This Saturday's webcast on public TV local production

The year's second Public Media Futures forum, on public TV strategies in local production, will be webcast live Saturday, April 28, from Los Angeles.

To connect, go to the website communicationleadership.usc.edu, from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Pacific time (12:30 to 4:30 Eastern time). Submit questions here.

Tentative start times of the three sessions:

9:45 a.m. Pacific / 12:45 p.m. Eastern: Nashville Public Television, a former school-board dependent whose local programs now outdraw the PBS schedule.

10:45 a.m. Pacific / 1:45 Eastern: San Diego's KPBS, a "fully converged" FM/TV operator that recently launched a half-hour nightly news show.

12:15 p.m. Pacific / 3:15 p.m. Eastern: How KOCE/PBS SoCal is performing in its new role as primary PBS outlet in Los Angeles, including local productions for TV and the Web.

Here's a list of participants.

The event is part of a series of forums on Public Media Futures sponsored by the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism along with American University School of Communication, parent of Current. This week's session is presented with the assistance of Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media (GFEM).

Attention RSSers: A look at waning NEA grants

The Arts on Radio and Television fund of the National Endowment for the Arts, a source of millions of programming dollars for public media, is distributing matching grants to a wider range of recipients this year — from a smaller pool of money. Grants in the revamped category, Arts in Media, were announced today (April 25), with only about half going to public TV or radio shows. Now online, Current spoke with past recipients about what a reduction in that NEA funding means to public broadcasting.

"Women, War and Peace," NPR, ProPublica win Overseas Press Club honors

WNET has claimed two Overseas Press Club awards, among several awarded to public media news organizations. The New York City station won both the Edward R. Murrow Award for best TV doc on international affairs, and the Robert Spiers Benjamin Award for best Latin American reporting, for Women, War and Peace, a five-part series produced by Fork Films.

The Lowell Thomas Award for best radio news of international affairs went to NPR for its coverage of the Arab Spring.

And the best online investigation of an international issue or event was awarded to a collaboration between ProPublica and The Financial Times, "Tax Wars: A Cross-Border Battle Worth Billions."

A full list of awards is here.