It’s been a very good Emmy season for indie documentaries on PBS. POV received four of the six statuettes credited to PBS in the National Academy of Television Arts and Science’s Sept. 26 Emmy announcement. Two went to Food Inc., putting it at the top of the documentary and long-form informational programming categories. In a likely first for a Web-based service run by a radio network, NPR Music was honored by the Television Academy for the Project Song video “Moby” as one of two News & Doc Emmy winners for innovation in arts, lifestyle and culture coverage.
PBS Kids unveiled last week its largest offering of math-skill games for preschoolers — a cache of 40 games that can be played on computers, mobile devices and interactive whiteboards. “As the nation’s children continue to fall behind, we need to embrace new technology to help them learn,” said Lesli Rotenberg, PBS’s senior v.p., children’s media. Games include Monkey Jump from Curious George, which has kids hop along with George and count as they fill a toy-store bin with bouncing balls; Hermit Shell Crab Game from The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!, in which players help the Cat, Nick and Sally fit hermit crabs into shells of corresponding sizes and patterns; and Carnival Count-off from Fizzy’s Lunch Lab, which teaches children how to estimate added sums and count by fives and tens. PBS partnered with CPB on the project, which is supported by a U.S. Department of Education Ready to Learn grant.
Oregon Public Broadcasting will produce and provide to NPR and PBS stations exclusive coverage of a Republican presidential debate from its Portland studios March 19, 2012. The 90-minute debate “will come at a critical time in the campaign” before anyone sews up the GOP nomination, OPB President Steve Bass predicted in a memo to stations. “Super Tuesday is on March 6, but delegate counts indicate that it will not be possible for the nomination to be won by any candidate by then. Political observers believe that the nomination contest could very likely go into the late spring.”
The Republican National Committee has officially sanctioned the debate, which “virtually assures the participation of the front-running candidates,” Bass said. OPB is partnering with the Oregon GOP and The Washington Times to present the debate.
Ellen Weiss, the NPR News chief who took the network’s blame for the Juan Williams affair, has joined the Center for Public Integrity as its executive editor as of Oct. 3, the watchdog newsroom announced. The center is headed by one of her predecessors at NPR, Bill Buzenberg. “Ellen Weiss is one of the best and most creative news executives in the business,” he said in a news release. CPI hired three other top editors, including Christine Montgomery, the center’s new chief digital officer, who was managing editor of PBS.org for two years while it expanded and then sharply reduced its online-news plans.
It hasn’t been a truly beautiful day in the neighborhood for more than 10 years. Not since Fred Rogers, star of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood for 33 years, hung up his red cardigan sweater for the last time in 2001. He had made 900 episodes of TV’s most gently nurturing programs for children. A couple of years later, in early 2003, Rogers died of stomach cancer and, though his nonprofit company lived on, his Neighborhood became a ghost town, existing only in reruns. Two years ago, PBS cut the number of reruns on its national schedule to one a week — at 6 a.m. Saturday.
Steve Talbot worked in public TV for more than 20 years before trying his hand as chief fundraiser for one of his own projects. His timing was not the greatest. On the day in 2008 when Lehman Brothers imploded, PBS agreed to back the pilot for Talbot’s Sound Tracks, a newsmagazine-style show about contemporary music around the world. The hourlong debut, which aired in January 2010, got positive feedback from viewers, programmers and PBS, but the recession has hampered Talbot’s efforts to make more episodes of Sound Tracks ever since. He’s still raising money to produce additional episodes.
Television viewers in Great Britain, the Middle East, Russia and India could soon be watching American public TV shows, if two initiatives get up and running in the coming months. The PBS UK channel is being bankrolled by W. David Lyons, an entrepreneurial oilman from Calgary, Alberta. The programming will be assembled by PBS Distribution (PBSd), a partnership of PBS and WGBH that holds international rights to a “significant number” of public television titles, said Jan McNamara, PBS spokesperson. In a separate venture, Virginia-based MHz Networks, which feeds international content to some 30 American public TV stations on its Worldview multicast channel, will reverse direction with its MHz America package, pushing local shows from at least five pubTV stations and independent producers to foreign markets. Each could be on the air abroad by year’s end or soon after.
