Q&A Henry Becton Jr.

Halfway through law school, Becton began looking for another career. If not for an animation teacher and a
beard, he might have turned to city government. (Photo:
Current.)

‘If we pursue a distinctive education mission, we’ll thrive, no matter which technology’

With the official opening of WGBH’s new headquarters next week and his retirement from the station’s presidency three weeks later, shortly before he turns 64, Henry Becton Jr. is awash in life milestones. In another sphere, there’s also a first grandchild to attend to.

Mehlman (left) and Krol were last staffers to have worked at WGBH longer than Becton (right) He also can claim a period, just begun, as the Boston institution’s longest-serving employee, with 37 years on the timeclock. At the end of the August day when Becton gave this interview, he attended the joint retirement party of engineers Benny Krol and Gordy Mehlman, the only WGBH employees who had worked there longer.

Even with boxes still unpacked throughout WGBH’s big new complex in the Brighton neighborhood, the bright, open setting must add extra buzz to the excitement around the retirement celebrations and the coming inauguration of Jon Abbott, who succeeds Becton as president and c.e.o. Oct. 2.

Becton, accompanied by Jeanne Hopkins, spokesperson and v.p., talked with Current Editor Steve Behrens in a small meeting room near the top execs’ offices. This is an edited transcript.

Current: Years ago, public TV series websites were disposable little leaflets with no use except to support a broadcast. Now sites like yours for Evolution not only attain high Google rankings, as you’ve said, but often contain conversations about the series—as well as on-demand episodes from the series itself. Did the significance and opportunities dawn on you gradually, in spurts or all at once?

Becton: Very gradually. One of the things we asked [Vice President] Brigid Sullivan to do, in her portfolio, was to explore the potential of interactive media. Even before the Web in the early ’90s, we were trying to experiment, on other people’s dime, with the earliest manifestations of interactive media.

We felt it was important to explore this potential for our content. We had a pioneering interactive department to do that. As the Web came along, each of the major series began to develop its own site. Our philosophy has been for each department, each project, to have the freedom to pursue its own initiatives in new areas.

Different series pursued different parts of it. Frontline, early on, understood that to create the definitive repository of interviews or information on a particular subject was something new. You could actually make journalism transparent by hosting the entire interview, not just what you put in the program, and let the audience see what you’ve chosen.

So we can imagine public TV being a multiplex with shows every night, or a newspaper that’s always fresh, or a library of sight and sound that does home delivery. Do you have some hints where this is going, and what public broadcasters can really add to it?

My view on the future is that public broadcasting is still unique. There are others, mostly nonprofits, that do pieces of what it does. But we have such a different mission than commercial media that, even though technology is changing dramatically, the content we provide remains distinctively different in most cases.

If we pursue a mission that focuses on distinctive educational content, I think we’ll thrive, no matter what the delivery technology is. There isn’t anybody else who focuses on curriculum-based educational materials for children. Or who takes enough time to explain string theory. Or who has the guts to create a complete curriculum package to teach evolution. Or is willing to devote the resources for a truly global daily perspective on public affairs.

So I believe if we stick to the content mission, we’ll do very well. How the content will be delivered will change, and the pace of change will accelerate. The audience is fragmenting. People are gaining control of their own content consumption and interaction.

So I’m a believer that we should reaggregate our audience over multiple distribution pathways. That’s why we’ve been proactive in developing additional linear channels on digital cable, expanding our broadband content available online, developing video on demand. When we did Age of AIDS about a year ago, we arranged with the National Cable & Telecommunications Association to provide it to 20 million households through video on demand.

What would you call this thing? At some point, public broadcasting may go to Congress and say, ‘We are expanding our field of operation, and it is called . . . ?’

The term I’ve been using the last couple years is “public media.” It conveys that we are still in the business of using media, but our mission is to serve the public, not stockholders or the bottom line.

There’s talk that public broadcasting, or public media, may go for reauthorization of the Public Broadcasting Act this year after remaining unauthorized for years.

Is the field ready to reconceive itself or perhaps develop some part of the American Archive idea, which WGBH has been involved in developing, in time for legislation this year?

We could be. The American Archive is a very important next agenda for public media, public broadcasting. We have an amazingly valuable library of content, collectively, over the whole system — historically important, educationally important, creatively important. A lot of it is not digitized, is not readily accessible to program-makers, to content creators or to the general public.

That agenda is probably one of the most important things we could do in the next five years. From what I hear, it’s gaining a lot of traction in Congress. We now have most of the infrastructure in place. People are understanding that, in the end, it’s really all about content.

