One of the joys for me doing this deep dive on PBS is getting to hear the stories of the individual local PBS affiliates. No matter the size of the station and its audience, each station has its own unique connection to its local audience and the community at large.

Panhandle PBS is located in Amarillo and until the station launched in 1988, PBS programming aired on various local broadcast stations or an over-the-air signal from Portales, New Mexico.

Even the launch of the station had its challenges. Including the fact the soon-to-launch Channel 2 signal was the subject of an FCC licensure tug-of-war between Family Media, Inc. and the Amarillo Junior College District.

The college eventually won the license and was able to launch the station thanks to a $1 million dollar federal grant and another $500,000 raised from the community. The station officially changed its name to Panhandle PBS in 2013, in commemoration of the station's 25th anniversary.

I recently spoke with Kevin Ball, CEO Panhandle PBS and Vice President of Communications and Marketing at Amarillo College about the history of the station, how he sees its place in the community and the challenges of navigating recent federal cuts to public media.

The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity:

Reading up on your station, it has a fascinating history. It took a lot to get it on the air and Amarillo was one of the last places in Texas, and in fact in the United States, that didn’t have a dedicated PBS station.

Other stations in the community just rallied around and said, you know what, we'd really like to have this under the umbrella of Amarillo College. So the visionaries at the time just wanted it to happen and that's what happens in Amarillo. When the people want something here, they either made it happen a long time ago or they make it happen now and the station was just one of those things that they had to have back then. So here we be.

What's the partnership like between the college and the station? Obviously, they control it, but what's the working relationship as far as assets and other things?

Let me tell you, it's wonderful because I sit on the President's Cabinet. So the station reports to me and I'm the CEO of the station but I'm also the Vice President of Communications and Marketing on the President's Cabinet and we have elected regents here. They're not appointed, they're elected and I attend everything that they do. So it's a really wonderful relationship here.

We have a new president that came on board about a year ago and she's very supportive and through all of this year, she came in right as this was all coming down last year and it's just been a pleasure to work with her, with the regents. But because I have one foot in the college and one foot in the station, I don't let that go south ever. It's the way that we operate here. And the college is very hands-off too, I mean, there's no big control from the college whatsoever.

It's run very independently for the community, so I think it's a great relationship right now. There's quite a bit of funding that comes from the college, a building, but again, the community. I have all the documents of people a generation ago that wanted this here and they thought that Amarillo College, because it serves the community as a community college does, was the perfect place to house that station. We're right on campus.
And we're a lab for our media students here and we also have a radio station. It's not affiliated with PBS, but it's in that same building and it all works together very well for the students too. In fact, we've had a lot of interns over the years that have worked at the station and we love that.

We create our own here, we really do.

That's an interesting dynamic because I know for some of the stations, particularly the larger stations, they struggle to get a younger audience, get people younger interested in the programming, interested in the station, interested in the idea of PBS. And you have a younger audience there who's familiar with the station, familiar with your mission.

They work in our studios right now, they're in summer session now, but in the fall they'll be in there three days a week working. And we do a lot of lunches and learn with a lot of different PBS programming, and our own programming that we create. We make sure that we can fit about 80 students in there. The media teachers make sure, the faculty make sure, that they're well attended and there's always something going on. We want that flow of those students coming through here, to be part of it.

You mentioned the Amarillo area being sort of self-contained or, self-sufficient. What impact does that have on your mission of doing local programming? And what things are important specifically to your area that you feel you need to focus on?

We are, and we have a real small staff. There's 11 full-time people and there's an engineer and a financial person and an events person that are part-time. Our senior content person was with our local newspaper, she came here 10 years ago when I did, but she was with the newspaper, that was her whole career. She knows this town, she's from here. I'm not local here, I've been here 23 years, so close enough, but she was born and raised here, she knows what's going on.

