Community Partnership—A Formula for Change
Nevertheless, during the past few years a number of stations have become serious about community partnering, and some of them have entered into it with real commitment, as a new way of life. The boldest, Cleveland’s ideastream, has worked closely with its community to create and build a broadband network of great power and speed—not a private ‘members only’ network like Internet2, but one that is available to all the citizens of the community. This is just the biggest of many examples of partnership in which ideastream is earning the trust of the people it serves. It is hard to analyze the prescription for such success, but an outsider looking in might note, first, that ideastream has rethought itself as “a multiple service public media organization,” not just a public broadcaster, and second, that it does not feel compelled to take the leadership position in every partnership it enters into.

What has happened in Cleveland in the past five or six years is proof that public broadcasters can play a vastly greater role in their communities than has previously been the case, but it is not easy and it is not quick. Other stations are moving in the same direction, and several of them are providing models of partnership in particular areas—between universities and local stations, between the not-for-profit sector and public television, in community archiving, in health education, in agricultural services, and in several other areas. These experiments (for that is how most of them are still thought of) are beginning to add up to something that might tentatively be thought of as the future of public television stations.

The test will be whether or not the community partnership strategy delivers new revenue streams. If it does, then a new business plan can evolve—as an augmentation of the old one rather than as a total makeover. If it doesn’t, then public television is probably doomed to struggle on under its old business plan—a plan that was designed for a different time and a different industry.

What has to happen, from my perspective, to make the strategy work? First of all, the attitude adjustment—the willingness to change the culture—has to take place within each station, from its board right down to its humblest employee. There is no point in trying to engage the community unless this change has taken place, or is taking place.

Second, since it is time-wasting and expensive to reinvent the wheel 168 times over, it is important that stations have a way of knowing what other stations are doing—what works and what doesn’t work. Public television stations, even though they meet each other fairly often, have a tendency to be isolationist—to think no other station is quite like them. One of the most amazing things about what has happened in Cleveland during the past six years, while it has been written about and spoken about a good deal—is that so few stations have thought it holds any practical applications for them. “You can do that sort of thing in Cleveland. You couldn’t do it here.” But models are created to be adapted as well as copied, and it is important that some kind of an exchange—perhaps a lab, maybe a virtual lab—is established so that stations can see some of the ‘best practices’ from other stations (and, indeed, some of the successful experiments in community partnering by libraries, hospitals, universities and other community organizations that have nothing to do with the media).

Third, the stations are going to need help, and probably a good deal more help than the central organs of public television are capable of giving, because these very fundamental experiments in community partnership will have to be undertaken while the stations are struggling to adapt to digital technology, and while most of the revenue streams on which they still rely are either flat or declining. Local and regional efforts, which should be the broad base of the strategy for the future and the means by which 168 licensees have the opportunity to move forward, would seem to be peculiarly suited to the sort of funding and involvement that local and regional foundations are capable of, and for which most of them exist.

Forty Years On
Remarkably, public television took almost no time at all to establish itself and become part of our tradition—ten years, at most. Its children’s programming and its primetime schedule, which so obviously filled a gaping hole in American television, were primarily responsible. But it was not given the means to develop and grow along with the rest of the media. When cable channels started up and stole its clothes, it was unable to respond. When its national programming should have been developing and diversifying, it was actually narrowing down to be the product of only three stations, all of them on the east coast. When the high quality and distinction of its educational archive could best have been exploited in the streaming boom, public television’s OnCourse quickly collapsed in face of commercial companies with vastly inferior content. When the stations should have been growing into vital community resources, most of them were (at best) on a plateau, cutting back on local content, and some of them were hanging on, sometimes by their fingertips. In these and many other disappointments, the spirit was generally willing, but the business plan didn’t allow for it.

Outsiders tend to think of public broadcasting as a “top down” organization. They think that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcasting Service—and even the Congress itself—will be the agents of change, if change is needed. But CPB and PBS can’t be and Congress won’t be—at least not unless Congress is prepared to allocate a tidy proportion of upcoming spectrum auction revenues as a trust fund for public broadcasting, which seems a very distant proposition at this (or any other) time. In fact, if public television is to change, it will have to be from the bottom up, from the stations right up through the system.

And this is a propitious moment for that change—a moment when new technologies have so transformed the media habits of the nation that many traditional forms of media are in real danger of becoming obsolete, but also a moment when these same technologies, by nature so flexible and adaptable, can be harnessed to do things in new, fast, and relatively cheap ways. For a local public television station, they offer a number of very timely opportunities—to provide new services in new, nonbroadcast ways; to distribute other people’s content as well as its own; to open up the possibility of new revenue streams; and to become, in general, a community enabler, a go-to organization at the heart of the community, one whose own identity is bound up in that of the community.

“The local stations must be the bedrock upon which Public Television is erected, and the instruments to which all its activities are referred.”

Thus spoke the 1967 Carnegie Commission, and it’s just as true today. If public television is to do more than survive during the next forty years, if it is to flourish, then it will be because it changed and greatly augmented its business plan in the first years of the digital dispensation (sometime between now and about 2012). And that change will have happened at the local station level, from where it will have percolated to the national, and even the international, level.

Richard Somerset-Ward
formerly Senior Fellow, Benton Foundation