When the new presidential administration sweeps into town, bringing its agenda of change, public broadcasting won’t be immune as some major changes are in store in the world of PBS, NPR and the CPB.

An article published late last month by Steve Behrens and Dru Sefton in Current, considers those changes, many of which are laid out in a chapter from the New Democracy Project’s book “Change for America.”  This chapter — and the entire book — should be taken very seriously because Obama has used the services of 15 of the book’s authors on his transition team.

A realization that broadcasting is no longer just broadcasting is perhaps the most fundamental of all changes sited.  The Project’s chapter quotes “media scholar and activist Robert McChesney, ‘in view of the new technologies, the very term public service broadcasting may be misleading; it is truly public service media.’”  The chapter recommends changing CPB’s name to the “Corporation for Public Media” as part of larger reforms.

And they’re not alone.  In Behrens and Sefton’s article, CPB Board Member Ernest Wilson says a name change is likely to be on the agenda.  Lonna Thompson, acting president  of the Association of Public Television Stations says leaders of that group have also talked about somehow including the phrase “public service media.”

This is not completely new, of course.  Minnesota Public Radio reorganized its stations and programming service as “American Public Media” back in 2004.  Earlier this year, Southern Arizona’s KUAT-TV/FM became Arizona Public Media and Northeastern Ohio public television outlets WNEO and WEAO, better known as “PBS 45 & 49”, launched a new identity this fall as “Western Reserve Public Media” to better represent the full range of their broadcast, Internet, new media and print services.  Our own Brooke Coneys wrote a post last month about this exact topic from the perspective of her own name change experience.  This trend will likely pick up steam this year.

The chapter also has significant proposals for how public broadcasting is funded, including bringing back the idea of a public broadcasting trust, an endowment of sorts which was originally proposed by the Carnegie Commission in 1967 and again as the Public Broadcasting Self-Sufficiency Act of 1996 but ultimately died in appropriations.  It proposes a number of ways to pay for a trust, including spectrum auctions (past, present and future), taxes on spectrum usage and even a TV license fee a la the UK’s BBC.  Any attempt to provide a stable funding stream or simply any change in that stream could possibly result in significant changes in how we as fundraisers approach our jobs.

The Current article also goes into the basic structure of public broacasting in an interview with KCET Chair and APTS Board Member Gordon Bava who assumes the worst:

“It’s broken, old, in need of repair and remodeling,” he says. “We cannot believe realistically that public broadcasting will get any more money,” says Bava. “It’s not in the cards.”

“We should take a lesson from the auto industry,” he says. “Before we go asking for money, we have to clean up our own mess.”

For example, he says, the system needs to eliminate spending on redundancy. “It’s painful—some people may be out of jobs,” Bava says. But, for instance, in Los Angeles, “we don’t need four public broadcasting stations offering the same PBS content.” By cutting costs, the system could invest more in new technologies and programming.

No question about it, change has been here for a while.  But President-elect Obama will likely be the catalyst that forces pubcasters into having to do somethig about it in a big way.

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