No Kidding, It’s Fun To Work in Public Television!

Hi, my name is Jeff Forster and I’m in charge of production at Detroit Public Television. I’ll be writing in this space every Friday.

I’ll try to let you in what’s happening behind the scenes at Detroit Public Television and let me tell you it’s more than eating chocolate donuts or cold pizza at the craft services table. Actually this is public television, there is no craft services table unless you count the leftover tofu lasagna I found in the station refrigerator on Monday but that’s between my gastroenterologist and me.

Right, behind the scenes! We’re very excited because we are in a transition from our old building, built in 1950 to our new building where we are building studios, editing and production control areas. The contractors are working right now on the editing and master control areas. Do you hear pounding?

Master control is the last stop for everything that goes on the air for Detroit Public Television. Right now, that includes our standard analog signal (Channel 56), our digital High Definition signal (56.1), digital standard definition (56.2) and the Create Channel (56.3). Our new facility will significantly limit the use of videotape with most of our programs playing back on a computer server. The tapes we used were big cassettes, just like in your car.

We are also constructing new edit facilities, that’s where we put together the local, national and pledge programs produced at DPTV. Right now, we produce six weekly local programs; Am I Right?, Get Up Get Out, American Black Journal, In the Frame: Exploring the DIA, Detroit Economic Club Speeches, and Leaders on Leadership. Our National Pledge Production Department has produced almost a dozen national specials since July. We also produce four national how-to programs and will edit them in this state-of-the-art facility.

The next step is to start work on our production studios. We’ll be building three studios in a wonderful warehouse space at the Riley Broadcast Center.

Now I’m not necessarily shamelessly promoting our station (maybe I am but I don’t mean to), it’s just to let you know we do a bunch of cool fun things on the air that folks don’t always hear about. Next time you’ve grown tired of watching a show with pretty girls opening metal attaché cases while an OCD host encourages greedy guests with a sadistic banker. …check us out. C’mon you know what I’m talking about.

Coming soon…on the road in at a needle craft conference…no kidding!