Civic partnerships for digital TV: an idea grantmakers like
Originally published in Current, July 5, 1999
By Steve Behrens
With expanded digital channel capacity ahead, an advance party of public TV leaders is looking to create new wellsprings of programming and funding through partnerships with local universities, libraries and other civic institutions.
This prospect--that public TV might put some DTV power behind voter participation, cultural events or other community initiatives--is reviving foundations' interests in pubcasting. The Ford Foundation, which gave many public TV stations their first major funding in the 1950s and 1960s, has stayed away from public TV policy and infrastructure for years. But now it's backing an APTS project to devise DTV-era models for stations' service and revenue streams, APTS announced last week.
The idea of multilateral community alliances, promoted for years by former PBS President Larry Grossman, is getting a systematic tryout at Connecticut Public Television, with Grossman chairing the oversight committee and with financial backing from the Ford and Markle foundations [related article].
Connecticut network chief Jerry Frankln (second from left), talks at the Penn State meeting with members of the network's Strategic Development Committee, including Fellows, Somerset-Ward and Grossman.
And Pennsylvania State University co-sponsored a three-day, CPB-funded conference June 21-23 that focused on community collaborations and DTV. Jack Willis--the former Twin Cities pubcaster who is now a fellow with George Soros's foundation, the Open Society Institute--called the Penn State conference "one of the best public television meetings I've ever attended."
Planners of the conference decided last week to continue work on the national level, while stations develop local plans, said Hartford Gunn Institute President Jim Fellows, a planner of the event [and chairman of the Current Publishing Committee]. "There seems to be a momentum about this that ... needs sustaining," he said afterwards.
Seven prototype station plans
The Ford Foundation is giving APTS a planning grant of about $375,000 to develop "service/business models" for seven licensees, according to APTS Vice President Marilyn Mohrman-Gillis. The seven are: KCET, Los Angeles; WTTW, Chicago; Maryland PTV; Idaho PTV; KLRU, Austin; WPSX, Penn State; and WTVP, Peoria. Two licensees farther along in their DTV planning--the Connecticut network and Washington's WETA--will also participate.
The hope is that the plans will serve as prototypes for other stations. APTS has engaged the Bortz Media & Sports consulting firm to work with the seven.
At the same time, Ford is giving smaller DTV planning grants to the Benton Foundation (for a broader look at public media), the Independent Television Service, the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (media arts centers) and CPB's minority consortia, said Gary Poon, a consultant to the foundation.
Though the Ford and Carnegie foundations were active in building pubcasting's infrastructure, decades ago, they and other grantmakers have generally spent their pubcasting grants on specific productions that fit the foundations' objectives.
"They made the shows but they did not elevate a vision of what public-service media should be," commented Larry Kirkman, executive director of the media-oriented Benton Foundation in Washington. But now "many of the foundations that invested in Eyes on the Prize or P.O.V. are now focused on the infrastructure issues."
Ford grantmakers are realizing that they must pay attention to the infrastructure that delivers programs, including revenue models for programs delivered by digital media, and questions about pubcasting's mission, said John Phillip Santos, a program officer in the foundation's Media Arts and Culture division, in an interview. "What is going to be sustainable, and how stations want to use the digital real estate, are key questions for us."
Providing further evidence of its growing interest in media policy, Ford this spring hired Gigi Sohn, an advocate for public media and reliable critic of public TV commercialism, to work on policy analysis. Sohn was previously executive director of the Media Access Project and a member of the Gore Commission.
Meanwhile, a variety of foundations are backing People for Better TV, a new coalition of large membership associations like NAACP and NOW, which debuted in May, as well as the fledgling Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting [earlier story].
The promises of DTV capacity are not the only cause for foundations' greater interest in pubcasting. Several major grantmakers have had changes at the top in recent years--Vartan Gregorian arriving at the Carnegie Corporation, Susan Berresford at Ford and Zoe Baird at Markle.
"Foundations are very interested in talking to public broadcasting, especially if it's talking in a wider context than public broadcasting itself," said Richard Somerset-Ward, senior fellow with the Benton Foundation, who discussed public TV's new wave of civic involvement in a talk at the Council on Foundations convention in April [text as printed in Current, June 7].
