But I would hope that even if I had studied journalism in college, spent a 20+ year career in the field, won awards and so on that I would show a hell of a lot more professionalism and simple human decency than the ugly curs trolling one newspaper intern’s blog this week.

Admittedly, it’s a volatile situation as people are losing their jobs at the Tampa Tribune and the newspaper company is confronting the facts: if they change nothing they’re definitely dead, and even if they change everything they might still be dead. That’s a tough situation for everyone.

It’s terrible to be laid off (it’s happened to me). Layoffs cast all reason out the window in favor of pain and fear. But come on. That doesn’t give you either the right or the moral authority to attack an intern as your personal scapegoat for everything that’s “wrong” with the media industry (in your eyes).

It’s been nearly 24 hours now since I read the post — a fascinating insider look that most journalists wouldn’t share with the public (oh, the delicious irony!) — and I’m still floored by the nasty and even threatening comments made in response to the post.

If your ivory tower is collapsing, shouldn’t you be looking for a safe way out or a safe place to land?

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The Monster appears about 2:15 into the clip and delivers lines worthy of a politician caught in a scandal. Priceless!

And just where can I buy that car that runs on imagination? Oh, the dealer’s on Sesame Street, right? Damn.

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(This is a more personal post than most. It’s not the normal fare for this blog, but I need to explain what’s been going on recently. I would put this all in Twitter updates, but I can’t do the story justice in 140 characters.)

The last few weeks have been unusual for me. Stressfully fraught with disappointment, excitement, opportunity, new ideas, reversals, and finally a resurrection of hope.

A little over a week ago I teased my Twitter friends that I had a “big announcement” to share. Then I delayed a day. Then another day. Then a couple days. Then I went silent — because I realized I had no idea how long it would take for this announcement to go from “expected” to “official.”  Now, a week later, I have a totally different announcement.

But I get ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning, eh?

About 18 months ago my then-CEO decided to leave for a better opportunity. While I had thought about leaving just before his announcement for other reasons, I stopped cold when he chose to leave. I figured I’d have front-row seats to a changing of the CEO guard and I’d learn a lot from the process. And indeed I learned a lot.

About 12 months ago we actually got our new CEO, a guy from outside the public broadcasting world, but a natural networker in our community with a history in commercial media (newspapers) as well as nonprofit organizations. Prior to his arrival, our Board recognized the need for a strategic re-visioning of the company and a key task for this first year with a new CEO was developing a new strategic plan, though there wasn’t much figured out beyond that. Staff, management and the Board simply knew there was something wrong — we were in a financial crisis and there was no coherent mission for the company — and we knew this wasn’t sustainable.

About 8 months ago we began serious discussions about a new organizational model for the company — a model that would deliberately shatter our historical divisions and bind our media services into a unified, localized, relevant and interactive service. Last November is when it began in earnest, when I and a colleague developed this first-draft whiteboard:

I’m not yet making a high-res image of this plan available, pending reorganization.

Meetings with the Board, presentations to managers and staff, development of org charts and more Saturday and Sunday meetings than I can remember filled the calendar from December through March. There were definitely some bumps along the way, some of them really disheartening. But on the whole we had momentum, we had fairly solid ideas, and we were determined to succeed with something — almost anything — new.

Then it all stopped.

Basically, we’d reached the limits of what we could achieve without actually making real, on-the-ground, hard choices and changes. We’d reached the limits of charts, chats, theories, PowerPoint slides and whiteboards. Indeed, we’re still there — effectively stalled out — and it’s been that way for months (this my opinion, mind you — others would likely make a different assessment of the situation).

Well, if I get the scent of stasis or stagnation in my job, my mind wanders. My eye wanders. I’m not satisfied with a maintenance job, especially when there’s so much original construction that could be done. Point of fact: in 2001 I left one of the best jobs I’ve ever had because I wasn’t willing to sit around and wait for the economic downturn to play out. My job was secure, high-paying, comfortable. I left because I knew I wouldn’t learn anything substantial over the next couple of years. I took a pay cut and moved all the way to Alaska to challenge myself. Had I stayed, things would have picked up 2 years later. But I wasn’t willing to wait. That’s just me.

So when a collection of indicators (which I can’t discuss openly) started pointing to stasis in my current job and company, my patience began wearing thin. After a while I stopped pushing, prodding, suggesting and requesting. I put some Craigslist RSS feeds in Google Reader in addition to the CPB jobs feed I’d been following for months. I began actively keeping my eye open for something else out there that might be a solid move.

And one popped up.

A New Job?
It wasn’t a public media job, but it was with a nonprofit cultural institution. It was an IT job with the Anchorage Museum. I won’t go into details here, but it was interesting on several levels. So I polished up the resume and threw my hat into the ring.

