First up (blogged earlier by Todd Mundt) is a take on the Bryant Park Project collapse from someone else that’s young and actually creating public radio programming. Only in this case it’s done on a small scale and is therefore sustainable.

The Sound of Young America‘s Jesse Thorn chimes in on both the BPP and the Fair Game cancellations. He offers lots of insightful commentary (so read the whole thing); here’s one great passage:

Fair Game and especially BPP were designed for a multi-platform future that’s in its earliest stages. Despite speculation to the contrary, both were building very strong podcast audiences. That said, both PRI and NPR are organizations that can’t afford to alienate stations, and that means they can’t really go directly to listeners for money. So the only real option available to them to monetize those online audiences is underwriting, and that’s a pretty modest revenue stream right now. So while both shows were relatively good at online stuff, they weren’t getting much money out of it. Certainly not millions of dollars.

—

Separately, On The Media‘s Bob Garfield is getting a lesson on web comments this week in the wake of the latest OTM show. Garfield went off in the show about web-based comments and commenters, even provoking Ira Glass to refer to him as a “royalist” with respect to how he views comments and the great unwashed masses.

One media commenter and experienced software pro — Derek Powazek — went a step further and wrote two pieces about comments and how they should work, taking Garfield to task for ignoring a long 10-year history of better comments across the web as well as playing the part of Grandpa Simpson.

This is Not a Comment (26 July 2008)

The story completely missed moderation queues, reputation management systems, or any of the hundreds of comment systems built over the last decade to address this very problem. Garfield seems to base the entire story on some bad comments on the OTM site, a site that provides a completely open, no signup required, comment system. But instead of asking “Is there a better way to do this?” he goes for the much easier story: “Gosh internet commenters sure are dumb!”

10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments (28 July 2008)

The real reason comments on newspaper sites suck isn’t that internet commenters suck, it’s that the editors aren’t doing their jobs. If more newspapers implemented these 10 things, I guarantee the quality of their comments would go up. And this is just the basic stuff, mostly unchanged since I wrote Design for Community seven years ago.

Powazek’s seminal book is basically out of print at this point, only available via used book sellers starting at $50 a copy. But the 10 points he offers above are a great condensed version to get you started.

I’m hoping to use his ideas (and the book) to get things rolling (someday!) in my own shop in Anchorage.

And I’m still in the camp that believes your ability to serve your community — online or otherwise — will keep you alive whereas a mass media approach in which you teleport content in from other places won’t make it in the future.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis recounts the many examples in which the web community has responded to Garfield’s notes on comments. He links to no less than 8 cogent comments on commenting.

http://static.ning.com/BPPDiner/widgets/video/flvplayer/flvplayer.swf?v=3.4.4%3A6369
Find more videos like this on The BPP Diner

BPP lovers can continue to meet on a new social networking site here, kindly started by BPP listener and public media consultant extraordinaire Robert Paterson.

I’ve joined and I’ll be fascinated to see if the community is sustainable once the core of the social network — the hosts and staff — are no longer working 40+ hours a week on an NPR program and sharing that experience with the “diners.”

Now the comments are piling up in reaction to interim CEO Dennis Haarsager’s posting about the cancellation. I already gave my comments. What I find remarkable is that so many in the audience “get it.” Making NPR’s decision here all the more puzzling / frustrating.

Here’s a selection of comments and comment excerpts that I found compelling and instructive (they’re numbered here for reference, but are not numbered at the NPR site):

[1] First, while I realize that you [Haarsager] weren’t head of NPR when the show started, could they have realistically expected there to be much analog carriage of another two hour morning news program?

Even shorter programs not tied to a particular time period take years to build up carriage. …

I’m also surprised you didn’t at least keep the show going at least through the election. You’re reachign an audience that may vote in greater numbers than in a long time. And they need information.

While some of them will listen to other NPR news programs, it is clear from the comments people who don’t are listening, and more importantly, interacting with BPP. –Steve Rhodes

[2] 9 months isn’t nearly enough time, and they shouldn’t have begun the show if they couldn’t have made a significant commitment to its success. –G

[3] It seems to me, somehow, your [NPR's] outlook on the BPP was more about the neat, shiny technology than anything else.

More focused on the “networks” than the “social.” –Carlo

[4] NPR should have availed itself of this opportunity to try direct funding because the current NPR funding model in unsustainable. I still support my local NPR station, but more out of a sense of duty than anything else. I have no love for them, their constant interruptions of national program with local crud, and their closed-door decision making (which rather reminds me a lot of the decision to cancel the BPP). Except for my dead of night BBC fix all of my listening is either streaming or podcast and I avail myself of every opportunity to support the shows I like directly. I’m about one recession away from dropping my support for my local station all together. NPR needs to allow me to contribute more directly to the things I like or risk losing my support entirely. –Dave Wiley

[5] You [Haarsager] said this: “But we can’t make those second-generation investments if we continue first-generation efforts that aren’t consistent with what we know about how media usage is maturing.”

