PBS Kids Summit: Changing the Status Quo intro

Paula Kerger, President and CEO, PBS

- Funding for 2011 is approx $430 million. 0.2% reduction.
- Lost the PTFP funding (comes to stations for technical needs).
- Ready to Learn grant - state of this is still not clear.  Have been told it's there but it's not clear in what form.

What does all of this mean for Public Broadcasting?

Q: How did you go from what looked grimm a few weeks ago to a reasonably good place in terms of funding?
A: Constituents. The reality is that as much as we'd like to believe we are articulate spokespeople for public  broadcasting, it's actually our constituents who have the voice and the power. PBS Stations banded together and helped focus / get a sense of where the public's feelings were in sense of PBS.

For Paula, what has been heartening has been that somewhere around the range of half a million people called, emailed their state reps. It got more calls / response than even healthcare. It shows that the view of public broadcasting as 'elite' is patently not true. 'We are the most american of organizations. We are in everyone's home'.

And that's what PBS is all about - we are the media organization that views our real work as being in communities.  We spend every day thinking about how we can make this country a bit better. The work PBS Kids are doing is at the heart of this. How can we make sure every child has every opportunity?

In the fall they did a national survey and the thing that came back as most important was childrens' education.

Even of the people who polled that said reduction of the national deficit was highest priority, 62% said that public broadcasting funding should be preserved.   72% of voters said they would be concerned if PBS had to cut back on educational programs and content for kids.  So it's clear that it's the work we've all done for children really helps them make the case for public broadcasting.

Now the task is to figure out how do we keep innovating and keep moving forward?

Right now in some respects we are in a complicated place because we've had such growth in the past few years. How do we keep this momentum going as kids' use of media continues to change? How do we really make sure what we're doing is as engaging and as important as ever?

But we also have limited funding so we have to be smart about the choices we make.

Public Broadcasting was envisioned as the place that would provide programming and content that was not found in commercial media. It's interesting now with all channels available territory one could argue was slipping away from us seems to be coming back - arts.   Eg. History, Bravo, A&E.  eg. History has big projects like 'monster trucks' to define the brand rather than how the channel defines itself. The arts is the one area that has completely fallen off the table in cable and broadcast.  eg. Visual arts is not present anywhere else except public broadcasting.

Why arts?  This is a place where we can step up - whether it's in teacher environments etc thinking about ways we can bring the arts into childrens' lives is going to be tremendously important.  Used Chuck Vanderchuck as an example.