Grossman advocated a "grand alliance" for cable programming between cultural groups and public TV when he was PBS president in the early 1980s, and later a scaled-down alliance to provide programming for the proposed Horizons cable network.
"Larry was so far ahead of everyone else back in the '80s," said Connecticut PTV President Jerry Franklin in an interview. "No one understood what he was talking about."
But people are beginning to come around. He returned to the notion in a 1997 lecture at the National Academy of Public Administration and then discussed the Connecticut project at a February meeting of New York institutiional leaders called by Carnegie's Gregorian and Richard Leone of the Century Foundation (formerly the Twentieth Century Fund).
No raids on partners' wallets
Foundations play a natural role in the idea because colleges, orchestras and hospitals usually aren't overflowing with spare millions, and are already wary of stations that may compete for philanthropy.
The objective for partnerships should be creating new products, "not raiding one anothers' sources of money," warned Joey Rodger, president of the Urban Libraries Council, at the Penn State Conference. With media converging and everyone going digital, nonprofits will be getting into each others' businesses anyway, Rodger said. They may benefit if they do so collaboratively.
What the partner institutions provide may be valuable program content instead of funding, but the relationship may enable both partners to tap new funding sources. It may make friends throughout the community, including elected officials, said Grossman. "Every legislator and congressman is an alumnus of someplace."
Collaboration also may mean selectively surrendering the stubborn independence of the journalistic tradition.
"If you engage in a partnership, you cannot be the gatekeeper," Grossman said in the conference. The station must instead provide a medium for others' work.
Editorial control "clearly is an issue," Franklin said in an interview. "We decided not to try and answer than issue before we get started. ... I admit, I don't have the answer."
What if one of the Connecticut network's partners wanted to air a training course for just five people on a statewide TV channel? Franklin acknowledged the problem: "You're using this tremendous delivery system to reach a handful of people."
Sharing control will be even harder with younger institutions and those with different values. If a partnership gives media access to new voices, they may "say something that is offensive to the old elite," commented Hugh Donahue of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania.
Coming apart as a country
The Penn State event, "The Role of Public Service Media in the Digital Telecommunications Age: Defining a Strategic Vision," drew about 75 participants to a hotel in Bethesda, Md.
The conference, well received by most participants, was planned by Mark Erstling, now senior v.p. of APTS, when he was g.m. of WPSX at Penn State, along with Jorge Reina Schement, co-director of the university's Institute for Information Policy. CPB, the Benton Foundation and the Hartford Gunn Institute joined in the planning, and CPB paid the on-site costs.
Penn State speakers led off by stating social challenges. Americans will have to develop "a learning society," said James H. Ryan, the university's v.p. for outreach and cooperative extensive. To maintain competency in the fast-changing world, workers will have to spend the equivalent of a full year of college study every seven years.
Schement predicted that neighborliness and homogeneity--major comforts of American nostalgia--are on the wane if not gone. With a flurry of statistics, the sociologist described a fragmented America with more people living by themselves and disconnected from neighbors, most households with no children and limited interest in supporting public education, and regions diverging in ethnicity and civic values.
We Americans deal more with strangers than acquaintances, often know different ethnic groups only through media images, increasingly consume different media than our neighbors, and create new communities online that are the "thinnest in human history," Schement said.
After the talk, stunned Pittsburgh pubcaster George Miles predicted aloud: "We're going to come apart as a country."
The disturbing demographics did not dominate the discussion during the next day-and-a-half, however. Mark Lloyd, a leader in the new People for Better TV group and head of the Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy, said as the conference was ending that he had not even heard "whispers" of Schement's demographics. Lloyd also noted that few conference participants were from ethnic minorities.
Though the event attracted numerous pubcasters and key foundation execs, it had sparse attendance from the worlds of libraries and other civic institutions. More were invited but they tended to stay home, Erstling explained.
Related story: Connecticut network tries "Mapping the Assets," 1999.
Outside link: Penn State conference web site, including RealVideo files of major presentations.
Web page created July 11, 1999
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