Cable Channel Recycles for New Programming : Television: The Learning Channel saves money and time by using archival material and fresh themes.

There’s an old adage in journalism that yesterday’s news is today’s lining at the bottom of the bird cage. But for certain cable channels that can’t always afford to produce their own fresh programming, yesterday’s news is today’s news too.

Beginning tonight at 6 and repeating at 10, the Learning Channel will present “Only Human,” a 13-part series about human behavior that has been recycled from the archives of ABC’s magazine show “20/20.”

“I was sitting at home watching a ‘20/20’ special that they did where they’d taken a batch of stories from their library about dealing with problem children and merged them together into an hourlong special,” said John Ford, the Learning Channel’s senior vice president for programming. “And I thought that it was a really neat idea to take pieces from ‘20/20’ shows and theme them.”

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Actually, it was an idea that had been done before. “60 Minutes” has created specials by merging previous profiles on entertainers into one program. “Saturday Night Live” has done the same with specials containing all political or all sports sketches. The Discovery Channel has even used the same “20/20” archives to produce specials about heroism during disasters and another on crime sagas.

For a fee that Ford would not disclose, ABC agreed to open its library to the Learning Channel, which then put together 13 hours of programs--most containing four separate “20/20” pieces--on various topics of human behavior and turmoil.

Tonight’s hour focuses on raising small children, with segments on how to get babies to sleep, whether spanking is a good idea, common childhood emotional problems and protecting youngsters from accidents.

Other weekly installments deal with depression, weight, sleep, marriage, compulsive behaviors, fear, sex, family relationships, mid-life crises, emotions and aging.

Each episode of “Only Human” includes a new introduction, narrated by ABC reporter Sheilah Kast, which serves to update the information, and an epilogue, featuring Dr. Timothy Johnson of ABC News, which offers the latest medical research on each topic.

Repackaging previously produced material in this way is obviously far less expensive than producing such a series entirely from scratch. Ford said that there is no way the tiny Learning Channel, which is available in about 20 million homes nationwide and scores an average prime-time audience of about 70,000 homes, could produce this kind of program on its own.

Ford said that about 55% of his budget goes to producing original documentary-styled programming for the channel and the rest is put toward acquiring existing material.

“We need to do this to create television that is custom-designed to our purposes and is also cost effective,” he said.

Though it’s unusual to take network material that has already aired in prime time in the United States and refashion it into new programming, Ford said the Learning Channel often buys product from foreign countries and then re-edits the footage to suit American attention spans.

German television, for example, shoots spectacular archeological footage around the world, he said, but the pacing of the documentaries is far slower and the emphasis far more academic than Americans will tolerate, even in a documentary. So the channel cuts them down and slaps on new narration and music.

The Learning Channel will similarly screen a joint Chinese-Japanese production that chronicles the history of the ancient Silk Route throughout Asia--but only after cutting the 18-hour series in half, color-correcting the footage, rewriting the scripts and music, and adding slicker graphics.

“We put our own stamp on it, and it looks like a brand-new series,” Ford said.