Programs/Content

Instructional TV sales exec moves to NBR’s bigger league

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In his career in the media niche of instructional television, Mykalai Kontilai worked with several respected names in public broadcasting as well as parts of Scholastic Inc., one of the world’s largest producers of educational materials for children and classrooms.

Two of these key relationships for Kontilai or Teacher’s Choice, the ITV sales company where he was a major marketing presence, fell apart abruptly and after a matter of months — those with a past education chief of NETA and a former CPB finance exec. Kontilai finally left the ITV field after Scholastic ended its business relationship in 2006 because, a spokesperson told Current, the company was “dissatisfied with Mr. Kontilai as a distributor of Scholastic product.”

Some of his ITV customers remain strong supporters, nevertheless, while others cut ties with him. Two station executives said they dissolved contracts with Teacher’s Choice early. Leaving the cloistered and shrinking ITV world opened new opportunities, however, culminating thus far in the announcement Aug. 13 that the for-profit company NBR Worldwide, with Kontilai as c.e.o. and partner Gary Ferrell as c.f.o., had purchased Nightly Business Report, a well-established weeknight show trusted by millions of PBS viewers to provide investment news and advice (Current, Aug.

Education/Engagement

Veterans’ welcome home morphed from doc to project to movement

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Wisconsin Public Television’s LZ Lambeau “welcome home” outreach for Vietnam veterans and their supporters last month was judged so successful that pubcasters in Texas, Oklahoma and Michigan are planning similar tributes to service members. The National Center for Community Engagement has scheduled a webinar June 23, and soon there’ll be a CPB-funded LZ toolkit

For the Wisconsin network’s three-day event, May 21-23, some 70,000 vets and supporters reported to the landing zone, Lambeau Field, home field of the Green Bay Packers. WGVU in Grand Rapids, Mich., has already scheduled LZ Michigan for July 3. “It’s a perfect fit for local stations, to get us into the community,” said Timothy Eernisse, development manager. “We’ve already had people on our Facebook page e-mailing from Ohio and Illinois — regular people off the street, asking how to reach their stations to help plan something like this.

Education/Engagement

Wisconsin plan: ‘I’d be there for that’

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While shooting more than 100 interviews for their Wisconsin Vietnam War Stories series, Wisconsin Public Television producers kept hearing the same comment from many of the veterans: They weren’t welcomed home after their grueling tours of duty 40 years ago in Southeast Asia. So on Saturday, May 22, 2010, they’ll finally get that “welcome home.” WPT has reserved Lambeau Field – home of the beloved Green Bay Packers, sacred ground for many Wisconsinites – for what may be the largest single outreach event in pubcasting history. Lambeau seats about 73,000, and organizers are pondering contingency plans handling overflow. It’s part of the state network’s wide-ranging Vietnam project. The series of three one-hour docs, now in postproduction, will begin airing within a few weeks after the event in Green Bay.

Programs/Content

Parks outreach as big as all outdoors

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Doing more than her share for public TV’s $6 million outreach project surrounding Ken Burns’ National Parks series, Shanda Roberts lost her shoe in the muck of the Everglades. Reaching to retrieve it, she bent down and hit her head on a tree. A public TV crew captured the disconcerting moment — which was lighthearted compared to the time they got her into a canoe. The Roberts family’s camping trip was a South Floridian element in the varied nationwide extravaganza surrounding the six-part Burns series, which debuts on PBS Sept. 27.

Programs/Content

Many stations packaging their own kids’ channels

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With the all-digital future arriving, if haltingly, and a bigger share of viewers likely to come through DTV multicast channels, public TV stations are reconsidering how to use their bitstream, making over their channels, and in some cases adding new services to woo audiences. The wee audience, for one. Little kids and their parents are a vital audience and constituency for public TV, and mockups of the stations’ future DTV menu often featured a dedicated channel for them. To supply it, stations had access to a 24-hour PBS Kids feed, packaged by PBS. That changed in 2005 when the network acceded to the desires of its two biggest producers for children and joined a partnership to package Sprout, a cable channel for preschoolers.

Programs/Content

EDCAR: ‘mother ship’ for school media

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Five years after the collapse of the CPB-backed OnCourse project, public TV is training for another run at the target. Which is: a comprehensive online digital library that gives teachers just the right video snippet, image, audio clip or interactive simulation that they can plug into a lesson …

Programs/Content

What makes public broadcasting ‘public’ is engagement

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The authors head the Public Media ThinkTank at American University in Washington, D.C.  With backing from the Ford Foundation they’re working to distill the means and motives of a broader realm of public media, including public broadcasting. This is one of their first efforts. Public engagement is the semisecret success story of public broadcasting, and it shouldn’t be. The many community partnerships that flourished with public TV’s June broadcast of the special on caregiving for seniors, And Thou Shalt Honor, and the amazing insights that Story Corps brings to public radio shouldn’t be heartwarming, exceptional stories. They should be the norm.

