When the first reports of a novel coronavirus began to make news in the final weeks of 2019, Dolores Fernandez Alonso was as prepared for its seismic effects as any media professional could be. Health care was already at the front of mind for Alonso, president and CEO of Boynton Beach-based South Florida PBS, which had just debuted a sister station, the Health Channel (allhealthtv.com), in August of 2019, following a year’s worth of listening sessions with PBS viewers.
“Pre-pandemic, what people were saying at that point was, ‘I don’t have as much time with the doctor as I’d like. I don’t have as much access to health care and health care information as I would like. Can you help us?’” Alonso recalls. “So we actually launched a 24-7 health channel. And in so doing, when the pandemic hit, we could really pivot, and create quality science-based health information that was picked up throughout the world.”
For homebound South Floridians and beyond, the channel hosted myriad virtual town halls, including two exclusive discussions with Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom Alonso was “bold enough” to call on the phone. “We were like, oh my God, he said yes!”
The station also modified its educational programming to accommodate remote learning. Miss Penny, its in-house education services manager, hosted book readings and virtual field trips, which soon “went bananas,” in Alonso’s words. “We had 18 million views during the pandemic. I think it goes back to, we listen to the community. By shifting our focus and quickly pivoting and providing this virtual content for kids, it was a critical service we provided.”
More than the decision-maker at the top, Alonso is the enthusiastic public face of South Florida PBS, where she has worked, in one capacity or another, since 1998. She became president and CEO in 2008, during which time she has transformed the region’s public-television infrastructure. In addition to starting up the Health Channel, her tenure has included the merger of two separate regional stations in the seventh-largest TV market in the United States—WPBT and WXEL—into the collective South Florida PBS. Under her management, the station has quadrupled the size of its endowment, and at the time of this interview, it had just earned 18 regional Emmy nominations—a testament, Alonso believes, to its viewer-driven mission.
“It’s one of the things that makes us really different,” she says. “We ask the community, ‘What things do we need to focus on for you to live a better life, a healthier life, a more satisfying life? What are the issues in this community?’ And when I first started doing these listening sessions, I was a doubter. I thought, it’s going to be so many different things, how are we ever going to get parity? But it wasn’t the case. We did listening sessions from Key West all the way through Vero Beach, and … there were some really striking similarities.”
The feedback focused on four pillars—education, arts and culture, health and the environment, and civic engagement—which continue to drive the station’s content, much of it generated locally in its Boynton Beach headquarters. Alonso sees the Congress Avenue space in Boynton, with its ample free parking, as an extension of its mission to educate, entertain and inspire. There are plans in the works to add 7,000 square feet to the studio, which will encompass a performing arts center, flexible classroom space, and a 360-degree experiential learning environment called the Igloo.
All of which is a far cry from Alonso’s beginnings in corporate media. A Columbia University graduate, she began her television career in the international newsgathering division of ABC News in New York. “I traveled all around the world covering breaking news stories, and news is hectic,” she says. “I wanted to go more in-depth, providing context—how does this affect the community?”
Now, Alonso says, “everything we do is focused on servicing the public good,” whether it’s generating a docuseries that addresses climate change’s impact on South Florida, expanding opportunities for emerging documentary filmmakers, or welcoming a diversity of voices into its programming. A moment from PBS’s Annual Meeting, in the spring of 2023, stuck with Alonso. Actor John Leguizamo, in a moderated discussion, said that when he was growing up, he only saw his future as a working Latino actor in two places, both on PBS: “Sesame Street” and “¿Qué Pasa, USA?,” a sitcom launched by South Florida station WPBT in the late 1970s.
“If you can use content for a good purpose, and you can help someone who’s growing up to say to themselves, ‘if I can see that, maybe I can be that,’ … I love the ability to have the freedom to do that, but also the responsibility to do it.”
This article is from the March/April 2024 issue of Delray magazine. For more like this, click here to subscribe to the magazine.
