Andrew Taylor on the Business of Arts & Culture
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Programming by the numbers
  Posted: February 23, 2006
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Antonia Zerbisias at the Toronto Star is in a bit of bunch over leadership changes at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. To her taste, the new team is a bit too focused on business models, audience segmentation, focus groups, and modeling of past peformance in making their programming choices for the network.

Developing and commissioning series is an art, not a science. There is no regression analysis that will spit out statistics to back a go-with-the-gut decision on hits such as ''Lost,'' ''The Wire'' or ''Desperate Housewives.''

So why is CBC-TV management now touting "the PARC system, the Program Planner, the Public Value panels, the FIATS survey, and the new Audience Segmentation approach'' — tools that look to past performance and not to the future? Is this what passes for programming vision nowadays?

It's a balance that strikes to the heart of cultural programming, especially in the increasingly sophisticated and competitive world of nonprofit culture. New tools and research methods can inform our programming choices, can flag the criteria of past success, can hone our perspective on narrow target demographics. But how much do we use these tools? And how do we keep them from using us?