ABSTRACT
Public broadcasting organizations face an environment of turbulence in the early part of this new millennium unlike any other period in their histories. What seemed to stations, and the system as a whole, to be the great promise of the digital revolution has emerged as a serious threat to their survival. In short, stations face mounting competition from various media outlets-cable, satellite, and Internet-based-and increasing costs from the slower-thanexpected shift to the digital broadcast environment. While federal funding for public broadcasting has maintained its level overall, other pieces of the funding pie are in decline, particularly the number of memberships stations can obtain (see Behrens 2001) and, most recently, foundation support. Clearly the shift to digital broadcasting and, eventually, the Internet as a platform for media distribution offers great opportunities in yet-to-be-defined ways; but the cost-benefit ratio for these new media seems to be exploding upward just as the dotcom boom lowers onto the heads of those in the media industry. The digital terrain of Web-based services and multichannel feeds in television and radio offers less promise as a land of abundant bandwidth, enhanced content, and potential income; instead, this terrain poses a quandary for the business strategies being developed by public broadcasting stations and the system as a whole. As public broadcasting consultant Richard Somerset-Ward puts it: "How can an underfunded, underperforrning, and somewhat dysfunctional system play any meaningful role in a marketplace that is already overcrowded with aggressive and profitable media?" (Somerset-Ward 2001, 239).
