Story by Chris Graham

I had an inkling as to what the meeting was going to be about - just from the tone of the e-mail.

The station management at WVPT, a public-television station based in Harrisonburg whose audience over the air extends from Charlottesville to Winchester and by satellite stretches into the Washington, D.C., market, had requested a meeting with me to talk about my fledgling monthly TV show, “Virginia Viewpoints.”

I had been waiting for the ball to drop for several months by this point - nobody had stepped up to sponsor the show, and really it had seemed to me that money issues were killing the station all around.

“That’s what I expected to hear today,” I told the interim general manager Richard Parker, who was all set and ready to go into detail about how much the station valued my efforts and just absolutely hated to have to cancel “Virginia Viewpoints.”

I saved him his breath - because I sensed that he was going to need it later on.

***

Before the end of the week, I had, not at all surprisingly, heard more bad news - not only was my show being canceled, but so were popular WVPT staples like “Garden Views with The Viettes,” “Local Lens” and the long-running “Pop Quiz.”

The only shows to survive the chopping block were the award-winning “Virginia Farming,” “WVPT Cooks with Tassie Pippert” and a scaled-back run of Richard Parker’s “Consider This” talk show.

In a press release issued in June when the cuts were made public, the chairman of the WVPT board of directors, Brad Roof, tried to lay the blame for the cutbacks as being made necessary “in light of reduced state and federal funding, the necessity to upgrade equipment for digital telecasting and subsequent increased costs.”

That made it sound like the issue was something that had sort of caught the station by surprise - when in fact it was something that had been years in the making.

“It’s mostly the reduction in state and federal funding that dates back several years - and literally for the last five years we have been operating in the red, and we have never been able to build back up to the point in those two areas of funding to where we were at that time. That’s been very painful,” Parker told me in an interview for this story.
“Candidly, our problem was that we were thinking that we could, and largely succeeded in, making this the finest public-television station in the state of Virginia. But we were spending beyond our means while we were doing that. And we could not keep that up - knowing that we had to rein things back in to get us back to a more reasonable financial mode where we were assured that we were going to have the money coming in that we could operate under and knew we’d be able to provide those services for years to come,” Parker said.

Budget issues are nothing new in the public-broadcasting business - it seems that station managers in both public-radio and public-TV are all working on margins that are ever-shrinking, for a variety of reasons.

“The state and federal funds have tended to not grow over time - so you have to find ways to raise money either from the contribution side of things, whether it’s individuals or corporations, or through whatever other means you can try and come up with,” said Curtis Monk, the president and CEO of the Richmond-based Commonwealth Public Broadcasting Corp., which operates three television stations and two radio stations under the Community Idea Stations umbrella in Central Virginia and Northern Virginia.
“To say the budget is flat from year to year - the issue, I think, that all public-television stations and really all business entities face is, on the one hand, you’ve got revenue, which is going to be somewhat flat, but on the other hand, it’s unrealistic to be able to run a business in a competitive and technology-based arena without having your expenses go up from time to time,” Monk said.

“There’s very little discretionary money in there,” said Tom DuVal, the general manager of the Harrisonburg-based public-radio station WMRA, of his $1.3 million annual operating budget.

“Assuming that we’re going to purchase the national programs that we’ve been airing - ‘Morning Edition,’ ‘All Things Considered,’ ‘Car Talk,’ ‘Prairie Home Companion,’ ‘Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me’ - assuming that we’re going to keep purchasing those, and assuming that we’re going to keep paying fully for those, that pretty much uses up almost that entire budget,” DuVal said.
“What we’re doing each year is just budgeting around those edges there - and it doesn’t give us a lot of flexibility to do new, different things,” DuVal said.

Former WVPT president and general manager Bert Schmidt is in something of a different galaxy now than he was when he was back in the Valley - now the president and general manager of the Hampton Roads-based WHRO, he oversees radio and TV operations that are housed under one umbrella and that have a $13 million annual budget to work with, more than four times what he had back in Harrisonburg.

