Gravity Medium

I know in a political election year we all cringe when someone approaches us with a “survey,” especially since those are almost always slanted to one side or the other. But here’s a great one — the PubForge Open Source Collaboration Survey. If you or someone at your public media station haven’t yet taken the survey, please do so right away.

The early results are interesting, as promoted by new media leader Dale Hobson (North Country Public Radio) in a recent e-mail to public radio folks (excerpted here):

Open source software has been widely adopted by stations as a whole: A majority of stations utilize open source software for some aspect of their online service. Where open source tools are not in use, there is considerable interest in finding ways to use them.

Allocating resources to web development and maintenance is critically low:

• More than half (55%) of respondents have ZERO full-time employees developing their website.

Top of the development list–stations are looking for:

• 72% - Freestanding player for streams, archives and user created playlists
• 72% - Tools to integrate existing social media networks into public media sites
• 68% - Complete CMS website solution, including audio file management
• 66% - Software to enable more community participation for public media
• 61% - Application for supporting micro payments (granular giving) to enable giving around specific content

In addition, the survey provides a snapshot of how stations are managing web content, what in-house skills and tools are available to them, how they are tracking visitors, and what they want to be able to do online, given the necessary resources.

There are more charts, more quotes and summary statements if you visit the site to see it all.

We need these kinds of surveys to be as accurate as possible, and the results are already illuminating. If you’re at a station, work with the web, and have just a few minutes, please take the survey.

It’s has been — and remains — insane at the office these days. We’re in the midst of a pledge period for TV, we’re preparing for another one in FM, and for the most part it’s my first run-through these events as the person ultimately in charge of our streams, so there’s a learning curve. I’m finding it easy to pick things up — it just takes time. Plus, the company is still shaking out some of the changes from about a month ago as we radically redesigned the management structure. So far, so good.

I’ve been neglecting Twitter and Facebook and this site for nearly a month as these events have played out. Luckily, it’s kind of a quiet period in public media as folks work through pledge drives and just get back into the non-summer swing of things.

Yet this past week a critical post went up from Dennis Haarsager that’s required reading for pubradio folks and I think for public TV folks as well:

• NPR’s digital distribution strategy

It makes a good deal of sense to me, as it gives a revitalized reason/purpose for national/local collaboration, as opposed to simple distribution. I’m not quite convinced it can be successful, but it’s got a shot if a critical mass of system leaders get on board. I know I’m paying attention.

That said, I’m concerned about future collaborations of all kinds, especially in the wake of a semi-private discussion in which I participated recently.

It seems public media’s chief difficulty today is not one of distribution, but one of mission. Why are we here, really? And do we all share the same response to that question? “Public service,” is not a real answer. We need a product, a specific service that can bind all of us together.

Personally, I think that’s news. I’ve railed against the national TV news media before for their lack of real public service, and I’ve suggested that public media’s greatest strength comes from news.  Not music, not arts and culture, not high society, but news. (Those other things are nice-to-haves, but they aren’t core things around which we can easily collaborate on various geographic or business scales.)

What does news, as a primary mission for public, have going for it?

• The Associated Press is breaking down as newspapers and stations — including my own — tell the AP to take a flying leap with their high costs and their regurgitated stories
• Newspapers are distracted as their profits crumble and they seem unable to find a way forward
• TV news is an abysmal, rancid landfill of time-wasters and poor information
• New low-cost journalism methods (not necessarily bad stuff, by the way) is on the rise, both in video and print, offering us new opportunities
• Digital exchange of information and finished media products has never been faster, cheaper or easier
• We have a public service mission unparalleled in the commercial world — a world setup to distribute commercials, not thoughtful information

NPR grew as media consumers discovered that quality news and information was, in fact, a good thing to have around. It grew in an otherwise toxic radio environment.

We have a chance, now, I think, to develop this shared mission and build collaborative structures around that. At the moment, Haarsager’s initial diagram (PDF) speaks to a broader service set than news alone. But keep the mission focused and the distribution / collaboration system begins to make sense.

Anything new that proposes to simplify collaboration in an ecosystem of diverse and often competing missions probably won’t get us very far.

So I’ve hinted at it via Twitter over the past couple of days, but not spoken openly until now.

