• by Joe Mandese , September 13, 2007

The theme of this board is "big thoughts on the future of the small screen." Today, I'd like to offer some on a small part of the small screen: public television. Actually, it's becoming a progressively shrinking, but still quite important, part, and one we rarely address on the electronic pages of MediaPost.

That's mainly because, from a commercial point of view, public television isn't all that relevant to our readers, who are primarily people who make media planning and buying decisions. Yet public television has various forms of "enhanced underwriting" and sponsorship that actually represent valuable media buys for some advertisers and agencies. But the real relevance of public television isn't what it represents for us as corporate citizens, but how it impacts us as civic citizens.

The problem is that relevance has shrunk as TV's multichannel marketplace has expanded and well capitalized, commercial programming networks have stolen much of public television's programming thunder. Nickelodeon, Noggin, Cartoon Network and Disney Family, have co-opted public TV's children's franchise, while the Discovery Networks have stolen much of its science, exploration and nature audience, and the Scripps Networks have cut into its home lifestyle base. And one of the few remaining public TV franchises - arts-oriented programming -- faces an increasing threat from Ovation.

Despite those threats, public television continues to produce some of the best quality programming within its genres, and nothing will ever supplant "Nova," "Nature" and "Masterpiece Theater."

And in an effort to remain current and relevant, the new leadership of the public broadcasting community has been pushing online and into new forms of digital media. Those are good things, but in an endlessly expanding universe of media content, I wonder if they are enough?

U.S. public television has always lacked a cohesive focus, both organizationally and in terms of its underlying programming philosophy. Organizationally, it's always been a political hotbed rife with infighting and power grabs that few outside the culture might even be aware of. A handful of powerful, producing public TV stations, like Boston's WGBH and New York's WNET, have called much of the shots, and set much of the nation's public programming agenda alongside powerful public broadcasting bureaucracies like the Public Broadcasting Service and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That was never the intent when public broadcasting was launched. The goal was for stations to focus on the development of locally oriented programming that was educational and provided a community service.

There have always been spots of that, but the reality is that public television has operated much like the commercial media marketplace, where a handful of powerful players utilize their mass, and the scale of economics to influence the rest of the marketplace. It was an economic conundrum that the federal government tried to address in the 1980s when Congress liberalized guidelines restricting how stations sold their underwriting and sponsorship agreements. The idea was to enable public TV stations to be more creative in how they marketed themselves to corporate underwriters in order to fuel new revenue streams that would foster a richer array of public programming. That hasn't really happened, for a variety of reasons. One is that many public stations simply felt uncomfortable sullying themselves in the crass, commercialized world. Another is the fact that smaller market stations lacked the organization capable of developing those corporate underwriting opportunities.

A byproduct of those moves was the creation of a small cottage industry of sales agents who could pitch underwriting opportunities for public TV stations, developing revenue streams that would allow them to compete more effectively with the big producing stations and public broadcast entities. I'm not sure how much they actually leveled the playing field, but this week two of the most powerful entities in the public broadcasting world -- WGBH and National Public Radio -- have made a bid to consolidate the industry further, and keep more of it under their control. On Sept. 11, they announced an offer to acquire National Public Broadcasting LLC, one of the biggest independent reps servicing public TV and radio stations, and to form a consolidated sponsorship sales entity owned by WGBH and NPR that will oversee sales for 60 public TV stations, 120 public radio stations, and national sponsorships for programs such as "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." As a result, a big piece of the public TV business will become a little more privately held.