Greetings,

We are a month away from launching our new season of programs and that seems like a good time to begin our conversation with you about what we are doing, why we are doing it and our own sense of what journalism in these times can be about.

With a month to go, the WIDE ANGLE staff is incredibly busy working with our filmmakers around the world to shape the pieces and get them ready for air. I am grateful for their experience and calm. As there is much work to do. It is not enough to simply present a program on Darfur or a program on the changing nature of the military in Japan or our own work on the sad and difficult Iraqi refugee problem in the Middle East. Our mission isn’t simply to make and support films on these issues.

What we must do and are doing is to make and shape films that look at these complicated issues in a compelling way. That requires not simply good journalism but good story telling – story telling with strong and compelling central characters that draw you into the journey we take each week. This is the essential difference between what I call “Eat Your Vegetables” journalism and work that you will not only watch but look forward to watching each week. In truth, the filmmakers and the WIDE ANGLE staff are far more experienced in the art of long form journalism than am I. So, I find myself helping some and learning a lot.

I come to this as a great believer in the mission and a great believer in you. This is a wonderful opportunity for me to engage in the kind of journalism that drew me to the craft a very long time ago. Modern media, with the pressures of minute-by-minute ratings, doesn’t always make that easy. A trip down Paris Hilton Lane is often easier and cheaper than a trip through the hospitals and culture of Mozambique. But you are a demanding bunch. You expect us to do work that is both important and compelling, and you should know how strongly all of us feel about delivering on that expectation. We are also sure you will tell us when we hit the mark and be just as vocal should we miss it.

That part of the season need not wait until we launch. We can begin now with a discussion of what you expect from us, from PBS and from the journalism you consume. I can’t promise we will answer each note we receive, but we will read them all and respond to as many as we can.

Finally, for some of you I am an old face in a new spot, for others I am just a refugee from cable news. To the first group, it will be so nice to work in front of you again. For that second group, I am eager to prove my chops. I trust you will not be bashful in your criticisms and – I hope – compliments.

Let the conversation begin! See Wide Angle site.

Aaron Brown
New York
May 29, 2008

(this post originally appears on Wide Angle web site)

See story below, or go to the AM NY site:

May 29 issue, page 16

Inside Thirteen blogger: David Reisman, Educational Publishing

Robert Miller, who is my boss, co-worker and friend here at Thirteen/WNET, is retiring in June. Robert has been the Director of the Educational Publishing Department since 1983, and I’ve worked with him since 1986. When I first met Robert, I was 28 years old and in my first semester in a graduate program in education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He had been working at Thirteen/WNET for three years. His first project was a set of ambitious print materials for HERITAGE: CIVILIZATION AND THE JEWS.

I became a full-fledged staff member in the early 1990s. Over the years our department has developed publications for public TV programs of all types, in all subject areas — long-running series like NATURE (we’ve produced its teachers guides for 20 years); Bill Moyers’ programs on poetry, addiction, alternative medicine, and dying; the international documentary series WIDE ANGLE; and even local programs like A WALK AROUND BROOKLYN.

One of the great things about working with Robert is that he brings a truly collaborative spirit to his projects, and he’s very generous with offering opportunities for creative input. Before working at Thirteen/WNET, I’d had some pretty negative experiences in the workplace, and Robert’s encouragement was tremendously important for me. From my first experience with educational publishing (research for the Faces of Japan viewer’s guide) to the recent comic books I’ve developed for NATURE, I’ve always been impressed by how much Robert enjoys the brainstorming process at the beginning of a big project, how seriously he takes the messages of each program we’re working on, and how dedicated he is to making sure that our materials have the greatest possible educational impact.

Robert Miller, Thirteen Education

In addition to his work in educational publishing, Robert is also a very creative person: He is a talented writer of strange, funny pieces of surreal fiction and has a surprisingly excellent singing voice (as my coworkers and I learned when he nervously called us into a conference room to rehearse for a recent guitar recital). He’s also been genuinely supportive of my work as an artist, and one of the nice things about working on 33rd St. and 10th Ave. is that we occasionally go see art exhibits in Chelsea during lunch.