Would the field mostly ask Congress to contribute liberalized copyright rules or money?

It has to be a combination of both. There have to be resources to do digital conversion and metadata tagging and providing easy-to-use interfaces. All we’re seeking is to convert some of what’s already been in the budget for technical infrastructure to unlock the content. But rights are tremendously important. The copyright laws need to be updated to the digital era.

The rights mostly belong to music publishers or film archives and the like. Would it be fair to ask them to subsidize this archive by extending rights periods? Or is there a way this benefits them, too?

I think it can be a win-win, because if we can’t create a structure that makes it easy to use the material, they’re not going to realize anything from it. If we can extend compulsory licenses that have been in place in the analog world, they’ll see more income from their assets, and we’ll have an easier time unlocking this content.

To help support this revived programming and all the rest, it’s not clear how much help producers will get from corporate underwriters. Public TV’s underwriting overall, local as well as national, was actually up 12 percent between 2005 and 2006. But for national programs, the prospects sometimes seem grim, with no corporate underwriting for Masterpiece Theatre, History Detectives and Secrets of the Dead. How challenging is the outlook for national corporate underwriting?

There are still a lot corporations that want to associate their brands with the content, values and trust of public broadcasting. A year ago, WGBH brought in about $20 million in national corporate underwriting, and this year we’re on track to finish up at the same level. Except for the loss of Masterpiece Theatre underwriting, that’s similar to what we earned in the 1990s, $25 million to $30 million a year.

There’s no question, though, that it is much more challenging because corporations have many more ways to reach audiences, and their advertising spending is fragmenting just the way audiences are. They’re looking for quicker turnaround, for the ability to change their creative messages more readily. We need to put national systems in place to be responsive to that.

Masterpiece Theatre is one of the most recognized brands, the most valued to our members, but what corporations generally are looking for is to associate not just with the public broadcasting brand but also with content that relates to their businesses. Within the universe of funders big enough to sponsor Masterpiece Theatre, there’s only a small subset whose businesses could be said to be related to it.

ExxonMobil, before it quit as the program’s sponsor, reportedly had been giving around $10 million a year to sponsor the show, based on what it cost you to buy the programming. But that amount wasn’t based on value of airtime in the sponsorship market.

We don’t discuss the price levels of underwriting, but it did cover all of the series costs.

Lance Ozier, a vice president here, has said you’ve looked for smaller amounts from multiple underwriters. Have you also aimed for lower total proceeds for the series?

We’ve tested the market at a number of levels. I think it’s fair to say we’re now aiming for the mainstream experience with similar series. ExxonMobil was sui generis. There was nobody else in the system at that level.

But you haven’t continued dropping the price to what would sell, which would be the market price.

We continue to try to see what the market price is. But our current strategy is to increase the value of underwriting. We’re rebranding Masterpiece, building up the online presence.

Overall, our goal is to increase the value for the underwriter by aggregating messages over different media to compensate for the fragmentation in broadcasting.

I still don’t believe that public television is just a media buy to most underwriters. It’s not. If you look at it strictly on a cost-per-thousand basis, we always command a significant premium over the market price. And we have shown we can continue to do that.

There are other reasons that get in the way of attracting sponsors, at the moment, such as having the ability to readily change credits to match the sponsors’ creative approach in current marketing campaigns.

You need SWAT teams of lawyers?

We need the technical systems at PBS and at stations to recognize the different credits and run them or not run them as scheduled through computer programs.

Public TV will also have increased shelf space for underwriting because of the new channels on DTV.

Those are new assets for underwriting. The additional broadcast opportunities on the PBS World channel and the Create channel will provide bigger audiences. The penetration of digital cable is growing dramatically. Create is already reaching 70 percent of households.

Another way of selling underwriting is to sell spots between programs instead of sponsorships for specific series. Prices would be unlinked from production costs, so underwriting from cheaper-to-produce shows would subsidize the others. I believe NPR does something like this. Is that an option for public TV?

I think there is potential, which we should organize ourselves to go after, to attract daypart underwriting on a national basis. It wouldn’t have to interfere with the stations’ inventory for local underwriting, which stations are fully utilizing in most places. It could use the inventory of unsold time in the national underwriting pods. Companies at a more introductory level might want to be national sponsors in public television.

Would stations have a problem with this because it would rely on PBS or some central broker to do more selling of airtime and concentrating authority there?

