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January 31, 2008

WNET's Chief Takes on Expanded Role

Neal Shapiro, who has been president of the New York public-television station WNET for one year, takes over as president and chief executive of WNET’s parent group, the Educational Broadcasting Corporation, on February 4, reports The New York Times.

During his tenure at WNET, Mr. Shapiro has successfully pressed for locally focused programming through his use of unorthodox fund-raising strategies, says The Times.

While public television is notoriously slow to develop programs and raise funds, Mr. Shapiro says that he intends “to spark a national dialogue” about community-financed programming. “One of the things that I think I can bring here is to try to make us a little more nimble,” he said. As an example, Mr. Shapiro successfully raised $455,608 from individual viewers and larger sponsors for a program to examine New Yorkers’ war memories as an accompaniment to the filmmaker Ken Burns’s multipart documentary of World War II.

Mr. Shapiro says he hopes to build a network of donors who will give broadly instead of on a project-by-project basis in order to promote quick-turnaround programming.

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