We really are all very active in the community because that's the way it is here. We really work together to create what we hear on the street for issues. One of the big deals we have here is water conservation, this is an area that's been drought stricken. And the aquifer under us, it serves all of southern Kansas all the way to Lubbock and that area. So we did a whole series on that this year on how do we save every drop of water that comes into this area and what is everyone doing and what are all the different services that they're working on to restore that aquifer. So we're always looking for things that are really big impact ideas in this area that are seriously true to keeping this area functioning, as I said, as a unit unto itself, because it's very self-sufficient that way.

Well, that's one of the things I think is great about your story. If you ask an average American to define a PBS station or their audience, they're thinking, big city, liberal, very urban, and that's not the PBS story at all in a lot of cases.

No, not here, not at our ranch. Here in Amarillo, we’re very connected to everything.

We have a 100-year-old symphony. They commissioned a piece last year called “Cadillac Ranch” from a Grammy award winning person, a composer, who had been here, and he and the conductor had an idea to do that for the symphony’s anniversary.

We did a documentary talking about the symphony and the city and Route 66, which goes through Amarillo. We just premiered that during the Route 66 festival, which was about a month ago, and it's a great show because it talks to local, but also, we have 1.4 million visitors that stop there every year.

And I don't know if you know, but Texas has its own PBS association here, we're all in a group together, and they have decided to air it throughout Texas this fall.

So we look at local things that are really important and take them and try to make them a little bit bigger too. It's on YouTube, it's wonderful, you'll really enjoy it, and it goes all the way from Amarillo to what the conductor felt when he was conducting it, it's really a great piece, plus the whole commissioned piece is shown on there, so you'll enjoy that.

I'm already sold on it, I'm going to track it down now. I guess the obvious follow-up question is, how big and important is that digital component to you, being able to get stuff on YouTube or other digital platforms?

Last year we were selected to be part of the Poynter Institute's digital transformation program as a small station. And as part of Rain We Keep, the water documentary that I was talking about earlier, they also did 26 short YouTube videos designed specifically for the online audience too.

They did another piece that was really fun this year, it was called Unmodified, and it was a documentary on tabletop gaming in the Texas panhandle, all the miniatures and all the things that people do.

I knew nothing about it, I used to immerse myself when they did the events and let our production people go, and they created a whole documentary and shorts on that for YouTube that are all about the culture of that and how it creates community and how people across the panhandle get associated that way and what they can accomplish and how much fun they have doing it.

And I learned really nothing about how to play the game, just don't get it, but I learned the people and how it's really more a sense of clubs and communities, and what a great time we had with that one too.

We also try to do serious items, like Rain We Keep. That is very serious issue for agriculture, we have a big cattle industry here. But we do some fun things as well, like Cadillac Ranch, which is kind of silly. We went out there about a month ago and painted the PBS logo on one of the Cadillacs, and 200 people out there, because we were the PBS people out there painting the Cadillacs. People paint them every day, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, if it's not, like, raining or snowing, they're out there. So we had a lot of fun with that. But we really have always been very local-orientated, because this area loves its local, but it also loves its Lawrence Welk, it loves, The News Hour. It loves all the things that PBS brings. But it loves that blend of the local with it, and that was the whole intent when the station was founded in ‘88, so we're trying to keep that up right now.

Well, that seems like a good place to ask about the impact that the rescissions had on this station, because, as you said, it's a small station, small staff, I'm guessing even in the best of times, budgets are tight, so what did that mean to the station?

We sort of saw it coming, the saber-rattling went on for months before it happened. We were always extremely conservative here with the way we spent, that's how I am, and I've been here ten years, The people ahead of me were the same.

What we did is we always had about a year's operating funds, one way or the other, between CPB money, or what we've raised, or what our membership would raise, or anything that came up. We were always okay for about a year, a year and a half, no matter what happened, and that was before we ever dreamt that this could happen.

So we've got very, very communicative with our 2,500 members here. They've been good to us. We just finished a feasibility study, and hired someone in this market to go through maybe our top 25, 30 donors, to see what our market will bear, because it was subsidized before.

The $800,000 we were subsidized is not probably available in this market every year forever, just through fundraising. So we're gonna have to figure that out. I've been in conversation with PBS, the small stations all have been. We are all the ones that really were subsidized for a reason. Those federal funds helped to keep these smaller stations on the air.

