KCET Lays Off 15 After Fund-Raising Comes Up Short

KCET-TV, the West Coast flagship station for PBS, laid off 15 staffers and elimi-nated 11 already vacant positions on Friday afternoon in the station’s biggest sweep in memory.

The layoffs leave KCET’s mini-campus on Sunset Boulevard with 170 staffers, a team that is nearly three-quarters its 1996 size and nearly half the size it was in 1990.

“The station was chugging along pretty well until we hit December,” said Al Jerome, KCET’s president and chief executive officer. “In December, our pledge campaign fell short as did our direct-mail and telemarketing activities. This was the first pledge drive in three years that we didn’t hit our budget. We fell nearly $1 million in the month.”

That trend continued in January, prompting Jerome to lay off staffers now instead of waiting to see the results of this month’s pledge drive. Additional layoffs in the coming months are not planned, and Jerome, who has spent most of his career at NBC, said he doesn’t anticipate rejiggering KCET’s programming schedule as a way to shore up support.

He said he was optimistic about recent programming decisions and pointed to the 16% ratings increase over the past year for the station’s Emmy Award-winning weeknight newsmagazine “Life & Times Tonight.”

“This is about getting unrestricted revenues that are used to run the station operation,” he said. Half of KCET’s $48-million budget is composed of individual memberships and unrestricted grants. But balancing the books has been a chronic challenge for KCET.

Just three months after he came on board in 1996, Jerome appeared in a 2 1/2-minute television spot asking viewers to send in money. In February 1999, Jerome eliminated 16 staff positions after a $1.7-million budget shortfall.