So Who’s Watching?
Does the audience know, or care, about what’s happening to public broadcasting? The New York Times recently reported that “the audience for public TV has been shrinking even faster than the audience for the commercial networks. The average PBS show on prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating.”²

Compare that with the highest average rating for a whole year, which was 2.7 in 1986-87 or, a fairer point of comparison, its 1990-91 average of 2.2. But ratings, on their own, no longer tell the whole story. They show how many people were watching a particular broadcast at a particular hour,3 but they cannot show how many people time-shifted the broadcast via Tivo or similar device, and they cannot show how many people have accessed the show online or how many may ultimately see it as video on demand (VOD). At the local level, station managers are more concerned with the “depth” of the audience than with a headcount. Jim Pagliarini of the Twin Cities goes even further, saying, “I’m not interested in growing our audience. I’m interested in deepening relationships with my existing audience.” Public television audiences, he points out, are almost always “engaged, active and curious—they want to learn. But the delivery systems to reach them will be different. To get to the younger generation, the cool kids and gadgeteers, we need to create content, and repurpose some of our own content, so that we give them the information the way they want to receive it.”

At this point in the discussion the journalism representatives play a large part. Nancy Palmer, executive director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, points out that there has been a major shift in audience perception. “It’s the many niche audiences, not the one broad audience,” she argues. “One person may be deeply interested in opera but could care less about smart growth, or the other way around. ... We get into trouble if we try to make one program that both the opera lover and the smart growth aficionado will love, because you’ve dumbed down the program to the extent that you’re not satisfying its niche audience.” Dean Mills of Missouri agrees, adding “It ain’t the audience: it’s a whole bunch of audiences, and you have to figure out which slivers you’re going after.” And Ernest Wilson of USC goes even further, contending it’s not an audience, but younger folks who will not watch, will not listen, if they don’t have a chance to talk back. They’re audiences but they’re not really audiences—because they are producers or in Wilson’s term, “prosumers.”

Rod Bates of Nebraska has collected evidence of how his audience is deepening, using the method of “deliberative polling” McNeil Lehrer Productions pioneered in By the People. He gives the example of Nebraska Connects coverage of one of the state’s more important issues: water. “We’ll poll people and see what they think about the issues surrounding water,” he explains, “then we’ll do a program and bring in a panel of legislators and water experts. And then we’ll poll the people again, after they’ve heard the expert discussion, so that we can see what difference it made. We’ve seen the needle move on attitudes toward very specific issues. It’s not a perfect measure, but it shows us something about the work we’re doing.”

A Role for Foundations?
The role foundations might play in funding national programming had come up in the earlier discussion, but now, when the subject is local programming and local foundations, it becomes more concrete. “There are plenty of local and regional foundations and corporations who have an interest in applying media to education and public service,” says Jerry Wareham of Cleveland’s ideastream. “So, as we prepare for the next four to forty years, it might be time to convene local stations along with local and regional foundations and other donors, so that together we can explore and understand the needs and applications of digital technology across communities. It could be just the kind of digital ‘turn-on’ we need to assure that we build on the success of public broadcasting over the past forty years and employ the power of digital media to address critical educational, cultural and civic needs.”

David Haas, who, as a foundation head, is actively involved in funding public media, is supportive of the idea of creating a consortium of foundations, but stresses that it has to be forward-looking; it has to have a vision. “I think it’s important not just to get them to rally around what you have (your mission in terms of supporting children, for instance) but also what you could be (the notion of the public space, for instance),” he maintains. Convening these foundations, persuading them that there is an investment to be made, that it is an investment capable of yielding handsome returns in education, healthcare, economic development and many other forms of community building within their areas of interest, is probably the hardest part of the process. Station managers are clearly hoping for assistance in meeting this challenge, maybe from some of the larger foundations. Vartan Gregorian is not sure that this is such a good idea because “local community foundations resent it when a big foundation comes in and tells them what it’s going to do for them.”

Another area of concern is the extent to which stations share their experiences with each other, their successes and failures, their experiments and their best practices. Twenty-nine years ago, Richard Wald says, he was commissioned by PBS to do a study of the stations and their work in news and public affairs. He was forcibly struck by “the extraordinary animosity and insularity of the stations, which hated each other and hated whatever they could do together.” Representatives of public television don’t think that is the case today. They cite the existence of organizations such as Putting Communities First (originally nurtured and funded by David Haas, more recently by CPB), which represents 25 stations (15% of the licensees). Ernest Wilson wonders whether there should be a clearing house within the system so that stations can see what others are doing. Jerry Wareham wants more than that. “We need a function within the system that is more proactive than a clearing house, that tries to encourage adoption of best practices in a more proactive way ... And it’s not just about the stations either; it’s about stations and communities. That’s why I suggest a convening of community foundations, of local and regional foundations ... They are deeply interested in their communities, deeply interested in innovative uses of technology—broadcasting and beyond—to address real community needs and interests. We need to talk about real community needs, and identify them, and meet them in measurable ways.”