PBS’s Paula Kerger

October 2006

By Anna Carugati

Having worked in public
television for many years, Paula Kerger is intimately familiar with the
challenges of financing quality programming. After heading up the very
successful public station Thirteen/WNET in New York, Kerger was appointed
president and CEO of PBS earlier this year. She is committed to maintaining
PBS’s most popular genres: science, history, nature, factual, investigative,
children’s and arts programming. She also has her eye set on extending PBS’s
mission of enriching people’s lives by offering programming on today’s various
emerging digital platforms.

TV DOCS: How
important are co-productions and joint ventures in securing financing for
programming?

KERGER: We
do a lot of co-productions. Nature,
Nova and Frontline do a fair amount. I do think that the fact that we
have always had to work really hard for our funding has forced us to be more
creative, and it has encouraged us to forge partnerships that are tremendously
important.

TV DOCS: Are
you satisfied with the funding that you have now?

KERGER: Never!
[Laughs] The fact that we do get funding from a diverse number of sources does
give us some stability, but it is a challenge. Federal funding is an annual
dance and we won’t know what this year’s appropriation turns out to be until
sometime in the fall. If you look at public broadcasters around the world,
there’s a substantial amount of federal money that goes into their operations,
and we tend to be on the shorter end of the stick.

In terms of other sources
of funding, actually, for most stations the largest area of support is
contributions from viewers. Private philanthropy has always been a key piece of
who we are. That has given us a lot of strength when we’ve had federal
problems.

Corporate funding is harder
to come by [today] than I can ever remember. Foundations tend to circle around
specific issues, so right now environmental issues are something that a number
of foundations are interested in. But I think that we are unique, and we
continue to work hard to earn corporate funding.

When I was at WNET, we had
put together an endowment, and the purpose of that was largely R&D. I’m
hoping that the money that we can raise through our foundation will enable us
to seek new projects and to take some risk, and particularly to work on some of
the new-media platforms.

TV DOCS: How
important is the digital world in extending the PBS experience to viewers?

KERGER: It’s
critically important. It’s where our viewers are now. I really trace a lot of
the amazing sea change in the industry back to last October, when Disney
announced that they would be making available some of the ABC shows on iTunes
for a $1.99 per episode. And from that announcement we went through a period
where it felt like once a week, if not every day, there was yet another
announcement. No one has really figured out what the real business model will
be, so the commercial networks are just putting money in lots of different
areas, trying to hedge their bets. For us, being the chronically under-funded organization
that we are [laughs], we are trying to be very creative and think hard about
some partnerships. We are doing a pilot with Google for distributing some
content through them. We have some material that is available on iTunes. My
best statistic right now is the success of Bill Moyers On Faith and Reason that launched in mid-June on iTunes. It’s been on
the Top 10 downloaded shows. For people who think that iTunes and iPod
downloads are only for teenagers, that is a real wake-up call. The NewsHour with
Jim Lehrer has been in the Top 100
podcast downloads consistently, so I think it’s a tremendously important
outlet.

Streaming video is not
only one way of serving the broad public who seem to be multitasking in ways
unimagined, but it’s also a way that we can reach a younger audience who just
cannot make an appointment to sit down in front of their television at 9
o’clock on Tuesdays to watch Frontline. And so Nova, The
NewsHour, and a number of programs
are available. We just cleared the rights for a number of series for free video
on demand to be offered through our local stations.

I’m trying to work very
closely with our local member stations to figure out all the new-media
opportunities. This is my biggest challenge outside of the money issue, as well
as the biggest opportunity, because I think we can really expand our reach.

TV DOCS: How
can digital help you do that?

KERGER: We
did a project this past year with Frontline called The Age of AIDS, and we offered it up on VOD in markets that were
able to carry it. The filmmakers worked on this particular project for five
years. [In the analog age] we would broadcast the show and were always really
happy if it got a reasonably good rating, which for Frontline [is] a 2 or 2.5 rating. That means that some 98
percent of the country didn’t
see the The Age of AIDS. So VOD
and streaming video suddenly give the program an extension. When people go to
the office and talk about that amazing program they saw the night before, other
people have that opportunity to see it. That is why I am really excited about
new media, because it just gives us an opportunity to fulfill our mission in a
way that we just weren’t able to when we were one single linear channel in the
market.

TV DOCS: Since
factual programming is such a large and important part of your schedule, what
kind of environment do filmmakers—from Ken Burns to less established
ones—find at PBS?

KERGER: Well, I
think that the reason that the Ken Burnses and the David Grubins and even some
of the young filmmakers come to us is that we give people the freedom to
develop their projects. Young Ken Burns came to public broadcasting and had
this idea that at the time just seemed so crazy—to do a ten-hour
documentary on the Civil War, and by the way, with no video clips. He will tell
you that the reason he stayed in public broadcasting is that he knows that we
will give him the ability to build out a documentary series. And he’s got a
tremendously ambitious series coming up next year on World War II. It’s huge,
bigger than Civil War. Some of
our documentaries are 90 minutes long. Some of our documentaries are on
subjects that may seem to some a bit more esoteric. There are two things that
are the hallmark of what we do: quality and authenticity, and I think being
able to allow people to tell their stories is tremendously important.

Public broadcasting
continues to be a home for great work from the past. In October, we will be
re-broadcasting Eyes on the Prize
[an award-winning series that tells the definitive story of the Civil Rights
era from the point of view of the ordinary men and women whose extraordinary
actions launched a movement that changed the fabric of American life]. It was a
landmark series when it was originally broadcast and it has not been seen on
broadcast television for a long time. It has amazing archival footage. We bring
back a series like that and we also look for new work, particularly from the
indies. We’re trying to give voice to a lot of different filmmakers, both the
Ken Burnses of the world and others—people who have good stories to tell.
That’s what we’re interested in.

TV DOCS: You
also do a lot of work with classrooms and teachers, don’t you?

KERGER: We do.
We started out many years ago doing teacher guides and companion guides to a
lot of the broadcast programs, but a number of those stations do content
specifically for the classroom.

What a lot of teachers are
doing now in the classroom is not what you and I grew up with, which was the
teacher would roll in the TV set and we would watch a half-hour program. Today
they use small video clips in order to make a point about whatever it is that
they’re teaching. Particularly in the areas of science and math, a piece of
video can bring a concept to life. A lot of kids are visual learners, so again,
to be able to help them make a lesson just pop for a kid is something that
we’ve done for a very long time.

Our work with schools is
very important. I’m looking to hire a senior vice president of education for
PBS to help us really make sure that we’re thinking about all the opportunities
in education, because I do think that we can expand upon and improve the work
that we’re doing.

TV DOCS: And
finally, what do you enjoy most about your job?

KERGER: The
thing that I enjoy the most about my job is actually getting out and meeting
people that benefit from the work that we do. To me that’s the most
rewarding—to be able to talk to a farmer, or to a teacher, or to people
for whom public broadcasting has really made a difference in their life. To me,
that’s what it’s all about. It’s being able to meet the people whose lives have
been touched by our work.