I wouldn’t worry about that. There are always functions that are better centralized. Maybe there won’t be one sales agency, but several. But you can’t have 50.

We are also concerned that public television’s membership rolls have diminished somewhat in the last 10 years.

Public television had a successful major-giving initiative that is expanding resources for major philanthropy across the country. I think membership also needs a reinvention. We need to find the things we can best do with economies of scale and the tools of the Internet and pursue them jointly in some concerted way. We can’t rely on 180 different cottage industries in public television to take advantage of these tools and grow our membership. This is an initiative the Major Market Group will be working on.

You came to WGBH in 1970. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had just been killed. It was just three years after the Carnegie Commission reimagined educational television as public television. Your dad was working in the family company, Becton Dickinson, and you had gone to law school. What was it that brought you to this place?

I decided about halfway through law school that I wasn’t going to be a lawyer. I was more interested in being a doer than being a counselor. And I’d always been interested in theater and film, but what really got me headed in this direction was that I decided I would take a photography course. The course was oversubscribed, but the teacher said the guy who teaches an animation workshop, he’ll take you.

I didn’t think I was interested, but I went to see him anyway. His name was Derek Lamb. As he defined it, animation was anything that wasn’t live action. So I took the course, made a couple films. They were shown on WGBH.

After you became president?

No [laughs]. At the time WGBH had an independent film showcase called Flick Out—a great ’70s name—and they had an episode about this animation course. Then I taught for a year at a high school west of Boston.

In Boston at that time, it was pretty hard to make a living as an independent filmmaker, and I went to see Chris Sarson, who was also in the course, and another friend, who were producers here.

I was hired by Michael Rice and Michael Ambrosino to be a producer trainee. They thought the combination of a law degree and these films they had already shown might mean I’d make a good producer.

I thought it would be an interesting job for a couple of years, but I ended up getting more intrigued.

When you look back on your life, you sometimes see patterns that weren’t apparent earlier. I had been the head of my college radio station and in various drama productions as a kid, and I can see things that lead right to this.

There was another job offer at the same time — to work for the mayor, Kevin White. A friend worked for the mayor, Colin Diver — who was featured in Common Ground, the book about school desegregation in Boston — and they offered me a job. But I had a big red beard at the time. Bob Weinberg, who was running the office with Barney Frank, said the beard’s gotta go.

I said, gosh, I think I’m more interested in this other job, where they’ll let me keep my beard.

Derek Lamb, your animation teacher, later did some memorable work with the station, I learned after he died in 2005.

Derek went on to become head of animation for the Canadian Film Board. When we started Mystery!, we asked him to do the animated opening with Edward Gorey’s drawings. He also created the characters for our children’s series Peep and the Big Wide World.

When you came here, WGBH had been running a TV station for 15 years, Julia Child had been on for seven. Michael Ambrosino would start Nova a few years later. It must have been very different from this place.

It was very different, very small. We were all in one building on Western Avenue. I think there were 125 employees, and the budget was about $5 million a year.

What attracted me was that suddenly I could see the potential for public television and public radio. The Forsyte Saga had just been on. The Ford Foundation had funded a two- or three-hour program every Sunday night called PBL, Public Broadcasting Laboratory.

On PBL, I remember seeing a documentary by Austin Hoyt called Multiply and Subdue the Earth, the first program about ecology I had heard of. It got me very excited because I’d always been an environmentalist. Suddenly they were talking about these issues that I thought no one in media cared about. I became enamored of the potential to have a big impact through television and radio — an educational, positive, pro-social impact.

We were trying new things all the time. The year I arrived, we created Evening at Pops. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was beginning to hand out money for national programming.

The sense was that anything could be tried. Michael Rice assigned me to work on the studio crew. The day I arrived, our New Television Workshop had a production in our big studio — Violence Sonata by a video artist named Stan Vanderbeek [clip and info on WGBH.org] It was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and directed by Fred Barzyk and David Atwood.

The program used two television channels and stereo radio. You were expected to haul a second television set into your living room and set up stereo speakers on either side. There were preproduced segments of dancers leaping from one screen into another, and pianos got destroyed. It was all about violence. I was assigned to run the boom microphone for people from the studio audience.

I got home that night and thought, my goodness, if every day is as interesting as this, I have made the right career choice. It has been to this day an amazing continuing education.

Where did ’GBH get its particular DNA? How much of its corporate culture was inherited from Boston, or New England or the universities?