A month later I got a call for an interview. I went to the interview and a day later I had an offer. We negotiated. Two more days later and I was asked to attend a second interview (huh?). The day after that interview I got a second offer and I accepted. Meanwhile, I maintained open conversation with my existing employer. It was a friendly and extraordinarily adult and professional process — more so than anywhere else I’ve worked.

While waiting for the rather lengthy background check to complete (the longest, most detailed one I’ve ever experienced — a process I ultimate thought was excessive and even a little insulting), I hinted at the change in jobs on Twitter. And the delays gave me time to think. I think my boss had an extra chance to think, too.

Over this past weekend the conversation continued and, lucky for me (and for us), a new participant was brought into the conversation. Very quickly what seemed impossible was possible; the clouds parted and I could see a forecast that included sunny skies — at least somewhere out there. (Okay, that’s flowery talk that doesn’t really mean anything, but I can’t go into details here.)

A Second Decision
Following all these chats and after a great deal of hard thinking, I made the decision Tuesday morning to pass on the Museum job and re-commit myself to this unusual public media company on the Last Frontier, at least for the foreseeable future. It’s the first time in my professional career I’ve ever made a decision to leave and then change my mind. Partly this is due to the unique nature of the opportunity where and when I am right now. Partly it was the timing of events surrounding this change. And yet another part was the support of a handful of really great people that made it very easy, and very attractive, to stay.

For a long time I’ve felt like we have a chance — a long shot perhaps, but a chance nonetheless — to change the way public media is organized and change the nature of our public service. Due to the small size of our company in Anchorage we just might be able to change, piece by piece, and become something new, maybe even something innovative or revolutionary.

Conclusions
I told public media consultant Tom Livingston something at IMA 2008 in late February that played into my thinking this past couple of weeks. I told him that if we in Anchorage could pull off the strategy we’ve developed, there’s no place in the pubmedia system I’d rather be. For a while that dream receded impossibly into the future. But now it’s back within reach.

So the “big announcement” is now actually a non-announcement of sorts. I’m not leaving APTI; I’m staying (despite what I may have said or what you may have heard). After some changes come to the company, I’ll be much freer to discuss what has actually changed and why. It could be the things we change might be relevant to other public media outlets and leaders out there.

For now, I have to thank my patient Twitter followers for the confusion, offer my deepest apologies to the Museum for reversing course so late in the process, and especially thank a small group of people at APTI and beyond that will make my re-commitment all worthwhile.

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The list is great, but it’s unfathomable to me that anyone understood web economics and impacts so early in the game. I mean, we’re still just figuring this stuff out, right?

Anyway, i think I’ll call this required reading: The thirteen commandments of the World Wide Web

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Steve Yelvington was the first I’ve found this week that understood the problem clearly and organically.

It wasn’t a “hyperlocal” problem; it wasn’t “too local” to be interesting or useful. It wasn’t a management issue. It was this, as Steve summarizes:

If you want to be a convener of community, you’d better be ready to get off your duff, away from the computer, and out in front of people. This is something you have to build by selling it in person to the people you want to engage.

Thank you! This was the primary mistake of the Washington Post Company with respect to LoudonExtra.com. “If we build it, they will come. We are the Washington Post!” Right.

Hyperlocal efforts require too much effort for too little payback in a for-profit top-down everyone gets paid a full-time wage corporate context. In other words, you can’t make money using traditional media methods.

Small local newspapers, by contrast, are different animals. They’re out there, in the community, visible and they have a physical manifestation in the life of the community (newsprint products distributed around town). They’re real. And they make money. Sometimes lots of it.

If all you have is a web site and you never go out and meet anyone and make real friends, you’re gonna have a tough time of it for two reasons:

1. Your approach to covering the community will be “false,” because you’re never actually out there participating.
2. No one will trust you because they have no idea who or where or what you are.

Rob Curley’s success in Lawrence, Kansas was partly driven by his love of the community itself, his long history and innate knowledge of it, and then his technological and managerial chops on top of all that. He simply kicked ass there because he knew it and loved it and lived it.

Since then he’s bounced around, landing briefly in Miami and then Washington, DC at the Post. But now he’s off again, this time to Las Vegas, taking his whiz-bang web abilities (and his team) with him.

I have to wonder how “connected” you can be to a community where you’ve parachuted in — with your own entourage in tow — just to do “web stuff” and get paid big bucks. Hyperlocal efforts just can’t sustain those economics, nor can they make the designers or coders or writers develop a deep connection with the community.

The future of local efforts will be a blend of paid, professional efforts and unpaid amateur efforts and everything in between. But I don’t believe you can build a geographically-bound service without having a deep affection for your geography.

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Great piece in Vanity Fair this week… How the Web Was Won.

It looks back, via personal interviews, at the founding and founders of the Internet itself, from ARPANET forward.

