Facing budget gap, PBS’s Now plans 2 months’ hiatus
The entire staff of PBS’s Now will take eight weeks of unpaid leave this year to offset a $1 million budget shortfall. Repeats of the show will air to fill the production gap.
Producers of the Friday-evening news program decided in January to enact the furloughs rather than lay off staff, which would have hurt the show’s quality, says Joel Schwartzberg, director of new media. All of Now’s 35 staffers will take unpaid leave for four weeks from July to August and another four weeks from November to December.
Foundations that back the program reduced their aid as the recession shriveled their endowments. Schwartzberg declined to name specific foundations, but funders listed on the show’s website include the Skoll Foundation, Orfalea Foundations, the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the desJardins/Blachman Fund.
Even two months of furloughs won’t entirely close the budget gap, according to John Siceloff, e.p. The show will look to streamline production and redouble efforts to raise money to make up the remaining shortfall.
In a note posted March 26 on the show’s website, Siceloff urged viewers to support their local public TV stations as a way of keeping Now afloat. Now staff took down the letter by the next day to return show-related content to the site, Schwartzberg says.
The Future of Now
The producer's message below was posted briefly on Now's website, March 2009
From John Siceloff, Executive Producer, Now on PBS
Good news and bad news.
This moment, this time, is an inflection point in American history--at least it seems that way from my perch as executive producer of NOW. In the last year we've witnessed an extraordinary election and now an extraordinary recession. We want to continue our reporting on these and other urgent issues for America and the world, and for that we need your help.
But first the good news. We were just notified that NOW on PBS won the top award for political journalism on television, the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Journalism, given by the Annenberg Center at USC. We tied with "This Week with George Stephanopoulos", and beat every other news show on every network and every cable channel.
And that's not all. The polling company Erdos and Morgan found that opinion leaders consider NOW on PBS to be the "most credible" weekly television news show on television. Again, we beat every other weekly show on network and cable.
These awards honor our tough investigative reporting. Our production teams go on location and follow the facts where they lead us. Since NOW's launch we've reported in all 50 states and 17 countries. Tom Brokaw sums it up: NOW is "fearless about challenging conventional wisdom."
Now for the bad news. We're a million dollars short for 2009. PBS has maintained its generous support, but many of the philanthropies who support NOW have had to make severe cuts in their grants to the show, due to plummeting endowments.
Every member of the staff, including me, will take an unpaid eight-week furlough this year. In that way, we avoid losing our most important resource: our journalists. No one will be laid off.
But we still face a shortfall in the resources we need for robust reporting and investigating. For our ground-breaking piece about the causes of the financial meltdown, "Credit and Credibility", we worked for months to get whistleblowers inside the ratings agencies to talk to us. We're about to air another piece in our beat about the state of the economy that we call "Out of the Woods -- Rebuilding after the Great Collapse". Our coverage of the economic crisis, based on real reporting which doesn't simply put talking heads in a studio, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I know that these difficult times have affected all of you. I urge you to dig deep into your pockets to support your local public television station. NOW and other shows on PBS are supported with dues from your station and the hundreds of other member stations. You can make a donation online, right now.
Make a Donation
Forward this letter to friends and colleagues
The original web page above had working links. "Make a Donation" was linked, not to the production company behind Now, but to the public TV station associated with the web user through PBS.org's "localization" feature.
Web page posted March 30, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC
