Документальный сериал «American Experience» обновляет стратегию для привлечения молодой аудитории

‘American Experience’ reinvents itself for a new generation GBH A new digital strategy is paying off for American Experience, the long-running documentary TV series produced by GBH in Boston. The station paused production of the show last year after the rescission of federal funding for public broadcasting caused cuts to American Experience’s support from CPB and PBS. GBH needed “to take stock of where American Experience was and figure out how to go forward,” says CEO Susan Goldberg. Rather than producing an “entire slate of brand-new programs while simultaneously rethinking an entire strategy,” Goldberg says, she and the show’s team took several months to calculate how to tap into a younger generation of history fans. Producers knew that American Experience needed a new digital strategy because history programs from different networks and countries were outperforming it online. Viewers in their teens, 20s and 30s were clearly interested in history, but American Experience wasn’t reaching them. “We knew we needed to rethink how we tell stories of the past for this new generation of consumers,” Goldberg says. The retooling also involved a structural change, with GBH moving production of American Experience, Nova and Frontline into a consolidated documentary unit in January under the leadership of Raney Aronson-Rath, then EP and editor-in-chief of Frontline. Goldberg says she made the change because Aronson-Rath has “led the way in terms of journalistic storytelling” at the station and understands the “social media platforms that we need to use to reach the widest possible audience.” Under Aronson-Rath’s leadership of Frontline, the show bolstered its presence on YouTube and passed 1 billion views on the platform in July. Now a revamped approach is giving American Experience a similar boost. GBH announced in July that short-form videos on YouTube, Instagram and a newly launched TikTok channel had generated more than 19 million views in the previous five months, nearly four times the number generated during the same period last year M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, an associate professor at American University who studies how social media historians have shaped public understanding of the past, says she’s delighted that American Experience has grown its digital footprint. (Current is an editorially independent service of American University’s School of Communication.) “Professional history hasn’t done a good job yet of responding to this new reality of viewing habits,” Rymsza-Pawlowska says. Mining the archive Goldberg says American Experience can play a vital role in helping viewers “understand where we are right now as a country,” adding, “It is an incredibly important moment to do fact-based stories about American history.” GBH has produced around 400 episodes of American Experience since its debut in 1988. But until recently, it put less emphasis on the show’s digital presence. Posts were less frequent, content wasn’t specifically designed for social feeds, and GBH wasn’t taking advantage of the show’s extensive archive. GBH’s digital team took on that task during American Experience’s production break, which included posting clips and series online that “hadn’t been seen in over 20 years,” says Goldberg. That required re-clearing rights to materials such as photography, video and audio from privately held collections around the world. Clips were posted to platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts to coincide with events such as March Madness, Memorial Day and the anniversary of the Tulsa massacre. Aronson-Rath says this strategy has achieved impressive results. Vertical content is averaging six times more viewers than similar clips reached last year. A TikTok video about Lyndon Johnson’s inability to relax has been viewed over 899,000 times on TikTok. “History does great on TikTok,” says Aronson-Rath. “73% of our audience on TikTok is 18 to 44, so it’s great to see that we’re reaching all generations, just like public media has historically.” American Experience has also had a spike in viewership on YouTube, with full-length documentaries on Love Canal, George H.W. Bush and Nazi sympathizers on American soil performing strongly. The channel has made significant headway among viewers ages 30 to 50, Aronson-Rath says, because American Experience is “authentic and not selling anything” and viewers in that age group can spot artificial and derivative programming. That authenticity is key to American Experience’s ability to counter online history videos that have suffered from “a death of expertise,” says Rymsza-Pawlowska. She says she began noticing in 2018 that content creators were increasingly doing their own research, a trend that peaked during the pandemic. “At least we know that American Experience’s content is going to be vetted,” she says. Rymsza-Pawlowska says she’s confident that American Experience will continue growing the audience for its short-form videos, “as the landscape of the market seems mostly limitless.” But she says she also wants GBH to use the show’s influence and resources to be a vanguard for online history content. “I think this is a moment where we can innovate the way we look at history,” says Rymsza-Pawlowska. “Stakeholders like American Experience are well positioned to do that.” Rethinking the broadcast strategy As it steps up its digital efforts, GBH is reimagining American Experience’s broadcast format as well. As a longtime admirer of the show, Aronson-Rath says she knew how “vital and important” its brand is for television viewers. That’s why she’s spearheading what she calls a “tentpole strategy” that will see big ideas, topics and people covered across three to four hours’ worth of episodes. This will begin in May 2027 with a three-part series about Charles Lindbergh. Ken Burns will be EP, reuniting with director and writer Stephen Ives. “It’s 100 years after his first flight,” Aronson-Rath says. “We have really extraordinary archive footage, some of the best interviews from his family came out of the Yale archive, so we’ve uncovered really wonderful, original moments.” The series will return in the fall with The Bureau: A Secret History of the FBI, a four-part series that will chart the agency’s rise, weaponization and survival. A series on the Great Depression is also in development, while two Stanley Nelson films, Freedom Riders and Freedom Summer, will be re-released in winter 2027. With its national documentary shows under one umbrella, GBH is now taking a more holistic approach to their production. Aronson-Rath says she was “intellectually curious to think across Frontline, Nova and American Experience’s genres and programmatically about history, science and current affairs.” Goldberg says she still sees the three programs as individual brands but that she and Aronson-Rath want each show’s programming and content to “tackle the same topic from their own perspective,” she says. “Frontline is about the here and now,” she says. “It’s investigative and revelatory. Nova is about the future and uncovering and inspiring people about the future. American Experience helps people understand where we came from. These three things can work together really well.”