And yet Schmidt still can’t go out and spend money like it’s going out of circulation.

“You’ve still got to be smart,” said Schmidt, who - full disclosure - was the person who hired me to produce and host “Virginia Viewpoints” during his tenure at WVPT.

“Yes, we have certain advantages here. WHRO is in a much more populated area. It’s the 40th-largest TV market in the U.S. - versus Harrisonburg, which is 186th. So there are obviously a lot more sources for funding than Harrisonburg ever had,” Schmidt said.
“And having both TV and radio is a wonderful combination. Right now, we have four TV stations - if you include our high-definition, kids channel and how-to channel - and we have two broadcast radio stations, a pure classical and a NPR news and public affairs. And two digital radio stations as well. Plus we have extensive educational services that are used statewide. So WHRO is fortunate to be in a position to have a lot more products to be able to raise money for,” Schmidt said.

“Of course, it costs us a lot of money to be able to provide those products,” Schmidt said. “But being able to house them all under one roof allows the administrative costs, the fund-raising costs, to be spread over all those products - as opposed to being at a smaller station, where you have just TV, and all the fund-raising and incidental costs have to be covered from just that one TV station.”

***

Of note is that even with that much, much larger operating budget, WHRO was by and large out of the local-production game before Bert Schmidt’s arrival earlier this year.

That interests me if only because it seems to me that the lifeblood of a public-broadcasting station - radio or TV - would be its local programming.

Curtis Monk seems to agree with me there.

“There needs to be a blend of national and local programming - the national programming for us tends to be either the Public Broadcasting System or National Public Radio platforms. But if we don’t have a strong local component, then over time I think we lose what is going to be an essential part of our identity in the community - and I think our local component ultimately is what is going to be able to compete effectively for membership dollars and corporate dollars,” Monk said.

But pay attention to how Monk views the importance of local programming - as being something that is hand-in-hand with the national programming that a public broadcaster can also provide.

“We want to provide a service that is as successful and as serviceable as possible to as many listeners as possible. And from what we’re able to discern from audience ratings and other kinds of research we do, there is a wide level of support for nationally-distributed programming that is common to a lot of public-radio stations. But there is also a certain level of loyalty and support for certain things that are only available here - and program services that we generate on our own,” said Bill Miller, the vice president of the Commonwealth Public Broadcasting Corp. and the general manager of its radio stations, WCVE and WCNV.
“I’d say at this point that we’re putting a roughly equivalent amount of resources in both of those areas - acquiring stuff from NPR and other networks and generating local content, local newscasts and local extended public-affairs programs,” Miller said.

“What it comes down to is providing unique and valuable content - and so certainly local programs that are produced locally, programs that are about the history and heritage of this region, about the arts and cultural scene, about the people, the issues, produced by a local, trusted PBS station, that is going to be important,” said D.J. Crotteau, the station manager at WHTJ, a Charlottesville-based public-television station owned and operated by the Commonwealth Public Broadcasting Corp.

“But of course there is no way that any one station can fill the year full of locally-produced programs - and you see that when commercial stations try to do that, and they end up just running gory news items from around the country to fill the space,” Crotteau said.

Anybody who has watched more than a couple of minutes of the news at five or the news at six or news at 11 recognizes this model from the commercial-TV world. The fact is that local programming - quality local programming - is expensive to produce.

Take my show, “Virginia Viewpoints,” as a case study. My salary wasn’t about to break the bank - I was paid $100 a broadcast for my services as executive producer and host - but the salaries of the director, floor director and three camera people were all subsumed within a staff budget that was spread across the spectrum of local shows at WVPT.

Another example is WMRA’s locally produced news show “Insight” - for which I have served as the substitute host on a half-dozen occasions. General manager Tom DuVal explained that the move to launch the show in 2006 was the result of years of planning and preparation from a staff and budget perspective.

“It was something that we had been talking about for years,” DuVal said. “We kind of slowly had been building up some reserve - and we got to the point where we said, OK, now we can afford to do this, and we’ve got enough reserve to carry it for a year or two and hope that having that program on the air will be part of what will help people decide to become supporters or support at a higher level. And then it will grow the revenue comparable to the expense over time.”

