CPB

Stay tuned for balance debates

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After a week as target of dark accusations and suspicions, Ken Tomlinson was weary. “We’ve all said what we had to say,” the CPB Board chairman told Current. “Let’s all declare victory and move on.”

That may make sense to many public broadcasters, but Tomlinson’s critics aren’t likely to give the issue a rest. CPB’s independent inspector general, Kenneth Konz, said he will investigate charges by two key House Democrats that Tomlinson violated the Public Broadcasting Act by commissioning a political content review of Now with Bill Moyers and recruiting a White House staff member to write guidelines for CPB’s new ombudsmen. In St.

Programs/Content

A cuddly sloth is set for science series stardom

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It’s a Big, Big World, a preschool science series from Mitchell Kriegman, promises to be the next big thing for PBS Kids. The series, which will launch with a major promotional push in January, “was an inspiration to us when we thought about what PBS Kids can be,” said John Wilson, PBS co-chief programmer, during the PBS Showcase meeting in Las Vegas. Kriegman, Emmy-winning creator of Disney’s Bear in the Big Blue House and Nickelodeon’s Clarissa Explains It All, unveiled the series during an April 12 [2005] breakfast at the PBS conference. “From my point of view, I’ve arrived in my career” by bringing to PBS a competitive show that will help children learn and grow, he said. Kriegman began developing the concept after 9/11.

Programs/Content

PBS, producers, Comcast wed to create digital kids’ channel

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Sesame Workshop President Gary Knell describes plans to create a PBS-branded
digital cable service for preschoolers as a “renewed marriage vow”
for PBS and the famed producer of Sesame Street, partners over three
decades in teaching young kids about letters and numbers and getting along. It’s a four-way marriage, however, and the two for-profit partners
are cable giant Comcast and Hit Entertainment, the London-based owner of Barney,
Bob the Builder, Thomas the Tank Engine and other kid brands. The deal gives public TV stations on-screen credit — “brought
to you by your local public TV station” — and access to future
shows from Sesame and Hit, but it associates public TV with a new digital
channel that carries ads during program breaks and that’s available
only to cable subscribers who pay extra for digital-tier service. [The channel was later named PBS Kids Sprout.]

When the 24-hour channel starts next fall, moreover, PBS will discontinue
its packaged PBS Kids channel, leaving stations to package their own kids’
services if they don’t participate with the partnership. For PBS and Sesame Workshop, the agreement announced Oct.

Programs/Content

Target: sitters who could be teachers

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KCET in Los Angeles unveiled a multimillion-dollar initiative to help prepare kids for kindergarten by training the adults who care for them. Two new daytime talk series — one produced in English and the other in Spanish — are centerpieces of the project. Through daily broadcasts of A Place of Our Own and Los Ninos in Su Casa, KCET aims to provide skills, information and inspiration to unlicensed caregivers and enlist them in the important work of nurturing early learning skills. These friends, neighbors and relatives of parents often work in isolation and have little access to training. Shaped by input from leading educators and formative research on its target audiences, the station’s education initiative has raised $20 million so far, including the largest grant in KCET’s history—$10 million from the energy company BP.

Programs/Content

PBS again taps viewer curiosity about old things

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A spin-off of Antiques Roadshow, PBS’s most popular series, will visit memorable guests from past installments and guide viewers through the ins and outs of the antiques market. Antiques Roadshow FYI debuts early in 2005 as a half-hour weekly magazine program. PBS will pair it with another new half-hour series to be announced next month. PBS announced the new Roadshow series July 8 [2004] during the Television Critics Association summer press tour. The network also announced a three-part history series, Guns, Germs and Steel, to be made with Lion Television and National Geographic Television.

