PBS

Securing the union, pumping up the volume, bowling in a league

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From the opening moments of its 2001 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PBS drew on the city’s role in U.S. history and a series of in-person presentations to foster pride and other warm fuzzies among 1,300 conference attendees. In a spoof of Antiques Roadshow with actors as the founding fathers, APTS President John Lawson presented a letter by Alexander Hamilton to appraisers Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. “We must secure our union on solid foundations — it is a job for Hercules,” Hamilton wrote. Lawson feigned amazement when the letter was deemed to be of “immense worth.” For plenary sessions in a convention center ballroom, PBS put on highly produced shows, with musical performances, staged interviews, scripts rolling on multiple teleprompters and program-related stunts replacing many of the clip screenings of past years.

Public Media Policybase

The Declaration of Interdependence, 2001

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Facing the first major station struggle of her 16 months as PBS president — over the perennial public TV issue of common carriage — Pat Mitchell introduced a “Declaration of Interdependence” at the network’s annual meeting June 14, 2001. The document summarizes major public TV objectives, gives a deep bow to stations’ local role and refers to a recent refinement: the aim to build “social capital” in American communities. See also Current coverage of the 2001 meeting. There comes a time in the history of public television, when the people we serve demand of us something more;

Because, they hold these truths to be self-evident:

Americans are first and foremost citizens, not consumers. Americans have an unalienable right to free access to content that challenges their minds, lifts their spirits, and stirs their souls.

System/Policy

Spending goals, slowdown prompt 60 layoffs at PBS

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Anticipating the rollout of a new strategic plan and budget proposal,
PBS laid off 60 employees March 15. Although the 9 percent cutback of positions was spread across the company,
the programming department saw some of the most significant changes in what
PBS describes as a “strategic realignment” under President Pat Mitchell. Among the team of regional programming execs that Mitchell began hiring
last summer, Jacoba “Coby” Atlas and John Wilson were elevated as co-chief
programming executives. Atlas, PBS’s West Coast exec, now has responsibility
for all primetime and news/public affairs programs. Wilson remains in charge
of children’s content, fundraising and syndicated programs, and scheduling. Pat Hunter, formerly v.p. of programming administration, was promoted to
senior v.p. and assigned project management duties.

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.

Public Media Policybase

Stations’ Forum petition seeks to reorganize PBS, October 2000

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The National Forum for Public Television Executives, meeting in Dallas Oct. 2-4, 2000, agreed upon the following petition to put before the PBS Members Meeting later that month, Oct. 24. The petition is divided into three amendments to a less specific “placeholder” petition that the Forum had submitted earlier. In addition to the amendment on Organizational Change (immediately below), there are amendments on System Educational Strategy and New Business Models.

Programs/Content

Several chefs prepare new drama menu for PBS

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After years of charges that PBS has ignored American drama in favor of
British imports, the tides are turning. This fall will bring a host of dramatic
works, from televised stage productions to cinematic interpretations of
literature to short new plays filmed in high-definition video. What ties
them together is their renewed focus on literature and theater that is distinctly
red, white and blue. Send a transatlantic wire: American drama is back. Instead of entrusting the genre to a single production unit, as it did
with American Playhouse in 1982-94, PBS is now buying dramas from
several production units, each with its own approach.

Programs/Content

PBS President Pat Mitchell: ‘I think I’ll be learning every day of the year’

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Since she was hired as PBS president early in February [2000], Pat Mitchell has met with 60 or 70 of public TV’s managers, and station board leaders as well, in trips to stations and at the APTS Annual Meeting. To oversee station relations, she hired the network’s former board vice chairman, Wayne Godwin, away from Cincinnati’s WCET (he starts work this week at PBS). And she’s expected to announce further initiatives starting next weekend at the PBS Annual Meeting in Nashville. Mitchell, a longtime producer in commercial TV, was previously head of Time Warner’s CNN Productions, based in Atlanta. She still has yet to pack her household and move to the D.C. area.