But right now we're okay. I have a new general manager that came from Indiana, he was with PBS for a number of years. We're redoing our master plan for the station, we're reworking some of the positions, and we're gonna go on a mission to find out what the market will bear financially for us. We know that we're not at the top of that right now at all, because we were subsidized and didn't have to be. So we're working on pushing that number further.

We'll work with PBS to make sure that no matter what, that we can stay in business here. Because we think it's really important for the area, and the community does too.

But I also know the limits we’re working with. I was in business for a number of years, and then left that and ran a non-profit, and I'm on a lot of boards. We have a pretty good handle on what we could probably raise year one in a big campaign, and then what the sustainability numbers would be going forward. And it's not probably near what the subsidy used to be. But we're taking it one step at a time, and I think we're doing a very thorough job of trying to figure this all out right now.

In the meantime, we're not broke, we can pay our bills, and stay on the air, and work with our underwriting, and that gets a little harder.

Another program that we started, it's called the Gilvan Group, our studio was founded by the Gilvan family, and what we've done is we've put together a relatively inexpensive package where we highlight a non-profit on air, with, if they have a video, with a video, and on social media, and their logos is used. And we find a program that's appropriate for them to mesh with, for 30 non-profits in this area.

So what that does mean when you watch Panhandle PBS? You see all these big name non-profits from the symphony, to the food bank, to the war memorial, to the art museum, and everything, they're on our station constantly, which brings that donor, who's also donating to all those places, a connection that nobody else is going to do in town. Commercial stations won't do that, we're the ones doing it. There's 350 non-profits in this area, and I would like to have maybe about 100 of them at any given time participating in that program on air, and on our social media platforms.

I’m curious if you think the federal funding cuts had any impact on the way that viewers and donors thought about the station. Stories about possible cuts have been published for years and I think after awhile a lot of people started to tune them out.

But now they’re faced with the reality of the cuts and the possibility that their station might have to change in ways they don’t want to see because they don’t have that federal funding. Do you think that reality gives them more of an investment in your success, and to maybe amp up their donations?

Well, I think one is, we don't look any different than we did pre-recission right now. We're still having a tremendous number of events in this community. We have something called Savor The Goods, which are farm-to-table dinners, and every one of them is different, different chefs. We had Lydia Bastianich last year for one of them, we're having Stephen Reikland here this year. We haven't let up on any of that.

So a lot of people, they turn their television on, or watch us wherever they're watching us nowadays, and they don't see a lot of big differences. So we've hired this GM, which will give me and he more time to get out in the public and tell them exactly what our future looks like financially two years from now.

Because right now, they know what has happened, they’re watching us and nothing is really different. They think everything is good and everything is the way it always has been.

That’s why I had that study done, that’s why we’re working with the news people at PBS, that’s why we’re doing Cadillac Ranch on a national basis, versus just local, because we plan on being here, we really do.

And I think that if the public heard we were really in need, dramatically, they would step up. But at the same time, that's not an image that Amarillo College portrays ever. Amarillo College was chosen as the Aspen Institute's best community college in the country three years ago in the country.Our image is always superb, and I want to keep the station that way also. It's very important to us. It's a fine line of being real needy, but not looking like we're on our deathbed whatsoever, which we're not.

Well, that's what makes your job so interesting, I guess.

Oh yeah, every day.

Is there anything else about your story that you think I should know?

We always promote the fact that we bring the world of PBS to this area by being so local. We make decisions on programming locally here for our constituents and our membership. We are out in the public a lot, we're into the school systems here, big time into events for children in this area, we just had our big summer fest here for kids on campus, because that's important to bring kids on this campus, as well as PBS. So it's a dual function for that.

We've always been very fair, we live in an area that requires us to not be seen as too liberal, and we're not, not whatsoever. It's just not the way we operate. We always think that we've always been extremely open to all sides of the equation for everything that we do here, and we just enjoy talking about it, we do a lot of good stuff here, with a few people, it's always a lot of fun.