Colleagues come and go, new technologies cause seismic shifts in the workplace - and through all the uncertainty, Robert’s been stalwart and reliable. He’s managed to find a way of being a constant, like the “c” in E=mc2 (the speed of light). He’s been both a mentor and a good friend, and I feel truly lucky to have worked with him over the years.

Bloomberg Radio is airing an interview with Neal Shapiro, Saturday, May 17th, on the program Bloomberg Muse Saturday.

It will air 5 times — at around 3:19 a.m., 8:19 a.m., 1:19 p.m., and 11:19 p.m. Find it on 1130 on the AM dial, Sirius Satellite channel 130, or the Bloomberg Web site (real-time only; click on ‘live radio’).

Inside Thirteen blogger: Fred Kaufman, Executive Producer, Nature

NATURE on-location in Hawaii:

Being in the wrong place at the right time is a necessity when filming volcanoes. Unlike wild animals that tend to run and disappear at the first sight or smell of a human, lava flows are unpredictable, quite dangerous and come right at you.

Good thing I wasn’t around for the filming of this extraordinary sequence of lava dripping into the ocean where it expands, pops and explodes for our upcoming film on Hawaii’s Kilaeua volcano. Emmy award-winning cinematographer Paul Atkins took his HD camera underwater to capture this rare event. He had to brave ocean water temps of 100 degrees to film fire underwater. First, check out the footage:

Here’s Paul’s account of the experience:

a rare opportunity
Normally, quality underwater images of lava entering the sea on the “Big Island” of Hawaii are next to impossible to obtain. Once the lava really gets pumping in a location, the scene below the surface is too unstable and dangerous, and the water visibility is reduced to almost zero. As the flow continues, the lava hardens and forms a massive ‘bench” which periodically collapses — certain death for any divers caught in the ensuing underwater turbulence.

catching the flow
The key is to catch a lava flow in its early stages before a bench forms, within the first few days of entering the sea.

In this case, the ocean-entry lava flow had stopped for several weeks. Suddenly, a fresh surface flow rolled down Kilauea volcano and began to sizzle into the ocean again. The sea bottom at this spot was relatively old, meaning it had not experienced a lava flow since the early 1980’s. This, combined with clear, calm weather on a usually turbulent coast, was the special set of conditions I had waited 25 years for.

The first challenge was picking a place to position our boat and enter the water. Out in front of the flow, the ocean surface was steaming hot, in places as much as 100 degrees fahrenheit. A few feet beneath this scalding layer, however, the water is much cooler. The plan was to slip under the hot layer, and swim in the cooler water toward the lava flow at the coast, navigating by compass if necessary.

getting out
In a way, lava diving is similar to ice or cave diving. In an emergency — if you run out of air, for instance — you can’t make a vertical ascent and come up. There’s a ceiling of scalding hot water looming above. You must save enough air to navigate out from under this ceiling before you can surface.

Our filming went well on the first dive, and we got fantastic shots of bizarre pillow lavas forming and exploding in clear, blue water. We thought we saved enough air pressure, 500psi, to make it out. But, as we swam toward our boat, we realized we had a problem. Each time we attempted to come to the surface — sticking one hand up to test the temperature — it was too hot and we had to retreat. We kept trying for 100 yards out. Nothing. The scalding hot ceiling had expanded while we were down under. We couldn’t come up for air and my air pressure was down to next to nothing, less than 20psi.

For a moment, I thought the rare footage we had just shot would never see the light of day. I looked at my dive buddy, Richard Pyle, and we just shrugged. No choice. We went up through the hot water. By some miracle, we surfaced in a cooler spot — I don’t know where it came from. It was hot enough to steam up our masks, but not enough to boil skin.

Thanks, Paul.

Why do people talk to their television sets? Have television and real life become hopelessly intertwined? And scarier, have television sets literally become our friends? I recently spoke with Jonah Lehrer, author of “Proust Was A Neuroscientist,” about these and other questions.

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T.T.: Do you think Proust would have watched television?

Lehrer: My sense is that he would have. He used to listen to live opera over the phone. In his essays, he comes back again and again to the way you are lost when you read, disappear into the medium. Books and television are both complex acts of disappearing.

T.T.: What actually happens in the brain when we read a book or watch television?

