“This is a very different role from the one we have been playing, and it challenges our established editorial standards and practices,” Wareham says. The other thing the Listening Project did was confirm that the public television audience really is a pretty faithful reflection of the American population. “We were amazed at the diversity of age and race that sat around the table, and what changed as a result of the Listening Project was that we began to relate to those folks,” he explains. New priorities have come out of this project. Having learned that “the greatest assets of the community are its arts and culture, and the greatest challenge jobs and the economy, we’ve committed enormous resources to doing work in those areas through partnerships.”

Unique among public broadcasters, ideastream has a massive resource that links it with its community. OneCommunity, Northeast Ohio’s hugely powerful [gigabit] broadband community network, connects all the principal institutions of the region—schools, universities, hospitals (including the Cleveland Clinic), cultural institutions, municipal governments and, of course, the public service media organization. Three years into its mission and now based at the Idea Center, ideastream’s headquarters in downtown Cleveland, OneCommunity is the ultimate expression of community partnership, with ideastream as a pivotal part of its governance, its operation, and its future.

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	Jim Pagliarini and Dean Mills

The Listening Project resonates with Dean Mills, Dean of the Missouri School of Journalism. “I think one of the most striking and difficult things about the new media landscape is the idea that we journalists have to change the way our minds operate in order to make this work. Our work with Minnesota Public Radio illustrates this. They’re doing just amazing things in terms of building social networks of listeners throughout Minnesota—and increasingly regionally—but they were almost scared of what they had engendered. ... They said, ‘but we want to do this as journalism, we don’t want these people to have a conversation with one another,’ and we were saying, ‘look, this is terrific, you now have this network of people who not only want to talk to you but want to talk to each other, so you’re in effect fulfilling the function of a community newspaper.’” Since the 1950s, Nebraska has been fertile ground for public broadcasting, and the state government has invested massively in radio, television, fiber-optic cable, microwave, satellite, distance learning ... anything that will span the great distances of the Plains. Rod Bates is the general manager of Nebraska ETV: he explains the thinking behind Nebraska Connects, which may be the best example in the United States of how to conduct a community-wide (in this case, statewide) discussion. Each month a different subject of importance to Nebraskans—from immigration to water resource conflicts to family violence—is explored in a series of radio and television broadcasts, town meetings, online forums and other forms of outreach. “In the old days,” says Bates, “we used to do a big special on cancer, for instance, and we’d raise public awareness about issues related to smoking ... and our local organizations would always get angry because we’d call all attention to it and then we’d be off to the next issue. What we do differently now is that we work with a community partner.” Together, they plan and execute the multimedia programming and events and establish the Web sites and other resources; then the public broadcasters hand everything over to the partner(s), who will ensure that it stays on the front burner, while the broadcasters go off to join forces with a different partner to mount the next Nebraska Connects.

Partnerships come about in many different ways. Bates describes a very productive ongoing partnership with the University of Nebraska established through the vice chancellor for research. Some of the projects for which he is applying to the National Science Foundation or other federal agencies for funding are particularly suited to having an added outreach component. “There was a significant project in Antarctica to do research on global warming; the vice chancellor talked to us, we talked to PBS and Nova, and we’ve got $1.5 million earmarked in that grant to do a Nova.” As a state network, Nebraska ETV also has a lot of highly productive partnerships with the state government for education, healthcare, emergency services, agriculture, rural services and other aspects of Nebraska life. The next logical step, Bates says (and he’s already at work on it) is the creation of a public media archive that will be a major resource for teachers, scholars and all Nebraskans. In the meantime, he works equally hard with Nebraska’s nonprofits. “Because of the switch to digital, we invited every state agency over to our facility for a lunch and a free seminar on the capabilities we have with our wireless broadband network, and 73 agency directors attended! That resulted in a lot of business because they have money in their budgets to do outreach to the citizens of Nebraska, and they saw a potential partnership with us. We’re doing the same with every nonprofit.”

