Comments on: Presentation: The Future is Public Service Media

By: John Proffitt

John Proffitt — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:46:21 +0000

Stop by Cambridge? Of course! I love Boston. Ever since the days of Macworld, lo these many years ago.

By the way, I had my first “social media” experience at Macworld in Boston back in the early 1990s. I exchanged “business cards” with another guy on our Newtons. Geek alert!

By: Jake

Jake — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:51:27 +0000

Damn, was hoping no one would notice and we’d sneak that cool $70M for ourselves…

Excellent presentation John. Let’s get you to Cambridge for a PRX visit soon.

By: John Proffitt

John Proffitt — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:31:16 +0000

Thanks Ellen! And for the record, I’m a big fan of your work. I only hope more in the public media community will hear and heed your thoughts on how the system needs to change.

By: Ellen Goodman

Ellen Goodman — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:21:28 +0000

You are absolutely right, John, that our slides (Goodman and Shapiro, Berkman 11/09) had the wrong number for CPB TV funding 2009 . I have since corrected the slide. The 2009 numbers are 49% for TV station grants and 18% for TV programming funding.

Ellen

By: John Proffitt

John Proffitt — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 19:55:16 +0000

Ah-ha! Now that I’ve put the Shapiro/Goodman numbers into a spreadsheet I spot the problem — their numbers don’t add up. Or rather, they add up too much. They have an extra $71,250,000 unaccounted for — which matches their number for TV programming support. Looks like they may have mingled the TV programming number into their TV Station Grants number.

If I take out the extra $71,250,000 from TV station grants, then the numbers fall in line. At that point, TV represents 66.9% of total CPB appropriation.

I’ll post a correction in the blog post, but changing the slides at this point will take some time.

By: John Proffitt

John Proffitt — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 19:43:03 +0000

Thanks, Tom. I was actually pulling my numbers from a presentation given by Jake Shapiro and Ellen Goodman at the Berkman Center at Harvard in November. On slide 15 of 32, they break out the FY2009 CPB budget showing about $342,750,000 of CPB's $406,000,000 is spent on TV station grants and TV programming. By my math, that's 84.4% of the annual CPB budget in FY2009. In the FY2010 numbers you point to at the CPB web site, it's $281,850,000 out of a $420,000,000 appropriation, or about 67.1% -- a dramatic shift, to be sure, but it wasn't evident in the FY2009 numbers I used. Am I seeing the numbers incorrectly?

By: Tom White

Tom White — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:14:08 +0000

John – just wanted to share a small correction. On slide 35 of your “Presentation: The Future is Public Service Media” you state that “CPB spends 84% of their appropriation on TV programming and operations”. Under the statutory formula contained in the Public Broadcasting Act (http://www.cpb.org/aboutpb/act/text.html), it’s actually 66.5% – 49.9% in grants to television stations and 16.6% in grants for television programming. Here’s a link to the CPB website with the FY10 funding allocations http://www.cpb.org/aboutcpb/financials/budget/