Lehrer: Television requires that we think a lot and invent worlds and keep track of characters, but when we watch the Sopranos, we’re all watching the same Sopranos. I think the most complete act of imagination is still reading words on a page. The brain provides an incredible feat of cognition when we read. It transforms symbols on a page into a movie we create in our head. It reads a sentence. ‘Jack was smiling.’ The abstract communication is translated, and our mirror neurons light up as if we were smiling, too, a hot new brain circuit. The mirror neurons are involved in how we understand how someone else is feeling. In science, we call this dual process. The frontal cortex rationally takes in the information and farther back in the brain, the limbic system responds.

T.T.: Does someone real or imagined make us respond in the same way?

Lehrer: The brain is constantly confronted with ambiguous symbols. It does really well in making sense of those ambiguities. We may not see the same color red, but we pretend that it’s all the same red. The visual cortex particularly excels at this. For example, we each have a blind spot in the middle of our visual field, but the brain seamlessly fills it in. Confronted with holes, we automatically make sense of it anyway.

T.T.: You’ve written about how, observing just a few brush strokes in a painting by Cezanne, the viewer will fill in the scene.

Lehrer: Yes. And similarly, if you show people a computer screen with just a few pixels and lines on it, representing a face, people will hypothesize that it’s a face. As for television, its very nature is so cinematic that I think it is captivating to memory and naturally confuses us. Photographs can do this, too. I know that many of my memories are actually based on looking at family photographs.

T.T.: But you don’t talk to those pictures.

Lehrer: When our computers crash we yell at them because we invest them with the qualities of something that has agency or intention -– something that is alive. The brain didn’t evolve in a state including television. When the brain evolved, all animated creatures were living things, not electronic.

T.T.: So how do we relate to electronic communication?

Lehrer: Television has many human characteristics. It seems to be a little moody. It throws out different emotions. And the brain is slightly tricked by things that don’t have agency and are not really alive. So you could construct a hypothesis that we talk to our television set not because we are lonely, but because our brain thinks it’s “one of us.”

Haven’t sent your renga yet? Just send one along when you’ve got it… And come back June 13th, when The Thirteenth presents an extremely limited engagement of “Public Television: The Swimsuit Issue.”

Inside Thirteen blogger: The Thirteenth (Vickie Karp, Freelance Writer for 13)

Inside Thirteen blogger: Andrew Yamato, Outreach Producer, Life After Broadcast

There was an op-ed column in the New York Times a few weeks ago about a recent survey of American teenagers in which 20% didn’t know who the United States had fought against in World War II. One quarter couldn’t even identify Adolf Hitler.

Statistics like these are partly why Thirteen commissioned Brooklyn-based Reel Works Teen Filmmaking to produce a half-hour documentary about World War II as part of our outreach effort for Ken Burns’ THE WAR. The completed film, titled Over Here, had its premiere screening on Monday, May 5th at Thirteen.

For this project, Reel Works co-founders John and Stephanie Williams assembled local high school filmmakers Derek Garcia, Zachary Lennon-Simon, Rebecca Kaplan, Niaz Mosharraf, Isaac Shrem, and Melinda Tenenzapf to work under the supervision of filmmaker and Reel Works mentor Maria Gambale. This “Team Thirteen” met with Thirteen staff last August to brainstorm fresh approaches to the well-worn subject of World War II, eventually choosing to focus on the homefront as experienced by New Yorkers who had themselves been teenagers at the time.

Reel Works filmmaker Zachary Lennon-Simon and interviewee Corliss Fyfe Whitney

Team Thirteen then went on to conduct extensive interviews with over a dozen subjects, weaving their candid recollections into a refreshing portrait of a “greatest generation” as diverse and opinionated as their city itself. Punctuated with eclectic stock footage and poignantly scored by composer Barney McCall, Over Here stands not only as a document of what happened over sixty years ago, but as an inspiring example of the direct and vital connection that can still be made between the wartime generation and the young people inheriting the world they helped save.

That connection was movingly evident as both filmmakers and subjects spoke of each other with deep respect and affection during the Q&A panel discussion which followed Monday’s screening. For myself and the other Thirteen staff present, it was a great opportunity to see the impact of our outreach efforts on such a personal level, and we’re looking forward to future collaborations with Reel Works.

