KCET adjusts its focus

KCET’s historic Sunset Boulevard soundstages are dark. “Life & Times” co-anchor Jess Marlow has retired for good. His colleague Val Zavala is pounding the pavement for stories, conducting interviews from the Hollywood Bowl and Santa Anita racetrack instead of the studio, part of a drastic cost-cutting move. Even the business of renting the public station’s soaring Spanish-style buildings to talk shows has dried up. The life and times of L.A.’s major public television station have been exceptionally bleak lately.

KCET President Al Jerome and his management team envision a brighter scenario, one that would have the 1920-era studios again blazing. In their Technicolor dreams, National Public Radio’s Tavis Smiley would be hosting a nightly PBS talk show from KCET by January, adding his voice to the national debate of the election year. Richard Dreyfuss would be taping a new “PBS Hollywood Presents” drama as a pilot for a series set in New York.

And by spring, toddlers would be scampering around as part of a KCET-produced groundbreaking daily program aimed at bolstering the teaching skills of pre-school caregivers.

Whether this future ever lights up the TV screens depends on money, tens of millions of dollars that the station doesn’t have.

Like public stations elsewhere, KCET has had to cope with a swift post-Sept. 11 economic downturn that left no money for new programs and dwindling funds for ongoing shows.

But even before that, the station was in the throes of an intense, sometimes painful period of change, adjusting to a new management team. When Jerome, a longtime NBC executive, arrived in 1996, “the average [employee] tenure was 15 years and they had been doing business a certain way,” he said. “It made it very difficult to advance the concept of change.” So Jerome put the senior staff through “workouts,” daylong group exercises in goal-planning and bureaucracy-busting, a key management technique of NBC parent General Electric. Meanwhile, the board has been revamped to include the kind of Hollywood players previously held at an arm’s length, from former NBC Chairman Grant Tinker to “Cast Away” director Bob Zemeckis. The fund-raising process is being overhauled to target deep-pocketed donors. Programming priorities have radically shifted to emphasize what’s unique about Los Angeles. The result is a station poised to play the kind of influential role in both local and national programming that it hasn’t in years, if all the elements come together as planned.

Like other public stations around the country, KCET has cast itself as a last bastion of localism, the only independent in a market whose TV voices are increasingly controlled by an ever-smaller group of consolidating corporate owners. Jerome’s goal is to “allow KCET to flourish regardless of whether PBS’ ratings go up or down.” But with federal funding limited and corporations and foundations cutting back, it’s a big step between claiming the mantle and actually producing the programs to fulfill that mandate.

Through the blur of numbers, the current picture isn’t pretty. Membership dropped by 40,000 between 2001 and 2002 before stabilizing last year at about 255,000. Corporate underwriting, budgeted at $4 million for fiscal year 2003 (which ended June 30), came in at $2.5 million. Foundations have cut back. When “Life & Times” abruptly lost one of two foundation funders and the $1 million couldn’t be replaced, the flagship 11-year-old daily report on Los Angeles-area life had to choose between the studio or life on the streets, where it moved in July, forgoing its timely live studio interviews.

Final figures for the just-concluded fiscal year aren’t in, but KCET said it expects to be roughly $5.5 million in the black. Operations , will be about $2 million in the red because of the corporate money shortfall and an accounting adjustment from a previous year.

With the station running on empty financially, some programs never got off the ground and others died, including a nationally distributed book show hosted by L.A. Times columnist Patt Morrison. In six years, layoffs have claimed 100 jobs -- 40% of the staff. The remaining 160 employees have been told that all donations will go to operating expenses, with any new shows funded separately. The continual retrenchment has left many longtime staffers dazed and demoralized.

Across the U.S., stations are grappling with the same issues. San Francisco’s KQED eliminated 11% of its staff in July and cut workweeks and pay by 10% for those remaining. New York’s WNET and Boston’s WGBH, two of PBS’ most prolific producers, laid off staffers earlier. Orange County’s public station KOCE is fighting for its future, as the financially strapped Coast Community College board this week debates selling it to a televangelist or merging it with KCET, which has put in a bid.

In Hollywood, not of it

But the problems of KCET, approaching its 40th anniversary next year, are in some ways unique. Few major corporations still have headquarters in Los Angeles, so the station can’t tap into their civic good will. In a city with lots of individual wealth, KCET found donors to pay for its superb physical facilities, site of the old Monogram studio, but it never built an endowment so it could commission shows without scraping for each dollar in advance.

And despite its home in the heart of Hollywood, in recent years it has been oddly distant from its commercial brethren. “Here is KCET, right in the backyard of all of the creativity that goes on in this community ... and the station might as well have been somewhere else for all it was missing in terms of relationships,” Tinker said.

That was partly deliberate as public TV cast itself as an alternative to commercial fare. Business realities intruded too: Agents get less money for putting their clients into public TV work that is done for love of the craft, not money. But the result, Tinker said, is that “KCET has over time not really taken advantage of what’s right here rubbing elbows with it.”