Programs/Content

Barksdale: Make literacy your mission

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Corporate leader and philanthropist James Barksdale, a co-chair of the PBS-appointed Digital Future Initiative, previewed his thinking in a Current commentary seven months before the long-delayed publication of the initiative’s recommendations. See also comments by initiative Co-chair Reed Hundt. In a story that has always held meaning for me, Lewis Carroll’s character Alice came to a fork in the road. Which way do I go? she wondered. The Cheshire Cat beamed down from the tree above her and asked, “Little girl, are you lost?”

“Well, I just want to know which way I should go,” she said.

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

Forum urges strong role for public TV in education

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If the National Forum for Public Television Executives has its way, public TV will:

raise an additional $200 million a year by loosening underwriting guidelines (notably, by airing 30-second credits), freeing up stations’ funds by making the PBS national schedule self-supporting,
develop educational and local services equal in impact to PBS’s national programming, and
restructure PBS, APTS and its other national organizations under a new board of station managers. The petitions come up Tuesday, Oct. 24 at the third annual PBS Members Meeting, where the Forum will ask all PBS member stations to endorse resolutions to the PBS Board. It’s the conclusion of an annual three-day policyfest. On Sunday, PBS will report to stations on big price increases for Nielsen ratings [story], and the strange new world of personal video recorders, digital cable and electronic “walled gardens” controlled by media conglomerates, according to Executive Vice President Wayne Godwin.

Development

Seven years in a ‘dynamic environment’

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Cecily Truett and Larry Lancit rolled the dice. In the spring of 1991, they took their production company and its best known product, and laid them at the feet of GKN Securities Corp., a small investment firm, which organized the initial public offering of their production company. By then, the Lancits had filled a trophy case with awards as producers of Reading Rainbow. But Lancit Media Productions’ earnings were barely enough to scrape by. It was certainly not enough to expand.

Programs/Content
Teletubby on a happy walk

Eh-oh!

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Over the hills and far away, Teletubbies come to play. In Teletubbyland, a lush green landscape of undulating hills spotted with clumps of bright flowers, the world is safe and fun — a place to explore and learn through play. We know this because the sun baby, who rises over the set at the beginning of each episode, gurgles, coos and shrieks with pleasure at the adventures of the Teletubbies, four alien yet adorable, toddlerlike beings who live there, cared for and entertained by otherworldly gadgets. Teletubbies, the groundbreaking BBC children’s series that’s prompted both an outcry and a massive consumer craze since its debut last March debut in Britain, is about to arrive in the PBS schedule, April 6. The series is based on the premise — already much-debated in Britain — that very young children are watching television but don’t understand it, so they might as well have a show that’s designed for them.

Programs/Content

After all we’ve done, think how much more we can do

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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.

History of public media

Frank Baxter, television’s first man of learning

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Like Norman Corwin, the exceptional radio producer profiled in the last issue of Current, Frank Baxter had his great broadcast successes on the cusp, just before his medium became too commercially successful to continue airing the kind of programs that made Corwin and Baxter famous. Both were forerunners of today’s public broadcasters. This Baxter profile was written by CPB’s director of international activities, David Stewart as part of his history of public television programming. When he died in 1982 many were astonished: Frank Baxter still alive in the ’80s! Many remembered him as mature, if not quite elderly, nearly 30 years before when he grasped national attention simply by talking to a TV camera about Shakespeare’s plays and poetry.

Programs/Content

Goal for Ready to Learn: engage kids and parents

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On July 11, PBS begins beaming its long-anticipated Ready to Learn service to 11 pilot stations, embarking on what planners acknowledge will be a bumpy journey toward better TV for early childhood learning. What comes off the bird will essentially be an expanded, repackaged version of the existing children’s service that, with the help of new educational break messages, will offer a learning-friendly environment for kids. Off-air, outreach activities will target the audiences most critical to the task of preparing children for school–parents, teachers and child-care providers. The on-air and off-air prongs of public TV’s Ready to Learn strategy are scaled-back versions of proposals that PBS floated at last year’s annual meeting. The estimated $72 million needed to launch a comprehensive national service has not as yet materialized.