ideastream:
the New "Public Media"

Origins of Public Broadcasting
There seems little doubt that the original lofty goals set out for public broadcasting remain deeply woven into the character of the organization and the aspirations of its leaders. “On a sustaining basis no one is in the space that we’re in,” says Paula Kerger, President of the Public Broadcasting System. “At the end of the day, the commercial marketplace simply is not fulfilling what public television originally set out to do, which was to use the power of media to entertain, educate and inspire. They [cable] sometimes entertain pretty well but they don’t always hit that educate and inspire part.”

While several of the 500 channels—“the vast wasteland” as former FCC Commissioner Newton Minow famously labeled television in 1961—have sought to produce high-minded programming, it rarely survives Wall Street’s demands for ever-increasing profits, which require large and loyal audiences, typically built on a formulaic “lowest common denominator” of public interests. Thus, A&E has lowered its once PBS-like standards and now provides prime-time staples such as CSI Miami while Bravo touts its lineup as: “Fashion, Comedy, Celebrity and Real Estate.”

Although commercial attempts at playing in the PBS marketplace have frequently fallen short, PBS itself, while true to its calling, struggles to maintain its viewership, with the commensurate loss of pledges those viewers provide. Add to that erosion in the financial support it previously enjoyed from business, foundations, governments and universities.

The New York Times wasn’t the first to question PBS’ future this past February, when it wrote a biting analysis beneath the headline “Is PBS Still Necessary?” According to the article, “Lately, the audience for public TV has been shrinking faster than the audience for commercial networks. The average PBS show on prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating, or roughly what the wrestling show ‘Friday Night Smackdown’ gets.” Acknowledging the occasional “huge splash” from a Ken Burns special, the Times uses the term “mustiness” to describe PBS’s prime-time lineup, noting, “The Newshour, Nova, Nature, Masterpiece [Theatre] are into their third or fourth decade, and they look it.”

While PBS viewership has slipped from 5.1 million members in 1990 to 3.7 million in 2005, public radio scored dramatic gains in weekly audience, up from about 2 million in 1980 to nearly 30 million today. But NPR, too, is realizing significant losses, according to Giovannoni, whose market research is the gold standard of public radio.

There was a 6 percent decline in listeners to All Things Considered and Morning Edition between 2004 and 2005, Giovannoni’s research found. His most recent report, Audience 2010, which “set out to identify what is causing public radio’s loss of momentum” found that “our listeners are still listening to radio [but] increasingly not listening to us.”

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	Jerry Wareham & Kit Jensen of ideastrem

Losses in popularity translate into lost revenues. While listeners and viewers who remain loyal have been willing to pay more in annual subscriptions or membership fees—on the PBS side, an average of $55.04 per subscriber in 1990 rose to $99.84 in 2005—the loss in market share has taken its toll as corporate sponsors follow the audience. And because the federal side of the ledger is light in a good year, the bulk of funding comes from subscribers, corporate sponsors, foundations and state and local government, with the balance coming from colleges, universities, auctions and other activities. For 2005, the last year for which the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) has reported data, statistics reflect a one-year loss of 6.7 percent in business sponsorships, a 7.1 percent decrease in foundation support, a 3.9 percent cut by states, a 3.7 percent loss in federal grants and contracts, and a meager 0.3 percent rise in subscriber support.

Adding to the difficulty, each year since taking office, the Bush administration has sought to slash spending for public broadcasting operations, most recently seeking a $200 million slice of the $400 million Congress approved for the FY2009 budget. Each year the faithful have rallied, successfully preserving the 10-to-20 percent federal share of the PBS and NPR budgets.

This financial dilemma is as old as public radio and public broadcasting in the U.S.. In January 1967, the landmark Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, created by Carnegie Corporation of New York, completed a two-year study, providing the blueprint for creating public television—to which Congress added, over some objections, public radio—and enacted the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, creating CPB as the oversight mechanism which, in turn, created PBS in 1969, and NPR in 1970, as the national content producers and parent organizations for stations throughout the nation. Congress rejected the Carnegie Commission’s proposal for a 2-to-5 percent excise tax on the sale of television sets—modeled on the British system for funding the BBC—to guarantee the unfettered, financial health of public broadcasting.

Ten years later, a second Carnegie Commission, often called Carnegie II, issued A Public Trust: The Report of the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting, which sought, once again, to secure financial independence for media technology and a more forward looking purpose for public broadcasting.

