Nearly half of the Penn State Outreach layoffs announced this week are in Penn State Public Broadcasting, the unit that houses WPSU radio and television, General Manager Ted Krichels confirmed Wednesday.
He said the broadcast operation, licensed by the university, is eliminating seven positions through layoffs and two through attrition.
That will leave Penn State Public Broadcasting, or PSPB, with a planned 75 positions in the 2011-2012 fiscal year, Krichels said. The positions lost were involved in staff and business support, infrastructure maintenance, technical support, sales, videography and editing, and media licensing.
‘It’s nothing I take lightly,’ Krichels said of the cuts. ‘And it’s incredibly painful to let go some very good people, which we have done.
‘On the other hand, we have a very strong organization,’ he added, with WPSU FM’s membership support having reached a new high this fiscal year.
PSPB also endured layoffs in 2009, when state funding was axed. Now the operation relies mainly on a mixture of federal funding, community support, video and new-media production and university contributions to fund its budget.
Its overall expenses are projected to be about $8.5 million for the 2011-’12 fiscal year, after a $500,000 cut from the university’s funding component.
That university-funding cut is part of the larger $2 million reduction in Penn State Outreach, of which PSPB is a part. The reduction, announced this week, is leading to 15 Outreach layoffs overall, including the seven in PSPB.
Outreach includes a variety of university functions, such as the World Campus, Continuing Education, youth camps, the Small Business Development Center and the Center for Sustainability. It will count 546 employees statewide after the layoffs.
A spokesman for Outreach, Dave Aneckstein, has said the $2 million cut was prompted by an anticipated dip in state funding in 2011-’12 and by the university’s ongoing Core Council process. (The Core Council, led by Provost Rodney Erickson, is identifying at least $10 million in permanent new savings across the university system.)
The $2 million cut will bring the annual Outreach contribution from Penn State’s central budget to $6.8 million, Aneckstein said. He said Outreach handles that as ‘seed money,’ using it to help build an annual revenue stream of more than $100 million — mostly from World Campus and Continuing Education programs.
Outreach returns about $30 million a year to Penn State colleges as part of a revenue-sharing arrangement. About $50 million is returned annually to the central university budget, Aneckstein said.
On the broadcast side of Outreach, Krichels emphasized that the news isn’t all bad. Penn State Public Broadcasting has seen ‘significant success with its public-service media efforts,’ he wrote in an e-mail message, noting projects about water infrastructure, domestic violence, geospatial technologies and human rights.
Large-scale public-service media projects, such as the ‘Telling Amy’s Story’ documentary about domestic violence, have ‘opened up new funding streams,’ Krichels wrote. He said it’s an area where PSPB is focusing for the future — and plans to add two project-development and -management positions.
PSPB also plans to hire a new-media director ‘to help us grow these initiatives,’ Krichels wrote.
Meanwhile, membership support for WPSU FM has climbed to more than $425,000 in the 2010-’11 fiscal year, a new high. The tally three years ago, by comparison, was $412,796.
The station is an NPR affiliate. Its counterpart, WPSU TV, is a PBS affiliate.
‘We’re doing well. We just have a less-secure world to work in … and we have to respond,’ Krichels said. ‘That’s part of being viable in today’s world. You have to make cost reductions when the need arises.’
That said, Krichels added that Penn State Public Broadcasting still enjoys generous support from the university, which holds the WPSU broadcast licenses.
‘If you look in comparison to other university-licensed stations, I don’t know that there’s one I’d trade places with,’ he said. ‘ … This is still the place to be.’
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