[Norfolk Arts and Entertainment]

Great point. I moved out of Hampton Roads the minute I could when I turned 18. I lived in Washington, DC and Miami. When I finally moved back to Norfolk, I finally appreciated some of the nice qualities of this area. And the Virginia Arts Festival and Virginia Symphony are great examples of that. Welcome to the forum, Bert!

Thanks all. I tend to just be a lurker, but........

[Norfolk Arts and Entertainment]

I'm very familiar with what the organization does. I know they receive public money to do so. I didn't realize that the Virginia Symphony had 25 full time people just to manage it. At what point do the organizations get too big?

It's like WHRO. WHRO receives public funding. WHRO begs for cash from the community, playing poor. WHRO has two ATSC HD transmitters, when the commercial stations can generally only afford one. When I had a company, I remember going to bid on private work, and WHRO was there. WHRO was using the DS3 line that is paid for, probably by taxpayers, to work on commercial business and compete against the local businesses. To me it's a head scratcher. I believe their ratings are also withheld by law from the books like Arbitron, but I'd have to verify this. While I enjoy PBS programming sometimes, you have to ask yourself is it fair to the local businesses? If there isn't demand for boring symphony concert video on the commercial stations, why should the public fund it?

Also, I'd be *really* pissed if Va Arts Fest used Ticketmaster for anything.

While WHRO does receive taxpayer support, it comprises only about 13% of our budget. Of course, those funds allow us to provide services to the Hampton Roads region not addressed by for-profit companies. 24,000 families from throughout the region think so highly about WHRO that they voluntarily provide the station financial support. Imagine that, giving money for something they could otherwise get for free. Clearly, WHRO is a valuable community asset.

The DS3 line you refer to is paid, in great part, by the 17 local school divisions that own us. This broadband interconnection allows us to provide a vast array of services to our K-12 students, including on-demand, searchable video, correlated directly to the SOLs, as well as a full blown online school (which includes over 70 teachers) that gives students access to for-credit courses that they would otherwise not be able to take.

It would be irresponsible for WHRO to not use any excess capacity from our capital infrastructure to ensure revenue diversity, especially in these dicey economic days. Of course, when we do bid on a commerical job, we pay taxes on any revenue we realize. And since we are primarily charged with using our capital assets for non-profit purposes (as opposed to the commercial companies that get to make money with their assets from day one), we feel pretty comfortable that the playing field is level. Of course we also partner with a great number of for-profit companies to enhance services to the region.

Of course, no ratings (TV or radio) are withheld from the public, by law or otherwise. Although it is true that Arbitron provides only commerical radio numbers directly to the local papers (much to our chagrin). When we get access to the numbers, we pass them on to the papers, but that usually happens after the numbers have already been published.

Hope that better helps you understand WHRO.

On a side note, groups like the Virginia Arts Festival and the Virginia Symphony are two of the many arts groups that make Hampton Roads such a wonderful place to live. Anyone that has lived outside of Hampton Roads for any length of time can see this clearly.

Bert Schmidt

WHRO

[Hampton Roads Off-Topic Talk]

Cool! I'll set up a computer to capture the HDTV feed weekly.

"What Matter's", WHRO's new weekly public affairs program covering important issues to the people of Hampton Roads can be seen Friday's at 8:30pm with a repeat at 10:30pm and numerous repeats over the weekend. It airs both on analog channel 15 and WHRO-HD (Channel 715 on Cox).

We also offer "What Matter's" as a video or audio podcast at www.whro.org and iTunes.