News

By Mary Hladky

    If all goes as hoped, two South Florida public broadcasting television stations will complete a merger plan by this fall.
    The new entity, South Florida PBS, would bring together WXEL-TV, which serves Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast, and WPBT2, serving Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties. The two stations said a merger would create the nation’s seventh-largest television market.
    Since the stations announced they were exploring a merger on June 5, staff and board members have been working out the specifics. If the two boards bless a finalized merger plan, the stations would seek Federal Communications Commission approval.
    “We can achieve greater success by working together rather than competing,” said WXEL President Don Sussman.
    The two stations would continue to operate. But the goal is to eliminate duplication of programming. Now, the stations offer — and pay for — a similar lineup during prime time. Divvying up those programs would mean viewers would have a choice in what they watch. Both stations would extend their signals to reach all of South Florida.
    It also would free up money so that the new South Florida PBS could produce and acquire new programs.
    “By pooling resources, we have the ability to create more content that is locally specific,” said Max Duke, WPBT2’s vice president of content and community partnerships. “This is the opportunity for us to spend the resources that before would have been spent competing.”
    George Elmore, a Gulf Steam resident and the founder and president of Hardrives in Delray Beach who serves as a WPBT2 director, said the change is overdue. “It is stupid to have the same program on two channels,” he said. “Everyone has reduced funding of public television. We have to merge or combine in some way to continue to bring quality programming to South Florida. It should have happened years ago.”
    Discussions about combining the two stations have taken place several times since 1997, but no deal was ever struck.
    PBS’s wildly popular Downton Abbey, which now airs Sunday evenings on both stations, offers an example of what a merger could accomplish.  If it ran on only one of the stations, its South Florida audience would be the fifth-largest public broadcasting audience in the nation, Sussman said. “That is a phenomenal shift in metrics for us,” he said.
    Another possibility is to air Downton Abbey at different times on the two stations, Duke said. “We might be able to offer best content more often without duplication,” he said.
    The merger talks come at a time both stations are financially challenged.
    “There isn’t a not-for-profit that has not been affected by the recession,” Sussman said. “The recovery has been slow, as has major giving. We hope this will bring people back.”
    South Florida PBS would offer a larger market for donors and corporate underwriters and eliminate the two stations’ competing for funding. Supporters of public television could contribute to benefit all of public broadcasting or could designate funding for a specific area of programming.
    By establishing South Florida as the nation’s seventh-largest television market, “we think we have a pretty good message for corporate underwriters,” Sussman said.
    Since the merger talks were announced, both Sussman and Duke said the stations have gotten positive feedback.
    One exception is Jupiter resident Murray Green, the former president of the Community Broadcasting Foundation of Palm Beach and the Treasure Coast, who wants WXEL to remain independent. He wrote a letter to the editor of The Palm Beach Post in June decrying a merger and saying WXEL’s spectrum will be sold.
    “Mr. Green is very misinformed,” Sussman said.
    The FCC is planning an auction of television broadcasting spectrum rights in 2015, and could do something that would “put us in a position we don’t want to be in at this point,” Sussman said. But absent that, WXEL-TV officials have no intention of selling, he said.
    “It is not something we are intent on doing,” Duke said.