The Globetrotters’ long winning streak continues.

On Saturday mornings, the TV series Harlem Globetrotters: Play It Forward is filling it up, attracting young viewers, especially young Black viewers, with a show featuring Black characters connecting with minority communities.

Following up on that success, Hearst Media Production Group, which produces the show with the Globetrotters, is entering into a partnership to develop inspiring, multicultural content for HMPG’s educational and informational programming blocks with Sunwise Media, a Black-owned media company.

The showrunner for Play It Forward is Ri-Karlo Handy, also CEO at Sunwise. 

Also Read: Sunwise Rises With Focus on Positive, Diverse Series

“The thing that’s cool about Play It Forward is it’s for and by and about the community,“ Handy told Broadcasting+Cable. “They’re doing real stuff that I can think about as a Black person, something that grabs my attention.”Handy said the numbers for the show are jumping with ratings in the time period up 55% year over year among 18- to 24-year-olds. Those numbers create an opportunity to reimagine Saturday morning programming.

“Because of that success, they were excited at the idea of doing more multicultural, African-American-facing shows for Saturday mornings,” Handy said. “We're going to bring that multicultural audience that we attracted with Globetrotters, but in a true partnership, versus just a work for hire.” 

Amy DeGregorio, senior VP, managing director of sales for educational/informational programming at Hearst Media Production Group, said the early success of Play It Forward has been “highly encouraging.”

She said Hearst has an “aspiration to develop more content that reflects the topics of diversity and inclusion.”

Hearst and Sunwise addressed the success of Play It Forward and their future plans at media agency Magna’s Equity Upfront on Wednesday (February 9), where advertisers are introduced to opportunities to sponsor minority-owned companies and programming with multicultural themes.

Working with a known entity like Hearst Media Productions Group brings a level of familiarity with media buyers and sponsors. “This is us telling all the brands in the room, ‘Hey, this is a new model. You’re going to partner with Sunwise and Hearst,'” Handy said.

“You look at TV One, BET and Bounce TV, basically none of those networks are Black-owned,“ Handy said. æYou have all these corporations that have made commitments to spend media dollars on Black-owned companies. Honestly, what they’re having to do is change to Black-created, because Black folks don’t own any of these channels that are serving Black audiences.”

Hearst’s E/I shows air in three-hour blocks on NBC, ABC, CBS and The CW, helping those networks and their affiliate stations fulfill their government obligation to provide educational shows.

Elverage Allen, partner and head of advertising sales at Sunwise, noted that Saturday morning kids shows are restricted in how much advertising they can run and what types of ads they can accept. But he said brands would be offered an opportunity to have their products integrated into the show, ensuring that whether they’re watched on broadcast, cable or streaming, the message gets delivered.

Many advertisers haven’t looked at educational/informational (E/I) programming as an advertising opportunity, but if they have community-based initiatives, sponsoring E/I programming could be a place where those companies can tell their stories and build their brands, he said.

Handy would also like to see more African-Americans working at the advertising agencies. His Handy Foundation is already playing an important role in workplace development in Hollywood, training and recommending minority candidates for production jobs.

“We really operationalized solving the problem of, how do you source talent from these communities when there’s really no training or college they can go to?” he said. “I think there’s a gap in a lot of industries like that, where there’s a desire for people but no mechanism to train them and place them.”

Ad agencies have made equity and diversity a priority, but the needle has barely moved, Handy said. “If Hollywood can do it with the Handy Foundation, we’d like to see it translate to advertising as well.” ■

WASHINGTON — When Sen. Ed Markey. author of the Children’s Television Act and critic of media deregulation, leads a press release by saying he is pleased with an FCC item deregulating KidVid rules, it’s news.

The Massachusetts Democrat was reacting to the Federal Communications Commission’s decision not to eliminate some of the baseline requirements, as it suggested it might, while still giving broadcasters more wiggle room.

Markey was reacting to the release of the commission’s Report and Order allowing additional flexibility in how broadcasters program their mandatory three hours of educational and informational (E/I) children’s programming. The full commission is scheduled to vote on the item, and almost certainly approve it, on July 10.

Markey still had problems with parts of the order, but the fact that he led his comment on the release with, “I am pleased that the FCC is not moving forward with its initial proposal to dismantle the children’s television rules,” was telling, even if it was praise with a faint damn.

The operative phrase in the FCC item was “substantial majority.”

The changes had been billed as modest by the item’s principal architect, Republican commissioner Michael O’Rielly, which was a bit of a course change from the proposal the FCC voted on last June.

At that time, the agency had tentatively concluded that E/I programs no longer must be at least 30 minutes long; that stations with multicast channels could air that E/I programming on a digital subchannel instead of the primary channel; and that those digital subchannels no longer have their own three-hour-per-week E/I requirement.

Instead, the report and order requires broadcasters to continue to air the “substantial majority” of E/I programming in 30-minute, regularly scheduled blocks on their primary channel, while allowing a “limited” amount of programming to be short-form (PSAs and interstitials) and to be aired on a digital subchannel.

The order did eliminate the requirement that free multicast channels also air three hours of E/I programming per week. It also expanded the window in which E/I programming meets the three-hour requirement, from 7 a.m.-10 p.m. to 6 a.m.-10 p.m., and will no longer require broadcasters to reschedule E/I programming pre-empted for a local news or programming special.

O’Rielly himself had suggested the rules might need to go away altogether, given that some scholars thought them to be unconstitutional content-based restrictions on speech. But that fight is being left for another day.

Both O’Rielly and FCC chairman Ajit Pai have talked about needing to deregulate the kids’ rules, given the changes in how children consume video: online, at all hours, in short and long bites and on a proliferation of other outlets, the same arguments being made for other forms of broadcast deregulation.

They also recognized how broadcast-only households over-index for poor and minority kids and the newly-released item makes that point.

Broadcasters took their half a loaf with equanimity. “While NAB believes the record supports even further relief from KidVid rules, we appreciate the flexibility these revised rules will provide to broadcasters to better serve children, parents, and our local communities,” the National Association of Broadcasters said.