Current (https://current.org/category/development/page/20/)
Few docs as substantial as The Principal Story, which airs on P.O.V. Sept. 15, are funded in full by a single angel, but this one was. The Wallace Foundation didn’t choose to cover the whole cost to make independent producers’ lives easier, though the grant did that.
Viewers like you — by name — have literally moved to the front of the line in underwriting credits at WQED in Pittsburgh. Since mid-August, a Mary Jones or Joe Smith of Anytown, Pa., who donated as little as $40 to the station, is mentioned ahead of major corporations or donors providing hundreds of thousands. That better reflects the overall importance of viewer contributions to the TV/FM licensee, said Deborah L. Acklin, g.m.
At a time when audience contributions are proving more reliable than many corporate and state government funders, the WQED credits and new ones from PBS are emphasizing the role of viewer-donors. The new national multiplatform credits package that PBS began feeding to stations in August focuses on the viewer as “Explorer” branding concept (Current, June 23). PBS head Paula Kerger seemed to approve of WQED’s idea after a Pittsburgh reporter mentioned it during her July appearance at the Television Critics Association tour in Pasadena, Calif.
Too many couples were splitting up before the offspring came along. Or they lived together grumpily, keenly aware they shouldn’t have had that second date. Ellen Schneider and her crew saw it was time for an intervention. Schneider’s San Francisco company, Active Voice, has published a 25-page booklet to turn things around: “The Prenups: What Filmmakers and Funders Should Talk About Before Tying the Knot.”
Austin City Limits is a hot commodity based on a cool brand built over 33 years on PBS. In two years it moves its entire production site downtown in the Texas capital city to a cornerstone 2,500-seat theater in a $300 million redevelopment.
If all of the stations in the Benchmarks survey matched the performance of the top stations, public radio would gain $47.4 million in net membership revenue.
The kinds of people who like new experiences, enjoy scanning expanded horizons, want to see things from varied perspectives are the people most likely to be PBS viewers, says Margaret Mark.
Swamped by the recession tsunami as they prepared for the new fiscal year, public broadcasters at PBS headquarters; WQLN in Erie, Pa.; two Wisconsin stations and Colorado Public Radio cut budgets to keep their noses above the red ink.Falling by the wayside are established services, including the weeknightly newscast for Delaware viewers broadcast for 46 years by Philadelphia-based WHYY-TV and the local reports on the radio reading service for the blind operated for 16 years by WMFE-FM in Orlando, Fla.Troubled stations typically reported revenues that were down across the board, in underwriting, corporate donations, membership and state government support. With no higher ground for refuge, PBS officials told staffers June 11 that 45 positions, including some vacancies, would be eliminated. That’s about 10 percent of the network’s staff. PBS is struggling to close a $3.4 million deficit anticipated for fiscal year 2010. Spokeswoman Jan McNamara said the job cuts and other measures already adopted will eliminate about half of that shortfall.
… Friendly began toying with an idea for a permanent source of funding for noncommercial television. In the spring of 1966 he began considering the possibility that synchronous satellites might provide the magic potion for the fourth network….
Thanks to the June arrival of the Sands Casino Resort in the industrial Lehigh Valley in east central Pennsylvania, the region can expect the opening of a shiny new public TV station as well.
On the Media, the NPR-distributed weekly press review, released a correction last week apologizing for what it called a “lapse in journalistic judgment” in preparing its November 2008 report about the public radio show The Infinite Mind.
Public television is asking Congress for a $211 million supplemental appropriation for fiscal year 2010 on top of the usual CPB funding, presenting it as disaster relief rather than another bailout.
Public radio and TV station revenues may decline $418 million or 14.6 percent this fiscal year, CPB executives estimated in a presentation to the corporation’s board of directors.
The kind of leaders needed to drive this transformation are not just media organization managers but also community leaders.
Bill Lichtenstein, executive producer of pubradio’s The Infinite Mind, got a phone call Nov. 20 from a New York Times reporter with troubling information: the program’s host, psychiatrist Fred Goodwin, had been paid more than $1 million by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline since 2000. “My first question was, where did you get that information?’’ Lichtenstein said in an interview with Current. When the reporter said that Goodwin had told him, Lichtenstein was stunned. “When he began to read me the dollar amounts of fees, year by year, I went from stunned to shocked.”