Thinking about public media, I was especially impressed with the following passage:

In 1985, a company called Control Video hired Steve Case, a product manager at Pizza Hut, to help market its fledgling electronic-gaming service. In a few years Case became its chief executive and pushed the company further into interactivity and communications. The company was ultimately re-christened America Online, and the catchphrase “You’ve got mail” became a salutation for a generation of computer users.

Steve Case: We always believed that people talking to each other was the killer app. And so whether it was instant messaging or chat rooms … or message boards, it was always the community that was front and center. Everything else — commerce and entertainment and financial services — was secondary. We thought community trumped content.

In public media we always talk about content. Content, content, content! We compare our content to the Discovery channels. We compare ourselves to commercial radio. But I (still) maintain that context trumps content, and Steve Case — way back in the 1980’s — agreed, though he talked about community (an expression of context).

If all we do is great content, I think we’ll be failing our public service mission in an age where the value of content itself is falling to near zero. We talk a good game about building community, but now we have to actually do it.

The good news is that there’s still time for us to grab this brass ring of community-building, of context development and sharing.

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Pop quiz, hotshot. There’s a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below 50, it blows up. What do you do? What do you do?

One of my favorite writers on matters of strategy, especially related to technology application in business, is Bob Lewis, a long-time columnist from InfoWorld and a popular business consultant as well. He writes a weekly column, shared via the web. Great stuff.

This week he wrote a piece (the second in a series) on business strategy: “A business change cornucopicolumn.” And it sounds like he’s talking about my specific public media company in Anchorage and the public media industry in general.

It’s spooky.

Check out this rather heavy quotation (sorry, I just had to) and see if it fits your strategic situation (added boldface is mine):

[Let's] start with a framework for describing any business. It has ten dimensions — five external, five internal.

The external dimensions are:

• Customers: The people who make buying decisions about what the company has to sell.
• Product: What the company sells its customers.
• Price: What the company charges for its products, along with margin goals, contract terms and conditions and so on.
• Marketplace: The business ecosystem — suppliers, distribution channel, competitors and partners.
• Messages: How the business explains itself and its products.

The internal dimensions are:

• People: Employees and contractors — the human [beings] themselves, their skills, knowledge and experience.
• Process: How people do the company’s work.
• Technology: The tools people use when fulfilling their roles in the company’s processes.
• Structure: How the company is organized — its reporting structure, [salary] structure, policies and guidelines, and internal communications.
• Culture: How employees respond to common situations.

In healthy organizations, the ten dimensions are consistent, interconnected, and mutually reinforcing.

Companies don’t undertake strategic change just because one or two are a bit moldy. They undertake it … because the company’s business model no longer works. Perhaps the company’s products are no longer relevant, or the customer segment it serves is shrinking, or its pricing is no longer competitive in its marketplace, or its marketplace has changed in some serious way. It’s fallen behind.

…

Many companies enter a sort of vegetative state in which doing nothing at all becomes the strategy — they pare spending down beyond the minimum, hoping someone buys them before they’re completely [beat]. The alternative, though, is nearly as bad, because there is no such thing as changing just one of the ten dimensions of organizational design.

…

[For example:] Your competitive challenge is pricing. But you can’t change just the price. You need a [better] response than that, because … you’ll lose money on every transaction.

To cut prices while preserving margins you’ll need to change your processes. That means “changing” your people in some way too, because new processes wholly or partially invalidate old skills.

Most likely, you’ll have to change structure and culture as well, and reposition yourself in the marketplace (including, perhaps, bypassing your current distribution channel). All of which will require significant changes in technology.

That’s a lot to change all at once. You have to take an interconnected ten-dimensional model of the business that worked and redesign it into a new interconnected ten-dimensional model of the business that works.

Then you bet the farm, implementing the new organizational design as one massive process. And you don’t get to stop running your business during the change-over.

…[The] company’s executive team decides the basic shape of pricing goals, production strategy (process), and distribution. It also decides on any structural changes that will be required, putting the right people in charge of critical business responsibilities.

And, it will define the underlying cultural changes necessary for everything else to work.

The executive team will focus its attention on the cultural change. The rest of the company will use the 3-1-3-4 formula (3-year vision / 1-year strategy / 3-month goals / 1-week plan) to figure out everything else and make it happen in manageable increments.

Holy shmoly!

I don’t know about your company, but that fits my company, right this second, perfectly.

