JoAnn Urofsky: General manager, WUSF Public Broadcasting, Tampa
By JEFF HARRINGTON
Published August 18, 2003
Q. With the ever-present money crunch in public broadcasting, how are you trying to reinvent the model?
By re-evaluating our core competencies and figuring out what things we're good at beside television broadcasting.
Both radio and television broadcasting are really becoming a business of managing digital assets as you put together programs. How can we do that for clients, whether partners or for-profits or other not-for-profits? And how do we have the outcome be funding to buy and produce more programming? That's the bottom line for us.
We have a project now with the Hillsborough County jails where we aggregate materials that people who are incarcerated watch. Some of it is for behavior modification. Some is about the processes of government so they understand how government works, specifically the court and jail systems. We have expertise in-house to find the programs . . . We put them on a server and feed it out to the location.
Q. Can you describe your project using digital technology to make courtrooms more efficient?
We've been working on it for about a year now . . . We've just signed a digital court reporting agreement in which WUSF captures the court record in video and audio and a typical transcription, and we will archive that for the courts. Ultimately . . . the public will be able to access this material. We'll be hiring additional people to manage it.
Q. How much are these types of ventures helping your bottom line?
At this point we're spending more in pulling together the partnerships than realizing income from the partnerships. We have one employee dedicated to this now, (but) this will become a big part of what we're going to do. Our first strategy is to maximize the government synergies, but absolutely we would be interested in commercial partnerships.
