A public TV alternative to news from BBC

The New York public television stations WNET and WLIW plan to drop a BBC-produced nightly newscast in the fall and replace it with a new half-hour program focused on international issues that will be produced by WLIW, the station is expected to announce on Wednesday.

The weekday programme, with the working title “Your World Tonight,” is also expected to replace BBC World News on an undetermined number of the more than 200 public stations nationwide that carry the BBC program. WLIW has distributed the BBC show to public television since 1998.

In the past year the BBC has sunk considerable resources into a separate nightly newscast, BBC World News America, with Matt Frei as anchor, that is broadcast on BBC America, its own for-profit cable channel. In discussions with WLIW, the BBC had been proposing strictly limiting how many public stations could carry BBC World News and at what times, said Neal Shapiro, president and chief executive of Educational Broadcasting Corporation, parent of WNET and WLIW.

“It would have meant 60 to 70 percent of the public broadcasting audience would lose access to the show,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview, adding that other comments made by BBC executives had made it “pretty clear that the future of the BBC was not intertwined with public broadcasting.” Mr. Shapiro said WLIW had also been asking the BBC to add more context for American viewers. “I thought the show we had was not as good as it could have been,” he said.

Michele Grant, executive vice president for news and sport at BBC Worldwide America, said in an interview that the BBC wanted changes in what hours BBC World News could be shown in an effort to make the programme easier for viewers to find, and also to avoid having the public broadcasting and cable programmes compete head to head. She called the BBC’s cable and public broadcasting newscasts complementary.

Ms. Grant said the BBC wanted the public broadcasting version to be carried as widely as possible, noting, “We’ve got a large and loyal audience for BBC World News on public television, and we’re absolutely committed to continuing to provide a broadcast from an international perspective to that audience,” she said. Distribution will now be handled by the Los Angeles station KCET, she added, “and we want to have this broadcast available in every market.”

Mr. Shapiro said that it was too early to discuss details of the new programme but that the newscast, which will begin in October, would have an American anchor and rely on news-gathering partners from around the world. It will do its own enterprise reporting and draw on experts from public policy schools and the United Nations in looking at issues like climate change, food shortages and global health. The executive producer will be Marc Rosenwasser, a longtime network news producer and Mr. Shapiro’s former NBC News colleague. Before coming to Educational Broadcasting, Mr. Shapiro was president of NBC News.