I do credit it, in some part anyway, to the fact that we were created as a consortium of universities and cultural organizations, whose presidents served on our board. So our value system came out of them. We drew on the faculties. The management understood it was their job to create the equivalent of a faculty. Certainly, Hartford Gunn had set his stamp on WGBH. He left within a couple months of my arrival to become the first president of PBS.

It got a start, according to Michael Ambrosino, with producers typically reading all the important works in a subject area before starting production. Which is very different from the basic journalistic approach, which is going out fairly ignorantly and asking questions.

What Michael was alluding to was the approach taken to its logical completion when we did the Vietnam series. We created a two- or three-week curriculum for the filmmaking teams. We brought academics and experts from all over the country to essentially school the producers in the content, the personalities and the source materials, so they had a huge, huge head start when they researched their films.

And that concept, which we called for many years “the Vietnam School,” was applied to War and Peace in the Nuclear Age and every major long-form series we’ve done since, and it’s been adopted by most of the other major national producers in public television.

Did the national endowments for the arts and humanities pick up the notion from public TV?

They already had the requirement that grantees involve academics, but they’ve never required that kind of intensive schooling. I think Peter McGhee deserves some of the credit for originating that concept with the Vietnam series.

How much of that genetic inheritance traces back to Ralph Lowell, who was still alive for a few years after you arrived?

I’ve known many members of the Lowell family but not Ralph, so I don’t have a personal view of that. I know that philosophically he felt very strongly that WGBH should be the media partner connected to the major institutions in Boston. And he worked very hard to make sure it wasn’t just the old Brahmin establishment that he came out of, but that it also included Brandeis, Boston College, University of Massachusetts, all the major strands of Boston at the time.

His family established the Lowell Institute in 1832 to provide free public lectures for the citizens of Boston. But after World War II, when Ralph was the trustee, attendance at public lectures had tailed off. The Harvard faculty was agitating for the university to go after its own public radio station, and James Conant, president of Harvard at the time, didn’t think that was the right thing for it to do, so he asked Ralph, who was head of the overseers of Harvard, to form a consortium. From that, the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council was formed, and that led to the establishment of WGBH.

When I arrived we were still taping Lowell lectures by faculty from different universities for television. That sort of faded out, because it’s not a great format for television. But when the Internet came along, we saw the opportunity to go back to our roots and create a site that would record and aggregate lectures and symposia from all the cultural institutions around Boston, and that’s the Forum Network [its website].

I suppose part of my passion for that project is that deep in my head I can hear Ralph Lowell and Michael Rice and others talking about the importance of providing those lectures to the people of Boston.

In June, a longtime staff member, Marcia Hulley, had a piece on WGBH’s weekly podcast, Morning Stories, saying a nostalgic goodbye to the old building [podcast], and she called WGBH “a place where people are acknowledged.” How did WGBH come to have this appreciation of people she was talking about? Ambrosino talks about former staff members having a reunion every few years, spending nine hours talking and hugging.

When I arrived, WGBH was small enough, it had an extended family atmosphere. We’ve had a lot of stability in senior management over these years, so as the place expanded, that culture has expanded with it.

Most people here are also very proud of what WGBH has accomplished. So many of us have spent such a large chunk of our lives during the years when WGBH developed programs and services that have had an immense impact on people, and that helps that bond.

Jeanne Hopkins: If I could add, David Ives had a way of giving recognition to people with little notes. He would save scraps of paper that were blank on one side, and you’d find notes saying “Nice job on that meeting yesterday,” or “Glad you knew about that.” Henry also will recognize individuals and give credit for achievements in any setting where people are gathered.

Becton: It actually goes back to Hartford Gunn, now that I think about it. Hartford, being the technical guru, had installed a system of telewriters in 15 or 20 offices — little machines with pens that wrote notes. He would write a note in his office and push a button. In your office, a bell would ring — it was very distracting — and a little arm would start writing a note!

Another thing that bonds us is that we’ve always laughed at ourselves. We find times to do that. We have an annual Blizzard Reunion Party, named after the Blizzard of ’78 that shut everything down for a week. We have a wonderfully talented in-house band.

I heard a recording of the band at the farewell party for David Liroff a few months ago, when he moved to CPB.

[The staff sang Lance Ozier’s lyrics to the tune of Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing,” including the lines:
Our David Liroff, well, he never gets older
Yeah, buddy, that’s his own hair
Trademark suspenders over both his shoulders
And Diet Cokes stashed everywhere.
Hear it for yourself, March 2007. ]

At the Integrated Media Association meeting in February you said you were involved in something called Catch 44.

