Former NBC News President Neal Shapiro (LA '80) will become president of the Educational Broadcasting Corporation, the New York-based parent company of public television stations Thirteen/WNET and WLIW21 New York.
According to an announcement last week, Shapiro will succeed president William Baker in February. Baker will continue as CEO through a year-long transition period, after which Shapiro will also become CEO.
"What excites me most about Neal is that he is one of the most competent people in the mass media business, and he is also very familiar with media as it has changed in this new complex environment," Baker told the Daily.
"I hoped he could bring public service broadcasting to a new level, which it needs to [in order to deal with] this new complicated world that exists today."
Shapiro, a former editor-in-chief of the Tufts Observer, oversaw NBC's news division from June 2001 to Sept. 2005, a period that included the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina.
Programming that he supervised included the morning "Today Show," "NBC Nightly News," and "Meet the Press".
Shapiro left NBC in September of 2005 and then taught at Tufts and Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.
"When I thought about what I wanted to do next, I wanted some creativity and some amount of public service," he told the Daily. "This job has both."
While his job at NBC made him accustomed to commercial television, he said he welcomes the new conditions of public broadcasting. "There are a lot of great things about commercial television: its reach is great. But there are limits," he said.
Ratings might measure the popularity - in sheer numbers - of commercial broadcasts, but they don't gauge the "depth or passion" of viewers, he said.
"There's a certain freedom in public television. You might have a smaller audience, but engage them in a deeper and more profound way, which you can't always do in commercial television," he said.
For a college student, he said, public programming need not replace that loyal Thursday dose of "Grey's Anatomy," but can augment what is already out there. "We don't want to compete: you want to add to what you watch," he said.
Shapiro also has plans to keep public television in New York up to speed with today's growing and diversifying media market.
"I'd like to make the strong shows they produce even stronger, and would like to try some new things," he said. "There's so much happening, and we're trying to find ways to make some of the things that happen be of more interest to a national audience."
His plans include not only new shows, but also more creativity with their distribution. "The days when people just sit back and watch TV are changing - they're watching on a TV as big as a room or small as an iPod," he said.
"All those things will require us to produce programs in a different way, and these challenges that face commercial television are no different than in private television."
Yet Shapiro said that in adapting to new challenges, journalists draw from the same roots. "Journalism is a fascinating field in that it changes all the time," he said.
"But the basic question is, can you rise above the daily grind of putting out stories and take some perspective? Journalists try to write the day's story as they see it."
This sometimes has its drawbacks. "[Reporting on Iraq], I wish we'd been able to find some things then that seem to be apparent now," he said.
For all of his prestige, Shapiro has not forgotten his Jumbo roots and the lessons he learned during his time at the Tufts Observer, where he was editor-in-chief from 1978-1980. At the time, it was the only newspaper on campus.
"It taught me about responsibility - we took our roles and duties very seriously, and had ethical debates about what was right to print," he said.
The best part? "Working hard on the paper all week, and then every Friday going to the dining halls to see everybody reading it."
Other highlights were in-depth coverage of budgeting to "see what tuition increases would be before they happened," and one particular scoop in the heat of the finals crunch.
"When President Jean Mayer had a heart attack during finals week [in May 1980], I had to miss a final to cover it," Shapiro said.
"The final paper was already finished, I had to go to the printing press and stop the paper. It was a real duty - the whole Tufts community needed to know."
Despite the twists and turns and expansion of the field, Shapiro would by no means dissuade aspiring journalists. "To try to understand and cover things in our world is a noble calling," he said.
