Photo by Craig FritzTribune

Tribune

A control room screen shows "The Line" panelist Jim Scarantino getting his makeup before the taping.

Photo by Craig FritzTribune

Tribune

Antony Lostetter (left), a staffer at KNME, and new student employee Hayley Iwaszek look at a camera monitor during a taping of "The Line." This is Lostetter's fifth year at the station, but this was Iwaszek's first taping.

Photo by Craig FritzTribune

Tribune

Saba Mohammad, a University of New Mexico student and the technical director for a taping of "The Line," gets instruction on using the control board. KNME is evolving in the digital age, and combining its programs "The Line" and "In Focus" into a single, hourlong program has been one of its higher profile changes.

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Public TV in Albuquerque isn't just Channel 5 anymore.

In the parlance of the day, KNME is evolving into versions 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3.

And if the digital TV revolution (coming in February 2009) is too much to drink in, you can get your highbrow fix online, YouTube-style.

New Mexico's main public TV station is a long way from just "Sesame Street" during the day and "Masterpiece Theatre" on Sunday nights.

Chad Davis, KNME's director of content, said online video is one example of the direction the station is headed. For instance, viewers can watch the station's half-hour documentary "From Curandera to Chupacabra: The Stories of Rudolfo Anaya" entirely online at knmetv.org.

"That's something we have to fully explore," Davis said. "It's just too important not to be in our portfolio of services. We're not just public TV but public media."

And for a station that relies on financial contributions, it pays to realize that today's MySpace and YouTube addicts could be tomorrow's core viewers and potential donors.

"We're going to have a big problem if in 10 years they're the major philanthropists and we're not on their radar," said Davis, who gained his PBS experience in Washington, D.C., and at Boston's renowned WGBH. "We're sowing now to reap in a generation.

"My biggest fear is we're not going to be there when they're there."

Two years ago, filmmaker Kelly Kowalski returned to the United States after more than a decade in Africa. Upon landing at KNME, her first project was a history of Albuquerque as it marked the city's tricentennial.

"It was a good crash course in Albuquerque history," she said. "I didn't realize how culturally unique New Mexico is until now."

She now is working on a film about John Donald Robb, the ethnomusicologist who recorded thousands of folk songs in the Southwest going back to the 1940s. The goal is to make KNME's Web site interactive so that viewers can navigate a map of New Mexico and hear regional music samples, she said.

Josh Keenan directs Web content, and his main directive is to complement the TV programming and foster interactivity with the community.

"We have an opportunity - because it's a new platform - to do a little bit of everything," Keenan said.

One of his early chores was to bring the station's video archives into the 21st century.

"When I first got here, our `Colores' episodes were on a shelf collecting dust," Keenan said. "Now, all of them are on Google."

"We'll continue to serve the existing audience - with television," Davis said, "and add a new audience on the Web."

Keenan added: "We want to be where people are and not force them to come to us."

With video equipment now cheap and ubiquitous, TV stations are no longer the only game in town when it comes to gathering information and telling stories visually. For a few hundred dollars, amateurs armed with digital cameras can make short videos that can have a place on Channel 5 or at knmetv.org.

"For so long, it's been . . . we act like TV is a magic thing and we're the only ones who understand it," said Kevin McDonald, KNME's director of public affairs programming. "With YouTube - TV, now, people are making it on a daily basis."

Which isn't to say that the editorial and entertainment chops of the KNME staff don't matter anymore.

"The difference between compelling and not compelling is still big," McDonald said. "But the technical part - not so hard."

One of the knocks on PBS, McDonald said, is that it isn't adventurous.

"We're kind of drawing a line in the sand and trying things," he said.

One high-profile move was to combine the station's centerpiece public affairs programs: "The Line" and "In Focus." McDonald this season has woven them into a one-hour package at 7 o'clock on Friday nights. Instead of two distinct half hours - one of talking heads, the other of roundtable pundits - there is one hourlong show that volleys back and forth between the formats.

In the past year, some veteran KNME personalities left - John Dendahl to run for governor; former Tribune managing editor Kate Nelson to work for Lt. Gov. Diane Denish. That allowed McDonald to shake up his public affairs lineup.

He has brought fresh faces to the roundtable at "The Line," replacing Dendahl's old-school conservatism with blogger Whitney Cheshire. "Line" host Gene Grant (a Tribune columnist) is in his second season. David Alire Garcia, a staff writer at the Santa Fe Reporter, took over Nelson's seat on "In Focus" this month.

McDonald wants more voices brought into the shows to foster a communitywide conversation.

"We're beyond the day when we sit five people around the table and say, `These are the experts,' " he said. "I see my job as facilitating that conversation."

The move to combine "The Line" and "In Focus" bucks the trend of balkanizing programming into smaller and smaller snippets. Now viewers must commit to a full hour - unless they go online, where the show is disassembled and available in segments.

Keenan breaks the shows out separately and posts them on his blog, which can be found at newmediainthelandofmanana.wordpress.com. (The forums at KNME's Web site have been under construction for a while.)

"Posting an hour show - that's really pushing the limit, asking someone to watch online for an hour," Keenan said. "But what if we cut it into five-minute segments?"

At the end of the day, the technology might be getting more complex, but the mission stays fairly basic.

"What I think is new is this evolving relationship with the audience," McDonald said. "Our storytelling stays the same. How we interact with our audience with that storytelling is different.

"This gives us an opportunity to explore."

Kowalski agreed.

"It's the same old business - storytelling," she said. "It's just a new tool."

"I don't ever want ever want public broadcasting and public media in New Mexico to become irrelevant," their boss, Davis, said. "That's failure."