On Thursday, August 14 we began, in earnest, the reorganization of Alaska Public Telecommunications, Inc. (APTI) in Anchorage, Alaska. APTI is a public media company that operates KSKA Public Radio (FM 91.1), KAKM Public Television (Channel 7) and the Alaska Public Radio Network (APRN).  APTI is both an NPR and PBS member and APRN is a statewide news network composed of about 24 public radio stations.

At the moment, I’m kind of exhausted from the many conversations and meetings swirling around this change, so I won’t go into much detail now. I’ll stick to the headlines now and try to do a longer explanation this weekend.

First off, I’m now in a new position. A position so new it has a non-traditional title: Vice President, Community Media Streams.

We’re organizing the company in a completely new way, using four divisions:

• Community Media Streams
• Media Production
• Advancement
• Operations

Previously we were arranged into platform and functional units with a total of 8 people at the “management” table, including the CEO. Now our “managers” number only 4. The old breakdown:

• KSKA-FM
• KAKM-TV
• APRN
• Broadcast Engineering
• Information Technology
• Development
• Finance & Administration

Much of this organizational structure stemmed from the two mergers that created APTI as it stands today.  TV and radio uneasily merged in the early 1990’s.  APRN was merged into the company (by necessity, I would contend) in 2004.  Since each merger, the units have largely acted alone — and have competed for resources.

The primary collapse is to bring together radio and television and the web — to date just a subset of my duties — under a single manager (me).  Other public media companies have called this a “Chief Content Officer” or some nomenclature like that. We decided to split what others might call “content” into streams and production because we felt the two were fundamentally different things. Media Production makes programs.  Streams creates experiences.

I’m falling asleep as I write this, so I’m going to stop here.  There’s much more to say, probably this weekend and, really, for months to come. In the mean time, here’s the formal press release (PDF) crafted by our own CEO on Thursday afternoon. It’s intentionally brief and vague.  We have longer docs we’ve been developing internally.

More later. And thanks to all the Twitter pals out there that patiently waited to hear more!

Back on the 31st I mentioned the NPR purchase of Public Interactive (PI), wondered what the meaning was and hoped for some announcements or details from NPR. Since then there’s been more discussion out there, including a rather long post by Robert Paterson as well as a short one from Sue Schardt. The NPR CEO himself, Dennis Haarsager, posted on the topic as well, including…

I will have a lot more to say about this, how we got here, where we hope to go with it, and who the key players have been in this multi-year effort to extend public media’s impact in a future post.  PI will continue its current range of services, but it would also be useful to think of it as the beginnings of a new digital division within NPR which will operate with the same culture of neutrality as has characterized public broadcasting’s satellite distribution systems for decades.

That’s encouraging, but vague. Knowing Dennis’ capacity for system design and strategic thinking, I definitely feel better that he’s at the helm, but I sure would like more details on what’s behind the purchase.

In the mean time, I’ve exchanged private Twitter messages and e-mails with a few folks outside and inside NPR. To date, either no one knows what’s going on with the purchase or they’re not willing to say. Very odd. A major purchase like this would, presumably, be backed up with a “big idea” or a plan for the future, and you’d think people would be excited to talk about it.

So I’m still in the camp of “huh?” when it comes to the NPR / PI deal. I’m not against it, but I’m not seeing the value yet. I’m hoping Haarsager in particular can shed some light in the coming weeks.

–

But I’ll be more specific: I’m not interested in more web templating services from PI or any other vendor. They don’t really help me provide valuable, organic, human-scaled interactive experiences for — and with — my community.

My station’s use of any media platform must be authentic and must be “tuned” to the rhythms of the platform and the needs of the community.

So if I’m providing interactive web services, they need to feel organic, natural, part of the web’s fabric and not a “patch.” The PI offerings have, in my experience, felt like patches. They were designed for stations that had no “digital natives” on board and could not or would not invest in next generation services, but still had to have something on the web. A noble goal in its way. Unfortunately, such services encourage stations to treat the web as an afterthought, as a necessary evil, not as a next-gen media platform that operates on a new set of principles.

As tools on their own, the PI services are fine. They work as advertised (which is more than can be said for a lot of software). But they all have the feel of “made somewhere else” and “commodity package we bought just to get this done.” It feels hollow. Ning sites feel more organic.

