System/Policy

CPB gives $2.5 million to Firelight Media diversity initiative

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Firelight Media, the documentary filmmaking nonprofit founded by Stanley Nelson, received a $2.55 million grant from CPB Aug. 20 to expand Producers’ Lab, a public television documentary mentorship project. Producers’ Lab recruits filmmakers and producers from underrepresented regions across the country to work with Nelson and Firelight Media to create documentaries that include a more diverse range of voices. The grant will allow the lab to add 30 to 40 more producers to the program over three years and expand its recruiting to all regions of the country. The program’s goal of adding more diversity to public TV’s airwaves was a main selling point for CPB, according to Joseph Tovares, senior vice president of diversity and innovation at CPB.

Quick Takes

WKGC dropping NPR affiliation, picking up BBC, APM shows

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WKGC in Panama City, Fla., will replace NPR’s newsmagazines with BBC news programs distributed by American Public Media. The station, which is also dropping its NPR membership, cited duplication of NPR programs in the market as the reason for the schedule change, which takes effect Oct. 1, reports the local News Herald. During morning and afternoon drive times, BBC World News and NewsHour will air on the WKGC instead of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered. WKGC is licensed to Gulf Coast State Community College and shares its service area with WFSU in Tallahassee, operated by Florida State University.

Programs/Content

Salt Lake City’s KCPW cites program costs, duplication in canceling NPR programs

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Salt Lake City pubcaster Wasatch Public Media, licensee of KCPW-FM, will drop all NPR programs June 24, a schedule change intended to save money and differentiate its service from other pubcasters in the market. “A lot of the decision just came down to sheer economics – NPR is just getting more and more expensive,” said Wasatch C.E.O. Ed Sweeney. “And, when you already have NPR in the market with other stations, it just gets harder and harder to set yourself apart when pitching to sponsors and underwriters.” The University of Utah’s KUER-FM is KCPW’s primary competitor for NPR news listeners. “We were just looking more and more alike, and you can’t stay in business doing that,” Sweeney said.

Firelight Media

PBS discount plan a ‘no-brainer’ for WLVT

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The public TV station serving eastern Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley recently decided that the best way to survive as an independent station was to step back from its status as the primary station serving its market. For WLVT in Bethlehem, a small city less than 70 miles north of Philadelphia, becoming a PDP station “was a natural,” said Tim Fallon, acting c.e.o. “It just doesn’t make sense that two stations, just two channels away from each other, have exactly the same programming.”

WLVT, which is locally branded as PBS39, was hard-hit by budget cuts in 2009 when the state sliced its $1 million in annual support to $100,000. Nearly half of its staff was laid off. When longtime C.E.O. Patricia Simon stepped away in March, the board appointed Fallon, a businessman and longtime station board member and volunteer. After taking over at WLVT, Fallon came to an “alignment of vision” with WHYY President Bill Marrazzo on how the stations could complement each other.

System/Policy

County okays merger of Charlotte’s WTVI, college

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The merger of PBS member station WTVI in Charlotte, N.C., with Central Piedmont Community College was approved March 20 by Mecklenburg County commissioners in a 6–3 vote, saving the station from going dark. Like a number of other troubled stations, WTVI’s broadcast area is overlapped by other PBS outlets — in this case, South Carolina ETV as well as North Carolina’s UNC-TV network. The county will provide $357,000 to finalize the deal and $800,000 over the next four years for equipment upgrades. The college will use WTVI as a base for journalism and videography courses and develop a digital media curriculum. Elsie Garner, WTVI president, told Current the parties aim to complete the deal before the start of the fiscal year in July.

People
Al Rose

Al Rose, 70

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Albert E. Rose, former program director of New Jersey Network and later the program distributor who brought nightly British news programs to U.S. public TV, died of lung cancer June 16, 2010, at a hospice in Newtown, Pa.

Development

Local talks and new national rules aim to end wasteful overlap of stations

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From here on out, it will be a lot harder to volunteer a public broadcasting station into existence. For a quarter-century, you mainly needed an FCC license that nobody else had snapped up yet, plus a minimal bankroll to show you had local support, and you could lay claim on a small share of CPB’s federal appropriation. The ordeal of starting a station was itself a test of mettle, but the field had no self-imposed or government-imposed criteria to select licensees, or national plans for rational siting of stations for universal coverage of the population. It may soon have such rules. Battered by claims that they are fat and wasteful, and facing the loss of some or all of their federal aid, pubcasters are pursuing cost-saving pacts with colleagues in Louisville, Denver and elsewhere.