Jack Gibson wants your attention on Thursday evenings.The senior vice president of programming and production for Miami's PBS affiliate produces a newsmagazine called New Florida. Every week, WPBT-Ch. 2 beams the program into 250,000 households in South Florida and the Caribbean.
Nonetheless, Gibson thinks New Florida's audience could be much larger. Earlier this year, sitting at a table filled with other executives from Florida's public television stations, he described his grand expansion scheme: to create a cooperative of PBS affiliates that would produce and air New Florida as a statewide newsmagazine.
Seven stations, including Tampa's WEDU-Ch. 3, signed up for the project. With each participating station having market exclusivity, New Florida will broadcast from Miami to Pensacola to a potential nearly 7-million households, starting in January.
As the plan goes, each station will produce six- to eight-minute news segments and submit those to WPBT for final editing. Then, every Thursday evening, all eight stations will broadcast New Florida in prime time via a feed from Miami.
"The individual stations will have quite a bit of freedom and creativity to develop a number of topics," said Gibson, who sees New Florida as a vehicle for Floridians to learn about issues and ideas affecting different parts of the state.
A similar news program exists in California. KCET in Los Angeles produces a 30-minute weekly newsmagazine, California Connected, which is broadcast statewide via participating public TV stations.
When New Florida premieres in the Tampa Bay area, it will include five or six news segments in its 30-minute program slot. At least two of those segments will be from Miami, and Gibson's staff will have final say over which stories are included on the program.
Because of the WPBT control, New Florida likely will have a decidedly South Florida flavor — to the possible chagrin of viewers in other parts of the state.
In fact, the show's host embodies this. Hunter Reno, a former model and magazine cover girl, is a Miami celebrity practically unknown outside of South Florida. She is the niece of former U.S. attorney general and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Janet Reno. The younger Reno formerly hosted the Travel Channel's Exotic Islands and Oxygen Media's Oxygen Sports.
"It will be dominated by South Florida," said José A. Fajardo, executive vice president and chief operating officer for WMFE-Ch. 24 in Orlando. "It would be naive not to understand that it's their program."
Fajardo, however, doesn't view that as a problem in the beginning. As the participating stations become accustomed to the newsmagazine and begin to contribute stories more frequently, New Florida's focus will balance, Fajardo believes. Toward this goal, the Orlando PBS affiliate designated one of its news producers as the primary liaison to New Florida's Miami staff.
Despite the initial focus on South Florida, Fajardo predicts that New Florida will fill an underserved niche in markets around the state. "Ours is going to be more intellectual than the other newsmagazines," he said. "The other newsmagazines are titillating with their news and journalistic values. We will take issues that are relevant and treat them in a sensitive and unique way."
Paul Grove, vice president of programming and production for WEDU, agrees. New Florida will serve the station's 17-county viewing area with stories affecting the entire state, but Grove maintains that Bay area viewers won't feel left out.
WEDU is hiring a full-time news producer to work directly with New Florida's staff and the station will receive a stipend from WPBT to produce at least one weekly segment. "The people at WPBT truly want this to be a statewide program," Grove said.
Like other participating stations, WEDU will rely on local freelance producers and filmmakers to produce much of the footage sent to Miami.
"The focus of the pieces is through the eyes of the people," said Gibson. "I don't think it's going to be a turnoff for a person from Pensacola or Miami to watch a segment about Central Florida."
But New Florida won't enter new markets without facing challenges.
PBS audiences generally are better informed than audiences of major networks. They see through sensationalism, which has taken root at such ratings-starved local stations as ABC affiliate WFTS-Ch. 28. They also know when courtroom stories of bizarre crimes and love triangles are used to compensate for a lack of shoe-leather reporting — a ploy often used by NBC's Dateline.
This same discerning audience, however, may have trouble accepting New Florida as a true newsmagazine, as Americans have come to understand the term through such aggressive news programs as CBS's 60 Minutes and ABC's Nightline.
Most of New Florida's segments are light features or eye-candy travelogues that accent Florida's positives. Investigative reports, profiles of corrupt public figures, analyses of bad policies — viewers rarely see those on New Florida.
While it's easy to criticize public TV stations for going soft on news, they don't have many options. Limited resources prevent the stations from doing investigative reports, which are expensive and labor-intensive, and their dependence on large corporate donations places public TV journalists in precarious positions.
How could cash-strapped WEDU, for instance, afford to probe a company that donates more than $1,000 annually?
To establish a core audience without jugular-slicing reports, New Florida will have to exploit its one true advantage: time. With 90 seconds considered a long story for local commercial news broadcasts, New Florida's longer, five-minute-plus segments will allow producers to explain issues in greater depth and tell stories the other TV media can't.
That's what Gibson, who has made an 18-month commitment to the statewide program, believes will make New Florida successful. Asked why viewers should watch his program over other newsmagazines, the WPBT executive didn't hesitate to answer: "We actually give new perspectives."
New Florida debuts Jan. 9 at 8 p.m. on WEDU-Ch. 3 and will rebroadcast on Jan. 12 at 2:30 p.m.
Contact Staff Writer Trevor Aaronson at 813-248-8888, ext. 134, or trevor.aaronson@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2002.
