Twenty-five years ago this week, public TV first aired Great Performances, its major performing arts showcase. And just in time for the anniversary, CPB in October 1997 gave its top public TV award, the Ralph Lowell medal, to Jac Venza, executive producer of the series from the start. Earlier in the fall the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences honored him with its Governors Award.No other producer has captured as much free-floating excellence and put it on videotape as Venza, public TV’s major performing arts impresario. He also serves as director of cultural and arts programs at New York’s WNET, overseeing the American Masters biographies, the pop music series In the Spotlight and the local City Arts series.

The makers of Liberty!, which airs Nov. 23-25 on PBS stations, are trying nothing less than to renovate the dusty reputation of the country’s founding fathers and their revolution. “People sort of consider it inherently boring — long-ago, far-away people in funny wigs, saying profound things you don’t quite understand,” says Ronald Blumer, writer and co-producer of Liberty! Not so! The producers summon up Ben Franklin to look viewers in the eye, and dozens of his contemporaries to admit they don’t know what will happen next in this Revolutionary War. This is exhilarating, even though we know how the story will turn out.

See Jane. See Jane run WBUR. See Jane ditch the music for NPR news and talk. Grow WBUR, grow. Why the primer approach? Because many in public radio consider General Manager Jane Christo’s reign at Boston University’s WBUR a textbook example of how to turn a middling public radio station into an overwhelming success. Under Christo’s leadership — and her faith in NPR programming long before it was a sure thing — WBUR has grown from 60,000 listeners in 1979 to 400,000 to date–the fifth-largest public radio audience in the country. “WBUR is a very important, bellwether station that bodes well for public radio in America.

Public radio audience researcher David Giovannoni this week will present findings from Audience 98, a major study that aims to extend programmers’ understanding of listener behavior developed in the widely influential Audience 88. Audience 98 is based in part on a rare re-contact survey of 8,000 Arbitron diary-keepers who indicated in fall 1996 that they listened to public radio. The survey was designed to elicit their pledging behaviors, personal beliefs, and attitudes toward public radio. Giovannoni will release Audience 98’s first national report, “The Value of Programming” Sept. 11 when he gives the keynote address at the Public Radio Program Directors Conference in Denver.

This analysis by the editor and co-founder of Current describes methods used elsewhere to reduce the influence of political favor in naming boards. If patronage appointments are giving CPB a mediocre Board of Directors and top management, as retired longtime staffer David Stewart contends in the accompanying commentary, there’s a simple reform that’s widely used in such situations. That is: inserting a nominating step in the process, a reform that brings to bear the attention and efforts of additional interests and reduces the now-predominant role of partisan considerations. That’s how people are named to the board that runs the National Science Foundation.

Nearly three decades of observing CPB close-up have convinced me that only an essential change in the way CPB Board members are selected offers some prospect of achieving the bright future projected for the organization by the first Carnegie Commission and the Congress in 1967.

As the prospective new owner of jazz station WDCU took constant heat over the past month from jazz lovers and public radio officials, another potential buyer was visibly waiting in the wings. The persistence paid off: Earlier this month, C-SPAN assumed Salem Communication’s $13 million bid for the Washington, D.C., station. Commercial broadcaster Salem, which owns one of the nation’s biggest religious radio chains, was facing a fight to close the WDCU transaction. A citizen’s advocacy group was set to file an FCC challenge, questioning the nonprofit bona fides of the corporation that Salem set up to purchase the station. NPR was considering filing its own challenge.

In his keynote address at the PBS Annual Meeting, June 22, 1997, David McCullough celebrated the value of history, the joy of collaboration in making films and both the achievements and promise of public TV. McCullough, a celebrated historian whose biography of President Truman won a Pulitzer Prize, has narrated many documentaries, including Ken Burns’ The Civil War and hosted the PBS series American Experience for 10 years. Did you know that if you were a flea, you could jump as high as Rockefeller Center? And, furthermore, you could do it 30,000 times without stopping? I learned that from Miriam Rothschild, who is the world’s leading expert on fleas.

It’s raining, so the production crew has scrapped a planned hilltop shoot. Now Russell Morash has just learned that the cement truck has broken down on its way to the renovation site in Milton, Mass., that will be center stage for This Old House‘s 19th season. The executive producer/director has to rethink the entire morning’s production schedule. Fast. Morash decides to move the crew inside the rambling white house, a 1724 timber-frame colonial that will be transformed over the next few months to accommodate a 21st-century lifestyle. He wants to shoot series host Steve Thomas discussing a scale model of the house with architect Rick Bechtel.

A debate on the proposed PTV Weekend experiment for two-nights-a-week advertising on public TV For the plan, below: Mike Hardgrove, president of public TV station KETC in St. Louis. Against the plan:  Fred Esplin of KUED in Salt Lake City. What could have motivated Larry Grossman, a man with unimpeachable credentials in public television, to propose a programming scheme for the industry based on that most despised of funding sources advertising? Could it be that he acquired, as a result of his tenure as president of NBC News, a disregard for the dangers of unbridled commercialism? His record at NBC argues to the contrary.

Lawrence Grossman’s PTV Weekend proposal for experimentation with a two-night commercial network for public TV stations — described for the first time in major newspapers this month — drew opposition and questions from several well-placed individuals. FCC Chairman Reed Hundt criticized the plan June 9 at the National Press Club. The proposed experiment with advertising on public TV is “an idea we ought to just reject out of hand,” he said. “Once you make public broadcasting commercial, you’ve lost it.” Bill Baker, president of New York’s WNET, a station whose market would be important to the proposed advertiser-supported programming, said PTV Weekend is “a wrong-headed concept at the wrong time,” which “could be very deleterious to the whole concept of public television.”

Four days before the May 27 airing of “Innocence Lost: The Plea,” Frontline‘s third documentary on the Little Rascals child-abuse case in Edenton, N.C., the prosecutor announced she was dropping all remaining charges in the long and troubling legal action. For producer-director Ofra Bikel and her colleagues at Frontline, the decision brought a rare sense of gratification. Over the past seven years, Bikel’s persistent scrutiny of a prosecution she had come to believe was unjust has made a big difference in many people’s lives. Whether the effect has been for the better or the worse depends on how close you live to Edenton, and which side of the Little Rascals case you want to believe.

A debate on the proposed PTV Weekend experiment for two-nights-a-week advertising on public TV Against the plan, below: Fred Esplin, general manager of KUED in Salt Lake City. For the plan: Mike Hardgrove, president of public TV station KETC in St. Louis. If we take up Larry Grossman’s proposal for PTV Weekend, we will do to ourselves what Newt Gingrich tried but failed to do: commercialize public television. This is a bad idea that won’t work — and shouldn’t. That we need to re-think the way we finance our national program schedule is clear, but the fact that a few public TV stations are prepared to abandon a fundamental principle in the process tragically may demonstrate how desperate we have become.

James Fellows, long active in public TV’s national leadership and founder of Current, analyzed the PTV Weekend proposal, when it was published in June 1997, on behalf of the Hartford Gunn Institute, a fledgling organization he was trying to launch as a planning agency for the public TV system. See also the PTV Weekend proposal and Current‘s coverage of it. The Hartford Gunn Institute is an independent entity that is interested in analyzing and encouraging promising opportunities in public broadcasting and telecommunications. It has no organizational or financial interest in the outcome of the research work which it undertakes. At the request of Lawrence K.