Stanford, KTEH Form Production Partnership

Business Wire, May 1, 2002

Business/Entertainment Editors

STANFORD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 1, 2002

Stanford University and Silicon Valley's public television station, KTEH, announced Wednesday they are forming a partnership to jointly produce programming for national and regional audiences.

Capitalizing on the strengths and resources of each institution, the partnership will showcase Stanford's cutting-edge educational research while taking advantage of KTEH's production expertise and ability to bring the stories of Silicon Valley to millions of television viewers.

"This collaboration brings together two institutions that are fundamentally committed to the creation and dissemination of knowledge in service of the public good," Stanford President John Hennessy said. "We are particularly pleased to be working with KTEH, which, like Stanford, has deep roots in Silicon Valley. We believe that this partnership will ably serve the local community while bringing national attention to the research and scholarship so central to the life of the university."

"We are delighted to partner with Stanford University on work with such far-reaching influence," said KTEH President and Chief Executive Officer Tom Fanella. "KTEH has worked hard to deliver Silicon Valley's stories to a nationwide audience. Bringing Stanford's enormous capabilities to bear means that we can multiply both the breadth and the depth of that storytelling, and better serve our local and national constituencies."

The partnership's productions will be designed to meet national distribution standards and be considered for markets beyond public broadcasting, according to Fanella. KTEH serves a 14-county area, including Monterey, and has a weekly audience of nearly 2 million viewers. Its audience is among the 20 largest in the nation for a public television station.

Two executive producers, Bill Free of KTEH and Randy Bean of Stanford, are heading a team that is already in the process of researching topics for future potential programming with faculty at schools and research centers across the university. The team is looking at telling -- in documentary as well as other formats -- compelling stories resulting from Stanford's research in such diverse areas as engineering, medicine, international affairs, race and gender, history and law.

Two initial projects will run on KTEH and other public television stations in upcoming months.

-- "Forgive For Good" is a 60-minute program that will be delivered to PBS
stations for broadcast in August. It features Fred Luskin, a clinical science
research associate at the Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention,
discussing the practical applications of his research on forgiveness to a
studio audience. Luskin, the author of a recent book also titled Forgive For
Good (Harper San Francisco, 2001), is former director of the Stanford
Forgiveness Project, the largest research project to date on the training and
measurement of a forgiveness intervention.

-- "Stanford University Presents: Bill Gates in Conversation with John
Hennessy," will be aired in June. The program features a discussion between
Gates and Hennessy and a question-and-answer session with a campus audience
that was taped April 25.

Stanford's 1,701 faculty members are among the best teachers and researchers in their fields, and include 17 Nobel laureates. Uncommon Knowledge, a program distributed nationally by KTEH via PBS, is produced in conjunction with Stanford`s Hoover Institution.

KTEH has won Emmy, Gold Camera, George Foster Peabody, CPB Gold, DuPont/Columbia and Cine Golden Eagle awards, and been Academy Award nominated for several nationally distributed presentations, including The Day After Trinity, The Battle of Westlands, Silicon Valley Trilogy, Cadillac Desert, The Abortion Rights Trilogy and The Silicon Valley Report.