If NPR bought the PI toolset and services with the idea of just selling them to stations as PI has done since inception, then this deal makes no sense; then it’s just a game: PRI owns it, then NPR owns it, maybe APM is next or PBS or whatever. But if NPR plans to use the skill sets resident in the PI staff to go in some new directions — more like API stuff, less like web templates — then this might make a ton of sense, and it’s a service I’ll want to use.

Too bad NPR already had a smart web services team in-house, unencumbered by the legacy PI business model. NPR could have started in-house with the team they have. Although I suppose buying PI gives you political cover while you develop these services. NPR Board and management can focus on traditional PI operations while substantial behind-the-scenes API / utility development costs are incurred. Maybe the PI purchase is just a new media red cape keeping the old media bulls distracted.

Am I being too cynical here? What am I missing? And when do we think NPR will come out and say what their plans are for the PI purchase?

I’ll be recommending the following video to my Board in Anchorage soon. Thanks to Robert Paterson for pointing it out. This is pure Internet gold that’s worthy of broadcast on PBS itself.

The point? It explores YouTube (and related sites) from an anthropological standpoint and explains the many ways in which “Web 2.0″ technologies are fundamentally different from traditional media. Blew me away with the depth of analysis and the many moments of self-recognition. It’s so reassuring to know there are others out there struggling with issues of authenticity, identity and community in the online world. Old media and new media are even more radically different than I thought.

The only downside: it’s a full 1-hour video. So you have to reserve it for a time when you’ve got that much time to watch it. No snacking here — this is a full meal.

Everyone in the public media world reads Current, right?

Well, Current isn’t just on paper any more. Be sure to join the fray online at a new Ning site setup by editor Steve Behrens. It’s called, cheekily enough, DirectCurrent.

So far writers from Current and readers are posing questions and sharing ideas both related to recent articles and just out of the blue. Good stuff.

Free account setup required. See you there!

If you’d like a preview of some of the difficulties headed for the public media space, look no further than all the blogging and analysis — and sniping — going on in the newspaper industry. Public media’s problems will be different in style and emphasis, but the core problem is identical.

Be sure to read the latest post by industry veteran and analyst Steve Yelvington.

It’s about connecting with your community in an honest, human way. This is less important for the national outlets, but critical for those in smaller markets where community connection will be critical. Knock over the ivory tower, if you have one…

I started writing Thursday afternoon about the NPR purchase of Public Interactive, but I figured I’d better stop. I have experience with both entities, I’ve read the press release, but I’m going to give the NPR and PI community 24 hours to express their thoughts first.

Because, at face value and based on the PR piece, I’m baffled as to why this is such great news.

The only way this purchase makes sense is if there’s something new NPR is planning that didn’t get described in the press release.

Please, public media blogosphere and Twitterverse, educate me! Can you complete the equation in this post’s title?

I just met with a true innovator in public media this week, someone that’s a bit of a hero, really, and in this brief conversation I was surprised to hear a comment about the web that was, well… stunning. (And I’m not going to divulge the identity of this person because it’s irrelevant to the story.)

When asked by a colleague of mine whether this public media company was currently selling online advertising via their web presence, the answer was not only “no,” but “no, and we don’t plan to.” This person went on to say that the cost of putting together and managing an online advertising system would outweigh the advertising revenue that could be gained. Their take is that careful cost analysis must be done before they do any new projects and right now the web doesn’t look like a good cost bet.

Fair enough. That’s actually the tack I’ve taken at our shop in Anchorage. Why bother with the rules, the systems, the web redesigns required when the payback would be so small on sites with comparatively low traffic numbers?  I’ve avoided it to date.

But the comments didn’t stop there. This person further said they were going to wait until they had created a “scarcity” in the market for web advertising (on their properties) and then set prices for online ads when companies are “begging” to get their ads on the target site(s).

You’re going to create scarcity? On the web? Really?

I almost started to counter this idea right there, but out of respect left it alone.

Later I checked my RSS feed subscriptions and discovered a blog post from Google talking about how many pages there are in their index of the online world. Their numbers:

• 1998 — 26,000,000 pages (26 million)
• 2000 — 1,000,000,000 pages (1 billion)
• 2008 — 1,000,000,000,000 pages (1 trillion)

And presently the index grows by several billion pages each day.