That part of the equation - support - has to be there when you’re talking about local programming, because as DuVal related, “on a cost-per-hour basis, ‘Insight’ is a totally different universe of costs compared to anything else.”

“We’ve got two full-time people - and then the incidental costs of telephones, postage, and when we have a guest in another city, we have to pay for a digital phone connection for that guest, travel costs for going somewhere to interview somebody,” DuVal said.
“Local programming is pretty expensive, usually - which is why it took us so long to finally say, Well, we’d better do it now, or we’re never going to do it,” DuVal said. “We just have to start doing it, make the investment, and hope that the quality of it is good enough and that the value of it to the listeners is high enough so that when we ask them to support us, they will.

“I call it faith-based radio management - because we have to have faith that we’re doing things that people will value and will support,” DuVal said.

A complicating factor for someone like a Tom DuVal in a small market like Harrisonburg is that production costs are generally going to be the same as if you were operating in a big market - even as the dollars in terms of funding support from the community are not at all the same.

“The cost of doing a show in Harrisonburg is pretty similar to what it is in Norfolk or anywhere else. The odds of me being able to find funding for a similar type show in Hampton Roads is greater when you have Fortune 100 companies based in the area. The advantage is that the likelihood of finding funders for it in the Hampton Roads region is much greater than being in Harrisonburg,” Bert Schmidt said, comparing his current situation at WHRO to what he used to have to deal with in the Valley at WVPT.

And even with all the talk about how expensive local shows are, “You don’t have to spend six figures every time you want to do a local show,” Schmidt said.

“That may be the easiest way to win a bunch of awards - but I’m much more interested in creating programming that is a benefit to the community,” Schmidt said.

“The important thing is you have to have your ears to the community - and hopefully do programming that’s relevant,” Schmidt said. “When I was at WVPT, we started ‘Virginia Farming’ - which has gotten great funding, and continues to get great funding. We’re doing a similar approach in Hampton Roads - focusing on programming that’s relevant to the community that surrounds the military, the African-American population, both of which are significant in this region.
“We have several TV shows in the development stage right now - and it’s not because we have this huge budget. In fact, the budget that we have is already committed to a lot of different things. So we will take a similar approach to trying to be smart with programming - to try to talk to the community and understand what the community wants and needs,” Schmidt said.

***

However you slice it all up, though, the bottom line is, well, the bottom line - and when money is tight, “the first thing that’s going to go at any station is its local programming,” Bert Schmidt said.

Schmidt understands why management at WVPT did what they did after his departure - and as somebody who was directly affected by the cuts that came down this summer, I do, too.

And Parker, whose own show was cut from 50 broadcasts a year to 20, he gets it as well as anybody else.

“I’m firmly convinced that the hallmark and the salvation of public television lies in the local programming. And I think we need to be there to reflect the needs of the community, what the community is about, what they’re doing, and make people proud of what they’re about and where they live, all of that sort of thing,” Parker said.

That said, “I think it’s going to take a year probably to work ourselves out of this,” Parker said.

“The reason I say that is I think the budget that we have established for this fiscal year, I feel comfortable that we will reach that budget. But reaching that budget is not the only thing that is necessary for us to be able to get back into that mode of producing programs,” Parker said.

“When we reduced the budget, we not only reduced dollar expenditures in a number of categories across the budget, but we also laid off six people. Those six people were largely laid off because other people were doing similar jobs or could do that same job, and most of the reductions came in the area of local production. So you lay those people off, and even if opportunity knocked on the door tomorrow, and someone walked in with half a million dollars and said, Do a local program, well, we’d have to hustle around to find the people to do that local program.

“It’s going to take a while to get back into the mode where we’re assured that we’ve got the income to proceed - and then to go ahead and find people, put them to work and get them back on the staff geared up to do those programs,” Parker said.

Filed under: 5-October 2007 Issue