“To be very crass, Hollywood is interested in money, not that’s there’s anything wrong with that,” added Brad Grey, the talent manager and producer who joined the board in 1996. “In public television, you don’t have that potential and I think it’s hard to get a lot of folks in the creative community out here to pay any real degree of attention to it.”

Jerome set out to change that, adding to the board more Hollywood types, who now make up nearly one-third of the 45 members. The list includes such prominent players as Grey, entertainment attorney Skip Brittenham, William Morris’ John Mass, director Sydney Pollack, former MCA President Sid Sheinberg and producer Norman Lear. Debbie Allen joined in 2001 after KCET produced her “The Old Settler” as the first in a new “PBS Hollywood Presents” drama series. And KCET executives said Zemeckis joined after watching a history of commercial aviation and asking to produce and direct a sequel, now on the drawing boards, on air traffic control. PBS too has started tapping into Hollywood, basing one of two creative heads here. The results have trickled in, including “Hollywood Presents” and “American Family,” Gregory Nava’s Latino drama that PBS and KCET rescued when CBS passed.

“Why wouldn’t we want to embrace the talent here, bring their good thinking, talent, advice to our work as we do it and articulate our mission?” said Mare Mazur, KCET’s executive vice president of programming. Mazur herself once developed dramas for CBS and NBC and grew up in “bike-riding distance from the station,” she noted. “I don’t know that my predecessors were necessarily L.A. guys. They came to KCET with much more of an East Coast bias, to be the East Coast station of the West.” In the mid-1990s, before Jerome arrived, the station had built a niche for itself nationally with children’s programs, including “Puzzle Place,” “Storytime” and a Shari Lewis show. But Lewis died and PBS dropped the other two.

Array of programming planned

The roster of programs in the works is extensive. In addition to the Smiley talk show, Dreyfuss is teaming with David Black (A&E;’s “100 Centre St.”) for a “Hollywood Presents” project, details of which are under wraps. Documentarian Ric Burns will tackle a history of L.A. for PBS’ “American Experience.” In January 2005 will come a six-hour co-production with the BBC on Auschwitz. Sheinberg brought the station a program on high school violence against gay and lesbian students, from Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“Celluloid Closet”). Locally, the innovative “California Connected,” which covers statewide issues, looks likely to survive into a third year. And “Life & Times” is still on the air.

“It would be nice if the news that came from commercial television stations would deal with the issues that those programs deal with,” said Robert F. Erburu, retired chairman and CEO of Times Mirror Co., the L.A. Times’ former parent, and now a director of the Fletcher Jones Foundation.

Fletcher Jones, which focuses its giving on education, was the first donor to the centerpiece of KCET’s rebuilding efforts, a project that the station is calling KCEd (for Education). Three years in the planning, the program, if it gets off the ground, will be produced with the help of Sesame Workshop. Done right, experts say, the bilingual program could be a breakthrough, bringing childhood development advice to legions of home caregivers.

KCET’s daytime kids shows routinely are among the top handful of shows in the time period, competing against daytime soaps and talk shows. Just over 60% of the audience for the shows is Latino; 23% of the audience is adults, presumably caregivers.

Fletcher Jones put up $100,000 of the $250,000 the station raised for developing and testing the concept. The station also got $50,000 from First 5 Los Angeles and First 5 California, the Proposition 10 cigarette tax programs aimed at improving early childhood development. In the fall, KCET will hire an executive producer and make a pilot. “We are dedicating ourselves to this not for a year or two years but forever,” Jerome said.

But the KCEd project alone will need $8 million to $10 million in its each of its first two years. Whether KCET can realize its ambitions depends on an economic rebound, and -- an element that is in its control -- the very dry world of database-managed fundraising.

As part of KCET’s rebuilding, board Chairman James Rothenberg and the Weingart Foundation put up a total of $1.15 million to be used to overhaul fundraising, the one area where staff has increased. Roger Workman, former president of the Otis College of Art and Design, was hired to oversee the area in 2001. He says it was quickly apparent that KCET’s business model, deriving most funds from the two volatile areas of membership and corporate underwriting, was “very, very odd, a 1950s business model.”

So the new model -- which mirrors a nationwide plan that the Corp. for Public Broadcasting wants other stations to adopt too -- focuses on major donors, those who give more than $1,500 a year, and on increasing the amount that smaller donors give. (The average gift in 2003 was about $73, up 10% from two years ago; giving during the “pledge breaks” that viewers gripe about surged to $4 million last year, from $3 million in recent years.) Consistent donors now get more individually addressed pleas. New databases have let KCET sort the list of 1.1 million people who have given to KCET over the years into “behavior groups” based on their giving to other charities. The station found 8,000 donors who are now getting invited to special events, in the hopes they’ll respond to the attention, and another 8,000 who are getting special mailings.

“Most university fund-raisers who heard me talking would think this is all rudimentary,” Workman said. The station is also trying to better target foundations. Workman wants $50 million in an endowment in the next 10 years. “The one thing I want to accomplish through all this,” he said, “is elevate the profile of this station to the level of a major institution of this town.”