I was executive producer of Catch 44. It was the first public access series, broadcast nightly on our second station, Channel 44. That was one of the things that attracted me to WGBH—the notion that media could be democratized and demystified.

For that show, we reduced our rules to a minimum and also our financial risks, and opened up the studio every night to any group that wanted to use it, with help from the staff. It was kind of what Twin Cities Public Television is doing now with the Minnesota Channel. For several years, we took all comers. The BBC imitated it with something called Open Studio. Marita Rivero and Rebecca Eaton were on that staff.

One colleague likened you to an orchestra conductor with an extraordinary number of soloists. Years ago, WGBH was even more decentralized, I’ve heard. If one department wanted help from another, you had to negotiate or persuade. But the station grew enormously. Revenues rose from $60 million when you were promoted to president to $207 million in 2000. What measures did you take to bring certain things under control and leave others as matters of managers’ discretion?

Many of our talented content creators could choose to work many other places. They choose to work here because they value the freedom and the time to get things right. So I think it’s important to give them enough room. And I’ve always believed encouraging the departments’ entrepreneurial initiatives was important to our success.

We, like any national producer, went through projects that got out of control. We needed an infrastructure to support and monitor projects, so we created an administrative manager system. Each department has an administrative manager who has a dual reporting responsibility—to the department or project and to the budget office.

And they weren’t seen as moles?

That was the risk, but in fact they became very helpful—and indispensable pretty soon. Most project heads really crave a good administrative person who can relieve them of that part of their responsibility.

It was also about that time I hired Andy Griffiths as our chief financial officer, and it was partly his personality and his light touch that helped this not become that kind of problem. Having been an executive producer myself, I had the credibility to implement administrative systems in a way that somebody else might not have.

At ’GBH the heads of national series, not the interactive department, creates the series websites. And Frontline, with David Fanning in charge, has stepped out in front of PBS and much of public TV to put more and more video online, including full programs. Did you go through much of a decision-making process with him on this, or was this simply his call and it seemed a good bet to you?

We treat it as a dual reporting activity for most series. You need to be close to the content, but you also need to be up to date on the latest web publishing techniques and tools. Frontline is different because it originated as a consortium of five stations and was set up more independently.

And if there’s a conflict where you have dual reporting, what do you do?

We work it out collaboratively. We’re a very collaborative place.

We now have something called the Advanced Media Group that meets regularly, that sets the overall direction for our interactive work. And there’s an operating committee that reconciles conflicts.

Back to your question, I think we always felt throughout WGBH, not just at Frontline, that we should put as much video online as we could manage, and experiment with how to make it most usable—whether it needs to be cut into chunks, how it needs to be indexed. We felt we should provide as much access to our content as possible. There was a time when PBS was less receptive to that. They had justifiable concerns about bandwidth costs and the impact on the home video market.

There’s an anecdote on the WGBH Alumni website about David M. Davis, one of the first managers of your TV station, who died this spring. Don Hallock, a young cameraman in the 1950s, remains impressed to this day that Davis let him use wider-angle lenses to shoot the Boston Symphony Orchestra, even though Davis was Scottish and therefore had strong feelings that an orchestra should be seen through longer lenses.

When you were in charge of cultural programming, did you impose your focal-length preferences on your subordinates?

No, I did not. As you’ve probably heard, I am more of a hands-off-style manager. I will try to persuade, but I rarely impose.

But there must be times you feel you must intervene. Are you guided by some instinct or internal calculation that tells you when to intervene? Do bells go off?

I would intervene if we’re about to violate the trust of our audience. If someone over time has misjudged repeatedly, I would intervene.

When I was an executive producer, that was different. I was the editor in charge of that project. Then I was much more proactive.

But as program manager and then general manager and president, my philosophy is to find good people, trust them, learn when you can trust them and when you can’t. And if you can’t trust them, move them on to something else where they can thrive. But not try to second-guess them.

If we get into a controversial area, then I want to be briefed and understand that we’ve done everything we needed to do and that we can stand behind everything in that program. And, I have to say, I’ve never been disappointed in that regard.

Judgments were questioned right and left in the Postcards from Buster blowup in 2005, at least outside WGBH. Just after the Bush administraton appointed a new secretary of education, she launched an offensive in the Culture War, objecting loudly to the Buster episode showing a family with two mommies, presumably lesbians. PBS withdrew the episode, and Pat Mitchell said she’d get to the bottom of the situation. Did you do your own digging here?

We did our own review of what our editorial decisions had been at what time, while the program was still being finished. Because this erupted while we were still editing it.