System/Policy

For the first time, a producer leads PBS

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PBS’s new president is Pat Mitchell, departing head of CNN Productions and
Time Inc. Television, whose appointment was ratified by the PBS Board Feb. 4. She is the first producer to take PBS’s top job, and is as comfortable in
front of cameras as behind them, having performed in numerous on-air roles. Her major projects for CNN included the Peabody-winning Cold War,
a 24-part documentary series that she executive produced with Jeremy Isaacs,
and Millenium: A Thousand Years of History, also supervised with Isaacs. A search committee reached an “enthusiastically unanimous” decision to recommend
Mitchell as the best candidate for the post last week, said Wayne Godwin,
committee co-chair and president of WCET in Cincinnati.

Public Media Policybase

By-laws of Public Broadcasting Service, 2000

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This is the PBS Board’s governing document as amended Feb. 6, 2000. For comparison, see also
the original PBS bylaws of 1969, and the most recent version, amended November 2011. Article I
Name
The Corporation shall be known as the PUBLIC BROADCASTING SERVICE (PBS). Article II
Offices
2.1 Registered Office.

System/Policy

PBS and Nesmith settle home-video dispute but are mum on price

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LOS ANGELES — The 63-month-old legal fight between public
TV and the former distributor of PBS Home Video, Michael Nesmith, was “resolved
amicably,” both sides told the U.S. District Court here July 7. PBS–appealing damages of $47 million levied by a federal jury in February–agreed
not to reveal what it will end up paying, said spokesman Tom Epstein, but
he noted that all settlements are compromises. “A happy finish for everyone,” said PBS’s lead attorney Jonathan D. Schiller,
as he left the courtroom. A grinning Nesmith sought out Schiller, his opponent,
and gave him an apparently gracious “thank you.” PBS President Ervin Duggan later wrote in a memo to his staff that the network
will pay the settlement out of proceeds from its self-supporting, revenue-generating
businesses, and services to stations will be “unhindered,” according to Epstein.

People

Rumors rampant as Ottenhoff steps down

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Chief Operating Officer Bob Ottenhoff is leaving the No. 2 position at PBS after eight years working for Ervin Duggan and the previous president, Bruce Christensen.

News of the change, already circulating in heavy rotation at the PBS Annual Meeting when Duggan announced it during the June 6 opening session, mystified station executives and even some PBS Board members. It added a new story element to what one former board member called “a range of colossally uninformed mispeculation” that Duggan was either (a) confidently moving ahead, (b) soon to lose his own job, or (c) both. High-ranking board members said nothing. Beth Wolfe, PBS’s chief financial officer since 1988, will take oversight of Ottenhoff’s departments, with the new title of chief administrative officer.

Michael Nesmith wins $47 million in video suit against PBS

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Almost five years after PBS sued its former home-video distributor, the legal action
boomeranged last week, hitting the network with a $46.8 million judgment. PBS said it was shocked by the outcome. “We’re going to take aggressive steps to
appeal this,” said Bob Ottenhoff, PBS chief operating officer. “I think the jury
didn’t understand the steps PBS had been taking all along to make this a satisfactory
venture.” But after PBS had lost hope, the court found, the behavior of its executives crossed a
line.

Programs/Content

American Experience: where we’ve come from

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On a warm summer day in 1946 I find myself, somewhat improbably, at the helm of a U.S. Navy ocean tug, threading through a crowded, palm-fringed Pacific atoll called Bikini. We stay only long enough to anchor the derelict ship we’ve towed here from the Philippines. Several days later, making slow progress east to Honolulu, we learn that the wreck we had pulled into that pristine island sanctuary had been obliterated — along with everything else in the lagoon — by two atomic bombs. More than a few of my shipmates are bitter that, unlike others, they had been denied an extremely close look at the destruction. But for most of us it is simply an isolated event, one among many in those rather bewildering post-war days following the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Tech

