PBS’s ‘Expose’ Is To Appear Online Before Being Broadcast

“Exposé: America’s Investigative Reports” returns this weekend for its second season on PBS, with a 20-week run of episodes that highlight investigative reporting from news outlets nationwide. But this season viewers who cannot wait until the broadcast premiere on Friday night can watch each new episode beforehand in streaming Internet video.

The experiment gives the series a way to get around one of the chronic problems in public broadcasting: Unlike a commercial network, PBS has its local affiliates run programs on different days and at different times, making it difficult to promote viewing beyond saying, “Check local listings.”

Starting today, each new episode of “Exposé” (which last season was called “AIR”) will be online on Wednesdays, beginning at noon Eastern time, at www.pbs.org/expose. In New York the same episode will be broadcast at 10 p.m. on the subsequent Friday on WNET.

Many networks have streamed first episodes of series online before their broadcast or cable premieres to generate buzz, but putting an entire series online has been largely limited to reruns.

Executives at WNET, which produces the series in association with the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, Calif., said they were not concerned that the online audience would cannibalize on-air viewing more than incrementally.

“So far the limited amount of research tells us that won’t happen,” said Stephen Segaller, WNET’s director of news and public affairs programming, and the executive in charge of “Exposé.”

He said the decision to make “Exposé” episodes available first online made “a statement about our collective, institutional view that more and more of our programming has to be available on every platform where anyone can find it.”

While some series, like “Frontline,” have put all their content online, public television has been slow to move to online streaming because of budget constraints and complicated ownership and rights issues. But starting in July, WNET also plans to make its newsmagazine “Wide Angle” available online for the first time, concurrent with the broadcast schedule.

The first episode of the new “Exposé” season features the reporter of a series of articles by The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that examined lax security at toxic chemical plants and on railways nationwide. Later episodes will look at a report by The Dallas Morning News on accident fatalities involving big trucks after interstate shipping deregulation, and an investigation by Vanity Fair into a defense contractor.

“We want to be megaphones for these important stories” that are not always picked up nationwide, Mr. Segaller said, adding that viewers last season also responded to the featured journalists. “We found lots of very eloquent, dedicated men and women who believe this kind of journalism is important, and they’ve dedicated their lives to it. And viewers have responded to that sense of mission.”

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