We’re grappling with these problems all at once:

• Public TV’s audience is dwindling nationally and locally. That reduces advertising (sponsorship!) revenue potential and revenue actuals.
• TV membership dollars are steady, but from a shrinking number of donors (per donor giving is up, total donor count is falling).
• The cost of producing national-quality mass-media-style pubTV programming has risen beyond our ability to do it locally and it’s quickly becoming too expensive to buy it in national packs from PBS.
• The cost of producing lower-end media has collapsed, allowing a flood of programming at the bottom-end of the market, and allowing the “audience” to produce (and consume) their own digital media, without paid gatekeepers like us.
• Our TV fundraising model is based upon transactions with people that don’t usually like us or give us money — we sell them stuff. In so doing, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner: true believers hate us when we grab the money and cut off their favorite programs, yet we need that cash to pay for the true believer programs. When we attempt to raise money around regular programs, they tank, financially.
• Our public radio audience has grown over the past 15 years, but has now flattened and may be starting a long backward slide if we can’t figure out how to grow our audience further or deepen our relationship with the audience we’ve got.
• Our staff is composed almost exclusively of baby boomers and others that built and/or grew up with the public media system. They are approaching retirement and don’t seem to have another “revolution” in them. Internet models are curious, but unproven, for them, and since they largely eschew new media consumption models, they don’t know how to approach them from a business angle.
• Government funding for public media in our state has fallen over the past 15 years. Using inflation-adjusted dollars, funding has dropped by more than 50% in 10 years. Plus, companies successful with fundraising activities are deliberately cut off from state funding. And federal funding has been flat or declining (in inflation-adjusted dollars).
• Our strategic drift has led to an accumulation of drifting employees and a loss of innovating ones. If you’re a striver, a pusher, a mover-and-shaker, if you want to accomplish something, we offer a frustrating environment at best. Our culture says we should wait for a knight in shining armor to come along with bags of money a new and exciting crusade to save us.
• Our product set, as currently deployed, does not compete well enough in a mass market well enough to draw the required revenue, and it doesn’t serve a niche market well enough to garner a rabid following of local support. In web terms, we’re too small to be Google, but too big to be 37signals. (What’s the opposite of a sweet spot?)

I could go on.

Our CEO has repeatedly likened our strategic situation to changing the tires on a bus while driving down the highway at 60 miles per hour. That feels about right.

Personally, I’d like to pull over, get this bus up on a lift and change the tires in a more controlled environment. Then we can get back on the road. But as soon as we drop below 50mph — KABOOM! …the bus explodes, and that’s it for Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock.

Which is why Bob Lewis’ 3-1-3-4 formula may be required for us on the mobile pit crew. And it’s why strategies built around a new understanding of the 10 dimensions of business are in order. Clearly, more than 1 or 2 of the 10 dimension have changed:

• Our customers are moving online and expect on-demand access in addition to the streamed services. They also want to interact with us. (Ironically, in a hyper-connected world, they’re more “disconnected” than ever — they need more connection with people like us, people like themselves, people in their neighborhoods.)
• Our marketplace has changed; it’s no longer “3 networks + PBS” and hasn’t been for years. And it’s getting worse as new platforms appear and the audience fractures.
• Pricing models have evolved dramatically as the scarcity economic model dissipates in media markets.
• Our people and processes were selected for legacy customers and markets, not the present day; they need to be retrained technologically and culturally or be replaced.
• Our legacy technology is prohibitively expensive to maintain, doesn’t offer sufficient economic advantage and prevents investment in new technology that would enable new processes and services.
• Our business structures and company cultures are unfocused at best and self-destructive at worst. We focus on “radio” and “TV” and “web” and we promote history over innovation. We need a culture that encourages and develops the best of what our public media “tribe” seeks to experience.

Can we still turn it around? I don’t know. Perhaps in smaller companies with a few lucky lightning strikes of vision and a philanthropic community that supports a positive vision of the future (a vision we must articulate). Or maybe in the largest companies with deeper pockets and tighter links to market forces.

We’re at the cusp of turning it around in Anchorage. Or at least I think so — I hope so. There’s still a great deal of fearless, tireless and perhaps even foolhardy leadership required. We might just have the kernel of what it takes. I think the rest of 2008 will likely set us up for ultimate success or failure. We’ll either get this right quickly or it will likely be too late to recover.

How are you doing with your public media bus?

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Michael Rosenblum — a perennial favorite writer of mine — has a series of posts this week about how the Travel Channel (a division of Discovery, the company vacuuming up viewers out of the PBS audience) is training all of their employees how to plan, shoot, edit and finish good video using the small cameras and laptop editing systems that are the hallmark of the Travel Channel Academy.

The best post is A Commitment to Literacy.

Imagine a world in which everyone in your public media company — your radio folks, your TV folks, your web folks, sales people, engineers, everyone — learned the pieces and parts of your craft, your public service. Everyone would have a basic, functional literacy about audio, video, text, photos, social media and so on. Wouldn’t that make your company smarter, faster, more dynamic, more engaged, more productive? Everyone would have a stake, an experience, that directly relates to the core mission and functions of your public service business.

