Joan Ganz Cooney may not be a household name. But Joan Ganz Cooney revolutionized viewing habits from toddlers to teens. Cooney is co-founder of the Children’s Television Workshop, a mainstay on Channel 13 since its launch in 1969. It is a perfect inclusion to FishbowlNY’s special series of interviews and posts dedicated to WNET’s 50th anniversary.

The CTW was producing programming solely for public television. Like national syndication today, it was made available for public TV stations across the country. The first show that Cooney and her CTW employees created was Sesame Street.

While each station made the decision when to air Sesame Street, Cooney had strong views for the start time.

“I didn’t want it in competition with Captain Kangaroo [8 a.m. on CBS], the only other quality children’s show at the time,” Cooney says.

To avoid the “Captain’s wrath,” CTW was encouraging PBS stations to air Sesame Street at either 7 a.m. or 9 a.m.

WNDT, (the original call letters of WNET), was not as accommodating. In a rarely remembered tibdit, Sesame Street actually had its debut on WPIX/Channel 11.

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For the first time in its nine-year history, the TV Land Awards pulled up stakes in Los Angeles and headed for New York, bringing a Big Apple feel to the Javits Center last night.

The Cosby Show, set in Brooklyn and taped in New York, was honored with the Impact Award. The cast, including co-creator Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad, reunited.

“It means that not only are we still relevent today…We made some sort of a difference, and some sort of an impact 25 years ago,” Sabrina LeBeauf (above) , who played Sondra on the hit sitcom, tells FishbowlNY.

The Cosby Show, which helped resurrect NBC from 1984 to 1992, had another “impact” on television viewing.

“I don’t see any show on now that impacts people in that way… [that] family show [did],” Geoffrey Owens (who played Elvin) says. “I think it’s fair to say that, unfortunately, that’s a little bit … of the past right now.”

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For the first time, the TV Land Awards, which honors past favorites of the medium, is moving to New York.

The ninth annual awards are scheduled to be taped and aired in April. The location has not been announced.

The program, which specializes in reunions of classic TV casts, will bring back The Cosby Show complete cast, including stars Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad. The show will receive the Impact Award.

Michael J. Fox will also be in attendance, reuniting with his 1980s sitcom family from Family Ties. That show is being honored with the Fan Favorite Award.

The TV Land Awards also recognize current shows as ”Future Classics.”

Extremely sad news for the mediabistro.com family: Julia Campbell, a newspaper reporter and former newspaper writing instructor for mediabistro.com, was found dead in the Philippines. She was a member of the Peace Corps and had gone missing. According to the Associated Press, Campbell “was found buried with one foot protruding from the ground near the village of Batad. It was not clear whether she had been buried by someone or if she was covered by debris during a fall.”

Here’s her instructor’s bio:

In her 14 years as a journalist, Julia Campbell has written for newspapers large and small, magazines and major Internet news sites. Her first newspaper job was at a weekly in Virginia, and, after writing about a defiant old woman fighting a highway that was to be built right through her property, Julia was hooked. She went on to work as a reporter for several newspapers, eventually landing a full-time freelance position at the New York Times. While at the Times, Julia worked on a team investigating police corruption and covered the New York Police Department. Her work at the Times led her to a correspondent’s job at People magazine, covering high-profile crime stories, including the Los Angeles murder of Bill Cosby‘s son, Ennis. A former senior editor at CourtTV.com and producer at ABCNews.com, Julia is now a senior editor at Star magazine.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, mediabistro.com’s director of community development, remembers Campbell:

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