Public Broadcasting Operations Seek Centralcasting Opportunities

The decision to collaborate and use one joint master control stemmed mainly from the need to adjust to the economic hardship in the industry, said Robert Daino, president of the WCNY TV and radio network in Syracuse. “We know that we have to innovate and do more with less,” he said. “The challenges are such that they're forcing us to look at everything.” WNET New York, WNED Buffalo, WPBS Watertown and WMHT Schenectady are among the participating TV operations. Funding includes a $6.6 million grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides grants to help stations “operate more efficiently and generate cost savings that can be invested in increasing local content and services,” CPB said.

The CPB is reviewing other joint master control proposals from stations in Florida, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, a CPB spokeswoman said. The Florida operation will be anchored by WJCT-TV Jacksonville, and will include 10 stations, like Florida stations WPBT-TV Miami and WBCC-TV Cocoa, and stations in other states, like PBS SoCal Los Angeles, said Michael Boylan, WJCT president. WJCT was already looking to serve the Orlando community when WMFE-TV Orlando was put up for sale, he said. The sale of the station to religious broadcaster Daystar is pending at the FCC (CD May 16 p13). “We saw this as an opportunity to create a system that could support a number of stations throughout the country,” Boylan said.

With a new facility slated for completion in October 2012, WCNY will be the anchor station for the New York effort. The $20 million broadcast and education center “will be designed to suit our needs and the collaboration’s needs,” Daino said. “It made sense for us to be the new home for the physical location.” In addition to the grant, the participating operations provided a proportionate match, he said. The business model was created in a way “that would provide new revenue opportunities to the stations and make the operation as self-sustaining as possible,” he added. Plans to interconnect the stations were in the making for quite some time, said Tom Hanley, WPBS president. “We all had different thoughts about this particular project and everyone agreed it was the smartest thing to do."

Freeing up personnel to focus on other tasks and investing the money saved into more local programming are some of the results the executives expect, they said. “We'll become more efficient and we won’t have to individually, as stations, do the same thing nine times over,” like scheduling programs and loading them into servers, Daino said. “In the new model, you only have to do that once on behalf of all stations” and save time, money and resources. Forgoing equipment replacement will be a major benefit to WXXI Rochester, said Norm Silverstein, president. “We'll see more of a savings in not having to plan for individual master control replacements in the future and not duplicating the same editing of programs before they go over the air.” The station would normally raise funds to replace an outdated automation system, he said. With the elimination of the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program this year (CD April 14 p7), doing so would have been much more difficult, he added.

Each station will retain control of its own broadcast schedule. The look and feel of each station “and how it interacts with the individual communities remains the same,” Daino said. The effort will ultimately lead to more members, Hanley said. “It will help us with our membership drives because we'll be able to purchase better programming than we're purchasing right now.” To transition, some stations are making changes among staff. At WPBS, two people were laid off and some staff members are being retrained, Hanley added. WXXI plans to retrain some people for production, Silverstein said.

Some executives said they expect that centralcasting efforts will be viewed favorably by opponents of federal and state funding for public broadcasting. “I think it’s going to be helpful in demonstrating that we're working to be more efficient,” Silverstein said. Some of the federal issues are more about ideology, he said. But in New York, “this is the kind of activity that our governor thinks we should do to find ways to work together and be more efficient.” State funding for public broadcasting in Florida was eliminated for fiscal year 2012 (CD Nov 15 p9). “We're looking at this as an opportunity to have the governor and legislature help us invest in the future … and perhaps make up some of the loss for them,” Boylan said. “We don’t want anyone to be lost on the fact that we need the support of the American public but in the meantime we're going to use the resources we have … to ensure that our services our exploited and provided to the greatest extent possible,” Daino said.