I work in a public radio and public TV company in which several employees don’t even have televisions at home. Those that do have TVs mostly don’t watch them or spend very little time watching our own channel. I almost never watch our station — it doesn’t speak to me much. [To tell the truth, I haven't turned on the TV to watch anything since Memorial Day. But I have watched a couple TV shows on Hulu.]

So what could make our media outlets more engaging — even for our own teammates? Contextual relevancy — meaning. It needs to be a meaningful thing to them. They need to feel involved. Same for the people formerly known as the audience.

The future of media companies will be focused not on distribution technologies (which will fade into the infrastructure background), but on meaningful media production and the social transactions that go along with it — the conversations, the sharing, the community, the Context. Imagine a company where everyone is immersed in media and community relationships.

I want my receptionist to know how to shoot and edit video. I want the membership people to be able to record and edit audio. I want to have a staff populated with smart people that can write, take a good photo, and sling digital media around without throwing up their hands in frustration.

Sure, there are day-to-day tasks that need to just get done, and they don’t involve video cameras or microphones or web sites and they aren’t always “fun.” (Believe me, I know — I have to go setup a bunch of stuff for a pledge drive starting right after this.) But if every job and every task were infused with the knowledge of why and how we do what we do, wouldn’t that make working in public media all the more meaningful for everyone involved? And wouldn’t that make for a better public service?

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It’s About The Conversation (29 May 2008)

Tim Eby had the good fortune to attend a conference in WOSU’s backyard last week and shares some of the insights from the conference that directly apply to public media leaders and organizations nationwide. One of several money-quotes: “We can no longer control the keys to the vehicle and keep our audience in the backseat.” The post includes slides from one of the presentations and a great five-point list of what NOT to do as a media organization in the age of conversation.

What’s Your Twitter Strategy? (29 May 2008)

As I’ve talked about Twitter with my colleagues (and shared article after article), I always get the question, “So what’s this thing for?” Todd Mundt answers this question, but more importantly answers it in a practical, down-to-earth, low-cost, low-impact way — specific to public media. Great, simple advice and reporting on what’s up in Louisville.

Louisville Public Media’s Strategy (28 May 2008)

Here’s a more wide-ranging piece from Mundt that encompasses LPM’s strategic approach to media. This is yet another brilliant, concise document out of Louisville Public Media (the first being their overall company strategy doc I mentioned in February). It’s both incredibly readable and shows a great depth of thinking.

If I’m lucky, I’ll become the “Microsoft” to Mundt’s and LPM’s “Apple” — I’ll fire up the photocopier every time they create an innovative new strategy, change a few names in the document and claim I invented it all!

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Get more Common Craft videos at their web site. You can even buy them for use at the office.

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I commented on Paterson’s site, but realized I liked my response so much I wanted to elevate it to my own blog in the process. Here’s Paterson’s question and my own response:

Is this the problem stated in Money terms?
Here is Diane Mermigas talking about the commercial networks — is this the same for NPR and PBS?

I would say Public Media are not impacted as directly by advertising losses like this, nor do the losses/impacts happen in phase with commercial media.

But the losses are there or soon will be (depending on the size and sophistication of your advertising clients).

But what’s worse — much worse — is that revenue from advertising (sponsorship!) is not managed as professionally in public media as it is in commercial media. This means that trends in ad spending are not understood as well in public media as they are elsewhere. So as changes ripple through the ad space, public media won’t figure it out for several cycles. Blunted reaction times will lead to lost opportunity and lost money.

Commercial outlets have a firm, financial bottom line and they calculate where that line lies every day, every week, every month, every quarter. Public media is not so fastidious. Our bottom line is the soft concept of “public service” (imagined in many different ways) and revenue is only a means to that end. We don’t have hard measures of public service, we don’t analyze so deeply or accurately, as a group (I’m sure there are some exceptions, of course).

Indeed, as nonprofits, we tend to downplay “overhead” costs like sales analysts or “management” functions that could lead us to higher revenues and better customer relationships in the underwriting space. We don’t really operate like a business where it matters most — where money intersects with mission.

On top of all that, then there’s the problem of TV. All TV outlets have fewer and fewer viewers as the mass media model breaks down in a flurry of new outlets and platforms. And then there’s the demographics of PBS generally, which are less-than-desirable for many marketers.

In short, the money is moving where it can get greater impact, and public media outlets are pooly prepared to sense the change or alter course to meet the advertisers at their new destinations.

The solution? Get engaged locally in a way that’s unassailable by national trends. Build deep relationships that, yes, can be “monetized” in both corporate and individual realms. Develop relationships with sponsors that have historically not played in local media. Plus, get your butt online in a real way, not with business card web sites. Oh, and be sure to have some hard-nosed analysts on board that keep the business honest on the numbers — avoid the doe-eyed optimism that sometimes overtakes “soft” nonprofits like ours.