The $1 million-plus figure had been uncovered by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, ranking Republican in the Senate Finance Committee, which has been investigating the lack of financial transparency in medicine.
‘PBS gives everyone the opportunity to explore new worlds” — this is the meaning that station communications to viewers and donors should evoke, the network says. PBS plans to test new messages with stations and make a new round of spots for its “Be More” brand campaign based on new research about language that moves people to donate to pubTV. The network’s goal is to create more consistent messaging across the system, says Judy Braune, v.p. of strategy and brand management. “When we set out to do the research,” she says, “we were looking to answer the question, ‘How can we position PBS stations as a cause that people want to support for the long haul?’”
PBS discussed the research findings at the PBS Development Conference in October and will review them at the PBS Content Summit in January and at PBS Showcase in May. In March, PBS plans to supply stations with new messaging materials to use on-air, online, and in direct mail and e-mail fundraising efforts.
The scene: a small conference room of the Senate Committee on Commerce, late on a February afternoon. The players: a senior committee staffer and her longtime acquaintance, a public broadcasting general manager. The author is president of Colorado Public Television (KBDI) in Denver. Illustration: Elene Usdin. ‘Well, the bastards have you right where they want you!” growled the aide, barely looking up from her papers spread across the conference table.
As in years past, the administration budget released on Feb. 5 [2007] calls for substantial cuts to CPB funding and other system line items. The White House would slice more than $140 million from the system’s current funding levels in fiscal 2008, a reduction of almost 25 percent from ’07…
Congress doesn’t work that way, said Wilbur Mills, the formidable chair of the House Ways and Means Committee in the late 1960s. Bill Moyers, then a young aide to President Johnson, recalled the upshot of the Public Broadcasting Act: Congress created CPB but left it without a dedicated revenue source, destined to lobby unceasingly for annual appropriations. This account is excerpted from Moyers’ speech to the PBS Showcase Conference in May 2006. (The full text of the speech is also on this site.)
… When he signed it, the President said that the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 “announces to the world that our nation wants more than just material wealth; our nation wants more than ‘a chicken in every pot.’ We in America have an appetite for excellence, too….
Before Nancy Kruse’s fundraising company closed, leaving more than $400,000 in expected public radio proceeds unaccounted for, Kruse’s company bio described her as, among other things, “director of The Writing Center in San Diego” who “has a master’s degree in public policy from Georgetown University and, in 1997, was awarded a Eureka Fellowship for her leadership in nonprofit management.” However, Georgetown University has no record of her graduation and Eureka Communities does not list her as a past fellow. She did indeed run the Writing Center, once a nonprofit fixture of San Diego’s literary scene, but Kruse’s former co-workers, who knew her under the name Delaney Anderson, say she presided over the center’s collapse. The center’s last days in 1998 were marked by double-talk and creative accounting, they say, which also characterized the rapid decline and closing of Washington-based Nancy Kruse + Partners this year, according to many of that firm’s employees. The Writing Center’s leaders say Anderson/Kruse suddenly resigned weeks before the center’s demise amid eviction notices and bad debts. Kruse, who ran online fundraising auctions for more than 40 public radio stations in her company’s 16-month existence, has not explained to stations what happened to more than $400,000 in earnings she had reported from September’s multistation auction.
Backed by a $200,000 Knight Foundation grant, PBS will develop a proposal for a public affairs channel — working title, Public Square — that public TV stations could air on DTV multicast channels, the network announced Jan. 8 [2004]. The channel would offer “sustained electronic journalism” that contrasts with other networks where “sleaze repeatedly trumps substance,” said Hodding Carter, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in a news release. “You might say what CNN’s potential seemed to be at the height of its potential is where we’re going,” Carter told Current. Repeats of PBS public affairs shows on the new channel could bulk up the programs’ audiences, cable-style, but Public Square would also need exclusive programming, said PBS co-chief program executive Coby Atlas.