The latest station to leave PBS is a production powerhouse, but one not fully integrated into the nation’s English-dominated public TV system. Puerto Rico TV — WIPR, licensed to Puerto Rico Public Broadcasting Corp., which is controlled by the commonwealth government — dropped its PBS membership July 1. The station in San Juan sometimes produces up to nine hours of content a day, including public affairs, culture, sports, music, talk and food shows, as well as the island’s only 24/7 news channel, all in Spanish. It aired only the children’s shows from the PBS lineup, including the limited number with a Spanish SAP (secondary audio program) soundtrack. The station wanted Spanish versions of the rest of the PBS Kids shows.
Thirteen current staff positions and eight vacant positions are being eliminated at PBS headquarters in Arlington, Va., and six “new or restructured” positions will be added, PBS President Paula Kerger said in a letter to the system July 13. Kerger blamed the “ongoing economic challenges faced by our system” and said PBS made the changes “to focus efforts in areas with the greatest value to the public media system in a time of budgetary constraints.”
PBS declined to verify individual departures or say what departments are affected. Several changes center on programming, which is “a key priority of the FY12 Strategic Plan,” Kerger’s letter said, “and part of a multiyear effort to transform PBS’ primetime lineup in order to grow audience and increase the amount of time viewers watch PBS programs.”
The programming community was surprised to hear that Steven Gray and two other top program screeners are gone. Gray, who had been v.p. of program development and editorial management since 1990, oversaw a staff of nine and reported directly to John Wilson, chief programming exec. Both of Gray’s senior directors of programming, Sandy Heberer and Allison Winshell, also left.
Puerto Rico’s government-controlled WIPR dropped its PBS membership on July 1 — the fourth member station to quit this year. Puerto Rico TV, which produces and broadcasts mostly in Spanish, carried only the English versions of PBS Kids programs. A separate station — Sistema TV (WMTJ), licensed to the private Ana G. Méndez University System — carries a selection of general audience PBS programs.
PBS lost WIPR fees amounting to $713,000 a year. The network earlier lost KCET in Los Angeles on Jan. 1 and two Florida stations as of July 1: Orlando’s WMFE-TV, and Daytona’s WDSC-TV, which shared their service area with a third station, which continues as a PBS outlet. Pedro Rua, WIPR’s executive v.p., said WIPR and PBS negotiated for about a year but could not reach an agreement that would retain the station as a member.
With a nod to mission — and a bid for more major donors — PBS is spotlighting the arts for nine weeks this fall, hoping to bring them back as a regular feature of Friday nights. Productions in the first PBS Arts Fall Festival range from the Los Angeles Opera’s Il Postino to the broadcast premiere of Cameron Crowe’s documentary on grunge-rock pioneers Pearl Jam. The network pulled together some $2 million in funding for the shows, each paired with a different locale and station. The festival will culminate with a yet-to-be-announced fundraising special during December pledge drives. Ratings-wise, it’s a risky move.
The Public Broadcasting Service (“PBS”) is committed to serving the public interest by providing content of the highest quality that enriches the marketplace of ideas, unencumbered by commercial imperative. Throughout PBS’s history, four fundamental principles have guided that commitment. Editorial integrity: PBS content should embrace the highest commitment to excellence, professionalism, intellectual honesty and transparency. In its news and information content, accuracy should be the cornerstone. Quality: PBS content should be distinguished by professionalism, thoroughness, and a commitment to experimentation and innovation.