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	DeAnne Hamilton

Jim Pagliarini of Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) also has a major interest in nonprofits. He has created the Minnesota Channel, a 24/7 cable channel, which is based entirely on partnership with content providers. The channel’s purpose is “to share the power of television with Minnesota’s finest nonprofit and mission-centered organizations to magnify their impact by helping them reach a broader audience.” Most of the programs are produced by TPT in partnership with these organizations, and there is clearly no shortage of willing partners. They share editorial control and modest production costs with TPT on the basis of carefully, and very clearly, written guidelines provided by TPT. The result is a powerful outreach tool for the nonprofits, often augmented by Web streaming, DVD distribution, etc. For TPT, the partnerships provide a great deal of local content—ranging from a speech or lecture delivered at a museum or library to a video made while traveling with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra on a European tour—on the basis of an economic model that really works. In fiscal year 2007 TPT did over $2 million in partnership production. The inspiration for the channel, Pagliarini says, was the simple knowledge that “the public sector in and around the Twin Cities is spending tens—maybe even hundreds—of millions of dollars each year trying to educate the public and get information and content in front of a larger audience.” TPT is addressing that need.

DeAnne Hamilton spent many years at KQED in San Francisco. From very early on in the digital transition, she says, KQED was using its new digital firepower to form partnerships with big institutions such as the San Francisco Symphony. It was generally a win-win situation where “they had their donor base and we had our donor base and we shared some of those donors,” she recalls. But now Hamilton finds herself running a much smaller public broadcasting station, WKAR at Michigan State University. Even though it’s licensed to the university, the station traditionally maintained an arms-length relationship to the institution for fear of being seen as its mouthpiece. But the university is the station’s natural partner, and Hamilton has sought to build that relationship. “There are museums on the campus and we should be working with them, there are performing arts centers on the campus and we need to work with them. But they are struggling to raise their funds and we struggle to raise ours. We haven’t yet found the economic model that will work.”

“You’re giving them national visibility; you should have access to the alumni, not just to the university,” Vartan Gregorian argues. But in the meantime, the station continues to associate itself as much as possible with the university. It seeks out stories, highlights university research, collaborates with various departments on interactive video services, podcasting, cultural programming and more. In doing so, the station confronts the same anxieties as other public broadcasters entering into partnerships: Are they compromising quality? Who controls the content? Still, the gains seem to outweigh any downside.

UCSD-TV is another university station, but a very different sort. Noncommercial, but not part of the PBS system, it’s a low-power analog station owned by the University of California, San Diego, and it’s unapologetically ‘highest common denominator.’ The station reflects UCSD’s intellectual and cultural diversity, devoting significant airtime to in-depth coverage of ideas, culture, sciences and the humanities while providing a consistently high level of entertainment from the community and performing arts organizations (amateur and professional) that surround, and are part of, the university. Their roster includes theaters, dance companies, orchestras, music groups, museums, libraries, town meetings, ethnic and religious organizations. UCSD-TV is seen on cable throughout San Diego County, is targeted at the general population rather than the university, has a scientifically measured (and faithful) audience of half a million viewers each month and does it all on an annual budget of just over $800,000—which is less than the cost of a single Great Performances program on PBS. Every program represents an individual partnership agreement between UCSD-TV and the content provider.

Lynn Burnstan, who has been managing director of UCSD-TV since its founding fifteen years ago, gives some examples of how the partnerships work. The La Jolla Chamber Music Society, for one, puts on a Summerfest, and brings in musicians from all over the world. The Society’s auditorium holds only around 300 people and the concert happens only once. What the Society and the musicians want is reach, which is what UCSD-TV can give them. A budget is drawn up and a partnership agreement is made. The Music Society puts in some money, maybe from one of its sponsors, and some rights, if appropriate, while UCSD-TV puts in its in-kind production resources. Together the partners may solicit additional funds from donors or foundations. Another very different example is in the field of nanoscience. In this case, a UCSD professor gets a National Science Foundation grant that includes a sum of money to cover all the expenses of producing a video program (or even a series of programs) about the research. The funding, in this case, is easier to acquire, but a partnership agreement is still necessary to govern matters of editorial control, ownership, the exploitation of after-rights and so forth.