Programs/Content

Surge of channels, people meter chaos depress PBS ratings

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There is no shortage of factors to explain why public TV ratings have kept sliding. For one, the proportion of viewers with access to satellite and cable has increased, bringing a surge in fragmentation. Then there’s Nielsen’s audience estimation system, undergoing its own upheaval while some pubTV stations still lack the encoders that let the ratings company know they’re out there. On top of all this, some station leaders say PBS isn’t doing enough to create programming that grips viewers. Over the last 10 seasons, PBS’s ratings have dropped 37 percent, from 1.9 in 1998-99 to 1.2 in 2007-08.

Programs/Content

Masterpiece to be umbrella for 3 strands

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Suspecting that Masterpiece Theatre is showing its age after 36 seasons — an eon in TV years — the program’s producers at Boston’s WGBH will “polish” the brand and expand into new media platforms in order to bring more structure and predictability to the schedule and reach the next generation of Sunday night drama fans. The same courtly theme music by French composer Jean-Joseph Mouret will open the program, but it will lose the little tabletop journey of its video opening and half of the series name. The producers will drop “Theatre” and add headings for three distinct seasonal strands: Masterpiece Contemporary in the fall, Masterpiece Classics in winter/spring and Masterpiece Mystery! (working title) in the summer slot Mystery! now fills.

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?

Programs/Content

Researchers invite others to use Audience 98 data

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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.

Why public media?

‘It just feels like hearts coming out of my head’

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What do viewers and listeners have to say about public broadcasting’s purposes? You can work backward from their letters and calls to stations and producers about the field’s achievements. Relief from yappy dogsDear NPR,

Ever since I arrived in Ukraine in June, I have suffered acute NPR news withdrawals. Sure, I miss my family, my friends, and all those “things” that have come to represent my previous life in America — hot showers, clean tap water, brown sugar for my oatmeal and lighted stairwells. But I suspect that it is the lack of those familiar voices that woke me up each morning in Salem, Ore., that has made my transition in this country most difficult. Please send those tapes soon.