But you’re going to create scarcity. Mmm-hmmm.

Okay, snarkiness aside… you can create scarcities online, I know. And public media entities are in a fairly good position to do that if they can gather their comparatively rarified audiences in the online space in large numbers and on a regular basis.

But there are two problems with this notion:

1. You’re not the only property online with desirable demographics for advertisers, because your web audience also visits lots of other sites and other sites can offer more targeted demographics.
2. Public media sites, especially for local stations, are… well… pretty bad as core web destinations. You’ll never be able to profitably sell such small and fairly broad audiences to advertisers in a market where #1 is true.

For the most part our public media (station) web sites are sorry shadows of our on-air presentations (there are, of course, a few exceptions where real investments have been made, mostly in the largest markets). Why?

• Our web services are typically afterthoughts.
• We do them because we “have to.”
• They are not must-see daily destinations.
• They are not valuable social networks.
• They have a fraction of the news presented by any local newspaper site.
• They are often unattractive and hard to navigate or bland, boring and so on.

The site visitor counts are understandably low.

And I level that charge against my own sites as well as the sites of other public media companies. They’re just not worth visiting regularly unless there’s something you heard/saw on air that you needed to hear/see again or you want to make a pledge online.

Further, if you did sell online advertising, how would you do it? You’d use your existing development / sales staff, wouldn’t you?  Commissions, salaries, healthcare costs, etc. all loaded up on top of the sales.  And then there’s the overhead costs of the rest of the organization as well.  No wonder web advertising isn’t worth it — it works on a different scale.

And thus we return to the same point made recently about the Bryant Park Project failure at NPR: you cannot expect broadcast economics success from a web economics property. Web properties work on a different scale than radio or TV. It’s a smaller, lighter scale. It supports fewer overhead costs and requires less staff.

Two solutions:

1. Create a web property that works on a web scale and draws its own audience and community. Make something that is a must-see daily destination, or create a site that solves people’s problems or provides a core service they need every day.
2. Create your web property in an economic “bubble” outside the normal expectations of staffing and profitability of broadcasting — at least to start. If you want your web property to help pay your transmitter bills, you’re dreaming now and probably forever.

So I agree — don’t bother selling advertising on bland sites with low traffic. I wouldn’t try to “monetize” most station sites today.

Instead, discover how network economics can work for you and build something compelling outside the expectations of the legacy properties. This might even be — or probably should be — a spin-off property, a la Mark Fuerst’s recommendation, captured on video here:

Back in April I mentioned the departure of Maria Thomas from her digital post at NPR. She left to join handmade crafts marketplace Etsy as their COO.

Well, just a few months laster she’s now CEO, as noted on the Etsy site and by Fred Wilson, venture capitalist and blogger extraordinaire.

Congratulations to Maria and Etsy on great news!

It makes me wonder what might have been had the stations and NPR actually agreed to do something in the wake of the New Realities conversations a couple years ago, conversations in which Thomas participated deeply. Had Thomas stayed at NPR, she could have kicked (even more) serious online ass for the network, but instead NPR, via the Board, has signaled the importance of the “R” over all things digital, especially in the BPP cancellation.

–

Someone I bumped into late this week with knowledge of the public radio system commented that the stations need to get out of NPR’s way and let it grow and mature. I couldn’t agree more — and I work at a station, one that ostensibly could be “hurt” by NPR’s evolution. A strong, vibrant, changing NPR would be good for everyone.

Here’s the thing… NPR’s future success cannot come at the expense of local stations if they are truly engaged with their communities. If NPR built direct relationships and funding deals with the public,  that would only cut stations out of the picture if their local community relationships were weaker than the ones NPR could build. If that’s the case — if NPR’s success really would be your station’s death — then just what are you doing in public media anyway?

Well, I guess the NPR shoe I’d been warned about has dropped, with respect to the cancellation of BPP.

It was not a satisfying thud.

The comments on the BPP blog site, reacting to the memo, have begun rolling in. They are not, one would expect, positive. There’s some respectful language in there, but the overall feeling is that this formal response missed the point(s).

