WETA is the flagship public media company in Washington, D.C., and a major national producer of programs for PBS, including the nightly PBS NewsHour with Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett, along with Ken Burns's documentaries such as The U.S. and The Holocaust, and projects by Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., such as Finding Your Roots. WETA has also produced a dozen programs about literacy for PBS and developed a group of ambitious local and national education projects including the D.C.-based Ready to Learn initiative.

WETA has long provided extensive educational resources through media and community engagement. Reading Universe will join the array of WETA's award-winning Learning Media sites, the most notable being ReadingRockets.org. Reading Rockets is the deepest and most widely-used site in the field of reading, serving more than one million unique visitors every month, winning numerous national awards, including the David M. Rubenstein Prize, the top honor in the Library of Congress Literacy Awards program.

First Book is a non-profit social enterprise with a 30-year record of success in soliciting and understanding educator needs and aggregating and elevating educator voices to drive product and service design as well as delivery. First Book has the capacity to target its 500,000-member grassroots network of K-12 practitioners by geographic location, program type, ages of children served, job title, and other parameters.

First Book's research arm has substantial qualitative and quantitative market research capacities to engage, understand, and empower the First Book Network, and to inform the market strategies of related organizations and initiatives.