KOCE Eager To Fill Its Major Market Role

The biggest story in public TV last year was the decision of KCET Los Angeles to end its long relationship with the Public Broadcasting Service after it refused the cut the station a break on the its membership dues, which had spiked to $7 million a year. But while the breakup may have been traumatic for PBS and KCET, it hasn’t been for the fans of Masterpiece, Nova and other staples of the PBS schedule. That’s because KOCE, the noncommercial station that had long labored in the shadow of KCET in Orange County, stepped up and, as of Jan. 1, took over KCET’s role as the primary PBS outlet in TV’s second biggest market.

In this February interview with TVNewsCheck Editor Harry A. Jessell, KOCE President Mel Rogers talks about his plans to remake KOCE into a market-wide station with a strong Los Angeles presence, no diminution is its commitment to Orange County and a much leaner operating budget that will be no more than a third of what KCET’s has been.

An edited transcript:

How’s it going?

It’s going very well. We’ve had to reinvent ourselves and do so in a hurry. These kinds of things let you know who your stars are internally. We have some people who’ve really risen to the occasion. We’re very pleased with the ratings. They are as high as KCET’s were when they had the primary PBS role. And some people still appear to be lost trying to find us. So we’re very hopeful that they will increase from here.

How much will you be paying PBS as the primary outlet?

Our PBS dues will double this year from what they were before. This fiscal year, which wraps up on June 30, we will be paying a little over $2 million, when, in the past, what it cost us was about $1 million. But that just accounts for half of the year. So going forward, our dues will probably be between $3 million and $4 million a year.

Where are you going to get that extra money?

Of course, before we took this on, we had to answer that question. The amount of money that one can generate in public television, to some degree like commercial television, is generated in part by the services you provide and the size of the audience you have. Revenues follow audience. And when I say revenues, I’m talking about funding from foundations, funding from “viewers like you,” corporate sponsorships, direct mail appeals, special events — any number of things that you do to generate revenues. Those increase the greater your audience.

KCET had this pretty good-sized operation and large overhead. We’re a much smaller operation with much smaller overhead. We never intend to grow to the size KCET was. And so with the same audience numbers they had, we should have no problem meeting much smaller obligations.

Are you staffing up at all?

We are staffing up, but we haven’t staffed up much. I think we’ve hired one person. We expect to hire two more in the coming weeks. And in March, we’re going to hire two more. But we are being very careful, and we aren’t going to spend money we don’t have.

Are these people going to be on the revenue side, selling underwriting or whatever?

Some will be revenue generators. Two of the four people that I just mentioned are revenue-generating people and the other two are involved in our online design and execution — you know Facebook, outreach, that kind of stuff, which also has a revenue component. So all of them will contribute in some way to revenue.

I presume that you’ve approached some of KCET’s major contributors. What kind of reception are you getting?

Actually, that would be incorrect. We have yet to approach KCET’s major contributors. We have been contacted by a lot of their supporters who say they’re pooling their support, and they want to come to us. Those generally aren’t major contributors. Major getting is about relationships. It’s about planting seeds, watering and tending the field, and then reaping later. And we still have a lot of work to do there, and we’re in the process of connecting with a whole lot of constituencies in L.A.

The good news is our Orange County supporters have stepped up and actually helped us even more, knowing that we have a greater obligation now throughout the region. A lot of friends are connecting us with the people we need to know in L.A. That’s coming along nicely. But we haven’t actually raised money from that crowd yet.

In an earlier interview with one of our reporters, you said that you expect that your operating budget will grow to around $20 million over time. That’s still just a third of KCET’s. How do you explain that gap?

Well, KCET has a large production infrastructure, and they grew in an earlier era when it cost a lot more in terms of people and equipment to do some of the same things we can do now in a digital age for less and with fewer people. So we’re trying to create the new model of a media company here.

But what we’re not going to do is be slackers on customer service, on interfacing with our members, on being responsive to them. We’re very aware that we need to be really strong there.

As far as production, we’re going to do what a lot of companies in media do now and that is expand and contract as the projects come along rather than have infrastructure in place. Of course, we have that to some degree to produce Real Orange, Inside OC and Bookmark, the local shows that we create here. But beyond that, we’re going to do a more on a project basis.

