New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg has announced a $127 million, three-year plan aimed at “reducing disparities” among young black and Latino men (and, we presume, young men who are both black and Latino and why do we keep discussing “Latino” as if it’s a race JESUS CHRIST) and the “rest of” the city’s population by, for example, creating job recruitment centers near housing projects and creating school progress reports that would specifically track Latinos and/or black students. Mayor Bloomberg will give $30 million to the plan via his foundation, with Liberal businessman and philanthropist George Soros matching that amount. The remainder of the funding will come from the city.

Nicholas Benson, a stone-carver and MacArthur Grant honoree, stopped by PBS NewsHour to discuss his craft. And at an ideal time, too. Why? Well, in keeping with today’s emphasis on remembering the past in order to create a more positive future, Benson’s current project happens to be The Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington, D.C.

How big does a story have to be for PBS to cover it on a weekend? Apparently bigger than the shooting spree in Tucson that killed six and left a member of Congress critically wounded. As PBS’s ombudsman, Michael Getler writes, ” if you are a devoted follower of the news and of PBS, when horrific stories such as the one that unfolded in Tucson last Saturday, Jan. 8, you must go to the big three broadcast networks or cable for coverage. The PBS NewsHour will get around to it on Monday evening.”

5QQ caught up with Jeff Brown while he was on assignment for PBS NewsHour in Haiti, producing a five-part series on how the country is doing a year after the massive earthquake. Brown’s been part of the NewsHour family for twenty years, as correspondent and a co-anchor of PBS’s nightly newscast–a program that he describes [...]

In many respects, PBS’ NewsHour With Jim Lehrer is the anti-cable news show. Media Nation’s Dan Kennedy is blunt in his assessment of it: “There is absolutely no need for a serious newscast to be that boring. NPR has hit on a formula that’s intelligent but also keeps things moving.”