Experience

About

Introducing Experience: A New WHYY Arts & Culture Service

Sure, the Delaware Valley’s cultural riches are widely considered among our greatest assets. How can this also be a problem? Well, consider that we have, literally, hundreds of destinations and thousands of potential experiences to choose from. On any given day (a day with less leisure time than we were led to believe would be ours) we are faced with an embarrassment of cultural riches through which to navigate. And, as a result, we neglect to learn about, and to experience, much more than we would care to admit.

Experience is a new and ongoing series of short videos designed to introduce WHYY’s 2.65 million viewers to arts and culture destinations throughout the Delaware Valley. It is, simply put, a cultural sampler weaving throughout our television schedule, introducing viewers to stories, places, and ideas that otherwise might be missed.

The idea of Experience is to build awareness, understanding and participation using interstitial time on TV. While, hardly revolutionary, this relatively low-cost, high-impact method of introducing regional arts and culture content to viewers can be considered a tool for building community awareness and cultural engagement.

We piloted the idea in the Spring of 2004 with four behind-the-scenes stories on Pennsylvania Ballet’s re-making of Swan Lake. In two months, these two-and- one-half-minute stories were aired fifty times and received an estimated 1.5 million views, contributing (agrees the Ballet) to the success of that production. Since then, we produced more stories on topics such as Benjamin Franklin's taste for Scottish Tunes and distaste for Handel (with Philomel Baroque); Christoph Eschenbach and violin soloist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg on emotion in music (with the Philadelphia Orchestra); and the Marian Anderson Prize for Emerging Classical Artists. In each case, we bring you stories that augment what you would encounter as an audience member. That is the power of WHYY as your provider of public service media.

This Spring, we launch Experience to an annual level of production where about one new story is produced, on average, every week. Fifty stories per year broadcast twenty times each will reach (according to our average viewership) more than 25,000 households with each broadcast. At this level of production and broadcast, residents across the Delaware Valley will view regional cultural content more than 25 million times per year. Without a doubt, Experience represents a significant enhancement of the public media footprint devoted to regional arts and culture.

To what end? At WHYY, Experience is an effective way to extend our regional Arts & Culture Service across two more media platforms (television and the internet) augmenting and complementing our longtime arts reporting on 91FM. We are extending the reach of both the viewer and the destination. For the community, Experience builds out an accessible format whereby television viewers and the region’s many cultural destinations become connected through stories that are interesting, valuable, and, perhaps even inspiring. Ultimately, Experience is about cultural engagement.

We hope you enjoy the series. Let us know what you think.

Kenneth Finkel
Executive Director, Arts & Culture Service