The new face of media is not about sitting around and reading studies and reports before you make a move. You do something first, see if it works, and make adjustments. eBay wasn’t an instant hit. Neither was MySpace, or BoinBoing, or any of a hundred examples. But the secret is making a move, not sitting around waiting for an idea. The secret is trying a good idea, and then adjusting it to make it better. Not shutting the whole damn thing down and starting again from square one. …

…the BPP built a passionate audience of a million people – on air, online, on Twitter, on Facebook, on the blog – in less than ten months. Morning Edition has an audience of thirteen million, after thirty years. –Sky Bluesky

[6] As a reverted NPR listener, a listener who came back to NPR because of the BPP, I understand that the average NPR listener treats their show as a member of the family. Believe or not, the BPP community has an even greater attachment than that, not just to the show but to each other. This isn’t simply a show; it’s a community. Staff and listeners exchange with one another, sometimes on news items and sometimes on more personal stuff. There are many examples of personal and intelligent exchanges between staff and listeners, examples that, if you take some time to look at on the blog, you will find have a depth of affection not found in anything else NPR produces on-line. This is not to disparage those other shows but to show how special the BPP is as a community. –Matthew C. Scallon

[7] I am 74 and live alone. Local NPR stations are mostly music. I get on the net and listen to NPR talk. I just found BPP and enjoyed it very much, intelagent but not stiff. It gave me many smiles and was topical. I wish I could have been saved. The idea of internet show funding should be explored. The net lets me listen any time I wish. The way of the future. –John Riley

[8] Mr. Harrsager your message rings false. In life there is no hope, there is only do and don’t do. Either you will do what is necessary to move toward those second generation investments, or you will cower and fall back on stale programming that has served for twenty plus years. The BPP is a bold experiment in knitting together a community through all the available media of our day, and one that would continue to expand as the media does. Giving it less than one year to succeed would have been the equivalent of President Kennedy asking NASA to put us on the moon, and then canceling the funding a year later for lack of success. –Greg Gioe

[9] “We’re doing it at npr.org/music and …” um, ok. I want talk that isn’t directed to people much older and more conservative than me. Music isn’t why I care, I can get that anywhere. –AmandaJ

[10] Before leaving for work every morning, I’d sync the podcast to my iPod and listen to it on the subway, in my breaks, and on the way home again. Being two hours a day, the BPP pushed out nearly every other podcast I listened to during the week. And guess what? That was just fine! NPR had taken over my iPod, thanks to the BPP (and I’ve been listening to podcasts since before the word was coined). –Trey

[11] I do not think NPR completely understands what BPP offers. David states “A number of you have expressed concern that with this cancellation, NPR has forsaken its commitment to reaching younger audiences. That isn’t true. We’re doing it at npr.org/music and on many of our major news magazines, on the radio, online and via podcasting.”

Simply offering something in a new media does not mean that it is geared towards a younger audience. The younger audience you are reaching is not the skateboarding, granola eating jobless hippie. We are exactly like your older audience but with younger souls and different taste. We are the Daily Show generation. We vote. We work. We want our BPP. NPR is making a big mistake by cutting this experiment off so soon. A big mistake. –Eight

[12] I feel a little bad for Haarsager, as there is simply nothing he’s going to be able to say to make people happy. The decision to cut the BPP has probably been brewing in the main office since day 1. No reason to shoot the messenger for that alone. …

Thank you, Dennis Haarsager, for having enough respect for your staff and their fans to address our concerns directly. I have no issues with your comments themselves, but what it says about NPR’s ability to adapt to a changing marketplace really worries me. –disgruntled in OH

[13] Mr. Haarsager underestimates, I think, the level of loyalty among BPP listeners and their likely willingness to support a dynamic, vital program. I also sense no love (respect, yes, but no passion) in his comments for such a vibrant, hip show, so it’s no surprise that NPR was able to so easily pull the plug on it. Shame on you, NPR, for not trying harder to keep the BPP flame alive. Cut back here or there, try to direct fundraise, try anything, but don’t just walk away from radio magic. –A. Magni

[14] The overriding message seems to be that local affiliates would have a conniption fit if NPR donors were allowed to directly support specific programs, ostensibly because it will cut into the funding of their local operations. I’m an American ex-pat living in Sweden. There is NO LOCAL NPR affiliate to which I can write out a monthly check. In other words, nobody is going to lose a peice of the pie if I (and the thousands of others who can’t listen to NPR on a local radio station) were permitted to provide financial support directly to the BPP. –Sharon Bowker

[15] It appears to me that Dennis Haarsager did not get the message that I as a young BPP audience member was attempting to get across. I came to the BPP because I didn’t want another young baseless attention tracked music station. I wanted quality news radio that wasn’t so downbeat that young audience fall asleep to it. We grew up in an Era of commercials which move at such a high speed between frames/music changes that it is difficult to listen to traditional NPR news radio. The BPP was unique in that it offered similar content to the traditional NPR news radio at the pace of today’s young people. –Courtney Bonney

[16] Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m going to put it out there anyway. I only listen to the BPP on Sirius Satellite Radio, which I pay for. Where does that money go? –K Rice

[17] I am not pacified by the management blog. I live on NPR – on WNYC, on Sirius, and on the Internet. Although I’m a 57 year old out of demographic, I found the BPP a perfect companion. I listen at different times of the day and the program accompanied me through many multi tasking time periods. If NPR was really interested in its consumers it would have openned up this dialog a couple of months ago and been willing to consider listener ideas. I’ll miss the program, but more than that, I’ll miss the idea that I mattered to NPR. –Larry E

[18] While I do appreciate Mr. Haarsager’s comments to the BPP community it’s not enough.

