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TED Teams Up With PBS for Education Program

May 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Television viewers — even those who watch the more sober-minded PBS — are generally not keen on sitting through long speeches. But TED, the nonprofit group that sponsors conferences on ideas, thinks it has found a way to bring its signature 18-minute talks to a TV audience that may not have found them on the Web or through mobile apps.

In its first television foray, TED has joined forces with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the New York public broadcaster WNET for a one-hour special, “TED Talks Education,” to be broadcast on PBS on Tuesday. If it is successful, the program could become a template for future joint projects, said Juliet Blake, one of the show’s executive producers and the TED official charged with bringing the conferences to television.

The program was 18 months in the making, a short time for public broadcasting but long for TED, which is accustomed to the more immediate online world. Other suitors have also sought to do TED television projects, Ms. Blake said, but “to reach the audience we want to reach, public television was the place.”

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting paid for the show’s $1 million costs under the auspices of an initiative that addresses the high school drop-out problem in the United States. “It was the perfect marriage of ideas that matter and our core value of education,” said Patricia Harrison, the corporation’s chief executive.

Hosted by the singer John Legend, who also has a foundation focused on alleviating poverty by improving education, and taped in April before an audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the show features teachers, students and educational reform advocates like Bill Gates.

The final speaker is the English author Sir Ken Robinson, whose 2006 TED talk arguing for more creativity in schools has been seen nearly 16 million times, making it by far the TED Web site’s most popular video.

The focus is on positive changes that speakers advocate. Mixed in are clips of students discussing what excites them in school.

In one concession to the medium, the show limited its speakers to 5 to 8 minutes. “People don’t sit in front of television and watch 18-minute speeches,” said Julie Anderson of WNET, also an executive producer. Some speakers went long, including Geoffrey Canada, the chief executive of Harlem Children’s Zone, so those talks were edited for the PBS program, although the full-length versions will be posted online.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/business/media/ted-partners-with-pbs-for-education-program.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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NPR Series on Race Aims to Build a Wider Audience

April 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The digital part of the initiative, a blog called Code Switch, started a week ago. NPR — using a two-year, $1.5 million grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to hire a team of six reporters, editors and bloggers — is ramping up its reporting on the topic as part of its efforts to appeal to a broader swath of listeners.

Gary E. Knell, in a telephone interview, said that since becoming NPR’s chief executive in December 2011 he has been working on diversifying the public radio audience beyond its traditional loyal base. That loyalty “is a great thing but it can also lead to complacency,” he said, noting that a recent survey found that 25 percent of the public “had never heard of NPR.”

The race, ethnicity and culture reporting, Mr. Knell said, is part of NPR’s strategy to “do better about mirroring America” by bringing in more voices and engaging minority communities more deliberately.

By giving the coverage a dedicated home on the NPR site and establishing it as its own reporting desk, “it gives permanence to the issues,” Mr. Knell said. “We want this emphasis on growing audiences and widening our presence to make a statement.”

The “Changing Races” series will explore the effects of the country’s shift to a multicultural society, looking at cities where demographics have changed, and, for example, the rise of Korean hip-hop, among other topics, said Matt Thompson, the team’s editor. Future reporting, he said, will augment NPR’s existing coverage of the issues, “in a way that’s more nuanced, deeper and more comprehensive than we’ve ever been able to do before.”

Audiences for NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” the nation’s most-listened-to radio news programs, have fluctuated in recent years, dropping around 5 percent from spring 2011 to spring 2012, according to Arbitron ratings figures, and rebounding last fall. Fall 2012 ratings put “Morning Edition” with a cumulative weekday audience of 13.4 million and “All Things Considered” at 12.5 million.

NPR’s diversification efforts have also included a marketing campaign to reach younger listeners and the use of more reports from NPR member stations, as a way of “making sure we’re covering more of America,” Mr. Knell said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/business/media/npr-series-on-race-aims-to-build-a-wider-audience.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder: A TV Project Planned on Female Leadership

May 9, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Pewee Flomoku/ITVS Liberian women demonstrate at the American Embassy in Monrovia in 2003, in the series “Women, War and Peace.”

The Independent Television Service and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are teaming up for a three-year, 50-film project called “Women and Girls Lead,” which will put a documentary spotlight on leadership roles of women and girls and the challenges they face in the United States and worldwide.

Most of the films will be broadcast on PBS, including three multipart series, beginning later this year with “Women, War and Peace,” examining how women have been affected by recent wars and their roles in brokering peace.

A four-hour film version of “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” based on the book by the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and
Sheryl WuDunn, will be broadcast in 2012, with the on- and off-camera participation of actresses including
Diane Lane and
America Ferrera.

“Women and Girls Lead” came about when ITVS officials noticed that a number of the films in their pipeline dealt with women’s leadership issues, said Sally Jo Fifer, president and chief executive of ITVS. “When our producers find the pulse together it’s really important to pay attention,” she said.

By highlighting the films in ITVS’s Community Cinema screenings and classroom materials and by working with project partners, she said it was less likely that the films would get lost in the media crush. “We can create a sustained conversation” around the issues they raise, she said. Among the dozens of nonprofit groups aligned with the project are CARE, World Vision and the Girl Scouts of the USA.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is investing $2.7 million in the project, in film financing and outreach work.

“All of it is to in my mind underscore that women and girls have a huge contribution to make to any society,” said Patricia de Stacy Harrison, the corporation’s president and chief executive. The project, she said, will link viewers with ways they can act on the issues raised.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=fd32b9b8ff98f4d72090bb3ebd6008d2

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