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Indeed, I felt about NPR’s coverage exactly the opposite of what I feel every time I see or hear commercial media reporting on, well… anything. I’ve cited before my disgust for all things TV news and especially cable news. The disasters that are CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC and so on would be laughable if they weren’t so fundamentally damaging to our democracy. They’re a cancer, not a public service, as they make our nation dumber with each minute of air time. They’re part of what I call the “bread-and-circuses” media. (And I’m not saying this for dramatic effect — I’m literally angered and saddened with each appearance of Wolf Blitzer and the army of morons that make up commercial TV news.)

Which leads me to a positive point, rather than just a rant.

In a world where…

• commercial news media are collapsing their operations and dumbing down their product at every turn
• the nails-on-chalkboard Nancy Grace is given a show on a channel called “Headline News”
• right-wing ideologues hold court on Fox
• Anderson Cooper promotes videos of nannies mistreating babies on hidden cameras as if it were news
• Katie Couric is paid $15 million a year to read a teleprompter

…in this world, NPR and public media has a tremendous opportunity.

Think about it — the kind of work NPR is doing is unavailable anywhere else. There are a few newspapers and freelance reporters here and there doing quality news work, but it’s a small group (and the newspaper group is shrinking). In the past, the competition for quality news was intense, but that’s relaxing now. The market is opening up, ironically at a time when there’s more opportunity to distribute media than ever before.

The future of successful ongoing media companies will be found in providing a service for a “tribe” with a shared set of values or tastes. In the case of public media these values include intellectual honesty and humanity and fairness and curiosity. Consider what the Public Radio Program Directors (PRPD) cite as their Core Values:

Qualities of the Mind and Intellect

Qualities of the Heart and Spirit

Qualities of Craft

Isn’t that what our “tribe” wants? Isn’t that what we fundamentally believe in?

By contrast, what are CNN’s core values? Well, there’s only one: shareholder profits. I’m sure there are still a few hard-core journalists left inside CNN, struggling onward. But they must be frustrated because selling advertising and gathering an audience to see those ads — that’s the game, and it’s a game played in a tougher and tougher media market. Public service, when it happens, is a coincidence and a side effect, not a goal.

So bring on the Britney Spears stories! (Even the Associated Press has admitted they’re spending more time gathering and reporting celebrity news because “that’s what the people want.”) More pedophiles, please! Serve up steaming plates of self-righteousness and indignation as red meat for racists! Yep, it’s time for another Princess Diana anniversary! Do whatever you must to gather the audience our advertisers crave. Foreign bureaus? Boring!

Public media is different and everyone knows it (even if they don’t watch or listen).

That said, there’s a lot of stuff we do in the name of public media today that isn’t news. To be sure, there’s always some niche that’s served by this food show or that music show and so on. Those are fine programs and they round out our offerings nicely. After all, “man does not live by bread alone.”

But news — reporting from all over the world and from neighborhood to neighborhood — that’s the core service I think we need to embrace as our first priority, even to the exclusion of other programming.

Why? Consider our competition outside the news sector: Discovery has effectively duplicated our food shows and nature shows and science shows and so on to the point where lots of folks don’t make a distinction between public media and commercial media. Discovery is, for much of America, the new PBS.

News is the our most important edge. It’s the thing we do best, and it’s the service no one else is providing. Consider Frontline on television — who else is doing that? C-SPAN is probably the closest competitor we’ve got on TV, but they don’t do news. And on radio? We have no competition. None. Newspapers are viable competitors for news coverage, but they’re so disrupted and distracted they’ve lost their way. Further, they have shareholders they must satisfy with juicy profits. Again, our shareholders are the American people… the citizens; plus a “tribe” that will actively support us.

So let’s go get those stories and cover them in a way that no one else does. Let’s deepen public media’s grip on quality news and serve our public in a future in which our former competitors give news short shrift. It’s our calling, and it’s a niche we can own outright.

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We’re still in the midst of a strategic reconfiguration at the office, yet that seems to be slowing down now, as… well, I can’t really explain it without betraying confidences. Basically the process of reviewing the company’s structure and mission has stalled out and I don’t know when, or if, it will re-engage. I’m hopeful that we can startup again before June, but who knows. It’s been quite the roller coaster and at the moment I just want to get off and find a Sno Cone.

—–

Separately — and way more fun — I’ve been working on moving my company and all its employees over to Google Apps, in the process dumping our Microsoft Exchange e-mail server and Outlook (at least officially).

So here’s the question: Do you have experience with moving your company over to Google Apps, especially away from Exchange and Outlook? If so, I’d like to hear about it either in the comments or via e-mail.

Right now I’m still in the planning and early-adopter transition phase, but in the end I have to migrate about 40 people to the service (which is tiny, I know), moving most of their archived mail to the service. I’ve already run into a couple mail migration glitches and I’m still figuring out how to handle public folders.

