Current (https://current.org/tag/television-programs-content-news/page/9/)
PBS is reconfiguring its lineup of weekend news programs, backing an expansion of the NewsHour and giving late-night interviewer Charlie Rose a new slot in its Friday-night public affairs block.
Sesame Workshop, production home to the iconic pubTV children’s program Sesame Street, announced Tuesday that it is laying off 10 percent of its workforce, or about 30 positions. The workshop’s most recent audited statements, for fiscal 2012, reflect a $24.3 million loss. That compares with a $10.8 million loss for the previous fiscal year and a $130,000 loss for FY10. Cash on-hand also plunged over the past several years, from $50.5 million in FY10, to $29.1 million in FY11 and $10 million in FY12. For FY12, Sesame Workshop was able to pare $9 million in expenses from year-to-year, largely from a reduction in production and development.
Programs on public television received 13 creative arts honors and one broadcast statuette in Daytime Emmy Award ceremonies Friday and Sunday in Los Angeles.
In a first for the station, Rochester’s WXXI has premiered a series on the Web, following sculptor Albert Paley as he creates 13 works of public art.
When PBS unveiled its fall slate of primetime programs during its recent conference in Miami Beach, Fla., in May, many of the featured titles were notably missing one thing: presenting or producing stations that typically help shepherd series through the PBS editorial process.
The author and illustrator of the book that inspired the PBS Kids series Martha Speaks is claiming that producing station WGBH owes her thousands in unpaid royalties after misleading her about ancillary revenues generated from the series.
PBS NewsHour is shutting offices in Denver and San Francisco and eliminating several positions at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., Executive Producer Linda Winslow and Bo Jones, president of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, told staff in a memo Monday. In all, 10 workers are affected, in addition to several jobs that will remain unfilled, NewsHour spokesperson Anne Bell told Current. The program is also planning future changes in technical production processes, in cooperation with co-producer WETA, “in order to streamline and further digitize operations,” the memo said. NewsHour’s fiscal year begins July 1, and all changes will roll out over the next six months, Bell said. “We believe the staff restructuring and production changes, along with continuing web investment, will make us stronger and enable us to be more effective and nimble,” the memo said.
The Fred Rogers Co., the production company that continues to create new PBS Kids series a decade after the death of its founder, last week moved out of its original home within Pittsburgh’s WQED and into a larger office on the city’s South Side. Rogers, the star and creator of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was one of the founders of WQED, according to Kevin Morrison, Rogers Company c.o.o. “So when he formed his own nonprofit to make Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in 1971, it was natural to stay in the building, especially since the series used the studio there,” he said. The last episode of the iconic PBS children’s show, which was primarily a live-action production, was shot in WQED’s studio in 2000. Since then, the company has developed new animated series for PBS Kids — including Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and the forthcoming Peg + Cat — and has outgrown its office space within WQED’s facility. The move “was an emotional goodbye for all involved,” said George Hazimanolis, WQED spokesperson.
Wes Moore, the host of Beyond Belief on OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network and author of the bestseller The Other Wes Moore, won CPB’s Thought Leader Award, which honors those who assist public media in the areas of education, journalism and the arts. A U.S. Army combat veteran who serves on the board of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and as founder of STAND!, an organization that supports youth caught up in the criminal justice system, Moore also hosts the forthcoming PBS primetime series Coming Back, which chronicles the returns of nine veterans from conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Wes Moore is an inspiring advocate for America’s youth and a champion for public media’s American Graduate initiative,” said Patricia Harrison, CPB president. The award was presented during the PBS Annual Meeting in Miami Beach, Fla.
Send awards notices to [email protected].
In a citation honoring Maine Public TV’s Kelly Luoma as the Charles Impaglia Programmer of the Year, PTPA lauded her “for tirelessly advocating for the audience and the programming community within public television, even when it is not politically correct . . . [and for] the singular achievement of increasing a station’s viewership every year since the digital transition, while the system has shown whole week and primetime declines.”
In another award presented during last month’s PTPA meeting in Miami Beach, Fla., Kentucky Educational Television’s Craig Cornwell was lauded for achievements in local scheduling. TRAC Media Services, which manages PTPA, cited Cornwell “for ensuring that local productions always get prime placement, for understanding a market where Best of the Joy of Painting often equals the Antiques Roadshow repeat on Saturday .
As public television’s chief program exec and top producers unveiled highlights of the fall 2013 primetime schedule at the PBS Annual Meeting May 13–16 in Miami Beach, Fla., the network also signaled its willingness to invest in genres with track records of building viewership and differentiating public TV from its cable competitors. PBS paired with BBC Worldwide to acquire Last Tango in Halifax, a hit contemporary British drama starring Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid as childhood sweethearts who reunite after 60 years apart. Call the Midwife, a drama that PBS chief programmer Beth Hoppe bought to boost Sunday-night viewership in fall 2012, will return for a third season in 2014. PBS’s strategy to build affinities between programs scheduled together during primetime, initiated last year, appears to be paying off. As network and member-station programmers in Miami celebrated their recent ratings successes, they also looked ahead at plans to build on them.
Assignment: The World, the longest-running social-studies instructional TV program in the country, broadcast its last episode May 23. WXXI in Rochester, N.Y., which produced the ITV series for 54 years, announced the cancellation May 20. “Assignment: The World has experienced an increase in news acquisition costs, which were unfortunately not offset by program funding,” said Elissa Orlando, WXXI v.p. for television, in the announcement. “WXXI is saddened by this decision, but will continue to discover new ways to serve the educational needs of students.”
Every season, students could watch 32 weekly episodes, 15 minutes in length, in classrooms, either on the air or on-demand over the Internet. Teej Jenkins, the last host to anchor the show, presented a roundup of news events from the past week; teachers and students often interact with the show through writing prompts, issue questions and polls.
New Jersey Television and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) of Newark are partnering on a new six-part cabaret music television series, American Songbook at NJPAC, to debut on NJTV and WNET this fall. The series will be produced from two live performance sessions at the center to be taped in June. Performers include Tom Wopat, Valerie Simpson, Rebecca Luker and Maude Maggart, and the duos Sandy Stewart and Bill Charlap and Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley. Each will perform 40-minute sets and sit for a Q&A session. NJPAC will donate proceeds of ticket sales to the Actors Fund, which assists professionals in performing arts and entertainment.
Two events at Arizona PBS’s Eight on May 23 will launch promotions tied to the three-part, six-hour documentary series Latino Americans, coming to PBS this fall.
The whole idea behind American Masters, the biographical series produced at New York’s WNET, was to build a library of America’s cultural history. To meet that goal, Executive Producer Susan Lacy had to mount high-quality productions in sufficient quantity to make an impression on TV viewers and potential subjects.
PBS will present a special eight-episode series about homeowners struggling to rebuild.
In an extended interview with Current, Frontline creator David Fanning recalls how he came to work at Boston’s WGBH more than three decades ago, and how the show is positioning itself for the future.
Aiming to build on its successful strategy to boost viewing on Sunday nights, PBS acquired a new hit drama from the BBC, Last Tango in Halifax.
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is adapting a book about cancer into a six-hour series for public TV, reports the New York Times. The project was originally conceived by Sharon Rockefeller, CEO of WETA in Washington, D.C., who read Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer in late 2010. Rockefeller herself had been treated for advanced cancer. The broadcast will coincide with an outreach campaign.
As of May 8, owners of Roku Internet streaming TV set-top boxes gained access to the first-ever curated collection of PBS shows to be distributed for free on-demand viewings directly to television sets.