System/Policy

CPB’s TV Future Fund was illegal, GAO finds

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A long-anticipated report on public television by the General Accounting
Office, released May 21, advises Congress that CPB illegally diverted
money intended for stations into the now-defunct Television Future Fund. The report, “Issues Related to Federal Funding of Public Television by the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” says CPB operated outside its authority
when it took money from the part of its appropriation that Congress designated
for station grants and used it for Television Future Fund projects. Between 1996 and this year, the Future Fund made grants for R&D projects
to improve public TV operations and fundraising. But GAO said CPB can’t legally
make selective grants from funds allocated for station grants. CPB President Bob Coonrod rebutted that conclusion in a statement printed
as an appendix in the report.

Audience

As cume slips, duo aims to keep PBS ‘relevant’

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For the past four years under PBS President Pat Mitchell, the network has had two chief program executives: at headquarters in Alexandria, Va., John Wilson, a veteran  programmer who came to PBS a decade ago from KAET in Phoenix; and in Los Angeles, Jacoba (Coby) Atlas, a news and documentary producer who previously worked with Mitchell at CNN. In this interview they describe for the first time a new formal practice of using minimum ratings, along with other factors, to judge the success of programs. They also discuss brainstorming with producers to create new programs and the tight budgets that limit how many new things PBS can try. Atlas and Wilson spoke with Current at PBS headquarters and later by phone. This transcript is edited. Setting ratings floors
In your programming plan in the PBS budget for next year, you talk about establishing a new set of goals for judging programs. What factors will you consider?

System/Policy

Public TV’s vision of itself: a lens for understanding the world

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After some fiddling with language, station leaders Feb. 23 [2004] endorsed a new mission statement describing public TV as a “unifying force in American culture.” Several participants celebrated the agreement at the PBS Annual Members Meeting as a significant demonstration of unity among the network’s notoriously divided members. “The beauty of this is that all the stations could sign on to something,” commented Ellis Bromberg, g.m. of WMVS/WMVT in Milwaukee. During the debate, station leaders agreed that the proposed “Vision” paragraph at the end of the mission statement had grown too wordy and needed to be simplified.

Programs/Content

Wiseman at work in Idaho state legislature

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The Idaho Legislature is the subject of Frederick Wiseman’s next cinema verite documentary. Starting with his controversial film Titicut Follies in 1967, Wiseman has filmed the day-to-day workings of American places and institutions — public housing developments, high schools and an old Maine seaport town, among other subjects. His last PBS broadcast, Domestic Violence, was filmed in a shelter for abused women and children, called the Spring, in Tampa, Fla. Wiseman, who doesn’t discuss his film projects until they’re near completion, declined Current’s request for an interview. But he told Idaho statehouse reporter Betsy Russell that he chose the Idaho Legislature because he wanted to film an American institution in the West.

Programs/Content

Worlds away from Rukeyser’s Wall Street

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Wall Street Week with Fortune, the PBS series that reinvented itself last year after a messy split with original host Louis Rukeyser, is setting itself further apart from its progenitor. The program sharpened its reporting this fall on the scandal-plagued financial markets while expanding its coverage to economic trends beyond Wall Street. Acknowledging the steady drumbeat of news about improper trading practices and corporate malfeasance, Executive Producer Larry Moscow wants WSW to reflect investors’ ire over scams that deflated their portfolios and retirement accounts. Investors, he observed, are now saying, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

“We want to put PBS at the vanguard of reporting on that rebellion by providing independent information about what’s going on,” Moscow said. “These are different times and we have to do things beyond sitting in the studio and talking about it.”

The shift in tenor was unmistakable in co-host Geoffrey Colvin’s introduction to the Nov.

Quick Takes

Network says PBS brand helps stations ‘be more’

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Inconsistent branding strategies make it increasingly difficult for viewers to see the connections between PBS, the programs it distributes and the local stations that air them. PBS convenes a meeting with station communications execs at Braddock Place this week to discuss how to rectify the problem, a remnant of age-old tensions over what public TV should call itself. The pow-wow follows up on a study by the branding strategy and design firm Interbrand, which concluded that the profusion of public TV brands undermines the PBS brand’s ability to raise money from viewers and sponsors. Interbrand noted that cable competitors and successful nonprofits focus on national brands. The consultants estimated that the PBS brand is worth $5.4 billion, based on their assessment of its ability to secure loyal donors and influence funding decisions in the nonprofit sector.

