A flashy future at WGBH
LIKE A proud new homeowner, WGBH will be showing off its great new Brighton facility to its members Oct. 13, and to the public the next day. Tours of the $85 million site will highlight the airy, modern studios and community spaces. It's worth the visit to gawk - this place is a starship Enterprise compared to the station's old rabbit warren - but it's also worth the trip to think about content.
The public television and radio broadcaster overflows with content. There's its current slate of shows and events, as well as the many thousands of old shows and other materials in the chilly, white-walled confines of its climate-controlled archival vault. Inherent in this material is the continuing work of answering the question: What do people need to know?
In what feels like the olden days, the station produced programs, and audiences consumed them at a set time. Now technology has divorced programming from time, with content constantly available on DVDs or the Web. And consumers increasingly want more than one-dimensional experiences. The new building should help meet this demand, creating more room for producers and for the public itself to create and share content.
One major asset is the new building's size. In the station's old Western Avenue home, "our best venue was the parking lot," said Marita Rivero, WGBH's vice president for radio and television. Now the ample lobby readily doubles as a reception space. A large, new performance studio easily held the 25 members of the New England String Ensemble, which performed a live broadcast there earlier this month. The old performance space, in a basement, would have been too small. And a digital mural is just beside the Massachusetts Turnpike, speaking in images.
The WGBH Lab, a four-and-a-half-year-old incubator for the work of outside producers and media newcomers, also has a new space that makes it easier for lab members to collaborate with WGBH producers. Lab-produced content has been added to an episode of NOVA, the station's science show. Even Ken Burns's World War II documentary, "The War," has become a platform. It is being broadcast now on Channel 2 along with three short films on war produced by lab members. Denise Dilanni, the lab's founder and director, expects to host more content from people who don't call themselves producers but do have something to say.
There's no telling what being a content provider will mean in as little as a decade: whether it's convening 1,000 people or producing material in a form that has yet to be conceived. The building is flexible enough to adapt to the future's demands.
It's an inspiring home - and a new-media neighbor with its doors wide open and an itch for long, multiplatform conversations.