Carnegie II recognized that new technologies were affecting the media and reinforcing the deeper questions, raised by visionaries such as Marshall McLuhan, regarding media’s influence on society, cultural values and democracy. Said the report, “This institution [public broadcasting], singularly positioned within the public debate, the creative and journalistic communities, and a technological horizon of uncertain consequences, is an absolutely indispensable tool for our people and our democracy.” Thus, Carnegie II sought to keep the door propped open to future technologies through a strong, independent financing mechanism, noting, “We conclude that it is unwise for us to attempt to chart the future course of public broadcasting as it continues to interact with new technologies. We are convinced, however, that it is essential for public broadcasting to have both the money and flexibility necessary to enable it to chart its own course as it responds to the future.”

That idea, too, went nowhere. Not surprising, suggest Liroff, a 28-year veteran of WGBH in Boston and currently Senior Vice President, System Development and Media Strategy at CPB. He says, “It was, to paraphrase McLuhan, as though we were speeding into the future at 90 miles per hour with our eyes firmly fixed on the rearview mirror. The idea of public broadcasting pre-Internet, pre- any of these technologies, was going to be a manifestation of the broadcasting system they knew at the time, dominated, of course, by commercial broadcast.” He continues, “This question of what is the role of public broadcasting in the media environment is as relevant today as it was back then except that the answers have to be very different. This is hardly the environment in which this system [of media distribution] was first envisioned.”

Increasingly, there is appeal for public broadcasting to expand its traditional role, to grow their portfolios as ideastream has done in order “to provide new services in new, non-broadcast ways,” explains Richard Somerset-Ward, an expert on public media and senior fellow at the Benton Foundation, which promotes digital media in communications. “This includes distributing 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 identity is bound up in that of the community,” he says.

Ward and others argue that public broadcasting has followed a flawed trickle-up business model: local public broadcasting stations must raise funds which they pay to NPR or PBS to produce programming. This has created enormous challenges, primarily for television where production costs are huge and viewership is decaying.

“The problem with the PBS stations is that they’ve never been able to contribute enough for PBS to not be almost totally dependent upon sponsorships, which they have been unable to keep up,” says Somerset-Ward. “What you need to do is to increase the amount of funding the stations put in and that means optimizing the health of the stations. That doesn’t mean an entirely new business plan [for the stations], just augmenting the present one. And the way is open to do that because of digital and all that implies. And Cleveland is the best example of how that can be done.”

However that requires an attitude adjustment on the part of broadcasters accustomed to an “I-produce, you-view” model, in which content is tightly control by producers and “pushed” to consumers, says Liroff.

Larry Grossman, the former PBS president, highly regarded as a visionary in public broadcasting, began talking in the 1980s about the need to create “a grand alliance” of “heritage institutions,” bringing together public broadcasters, universities, libraries and museums. Today, Grossman remains committed to a top-down approach in which PBS and NPR lead and the stations follow. What is lacking, he says, “is a blueprint and anybody articulating the dream: what is the role of public broadcasting, what should it be going forward?”

Yet, Grossman’s vision in the 1980s remains vital today. Explains Liroff,“What Grossman saw more clearly than the rest of us is that public broadcasters and universities and libraries and all the rest are all in the same business and the old business model that makes them look so different is being compromised—in the best sense of that word—in terms of their separate identities by digital technologies, which they all share. So it is just as likely...that digital technologies allow these heritage institutions, among others, to begin to extend their services...on the Internet in ways, which at least in form, will be indistinguishable one from the other.”

Or, put another way, Internet consumers tend to be agnostic about the sources of data; they don’t necessarily know or care which museum or library provided the recording of, say, Robert Frost reading “The Road Not Taken”—just that they can access it. Add to that the current steep declines in the cost of digital storage and you have “extraordinary consequences for any individual’s ability to call up what they want when they want it,” says Liroff.

What all this means is that broadcasters and journalists, who have been trained by competition and regulators, most notably the FCC, to fiercely protect and keep tight reign over their turf, to serve as gatekeepers, must learn to loosen the controls, become more interactive and accepting of “pull” technologies.

But that raises an important question: if traditional broadcasters are expanding their roles to serve as content developers and data distributors on platforms other than broadcast, does the mean that five or ten years from now their primary function could be something other than delivering programming by radio and television?

That seems a distinct possibility, say many observers, including Liroff, Grossman and Somerset-Ward. Yet industry leaders, including Wareham, Kerger and others, are quick to disagree.

“Everyone is quick to write off traditional broadcasting, but it’s been around a long time and survived all sorts of predictions of early demise,” says Ken Stern, former CEO of NPR. “So I don’t think that’s going to change.”

Stern resigned his post as CEO this March after only 18 months, reportedly in a dispute with his board over NPR’s digital future, which he saw combining a strong video presence on the web with Public Radio’s traditional radio journalism. “I absolutely agree that the audience is being fragmented and it’s important for public broadcasters to meet the audience where it is, so things like podcasting and moving to multiple platforms is the reality,” he says. “But the need is to meet the audience across many platforms and not to give up the broadcast platform.”