Basically, we assured ourselves that what we set out to do and what we had said we would do—both to PBS and the Department of Education—is what we ultimately did.

Every one of our children’s projects is produced with input from curriculum specialists and child-development specialists. This series had deliberately aimed to expand the horizons of American children to the diversity among children within this country—their cultures, their families, their lifestyles, their activities. After 9/11, we felt that was an important mission for our children’s programming. Here we had this Buster, a trusted character and vehicle, and could turn it to that purpose.

When the controversy began, I took a look at the material in its rough- or mid-edit course and could see that this program was not going to create any problems for children. It was only a problem in its concept for adults who hadn’t seen it. It was true to the mission of the series, it was what we said we’d do, and it was something important, and so we stuck to the plan.

So your review found it would be appropriate for kids, but had your managers weighed whether it would be politically acceptable to viewers, especially for social conservatives?

No. I have always felt the most important thing is the trust of the audience. The audience trusts us to use our best judgment. They have grown to rely on us not to pull any punches because of pressure, whether it’s from a major corporation, a government agency or a even a community pressure group.

You have to remember the context is the public television system, where every station makes its own decision. We provide the program to stations with plenty of context and background, occasionally with additional framing material, and then let the local stations decide, as we did in this case. That’s ultimately how this worked, as it should.

In some cities, the majority of people may find a program unacceptable. Would that be a legitimate reason not to air it?

Each manager will have to make that decision. I think the audience deserves a lot of credit for being able to sort these things out themselves. So I’ve always chosen to err on the side of putting the program on the air rather than keeping it off the air.

For example, in 1990, when controversy erupted over whether the Robert Mapplethrope photographs should be exhibited here at the Institute of Contemporary Art, our Ten O’Clock News—the equivalent of our Greater Boston today—felt they couldn’t do justice to the story without showing the photographs. We thought long and hard about it and decided with plenty of warning and framing that showing the photos would be the right thing to do.

This is an example of a subject that would probably be objectionable to a large percentage of the local population. One of the most vocal critics, a city councillor from South Boston named Dapper O’Neil, praised us for showing what these “awful” photographs were like.

But I do not believe you should make program decisions based on your calculation of the democratic response. People look to us to expand the perspectives they can get access to on television and radio. We’re respected because we will put on a minority view. After all, in some sense, commercial broadcasting is the majority view.

So you’re going to have a ribbon-cutting for this building Sept. 17?

This community will be very proud of this facility. It finally embodies the role that WGBH has grown to play in this community. We are much more of a public institution than when I arrived. We hold many more events and screenings. We have many more partnerships. Public stations more and more are being conveners of partnerships with other cultural and educational institutions.

It’s designed to put up front the manufacturing part of program-making, so we can demystify media.

You said last year that you’ll retire from the presidency here in October but stay with WGBH, as David Ives did when you succeeded him in 1984. What will you do here?

I’m going to stay half-time as vice chairman of the board. I’ll continue to represent WGBH on some national boards. I’m on the boards of Public Radio International and the PBS Foundation, and I’m vice chairman of the APTS Board.

What I’d like to do is work on major programming initiatives, helping to build the constituencies and put together the funding, helping [Vice Presidents Margaret Drain, Brigid Sullivan and Marita Rivero]. For instance, we’re working now with WNYC in New York and PRI and the BBC on the new morning show for public radio.

You know, one of the advantages of a long tenure is that you go through cycles of public attitudes toward public broadcasting. In the early ’80s, I remember, people thought all these cable channels would make public television irrelevant. I don’t hear that anymore.

Just from some members of Congress.

But from fewer and fewer voices. Because people understand now what a fragile and important thing public culture and journalism are for a healthy democracy.

Of course, there are also the new promises of the Internet—people predicting that new institutions will arise there to do what public broadcasting has done.

And there already are. But public journalism has to have a financial model that is sustainable. So there’s a lot of blogging but very little original reporting.

Commercial media’s business model is under tremendous threat and challenge right now, and the Internet hasn’t replaced it yet with anything new.

The financial model for public media is quite different. It’s important to continue refining and expanding it and keep it distinctly different from commercial media. If it became like commercial media, the programming eventually would follow and become like commercial media’s.

Correction: The comments on this page by former cameraman Don Hallock were incorrectly attributed in the print edition. His full comments are on WGBH's alumni website.

Web page posted Sept. 17, corrected Sept. 18, 2007
Copyright 2007 by Current Publishing Committee