ABSTRACT
I work on the industry side of children’s media, and currently oversee children’s programming for PBS, working out of the PBS headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. In the course of my career, I have been in charge of development, mostly of animated series, at both Nickelodeon at the start of Nicktoons and Cartoon Network in its early days. I have been known to dabble in academia, having written chapters for five academic books in addition to having taught and lectured at colleges in the course of my career. I have had a unique vantage point for watching the relationship (and often the non-relationship) between the kids’ media industry and the research community over the years. Although I worked with researchers at both Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network and oversaw
more than a hundred focus groups, I had not worked closely with what we think of as “experts,” people with advanced degrees either working at research companies or in academia who are knowledgeable on topics ranging from child development to how children learn particular topics. While at Nickelodeon, we invited a few advisors to weigh in on what a child might get out of watching some of our shows. At Cartoon Network, as the channel was considering making preschool shows, we asked an educational expert from a research company about what challenges we could expect to encounter and what kids could gain from watching a cartoon. The information we received in both cases was considered incidental to our decision-making. Rather than thinking much about child development, we mostly focused on funnier jokes, the acquisition of a larger audience, and higher ratings as we produced our series.