In the end, I expect to save anywhere from a few thousand to several thousand dollars per year (electricity, server upkeep, backup management, software licensing, staff time) and get some intangible cultural benefits from pushing the company further online. Instant messaging integrated with the web e-mail client is compelling, as is vast e-mail storage space and the document sharing features of Google Docs.

So let me know if you’re a Google Apps shop. What works? What doesn’t work? Send me your cheers and your jeers for the service. I can share my experiences, too, if that’s helpful.

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Bravo to Todd Mundt on both “cutting the cord” from his cable company and writing in-depth about the process and experience of consuming media — up to and including HD video — without cable (or satellite) TV service.

The mix of technologies required today are a bit daunting to anyone that wants just a plain old “boob tube” experience, but for any moderately inclined hobbyist, this is pretty accessible.

Furthermore — and this is the kicker — there’s more content out there on the ‘Net than on PBS, as lots of sources distribute directly and PBS (for various reasons, many of them good) chooses not to carry the stuff.

Read all about it here.

(For the record, Todd reports that he still uses the cable company for Internet access, just not for TV. My own experience is that my local cableco won’t sell me high speed service without a TV bundle, so I can’t fully follow his example. However, I have stopped watching BSG on TV and instead watch exclusively via hulu and DVD).

Oh, and be sure to follow Todd on Twitter, if you aren’t already.

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Now Google, in a lightly self-promotional way, has posted a video starring the team from KPBS that made it all possible. It’s wonderful to see new media folks in the public media world getting some credit. And now you’ll be able to spot them at the next conference you attend!

YouTube Linkvideo link

For more from the KPBS team — and others that have used social media in disaster situations — be sure to listen to the Disaster Relief and Emergency Preparedness session from IMA 2008:

The wildfires in southern California, the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, the bombing in London. Hear the experiences of our colleagues faced with these crises: what tools they used, how they deployed their staff; what collaborations helped them deliver effective service.

Moderator: Andy Carvin, NPR

Panelists: Leng Caloh, Senior Online Editor, KPBS; Peter Horrocks, Head of the Multi Media Newsroom, BBC; Julia Schrenkler, New Media Interactive Producer, Minnesota Public Radio

Download audio file (using-social-media-for-disaster-relief-and-emergency-preparedness.mp3)

Download the original MP3 audio file here.

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Apple’s online media store turns 5 years old this week.

At launch in 2003 the store had around 200,000 music tracks and a handful of early-adopting customers. Today there are something like 10,000,000 songs, but there are also audio books, iPod games, video and audio podcasts, TV shows and feature-length movies.

I remember the early years, when Steve Jobs would talk up sales figures and the size of the library and would point out where Store sales were in relation to other music resellers, physical or digital. Wal-Mart was always at the top of the heap, followed closely by Target and Best Buy. In each annual update, iTunes would step up the chart, knocking off one competitor after another.

But in all those years, I never thought iTunes would become the #1 music reseller in the U.S. That came to pass earlier this month, based on studies published by industry monitors.

How many other companies have entered a long-established (perhaps stagnant) market and rocketed to #1 in just 5 years, shoving aside formidable competitors along the way? Moreover, who’s done that while simultaneously shifting the shopping, distribution and delivery system from physical to virtual?

Simply amazing.

New competition may be afoot, of course. Amazon recently (late 2006) added their MP3 store, which is pretty good (I’ve bought media through both outlets), and they’re growing quickly. But they aren’t yet threatening iTunes. Maybe someday, but not yet.

For public media, the message is this: people will go online for things they used to get other ways, if the overall value proposition is good enough. And they’ll pay gladly for the service.

Oh, and by the way… make sure all your podcasts are listed in the iTunes Store (it’s free). With some 50,000,000 customers, listing there is simply required.

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Recently I’ve told people I know, especially folks I meet via Twitter, that this here blog is really kind of an “inside baseball” thing for public media purveyors or supporters. It’s not a general interest kind of thing. Well, for this post, I’m going to kick up the inside baseball factor a notch…

In the wake of the Ken Stern departure from NPR, the rumblings in D.C. were audible all the way out here in Anchorage (it helps if you have a former NPR staffer working in the next office). Stations across the country were in a tizzy for a few days trying to read the tea leaves — what did it all mean?

Then a few weeks later we heard about the departure of Maria Thomas, NPR’s digital media guru. As one of the chief architects of NPR’s many digital initiatives, her exit fueled speculation that the elimination of Stern was a rebuke of online activities at the company and Thomas left because her days were numbered.

At least that’s the speculation I heard. But I didn’t believe it.

Thomas came to NPR with solid online / e-commerce experience. She did great work at NPR. But I suspected she basically had achieved all she could in a company that, for all its good intentions, cannot move too terribly quickly, given the distributed nature of its goals and relationships. Plus, her work would have gotten her continued attention in web circles. She was likely hit with a job offers repeatedly. 