Software vulnerabilities, including an outdated operating system used by PBS.org, allowed the pirate band of hackers LulzSec to sail deep into the innards of the network’s main website over Memorial Day weekend. The marauders were retaliating for a Frontline documentary about WikiLeaks broadcast five days earlier. The hackers gave their assault a playful air, invading PBS NewsHour’s site and briefly posting a false report that the late rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were actually hanging out in New Zealand. Techs at PBS.org and at the NewsHour spent hours regaining control as the cyberattack exposed contact information for hundreds of staffers, stations, producers and press, as well as several internal PBS databases. Site managers “were playing cat and mouse” with LulzSec, said Travis Daub, NewsHour creative director.
The traditional pledge-drive mantra brags about a piece of public television’s ancestral DNA: “PBS — your home for quality, uninterrupted programming.”
So the public reacted fairly predictably when PBS announced at this month’s annual meeting in Orlando that it’s considering internal promotional spots as part of its primetime revamp. As one blogger quipped, “Even though it wouldn’t involve actual commercials, I honestly think that Fred Rogers wouldn’t be happy with this idea.”
But some public TV programmers have responded more with curiosity than with outrage. They realize that the PBS schedule loses hundreds of thousands of viewers between shows and has for years. And by clustering compatible programs, as PBS plans to do for the fall, stations can retain more viewers through the station break. The audience isn’t keen on sitting through the present hodgepodge of video snippets between shows: some eight minutes of national and local underwriting spots, promos, program credits, network and station branding and teases.
PBS’s budget for next year reflects a harsh reality: Revenues from member stations are flat for a third straight year, and scant other income opportunities lie ahead. The all-important annual program budget, as projected for fiscal year 2012, will remain at about $200 million, where it’s been stalled for a decade. For the first time in the past five years, there will be no new children’s series. The News and Public Affairs Initiative is on hold. PBS is retooling its primetime schedule to attract more viewers and underwriters and negotiating to push down program production costs per hour.
PBS has postponed the rollout of an online news aggregation site called PBSnews.org that it had planned to start in January or February. … Plans for the news site had grown out of the PBS News and Public Affairs Initiative and a report filed almost two years ago by Tom Bettag, a network news veteran …
Don’t tell the county fire marshal, but the president of PBS keeps working while her staff evacuates the building in deference to a fire alarm. Kerger travels, meets future donors, smiles dazzlingly at galas, and works some more with the determination of a distance runner, which she is.Here she tells readers:
PBS will propose hot-switching station breaks to help build audience flow, though the new practice would make it hard for stations to slide programs around the schedule,
The network needs to raise immediately spendable money, though she wants it to start accumulating an endowment,
Why PBS didn’t promise Bill Moyers a slot on Friday night in particular. Kerger spoke with Current editors in her conference room at PBS headquarters in Arlington, Va. The transcript is edited. Current: The proposed PBS budget for next year makes a point of concentrating attention on primetime.
Jim Lehrer, who has reported the news of the day for more than 50 years, became part of it May 12 when he announced that he will step away from the weeknight anchor desk at PBS NewsHour in June. A big Washington Post story the next day, dominating the feature section, lauded him as “one of America’s most respected newsmen.” It estimated that come June 6, when Lehrer cuts back to once-weekly appearances, he will have anchored some 8,000 broadcasts “and a few zillion newsmaker interviews.”
This week (May 19) Lehrer turns 77. “I feel good about this,” Lehrer told Current May 13. “I thought I might have second thoughts, but no. This was my idea, I planned it, I worked out a way to do it.” That planning began about three years ago, Lehrer says.
WMFE’s sale of its TV station in Orlando, Fla., leaves two smaller public stations reluctant to assume the role of big kid on the block. Other PBS member stations in the state are now discussing how to provide the full PBS schedule to Orlando, the country’s 19th largest TV market, according to Rick Schneider, chair of the Florida Public Broadcasting Service and president of Miami’s WPBT. The Orlando area’s largest PBS station will become a new outlet for the Daystar Television religious broadcasting chain. The buyer is Community Educators of Orlando Inc., based in Texas and headed by Daystar chief exec Marcus Lamb and his wife, Joni Lamb. The nonprofit evangelical Christian broadcaster owns some 70 stations and runs programming on about 80 more.