HDTV debut: full-blown spectacle

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Even on crappy old analog TV — the way nearly all of its audience will see it Nov. 9 — PBS’s premiere high-def offering is a Whitman’s Sampler of eye candy. Made by public TV’s most experienced high-def production team, at KCTS in Seattle,
“Chihuly Over Venice” amuses your eye with color while impressing you with the
glassworking skills of Dale Chihuly’s sidemen, and introducing you to the glass master, a
mercurial Seattle character. Producer/director Gary Gibson, who documented a Chihuly exhibition in 1993, returned to the artist more than two years ago to begin the station’s next big HDTV project–the first without much aerial footage, after a successful string of Over This-and-That travelogues. The occasion was Chihuly’s ambitious plan to make a series of large chandeliers in
major glassworking regions — Seattle, Finland, Ireland, Mexico and Venice — and then hanging
the works over the canals of Venice.

Tech

Pubcasting on the Web, three years later

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PBS Online is celebrating its third anniversary this week with a doubled
staff, an expanded mission, an upgraded teachers’ service that opens next
month, and a much faster connection with the Internet, to be turned on this
month. In the three years since PBS launched its site, the Web has grown to 39
million users a week in this country, with online ad sales approaching $1
billion. During the same period, public broadcasting’s largest web site,
PBS’s, has built an audience of more than 2 million unique visitors a month,
who choose among some 50,000 pages. Things have moved so fast, says PBS Online
chief Cindy Johanson, “it seems like it was 10 years ago, not three.” PBS expanded its Internet connection by one-third last February, and demand
soon had it hitting the ceiling again.

Programs/Content

Ambrosino and ‘Nova’: making stories that go ‘bang’

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In the first of May in 1971, Michael Ambrosino sat at his desk at 25 Wetherby Gardens in London writing a six-page, single-spaced letter to Michael Rice, vice president for programs at WGBH, Boston. “This project in science,” he wrote, “would begin to fill an appalling gap in PBS service. It would attempt to explain and relate science to a public that must be aware of its impact. “The strand would be broad enough to cover all of science and . .

System/Policy

Managers try to form a more perfect union

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Austin, Tex. — The Convention of Stations on Nov. 5 [1997] created a Forum for public TV’s national decision-making, opening the way for new cooperation in the fragmented field as well as new varieties of bickering. The new Forum may find itself locking horns with PBS’s board, for instance. Several backers spoke of the Forum as a means of giving guidance to PBS and reallocating functions in the field.

Arts programming

‘Great Performances’ team brought stage virtuosos into the videoscape

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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. Venza talked with Current Editor Steve Behrens in the offices of the arts unit at WNET.

Development

PTV Weekend: Notes on Questions, Concerns, Strengths and Benefits

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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. Grossman, former President of the Public Broadcasting Service, The Hartford Gunn Institute was commissioned to explore with key leaders in public television their questions and concerns concerning the strengths and benefits of what has come to be called PTV WEEKEND.

Programs/Content

Hull dived into the PBS archives, found himself among old friends

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After a year of combing through PBS’s archives, Ron Hull has uncovered a treasure-trove of programs worth reviving one way or another. Though he still spends part of each week in Nebraska, where he teaches a university class in international broadcasting, Hull has made considerable progress on his special assignment at PBS headquarters in Virginia: he has read through some 12,000 old file folders, come up with 850 programs that might be useful, and begun the gargantuan task of screening the first 10 minutes of these myriad possibilities. He’s been assisted in this by Nancy Dillon, assistant director of program data and analysis. The revival prospects that he’s found could come back through the National Program Service, be syndicated through PBS Select or PBS Plus or be offered as fundraising programs. When Bob Ottenhoff, PBS executive v.p., recruited Hull for this assignment last spring, he also asked the veteran programmer to look for shows that could be released on home video, sold overseas, or packaged for a dedicated cable service. The idea was to cull the archives for programs that could find new broadcast audiences or generate new revenue streams for PBS.