NET wins more awards
By Patti Vannoy
J Alumni News staff
Over at Nebraska Educational Telecommunications, it was just a typical spring: an award season that has so far yielded 14 accolades for the Nebraska Public Radio Network and four for Nebraska Educational Television.
NET usually gets a bunch of awards every spring, said David Feingold, assistant general manager for content, so he's pleased but not shocked to receive the latest batch.
Among this year's crop, the long-running children's series "Reading Rainbow" received seven Emmy nominations. NPRN won five first-place and six second-place awards in seven categories at the Nebraska Associated Press Broadcast News Awards. "Statewide" garnered a regional Edward R. Murrow award as a first-place television documentary series. The University of Southern California's (USC) Annenberg Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Journalism went to "Statewide" reporter and producer Mike Tobias.
But the two most prestigious of NET's awards haul have gone to executive producer Christine Lesiak.
Lesiak won a Writer's Guild Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement in television writing, for her script for an episode of the PBS series "American Experience." "Monkey Trial" tells the story of the 1925 trial of John Scopes, who was prosecuted in Tennessee for teaching the theory of evolution.
Lesiak, a 22-year veteran of NET, said she was most proud of the Writer's Guild Award because it was awarded on the basis of votes by other writers.
Her other award this spring - the George Foster Peabody Award - recognizes the entire production staff of "Monkey Trial."
Both Lesiak and Feingold pointed out that Walter Cronkite once said the Peabody, which is administered by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Georgia, was not the Pulitzer of broadcasting. Instead, the Pulitzer is the Peabody of print journalism.
This year's Peabody is only the third in NETV's nearly 50-year history. The others were awarded in 1981 for a dramatization of the Mark Twain story "The Private History of a Campaign that Failed" and in 1993 for an episode of "Reading Rainbow" titled "The Wall."
Lesiak said the caliber of NET's awards has stunned some colleagues in larger broadcasting centers like Los Angeles and New York.
"It surprises people. You win a Peabody and people ask, 'Where are you working out of?'" she said.
The reason, Feingold said, that outsiders refer to NET as one of the jewels in the crown of the public television system is that NET "punches above its weight." Its success is due in part to the environment Nebraska provides.
"People invest in us. They have an emotional investment; they have a financial investment," he said. In Nebraska, public television is important.
NET's location is an asset in another way, Feingold said, because Lincoln is a great place to live that attracts and retains quality broadcasters like Lesiak.
"We tend to grow our own. It's almost like there's an inbuilt professional academy here as people work their way up," he said.
And the most surprising thing, Feingold said, is that NET managed to win all these awards in a year in which their budget and staff have been cut by nearly 25 percent.
"We're not in the awards game. We don't produce programs to win awards," Feingold said, but in their pursuit of quality, they just happen to get recognized along the way.