Today venture capitalist (and uber-blogger) Fred Wilson announced Thomas’ installation as COO of the unique online retailer Etsy.com. While we knew the Etsy part of the story weeks ago, I think the warm welcome she’s being offered tells the real story — that hiring Thomas was a coup for Union Square Ventures and Etsy, not a housecleaning for NPR.

Be sure to check out the introductory video — great stuff. And note what Thomas says when asked why she likes Etsy: “I love that Etsy means connecting with something authentic.” Spoken like the new media veteran she is.

Of course, I could be wrong. Hit me in the comments if I’m missing anything.

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I know, it’s probably already in your RSS reader, right? But if not, be sure to check out the new (2008) podcasting study by Edison Media Research. This year shows a solid bump upward in consumer adoption of podcasting and it’s always great to get new charts for wallpapering the office and showing your pals how quickly these newfangled media things are catching on.

Check out the intro and download the report PDF here.

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Excitedly Czervik shouts into the phone: “Buy, buy, buy!” and after a pause to listen, “They’re all buying? Then sell, sell, sell!”

That last piece of advice now appears to apply to stocks in the broadcasting sector, according to a report in BusinessWeek, which includes this ominous quote:

Meanwhile, traditional broadcasters will probably remain challenged by secular factors such as audience fragmentation, as advertisers shift more spending to the Internet and other new media platforms, Amobi says. A terrestrial radio recovery could be impeded by a continued supply and demand imbalance, while the satellite radio companies have also seen anemic retail sales, even as they await a likely imminent regulatory decision on their pending merger proposal. However, TV advertising offers a bright spot, in our view, with a relatively strong 2007-08 upfront and scatter market for the networks, and a specter of record political dollars for local stations with the upcoming Presidential elections.

To be fair, this isn’t exactly breaking news. Audience fragmentation has been the hallmark of the 21st century as media outlets and platforms proliferate and the old media companies actually accelerate their decline by reflexively going for ratings with sensationalist and over-commercialized programming.

And on the matter of TV advertising, what happens after the 2008 election cycle? That’s not a pretty picture, even if it does come in HD.

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Perhaps Leo Laporte was right a couple years ago when he suggested that the “pod” in podcasting be eliminated and replaced with “net” to make “netcasting” the word. Of course, that might have confused things with various forms of streaming.

In any case, here’s yet another Common Craft video you can share with your public media clients to explain podcasting a bit. You can even contact Common Craft to get the video branded with your own company name.

I would also recommend Apple’s introduction to podcasting, which is iTunes-specific, but iTunes is a really great choice for most listeners due to the integration of their podcasting directory / subscription system.

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For those of you still not using (or at least trying) Twitter, or if you’d like to learn about some resources that can make your Twittering more interesting or useful, check out this comprehensive post by digital media professor Kathy Gill (University of Washington). Good history, good explanations, great list of resources.

Plus, don’t miss the Twitter Fan Wiki for even more tweety goodness.

I’m still not a constant Twitter user myself — it kind of happens in batches for me — but it’s still a lot of fun. I’ve met people in my own area that use Twitter and maintained some interesting pseudo-connections with people very, very far away.

My experience:

• it’s better than IM, because it’s asynchronous in nature — like e-mail
• it beats blogging every thought that comes into your head
• it’s highly mobile — via iPhone with web or any cell phone with SMS
• it offers a fascinating stream-of-consciousness view of the world
• it actually informs me about the world — it’s faster than RSS feeds, far faster than web sites and the news I capture via Twitter friends is much more relevant to me (most recent example was learning about the midwest earthquake before I heard about it anywhere else)
• my wife won’t sign up, so I can say whatever I want!

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• Download the Web Extras Toolkit here
  (PDF, 1.5MB)

And feel free to recommend your own toolkit additions or corrections via the site comment feature.

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(The one exception, of course, is most of the stuff distributed via PBS. The pubcasting news/public affairs shows have their own problems, but integrity or seriousness of intent is not one of them.)

Thank God there are so many smart people in the world that are as outraged by (commercial) TV news as I am. The reaction to Wednesday night’s Clinton/Obama debate in Pennsylvania was instantaneous, nearly universally negative and — bonus — entertaining to boot.

Check out these Twitter posts (tweets) regarding the debate, from a variety of users…

• 45 minutes into the debate and I’m thinking this is exactly why network TV must die. Not one real issue - just flag pins, Wright, and Bosnia
• And should a former Clinton campaign manager be one of the two people conducting the debate? Doesn’t ABC have any real journalists?
• ABC’s debate was a bigger joke than CNN’s compassion forum. it’s good the newseum in dc is now open because real journalism is cold and dead
• hehe Charles said “fascinating debate”. What debate was he watching?
• Just wrote a letter to my local affiliate complaining about how bad the Debate was handle