Embracing Digital Era, PBS Hires John Boland of KQED to Fill New Post
Staking its future in the digital media world, the Public Broadcasting Service has created a new post of chief content officer and named a public broadcasting executive with extensive digital experience to fill the job.
John Boland, 57, is currently the executive vice president and chief content officer at KQED Public Broadcasting in San Francisco, which operates the PBS and National Public Radio stations in Northern California. KQED was one of the first PBS stations to have multiple digital channels to make its shows available at different times, and it was also one of the first to offer its shows on demand, through its Web site and in podcasts.
At PBS Mr. Boland, who starts in September, will oversee television programming, new media, education and promotion. As part of a restructuring, PBS will close its small Los Angeles office. Jacoba Atlas, one of PBS's chief programming executives, who is based there, will leave PBS at the end of this month. John Wilson, who with Ms. Atlas had been overseeing PBS programming and is based at PBS's headquarters in Arlington, Va., will now report to Mr. Boland.
Ms. Atlas said in an interview that she did not know what she would do next, and called it "a privilege to have been able to deal with content that is as exceptional" as that of PBS.
Mr. Boland's appointment is one of the first strategic moves by Paula A. Kerger, who took over as PBS's president and chief executive officer in March. In recent weeks she has announced an agreement to make available more PBS shows through free video-on-demand services, as well as a new partnership to offer hundreds of hours of PBS programs to schools, through Discovery Education's digital learning services.
In an interview Ms. Kerger cited "Quest," KQED's ambitious new science, nature and environment initiative, as an example of what PBS can aspire to. Under Mr. Boland's direction, KQED raised $7.5 million to pay for the first three years of "Quest," which will begin in the fall. The station's most expensive local undertaking ever, it will include weekly television and radio shows, a content-rich Web site with games and nature center tours that can be downloaded to personal portable devices, educational lesson plans that meet California teacher standards and community organization and museum tie-ins. All the broadcast material will be archived and available on demand after it is first shown.
The new digital world is "made to order" for PBS programming, Mr. Boland said in an interview. "We have content that has a very long shelf life and very long value because it was so well researched," he said. Because PBS programming doesn't rely on advertising for support, he added, it doesn't matter whether a viewer sees it when it is first broadcast or an educator accesses it 10 years later.
But PBS, a consortium of 348 local public stations, has to figure out how to make the transition from a program service that is still primarily used in a linear fashion, he said. Viewers, Mr. Boland said, "are still watching 'Nova' on Tuesday night and watching 'The NewsHour' at 6, and we need to continue to serve that majority of the public," while experimenting with all the new distribution outlets.
PBS and its stations must also find the money to finance the transition and experimentation.
Financing has been a continuing challenge at public television for the last decade, as corporate underwriters have cut back support of programming, colleges and universities have started forcing the stations they run to pick up overhead costs, and lawmakers at the state and federal levels have tried to cut government financing, often successfully.
Mr. Boland, a former newspaper reporter who has been at KQED since 1995, said that Ms. Kerger, previously the No. 2 executive at the parent company of WNET and WLIW in New York, came to PBS with "more experience in fund-raising than any of her predecessors." PBS has started a new foundation to raise money, and Mr. Boland said he hoped that would be one source of financing for new digital initiatives.
Ms. Kerger said Mr. Boland would also be reassessing PBS's programming, not to make wholesale changes, but to think about new directions. "I would like him to think hard about how do we make our iconic work even better and bring new stuff onto the schedule," she said. PBS is already looking for new science programming, and Ms. Kerger said she would "love for us to think about the arts again."
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