My own comment, submitted to NPR (and it may be up by the time you read this):

For all those saying NPR should have raised money directly for BPP, there’s a political mess you’re not aware of here.

If NPR openly attempted to raise money for any program, with large or small station carriage, the nationwide collection of stations would revolt. And please note the Board of NPR is majority-controlled by stations.

In short, it would never be attempted and would certainly be killed if it were.

There are indeed structural and cultural problems within NPR that make a project like BPP fail and put all forms of new media engagements at risk. But never forget that many of NPR’s most anti-new media anti-innovation qualities are inherited from the codependent relationship with the stations. In a sense, it’s no one’s fault, yet it’s everyone’s fault. And that’s the center of the problem.

The entire system is trapped by its own success in the radio medium — not the web. Asking it to change in fundamental ways (e.g. embracing direct funding, using the web innovatively and as a medium of first resort, building real community) is asking for a revolution in which heads would most certainly roll.

But public radio has not historically been a head-rolling collection of institutions.

If you want to change public media for the better, focus on your local station — volunteer, get on the Board, ask tough questions, demand new services, and prove to your station there’s money to be saved and made in engaging the community in new ways, especially online. And tell your station to let NPR grow and mature — even if that means audiences want direct relationships with the network rather than the station.  Local stations need a reason to exist beyond rebroadcasting NPR anyway.  It’s time they learned how to be local (again).

Or, failing all that, strike out on your own and create a new media entity with the soul of a public radio station but the structural DNA of a Google.

There’s a future for public media, to be sure. But only time will tell whether NPR will participate in it fully and faithfully.

Naturally, I have more thoughts, but didn’t want to post them at NPR’s site.

Overall review of the memo? Disappointing.

Haarsager’s memo language does not, as so many commenters already noted, ring true. There’s something wrong here; something out of place.

Canceling BPP doesn’t bother me per se (this kind of thing happens from time to time for many reasons, and BPP was cursed with bad luck from the start). But NPR’s handling of the cancellation has the feeling of political talking points about it, and that won’t fly in a new media era.  Words like “misdirection,” “willful ignorance” and “politically convenient” come to mind very easily here, and they shouldn’t. That’s not what I want to think about NPR.

But if you think my take on the situation is harsh, head over to the Huffington Post where Daniel Halloway has his way with the story.

For me, the upshot is that NPR is fundamentally flawed due to the nature of the relationships between stations and network. There’s no long-term-successful way forward unless that flaw is corrected, either by renegotiation of the relationship or by breaking free of the relationships entirely.

While it’s not an exact analog for where newspapers were 10 years ago, it’s close enough: a medium…

• trapped by its own success
• unable to innovate into a new model, even in small ways
• finally dismantled by market forces beyond its control

I really hate this. This isn’t what I want for NPR specifically or public media broadly. Will someone please tell me I’m wrong? I don’t want to lose NPR!

Earlier this week I was advised privately to wait for an announcement from NPR about BPP — without any hint of what said announcement might be — and I’m still waiting. I’d love to hear NPR announce a bold new plan to take the BPP straight to the web and change it up somehow. If anyone would care to shed additional light, I’m all ears (as are about 600 commenters on the NPR site).

In the meantime, there’s been some great pieces out there I’d like to point folks to (yeah, I know — you already saw these, but just in case…).

First up are two posts from Robert Paterson, a past NPR consultant and an avid BPP audience participant:

• A rescue plan for Bryant Park Project and also for NPR
• A rescue plan for Bryant Park Project and also for NPR - Part 2

I’m not a fan of Paterson’s claim that the U.S. is heading into a full-blown depression (because that scares the bejesus out of me and I don’t know what to do about it), but the rest of it rings true, even if the economy were booming.

Next up is a post from Jeff Jarvis, one of my perennial faves:

• National Public What?

(I love the title — talk about not burying the lede!)

The Jarvis piece is good, but the comments are even better.  When I visited, the first half of the comments were really insightful. And don’t miss Mindy McAdams‘ comment in there, too.

What worries me more and more is that Stephen Hill — that too-smart-for-his-own-good bastard! (and I say that with love) — is going to be proven right if we public media people don’t stop behaving like nitwits and face up to the Innovator’s Dilemma.

I’m not sure whether I have the energy to start my own public media company. Do I really have to?