Programs/Content

Moyers a flash point in balance talks led by CPB

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CPB has revived debate within public TV about balance and fairness
in public affairs programs, citing specifically Bill Moyers’ dual roles
of host and uninhibited commentator on his Friday-night PBS show. After a vigorous debate among station reps and producers June 9 [2003]
at the PBS Annual Meeting in Miami Beach, CPB President Bob Coonrod
proposed to broaden discussions within public TV on standards of fairness. In a widely circulated letter exchange with PBS President Pat Mitchell,
he put topics from the session–including Moyers’ roles–on the agenda
for future talks between the two. “Specific notions of fairness, or perceptions of fairness, may
vary by individual or by region, but the overall message was clear:
There is a deep and abiding interest among our colleagues to try to
‘get it right,'” Coonrod wrote. After participants in the session
screened a Moyers commentary from Now, “there was serious
discussion .

People

Yankee pitchman, former GBH pres David Ives dies at 84

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David Otis Ives cultivated an eccentric Yankee image as a WGBH pitchman that endeared him to New England audiences and helped fuel the Boston station’s emergence as a national production powerhouse. His enthusiasm for the station seemed boundless as he demonstrated pledge premiums, performed songs and skits, and even rode an elephant on camera. Ives

Beneath the madcap persona, WGBH’s fourth president was a stickler for good grammar, deportment and intellectual rigor — standards he set with “great humor and grace,” recalled Brigid Sullivan, VP of children’s, educational and interactive media. Ives, 84, died May 16 after becoming ill while visiting family in San Francisco. Henry Becton, who succeeded Ives as president in 1984, called Ives “a national leader, a Boston institution and a wise and generous mentor.

Programs/Content

Friday nights, PBS has balance on its mind

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PBS has initiated fast-track development of a new 10 p.m. public affairs
series to supplement its two-hour Friday night block. The half-hour show — to
be chosen from proposals submitted last week — will debut by July. Coby Atlas, the network’s co-chief program executive, already has commissioned
a pilot adapting a pubradio series — KCRW-FM’s weekly Left, Right
and Center. She expects to ask for minipilots of up to four proposals
before green-lighting the winning concept next month. CPB, which is jointly
funding the new series, is also “in the mix of decision-making,” she
said.

PBS

Securing the union, pumping up the volume, bowling in a league

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From the opening moments of its 2001 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PBS drew on the city’s role in U.S. history and a series of in-person presentations to foster pride and other warm fuzzies among 1,300 conference attendees. In a spoof of Antiques Roadshow with actors as the founding fathers, APTS President John Lawson presented a letter by Alexander Hamilton to appraisers Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. “We must secure our union on solid foundations — it is a job for Hercules,” Hamilton wrote. Lawson feigned amazement when the letter was deemed to be of “immense worth.” For plenary sessions in a convention center ballroom, PBS put on highly produced shows, with musical performances, staged interviews, scripts rolling on multiple teleprompters and program-related stunts replacing many of the clip screenings of past years.

Programs/Content

Social capital: purpose or just a slogan?

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The buzzword “social capital” has acquired lots of different meanings within public television as PBS and its member stations speculate whether and how they will be viable in the digital media environment. What will it really mean for public television to “build social capital,” as system leaders propose, by producing certain kinds of local programs and services? Before Robert Putnam’s 1995 article and subsequent book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, social capital was largely an academic term for the social connections between individuals that prompt activism and confer benefits on their communities. Putnam’s description of our country’s eroding civic life resonated so broadly that “social capital” has become something of a catch-all phrase for what we’re missing. Public TV leaders have seized on the concept as a tonic to reverse PBS’s sagging audiences and membership numbers.