About

Hi. I’m John Proffitt. Gravity Medium is my professional ruminations site.

I currently live in Anchorage, Alaska.

Through this site I’d like to explore issues affecting public media firms as we attempt to make the transition from the massconomy (Umair Haque) to the attention economy. In a world of ubiquitous and direct digital media distribution, where content is cheap, how do we serve the public interest in new and meaningful ways that carry real value and can be financially sustained?

In thinking about these issues, four words or ideas feel especially important to me:

• content
• contact
• context
• tribe

Content is what public media companies used to do; content is what we used to “own” in the relationship with our communities. We controlled content delivery in a one-way top-down distribution model. That content gave us to power to manipulate delivery both for public good and to create an income stream. But today, anyone can create content; anyone can distribute content. Today, content’s value — even the best content in the world — is approaching zero.

Contact is what we lack, being one-way Media 1.0 companies. Sure, we’ve had community contact in small doses (volunteers, pledge drives, in-person events), but it was never a core goal, nor was it an affordable public engagement model — until now. Contact is what we must build into our activities, into the core of our strategies.

Context is what matters most in a world where content is free, ubiquitous, and available on demand. When something is “in context” for me, then it matters to me and I will pay for it, with “attention” or real cash or volunteered time. Content + context = value. Contact + context = value. Content or contact without context is a distraction and carries either no value or negative value.

Tribe is a notion taken, most recently, from Seth Godin. It’s any group of people that have a shared notion of things that are important to them, to their worldview. Public media supporters fall into a broad tribe, befitting a broadcasting model. But what tribes will we lead in the future, both to sustain our public service mission and to enrich the lives of all the tribe members?

Heading deeper into the 21st century, public media companies that fail to deal with the issues of content, contact, context and tribes are likely to fail rapidly as communities and markets reformulate around new value propositions. If we ignore the brief opportunity to realign our thinking and action, we are begging new public service media entities to displace us.

Of course, I could be nuts. But that’s why blogs have commenting features.