Last Words

	Alberto Ibargüen

So what has been achieved around the Carnegie Corporation table? For Ernest Wilson, “It’s been heartening. ‘The perfect wave’ is probably too strong a term for it, but it does seem that there’s a confluence of some things that make action more possible and more likely of success.” One positive factor, he says, is that foundations are increasingly concerned with the public media and with the issues they give rise to. There is a potential for leadership here, the more so because several of the foundations have, or will soon have, new leadership of their own. On the public broadcasting side, a great deal is happening, and most of it is exciting. Local stations are grappling with the possibilities of a fully interactive “pull” environment taking over from public broadcasting’s traditional “push” mode. At the same time, stations are attempting to bring together the two cultures into which the media world is divided—the traditional culture public television has been a part of for forty years and the new culture, which has captured the imagination of at least half the population. Much will now depend on the adopting of best practices and lessons learned, and that effort is one in which the Knight Foundation is already playing a significant part. But, Wilson notes, where there should be a consortium of interested institutions, there appears to be not one university in the United States focusing on public service media and providing consistent research, training and thought leadership for it. Wilson urges that this conversation about the public media be carried on, with urgency and intensity, and he urges the leadership “to stick with the high vision, to pull together a coalition of foundations, large and small, national, local and regional, working with the public broadcasting system, to begin a Carnegie-type conversation.” Vartan Gregorian agrees, adding that the cultural division is not simply an age issue but “the reality of technological revolution.” He urges those involved to be prepared to take risks, and be prepared to fail from time to time. Failing is not necessarily a negative, in his view, “but an accepted way for practitioners, to assess what things did not work.”

	Vartan Gregorian

The last word goes to Alberto Ibargüen of the Knight Foundation, which is already deeply involved in conversation and experimentation on models of the new media. “We are trying to shift all our clients, all our grantees, to working with the new media—not working on our ideas, our projects, but setting up the grant-making process more as an open RFP (request for proposals).” The Knight News Challenge, which has received 3,000 applications in its second year, is about delivering news and information to a geographically defined community, using one or more digital platforms. Knight is working with young journalists and teenagers, with texters and bloggers; and has given a grant to MTV to have teenagers cover the presidential campaign in their own states, using cell phones only, texting their reports to other teenagers in the same cell phone network. Knight is sending all National Public Radio reporting staff to a course at USC; and is about to mount a separate initiative with community foundations, challenging them to work on the information needs of their particular communities. “We need to hurry up and do more of it,” says Ibarguen, “We’re open for ideas, suggestions... for ways in which we can generate ideas, generate experiments ... and bring some fun back into this thing.”

While this conversation has reached no conclusions, per se, nor was that its aim, a number of ideas do stand out.

It’s clear that public television will be different in the digital age—no longer strictly a push medium, but push and pull with a high quotient of interactivity. Broadcasting will still be its principal function, but almost any platform in the broadband universe, especially the Internet, will be in play as well. This is the promise of the digital era, and it opens up amazing opportunities to the local stations, which now have the potential to become what the first Carnegie Commission believed they should be—essential and valuable parts of a community.

This overarching change might seem to indicate that everything must change. But most participants in the meeting seem to feel the most necessary changes concern the culture of the medium. As of February 17, 2009, the analog world will belong to the past, creating a culture problem that is most detrimental within the stations. There seems to be no appetite for changing the structure of public broadcasting, and there is an underlying fear that any attempt to restructure will destabilize the industry at the very moment when stability is most needed.

In broadest terms, public television’s mission to “use the power of media for the public good” has not changed. But the mission originally stated by the Carnegie Commission was more specific: to fill the gaps left by commercial television. With so many channels now available, there are fewer gaps at the national level. But of those that still exist, many are filled by public television. Its preschool programming is unrivaled; its science programs, period dramas and arts programming all supplement commercial content. Yet PBS could do a lot more—and do it more adventurously—with more money. At the local station level, the switch to digital has the potential to reinvigorate a 40-year-old mission that, for the vast majority of stations, has scarcely taken off or has been stifled by lack of resources.

The new media culture is challenging public television in a way that some embrace but that many others at the roundtable find troubling. Some see the digital challenge more as a war than an opportunity: new media seems unregulated, anarchic, hugely powerful in reach and influence; rife with unknown possibilities and potential problems. In contrast, traditional media, public television included, is regulated and meant to serve the public interest. The two cultures are struggling to meld, and this meeting revealed that while the Luddites aren’t controlling the next step, the optimists’ vision has yet to win out.

Not driven by advertising or the profit motive, with its roots in education, public television is unlikely to move away from the ‘elevated’ output that distinguishes it from commercial and most new media outlets. As Vartan Gregorian pointed out, not everything needs to be “lite” in America, and public television’s high-minded menu may help the country compete on the global level.

	Sharon Percy Rockefeller

Whatever public media’s future, funding remains its greatest problem. Two schools of thought emerged at the meeting: (1) Financial survival hangs on national programming, which is the highest priority, and if the programmers find some “big ideas” money will materialize; (2) Public television’s national problems will persist until the stations are healthy, since most money for the National Program Service comes from (and should come from) the stations’ PBS dues. The funding shortfall is due mainly to corporations and foundations abandoning public television and producers forsaking creativity to avoid potentially controversial subject matter. At the same time public media leaders insist there are plenty of exciting program ideas—the problem is paying for them. Of these two schools of thought, the one that stresses financial growth through local station engagement promises a long haul with little revenue. However, federal funding is both erratic and highly political and, as well, corporate and foundation funding is expected to remain limited. In this age of digital opportunity where building community has new meaning, these questions must be raised: Should new alliances be built? Should the concept of community in public media be rewritten? And should the field focus on local stations as centers of change and on promoting new business opportunities?

The means of revitalization are at hand: a digital armory, a nation whose people depend on digital media and local communities who will be welcoming, even generous, toward public media companies who are productive partners, conveners and facilitators. To move ahead on this front the stations would need help in the short term, which local and regional foundations are likely to provide once they know what the stations will do for the community. Local foundations specializing in education, healthcare or the arts could be persuaded to accept public media companies as partners in promoting their missions, since many are active in fields where public television has a presence and where digital technology could be harnessed to considerable effect.

Public television at 40 has a new name—public media—and, consistent with that iconic birthday, is at a turning point, forced to assess its role in a new era quite unlike the one in which it came of age. The meeting at Carnegie Corporation revealed public media’s pride in how far the system has come, but revealed as well its struggles to remain vibrant while facing an uncertain future. Everyone present agreed there were no guarantees, and little time to waste.