Next year’s Public Media Development and Marketing Conference, the annual event organized by pubradio’s Development Exchange Inc., will include a new track for pubTV professionals, produced by PBS. The conference runs July 12-14 in Seattle. The track will focus on pledge practices, fundraising and community engagement around children’s programming, and television-specific research. DEI and PBS announced the collaboration in a statement Dec. 6.
As public broadcasting braces for expected cuts from its most predictable revenue source — the annual CPB appropriation — system leaders are talking as much about saving money as raising more of it. Collaboration and consolidation — ideals that pubcasters have long espoused but rarely implemented — were buzzwords at this month’s Public Media Marketing and Development Conference in Pittsburgh. Top fundraisers, station execs and analysts urged their peers to tear down walls that separate local stations and cooperate to preserve and strengthen audience service.
Keynoters Fred and Paul Jacobs, sibling radio consultants from Detroit, delivered the starkest diagnosis and most urgent prescription — formation of a commission to analyze station finances and design a restructured, pared-down system of stations. Pubradio leaders already working in these trenches described a new strategy for preserving service as more universities spin off their stations. In his first major speech since promotion to chief exec of American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, Jon McTaggart said pubradio can tackle its funding challenges and competitive threats by relentlessly focusing on audience service.