The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) has selected its executive who will work closely with public media’s national organizations, local stations and independent content producers to accelerate cultural transformation, innovation, and content creation throughout the public media system.
That task is going to Maja Mrkoci, who takes an “expanded role” as Chief Content and Innovation Officer. She will continue to lead the development and implementation of CPB’s strategy for investing in innovative, creative, and diverse programming and content for national public media audiences.
Mrkoci joined CPB in 2015 as VP/Content & Digital Media. She then rose to VP/Digital Innovation and in 2017 was again promoted, to SVP/Television Programming and Innovation.
Prior to joining CPB, Mrkoci worked at PBS, where she held a number of roles over her nine-year tenure. Earlier in her career, Mrkoci worked at Discovery Communications.
Concurrently, CPB has named 17 public media stations to participate in the second round of the Digital Culture Accelerator. “Created to spur digital transformation at public media stations, the Digital Culture Accelerator helps stations break down silos, create alignment, explore digital tools and opportunities, and inspire organizational change,” CPB said.
The 17 stations selected to participate in the year-long Accelerator initiative are: Arkansas Educational Television Network; Connecticut Public Media; Iowa Public Radio; KCPT and KCUR 89.3 (Kansas City); KQED (San Francisco); Mississippi Public Broadcasting; Nashville Public Television; Nebraska Educational Television; New Hampshire Public Radio; PBS SoCal; Public Broadcasting Atlanta; Rocky Mountain PBS; Vermont PBS; WJCT (Jacksonville); WUCF (Orlando); and WVIA (Scranton).
These stations will join WUNC-TV (Chapel Hill, N.C.), ideastream (Cleveland), and WBHM-FM (Birmingham, Ala.).
All 20 stations will serve as ambassadors for the initiative to spread the model and its approaches throughout the public media system.
The initiative is being led by QCatalyst, which created CPB’s online Digital Culture Accelerator Playbook, a step-by-step guide to digital transformation and organizational change for public media leaders. QCatalyst will continue to refine the Playbook throughout 2019 as part of this initiative.