You can watch Over Here on Thirteen’s NEW YORK WAR STORIES website.

It will also soon be downloadable from iTunesU—Apple’s collection of free educational podcasts.

There aren’t too many people on the planet that I can say I’d be honored just to pass in a lobby, but that’s exactly how I feel about author and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. We just ran into each other downstairs, and I got to exchange a few words with a great man. He was here shooting an interview to coincide with our broadcast of Visions of Israel.

When I asked the crew how the shoot had gone, they could not have been more complimentary. One of our staffers told me that “when Elie Wiesel shakes your hand, it’s a handshake you’re going to remember for the rest of your life.” I couldn’t agree more.

Visions of Israel will premiere on May 14th, 2008.

Inside Thirteen blogger: Neal Shapiro, President

It looked like my usual Tuesday morning:

8:00 a.m.: Dropped my son off at school.

8:30 a.m.: Breakfast meeting with someone interested in our new international news program.

9:30 a.m.: Meeting about Great Performances.

10:30 a.m.: Senior managers’ meeting.

12:30 p.m.: Meeting with Mayor Bloomberg and Sting.

WHAT!? BLOOMBERG AND STING?

That’s right. At a press conference at 1 p.m. in Times Square, Mayor Bloomberg, Sting and the Police announced their very last concert ever in NYC. The proceeds from the concert will be donated to our public television stations, Thirteen and WLIW, and they will also fund planting 10,000 trees in NYC.

I was there to represent Thirteen and to thank Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers for their generosity. My colleague, Terrel Cass, president of WLIW, was also there.

We gathered just off Times Square while we waited for the mayor. Perhaps you were wondering if The Police were one of those bands who travel with a huge entourage and keep to themselves.

In fact, they were very approachable and friendly. They patiently posed for pictures, including a few with the real police as we chatted about life on the road.

Sting and Neal Shapiro

I asked if they had a chance to enjoy the different cities they visited. Stewart said that life on the road is a blur and even if you are in a great city, they are often too exhausted to enjoy it. “Better to go back when you have more time,” he said. “though I always love New York.”

I asked Andy if they always played the same set…if they ever decided to sing in a different order. He said the band might like to do that on occasion, but there are all kinds of lighting and stage cues involved in each song, so making a change on the fly is very difficult.

Finally, I told Sting that my wife and I had seen him on his recent tour and I was struck by how much he invited the audience to sing along with him, often times stopping a verse in the middle so the audience could complete the song. “Well, mate,” he said, “just means less singing for me!”

By now, you may be saying, “Enough with the backstage banter. Where is the concert? How do I get tickets?”

Well, we are still working all that out. So, as we say in tv, stay tuned.

Inside Thirteen blogger: Kelly Lafferty, Associate Producer, Cyberchase

Why were thousands of kids screaming “pentagon!” at a Mets game on Wednesday, April 30? Cyberchase Day at Shea Stadium! Over 10,000 kids were captivated (that’s right, 10,000 kids were quiet in a baseball stadium) as Matt “Harry” Wilson and Digit LeBoid hosted an interactive pre-game show featuring Mets players John Maine and Aaron Heilman. With his voice booming through the stadium and his face projected on the huge Jumbotron screen over a Cyberspace background, Maine asked the kids if they could name the geometrical shape of home plate – and NYC students’ thunderous reaction proved they understand the connection between math and sports.

Cyberchase’s 25-minute pre-game show demonstrated ways that math can be used in sports. Kids were even challenged to estimate how many hot dogs are consumed during a game. With 30,000 people at a game, about 1 out of every three people will chow down on a hot dog – so kids discovered that ~10,000 hot dogs are devoured.

Throughout the game Harry & Digit made field appearances with Mr. Met to the delight of cheering fans of all ages. Wednesday was the second time that Cyberchase was invited to Shea Stadium … and both days have proven a “home run” (sorry but i had to!) for the WNET team, the Mets, and most importantly, Cyberchase fans.

Cyberchase Day at Shea is part of Cyberchase’s Math & Sports initiative, which gives kids tools to develop winning game strategies while encouraging them to get active with math. Go to Cyberchase for math & sports online games, episode information, and activities for teachers and parents.