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Big Money 2012 is an ongoing cross-pollination between PBS’s Frontline and American Public Media’s Marketplace that works to incorporate traditional news documentaries with online multimedia reports and print investigations.
Filmmaker Dyllan McGee’s documentary Makers: Women Who Make America features interviews with 70 accomplished women.
Turn on the black light, cue up a Doors album and sink into your beanbag chair: The American Revolution, a documentary coming to public TV in August 2013, is going to transport you to a time when radio riled America’s youth.
PBS topped all the other broadcast networks, as runners-up ABC and CBS each won seven. POV’s “Last Train Home,” a film about Chinese migrant workers who go home to celebrate New Year’s, won in two categories — best documentary and outstanding business and economic reporting (long form) — while “Armadillo,” which tracked Danish soldiers in Afghanistan, was cited for editing in the documentary and long form category. Also in the long-form category, “Enemies of the People,” which examined Cambodia’s killing fields, won for outstanding investigative journalism; and “Where Soldiers Come From,” about National Guard recruits from northern Michigan, was cited for its continuing coverage of a news story. All films aired during 2011, POV’s 25th season. “Many of the filmmakers honored tonight have taken tremendous risks to tell these stories of common people caught up in extraordinary circumstances,” said Cynthia López, co-executive producer of POV.
As a Masterpiece production competing against other miniseries, movies and specials, Great Expectations received Emmys for outstanding achievement in costume design (Annie Symons, Yvonne Duckett), art direction (David Roger, Paul Ghirardani, Jo Kornstein), main title design (Nic Benns, Rodi Kaya, Tom Browich) and cinematography (Florian Hoffmeister). In addition, the Masterpiece production Page Eight won an Emmy for original main title theme music (Paul Englishby). Other PBS winners included the Independent Lens production Have You Heard From Johannesburg, a seven-part series about the global anti-apartheid movement that received a juried award for exceptional merit in documentary filmmaking. Cited were Connie Field, producer; Lois Vossen, series senior producer; and Sally Jo Fifer, executive producer. Geoffrey Ward received the Emmy for nonfiction writing for scripting Ken Burns’s Prohibition: A Nation of Hypocrites.
This year’s Pipeline survey lists 120 television projects planned, underway, or completed for future seasons on public TV, beginning with Winter 2013.
Producers of the documentary As Goes Janesville found themselves, quite by accident, in the midst of three national news stories during filming.
PBS’s yearlong effort to build more audience flow in its primetime schedule moves into new territory with the Sept. 30 U.S. broadcast premiere of Call the Midwife, a limited-run BBC drama that will attempt to draw in Masterpiece fans and keep them watching an hour longer on Sunday nights.
America By The Numbers, a PBS election special produced by Maria Hinojosa, looks at the demographic shifts found in U.S. Census data, focusing on people whose engagement in community life exemplifies the increased diversity of American civic life.
With the NewsHour‘s Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff stepping into co-anchor roles for PBS’s coverage of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, producers have reconfigured their set and editorial plans for the 18 hours of live broadcasts that begin airing on PBS stations on Tuesday.
The coverage, airing at 8 p.m. ET through Thursday on most PBS stations, marks the passing of the torch from retired anchor Jim Lehrer, and makes Ifill and Woodruff the first female anchor due to co-anchor coverage of the major party conventions…
Producers of Austin City Limits have recorded more than 800 performances of the PBS rock music series during the past 37 years, but there are hours of footage that loyal viewers and music fans don’t even know about. Access to never-broadcast performances will come soon under a deal with Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame…
After discussions lasting nearly a year, New Hampshire Public Television and Boston’s WGBH have hammered out a collaboration to coordinate program schedules and consolidate some back-office operations. The agreement stops short of a merger, and each station will remain independently owned and operated. The arrangement will bring PBS’s full common-carriage schedule to the entire state of New Hampshire beginning in October, a departure from the current setup, under which NHPTV time-shifts the PBS national lineup because of a partial signal overlap with WGBH. The cost savings from outsourcing some technical and administrative functions — including master control and broadcast technologies, membership services and financial administration — to the Massachusetts station will allow NHPTV to revive a local student quiz show, Granite State Challenge. The program went into hiatus last year after legislators zeroed out the network’s state funding.
An online-only documentary project from WGBH is channeling the Olympic spirit toward a major sporting event that receives scant media coverage yet is of great interest to under-served audiences.
PBS began mining national Nielsen data for pledge-drive audience insights in 2009, but it hasn’t learned what to do about declining pledge ratings.
Current’s Pledge Pipeline previews 17 shows heading to public TV on-air membership drives in December 2012 and March 2013.
LOS ANGELES — It’s unlikely that PBS will reinstate Fred Willard as announcer of Market Warriors, its new antiquing reality show, if Los Angeles prosecutors decline to press charges for his July 17 arrest for lewd conduct in a Los Angeles adult theater. The comedic actor, whose role on the show was limited to voiceover announcing, was fired July 19 after news of his arrest went viral. Producers at WGBH tapped Antiques Roadshow’s Mark Walberg to replace him and to re-voice the episodes Willard had already completed. In Market Warriors, which premiered last week, antique-savvy buyers compete to buy and resell collectibles, and earn the highest returns at auction. Because Willard did not appear on screen, no scenes had to be reshot, PBS President Paula Kerger said during her July 21 executive session with the Television Critics Association.
Decades ago, a teenaged Raquel Bitton locked herself in her San Francisco bedroom, suffering miserably from her first broken heart. Her only comfort was an album by Edith Piaf, the diminutive French chanteuse known as “the Little Sparrow.”
“It is the love that you love,” Piaf sang in “C’est L’amour.” “It is love that makes you dream. It is love that wants love. It is love that makes us cry.”
“I listened to it all and came out of my room with a decision to get onstage and sing — and to love again,” Bitton said. “I put together a little revue singing Piaf’s songs, telling pieces of her stories.
Halfway through its three-year transition from one of PBS’ leading outlets to an independent public TV station in the world capital of film and television production, the new KCET is still very much a work in progress.
See also more complete story from print edition of June 25, 2012. Two top managers at Alabama Public Television were fired from their jobs June 12 with no explanation of the cause for the immediate dismissals. The Alabama Educational Television Commission came out of an executive session Tuesday afternoon and ordered veteran pubcaster Allan Pizzato and his deputy, Pauline Howland, to clean out their desks and leave APT’s headquarters in Birmingham. “All I can say is that it was an irreconcilable difference in opinion of the future direction of the station,” Pizzato told Current. “I serve at the pleasure of the board.
Though public television stations have been reluctant to solicit pledges during their daytime PBS Kids block, some are testing new approaches for tapping into viewers’ strong affinity for the shows.