By Dan Beyers, Published: March 23, 2014 / The Washington Post…
When the founder of Discovery Communications announced last week that he was retiring from the cable programming giant, he was not marking an end as much as signaling his desire to get back to his original passion.
John S. Hendricks started Discovery at the dawn of the cable TV age 32 years ago, with the idea that a channel based on documentaries and nonfiction programming could have a sizable audience. Time has proved him correct, even if the parent company’s collection of shows in recent years , featuring moonshiners, tattoo artists and a child beauty pageant contestant nicknamed Honey Boo Boo, sometimes seems to stretch the genre. Discovery is an international powerhouse with a market capitalization approaching $30 billion; its holdings include not just Discovery but also TLC, Animal Planet, Velocity, a 50 percent interest in Oprah Winfrey’s OWN and more.
Hendricks, though, has never really gotten over the notion that video can be a powerful educator. He is using a relatively small part of the fortune he made from Discovery and starting a company, the Curiosity Project, to create what he calls a lifelong learning academy. Go to article…
