Quattrone leaves PBS for Discovery health spin-off
Originally published in Current, May 10, 1999
Kathy Quattrone, PBS's chief program exec for almost four years, leaves this week for a new job with Discovery Health Media Inc., where she'll have to put a new channel on cable by Aug. 2 [1999].
Quattrone will be senior v.p., programming and production, for the new spin-off of Discovery Communications, which will also launch an Internet health "portal" June 28 and sell health videocassettes and other media products.
She gave notice to PBS on May 1 and leaves after May 14. "There's never any sense in making a long departure," she said last week. "At the moment, I'm in the wrenching phase. It's very hard to say goodbye."
She will be joining old friends at Discovery. Her boss, president of Discovery Health Media, John Ford, is a former executive of Philadelphia pubcaster WHYY, while the g.m. of the Discovery Channel, a sister operation, is her husband, Mike Quattrone, another WHYY alumnus.
Asked to name her proudest achievements at PBS, Quattrone lists:
- the new strand of world history programs co-financed under a 1998 deal with Devillier Donegan Enterprises [earlier story];
- the forthcoming return of American drama to PBS through the expansion of Masterpiece Theatre [earlier story];
- continued development of new children's series, including Teletubbies, which joined Arthur, Barney & Friends and Sesame Street among the programs most-viewed by children ages 2-5 last fall; and
- agreement between the stations and PBS on a limited common-carriage policy, which assured underwriters for the last three years that selected programs would get 90 percent coverage of the TV-viewing population [earlier story].
She said her "great team" of colleagues at PBS were "very much ready" to handle programming decisions after she leaves. Vice President John Wilson, her top deputy, will do her job on an acting basis, PBS President Ervin Duggan told the stations May 4.
Twenty-two years in public TV
Except for three years as a high school teacher, Quattrone has worked in public TV her entire career. In 1976, just up the Interstate from her hometown of Fairmont, W.Va., she started as a production assistant at WWVU (now WNPB), Morgantown, and soon became a reporter for its news program, Mountain Scene Tonight.
She moved up to director of programming and production, earned a master's in journalism at the university in 1983 and the next year moved to Orlando's WMFE as program director. She joined PBS in 1987 as associate director for program business affairs. After several promotions, she became acting chief program exec in February 1995, when Jennifer Lawson resigned. Duggan gave her the job in June 1995 [earlier article], after his fruitless, 15-month search for an "impresario" from outside of the field who would work for a salary in the low six figures.
"The major achievement of anyone in that job is to ride the tiger and not fall off and not get eaten," says Bill Grant, head of science and nature programming at WNET. By all accounts, Quattrone not only survived but developed a reputation as a serene but friendly program chief with a complete grasp of detail.
"Kathy was always approachable, whether you were a producer or programmer or associate producer," said Mike Seymour, top programmer at Florida Public Broadcasting Service. "She was a great listener, and she absorbed everything."
"I was very impressed by the agility of her mind," said Ron Hull, the Nebraska ETV programmer who worked a year on Quattrone's staff. She developed into "a very fine executive," he said.
"My only dissatisfaction," Hull added, "is that ... we put too much of our treasures into acquisition and co-production, which just replicates the kind of material we get on Discovery and A&E. ... The only thing that distinguishes PBS is being top-of-the-line in everything we choose."
"She's been a very remarkable leader because she has such positive relationships with all her constituencies," said Andrea Hanson, a friend and director of programming at Connecticut PTV. Quattrone "helped improve PBS's station relations because there is a lot of trust in her."
Among other achievements, Quattrone helped expand a corps of personalities like Bob Cringely and Denise Graves who appear repeatedly on public TV and become identified with it, observed Byron Knight, director of Wisconsin PTV, who worked at PBS on the Reader's Digest project. "One of her abilities was to sit down with people like Michael Wood and talk about their plans as producers--what are their aspirations? where do they want to go?--and then keep those in mind in creating a package for them to remain involved in public television."
Building personalities was part of Quattrone's deliberate plan, Knight said. "She is very able to articulate a plan and put it in motion, and then come back and measure it."
Was Quattrone somehow superhuman? "Obviously, she was not," said Knight, "but she always conducted herself that way."
The departure of Quattrone and the recent reassignment of schedule chief Steven Gray to head PBS's digital channel planning are "shaking up what's become a very stable, dependable service," commented Keith York, programmer at KPBS in San Diego.
"Kathy was always one who enjoyed a new challenge," said Judi Parker, a former colleague in Morgantown. Quattrone's new job "is almost a toy for Kathy to play with and bring to fruition."
Quattrone is indeed excited, she said, to be joining "a new company that is at the frontier of where I genuinely believe the whole industry is going," Quattrone told Current. Discovery Communications is setting up the separate Discovery Health Media with more than $300 million in capital as a model for a venture that deals in all media, she said. The subject area, health, "is at once global and personal," and therefore "the perfect subject" to treat in various media, depending on the viewer's level of interest in each health topic.
The company will be based in Bethesda, Md., not far from the Discovery Channel headquarters.
Earlier news: Quattrone succeeds Lawson as PBS's chief program executive, 1996.
Web page created May 16, 1999
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