system, has received two grants for its documentary, J.A. JIVE: Jazz Music in the Japanese American Internment Camps (w.t.), which uses Japanese woodblock animation. The National Park Service selected it as one of 24 projects to get $2.9 million to "preserve and interpret sites where Japanese Americans were confined during World War II." The hourlong work by local artist Amy Uyeki won $96,465 and was one of three projects cited in a press release from the U.S. Department of the Interior. The documentary also received $22,000 from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program.

KEET-TV producers Claire Reynolds and Sam Green are collaborating with Uyeki to tell the stories of former internees who played music in the camps, through interviews and historical footage combined with a 10-minute animated short based on actual events. Uyeki's parents were both interned with their families at Gila River and Minidoka Internment Camps. The doc will be offered free in late spring 2012 to PBS stations.