Before this broke out, there was some talk of combining all the public stations in Southern California. I know you have relationships now with KLCS and KVCR. What about bringing KCET into the fold and doing this jointly?

Well, first of all, what we were talking about was a collaboration or consortium. It’s something that I had proposed many years ago, and actually went up to KCET and tried to make happen once without success. But we knew in a four PBS station market that we had at the time, the collaboration wouldn’t work unless the big guys played. And KCET, as the big guys, decided in the last year that they were interested in doing that. And so we were in some conversations about that with them. And frankly, those were progressing nicely, and I thought we were on that path. I was very surprised when KCET announced they were leaving PBS.

But in terms of what happens going forward, a lot of the things that are involved in these kinds of collaborations require that we all have similar access to content and rights, and the strategic program schedule and cross-promotion  that we’re trying to do. It would be especially challenging if we were doing it with an entity that didn’t have rights to much of the content that we’re trying to share and strategically use among the stations. Of course, KCET doesn’t have access to those rights now.

Would it be impossible? Maybe not. Is it something we would absolutely rule out in the future? No. But right now, we’ve got to make sure the PBS brand and content are delivered where they need to be delivered, and that we don’t miss a beat in that regard. And our focus is there. I can’t predict what’ll happen in a few years, but I don’t see KCET being a part of it in the immediate future.

Let’s talk about distribution. Between your over-the-air signal and cable, do you have any holes in your DMA coverage right now?

No, we don’t. There were some cable holes when we first took this on — some things I was even unaware of in a few spots. Right now, Charter Cable still doesn’t have us in HD on some of their systems in pretty important places, like Malibu, Burbank, Long Beach and Glendale. But they are in the process of making that switch so we will be in HD there. We’re, of course, in HD and SD on Cox and Time Warner now.

Our broadcast signal has always been very strong since we moved to Mount Wilson many years ago. And, in fact, it actually has a more powerful signal than KCET. So people always ask, will your signal reach where KCET’s does? Actually, it reaches farther.

The hole right now in over-the-air transmission is Santa Barbara and Palm Springs. However, I’ve got on my desk an agreement with a broadcaster who can make possible the transmission of PBS into Palm Springs and Santa Barbara over the air. We’re just working through the legalities of that document.

Do you feel that you have to go into L.A. and create programming?

Absolutely. We’re not going to do a show called Real Orange and talk about LA. We have to create new content, and we have to make sure that the content is constructed in a way that we can approach the subject matter on a market-wide basis. We will be in L.A., doing shows about the arts in L.A., but we will make sure that those shows also talk about what else is available throughout the market, just as if we were in Orange County doing shows about the arts here.

We are looking at some offices and studio access in L.A. We’re going to have an L.A. presence. Public TV stations aren’t just about PBS. They’re about being places in the local community where people can gather in front of lights and cameras and talk about their issues and get to know each other. We’ve been doing that very well in Orange County, and we’re absolutely committed to doing that in L.A. It won’t all happen immediately, but over time, we intend for L.A. to feel as affectionate toward us as Orange County has felt toward us.

When will that physical presence be established in L.A.?

Soon. We’re looking at places; we’re studying options. So I can’t give you an exact date. It’s not going to be in the distant future.

And at the same time, you’re moving your Orange County headquarters, correct?

Oh yeah. We’ve already moved the offices. I’m in my new office now speaking to you. Downstairs from here is a big, empty space where we will, over the next four or five months, be building our studio, moving it over here from where it’s been on the Golden West College campus in Huntington Beach.

And what about your multicast channels? How do you plan to use them?

We do have our OC Channel, which is one of the most important things that we do now in light of our new obligation market-wide. We created it a couple of years ago, with mostly Orange County content. It has a news crawl that goes across the bottom of the screen that’s Orange County-only news. It’s got a lot of history about Orange County, a lot of conversation about Orange County and a lot of great shows. In fact, we are the only public television station in the digital era that has created, on our digital bandwidth, an ongoing, 24/7 channel that’s all local content. Most stations are importing stuff off of satellite, international shows, stuff like that. What we’re doing is trying to build a channel here that’s really going to serve Orange County.

So that’s your big answer if somebody accuses you of going Hollywood?

That’s right.