PBS’ Sylvia Bugg Says Diplomacy Is Key for Creating ‘Healthy Conversation and Dialogue’

Over the course of her 30-year career, PBS chief programming executive and GM Sylvia Bugg has discovered the power that comes with being a diplomatic leader.

“Diplomacy is an important skill and trade to have,” Bugg told TheWrap for this week’s Office With a View. “Listening and really understanding and engaging helps us to provide spaces for there to be healthy conversation and dialogue.”

She learned the skill firsthand during a summer program for the federal government, in which she spent several years working at the Pentagon. That experience would open the door for her very first job out of college in the National Guard Bureau’s civilian human resources department in 1992.

While flipping through the classified section of the Washington Post, Bugg came across an administrative position in PBS’ programming division and ended up joining the public media network in 1993. After leaving the company to serve as Discovery Channel’s director of operations from 1999 to 2012 and the Corporation of Public Broadcasting’s vice president of diversity and television content from 2014 to 2020, she returned to PBS as vice president of programming. In October 2020, she was promoted to her current role as chief programming executive and general manger of general audience programming.

“I think for me early on there was a preconceived notion that if I could tell great stories and be able to identify a great piece of content that was all I needed,” she said.

“Now that I’m a bit further along in my career,” she continued, “I’ve learned not to underestimate the value of learning as much as you can about the business because you can have great ideas all day for television or media content, but without knowing about the business and funding and rights and packaging and distribution and marketing, you don’t really have much.”

What’s a challenge you experienced in your career and how did you over come it?
Three years out of undergrad, I got a journalism degree because I wanted to be a reporter until I learned that I couldn’t start in a major market. I would have had to relocate to a smaller market just to get started. At that point, I didn’t really want to leave family, I wanted to stay close to home in Southern Virginia.

So I decided that I could think about pursuing a career in media behind the camera and still be an effective contributor to providing storytelling with purpose. So it was this realization that there were many career paths that I could pursue and it didn’t have to be in front of the camera.

What’s a key lesson that you’ve learned over the course of your career?
One of the key lessons that I learned throughout my career was just the power of keeping your network active and ongoing. I think about some of my early mentors and people who I met very early on in my career and I still stay in touch with them and stay connected with them. So I think just the power of relationships and relationship building is so important.

I find this business is not as large as we think and so we realize how connected we really are. Over time, we start to see a lot of the same people move into different roles and responsibilities. The power of networks is so important, especially in these times as we’re all thinking about different ways to tell stories on different platforms.

I think the other piece is lifelong learning. I never think about a time when I’m not in a space where I want to learn something, explore something new, read something and just be more knowledgeable about a number of different things. I think, especially in media, as generalists we often have to immerse ourselves in a number of different areas, subject matter and storytelling.

As viewership on linear television declines, how will PBS evolve its streaming strategy in the coming years?
For me, it’s not one or the other. We will continue to serve the core audience, but we’ve also recognized that we need to be in other places. We’ve spent a lot of time over this past year and we’ll do more around building out more digital content strategy opportunities.

We just finished wrapping on Season 2 of “Great American Recipe,” which was our version of a friendly cooking competition for home chefs. So what we decided to do was to create an eight-episode series for linear broadcast but we also created a series for Youtube called “Pan Pals,” where we get two people together and they share each other’s family recipes and these are short form pieces… It’s done amazingly well because we’re able to leverage that digital series to bring people over to “Great American Recipe.” I think more and more we’ll look for those opportunities.

Are there specific content areas that you hope to expand into going forward?
I would love to figure out a way for us to do more in the sports documentary area. So I’m thinking about that. I think we’ve been looking for more dramas that represent diverse perspectives. So those are two areas that I’m thinking a lot about. And then obviously around democracy and civics, that’s gonna be a pretty long stretch and where we need to go to ensure that we’re providing spaces for there to be vibrant conversations… We’re not here to tell people what to think, but to provide content that can give context for issues that are really important.

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