Instead of saying, “Wow, a lot of people love this show we should try something different to save it.” we get “We can’t do anything, don’t get mad and stop listening to NPR. Try our other products that you aren’t that excited about.” –Mark Guyer

[19] I won’t comment on the CEO’s post directly, other than if the same approach were taken with ATC when it first started, we would not have it here to day. 9 months? Even PRI gave Fair Game a longer attempt! –Michael Black

[20] I read this over and over again, looking for another way to interpret it. Instead what I keep seeing is this:

“We’re cutting Bryant Park Project because we don’t actually need that new content to reach younger audiences, just new delivery mechanisms.”

And yet, if you did read half the comments here as you claimed to, you would understand that’s 100% not the case. The compelling programming drew people to the show, not the delivery method, or at least in addition to the delivery method, and in some cases DESPITE the delivery method (as in no easy radio access). Offering up npr.org/music is patently ridiculous. This gives me news? I don’t even have to look there to see the answer.

Commitment to younger audiences doesn’t just mean podcasting and blogging the same old content. That’s where the Bryant Park Project comes in. It’s an offering that has, as far as I’ve been able to find, no equal anywhere. Sure, I suppose I could get my news on Morning Edition, with its numerous bits that I increasingly tune out, but I go out of my way to hear the BPP because it’s more enjoyable.

I don’t see any indication in this post that NPR understands what it has here. Instead there’s still the old-way stumbling block:

“BPP was created as a two-hour program primarily for satellite radio and the Web”

BUT

“Radio carriage didn’t materialize to any degree”.

Hm, way to set yourself up to fail, yes? Where did you expect the radio carriage to come from? Apparently “materialize” is the perfect word there. –Greg

[21] When you hear a disco beat sample looped inanely behind the news reporting, you’ve got to wonder who let the kids into the studio. –Chris G

[22] …if you don’t invite kids into the studio, they’ll take their games (and their money) elsewhere. Thank you for your brave quest to keep NPR safe for the town from Footloose, but the rest of us are hoping for a change. –still disgruntled in OH

[23] And now time to use my new favorite BPP inspired catch phrase that I hope to pass on to my friends NPR, get off my lawn. –Sarah Lee

[24] Mr. Haarsager, I feel like you are reliving Hillary’s experience in a Howard Dean/Barack Obama world. Have you been to Barack Obama’s website? It has a community of people who feel involved in an experience of making him president of the United States. Have you been to the BPP’s website? They too have a community of people who feel involved in an experience of making a wonderful radio/satellite/internet broadcast. In both places, we feel like our ideas matter and are heard.

When Barack Obama asks for more money, that community of people reaches out and gives $52 million with an average donation of $68 each. When BPP asks for money… Oh, I’m sorry, you hadn’t tried that out. –Kathy Fisher

[25] I listen to BBP on HD radio in Lexington, KY. I love the program, although I am not the demographic you envisioned for the program as I am 66 years old.

BBP is witty and refreshing. I also like the fact that they deal with real content. I often discuss the segments with others — both peers and my children and their friends — and even attempt to retell some of the jokes.

While it is hard to get around the it-costs-too-much argument, I suggest you reassess priorities. BBP was designed to appeal to thoughtful young people, who are interested in world affairs. It plays on the strengths of NPR. –Philis Alvic

[26] I think the producers of BPP should try to shop the show elsewhere. I’d gladly pay money to be able to still have this community. –jen

[27] I challenge Mr. Haarsager to write another letter explaining in detail why the decision to cancel the BPP was precipitated, without just blaming the costs. –Emily

[28] This is NPR’s Balk of the Nation. It is sad abandonment of investing for the future. When Haarsager mentions carriage, I can’t help of thinking about buggy whips. It is clear to me that this is a short sighted fiscal decision meant to shore up the status quo. –John

[29] You expect to pull in a younger generation by giving us some baby boomer’s music selections [on NPR Music] of what’s ‘hip’ for my generation? –Jeremy

[30] “BPP was designed to help us explore the complex, undefined digital media environment and, we hoped, to establish new ways of providing content on unfamiliar platforms….”

And in the same paragraph:

“Ultimately, we recognized that wasn’t happening with BPP. Radio carriage didn’t materialize to any degree: right now, BPP airs on only five analog radio stations and 19 HD Radio digital channels.”

Am I confused, or is that a contradiction? “We want to target non-radio platforms, but didn’t get into enough radio stations…”

Huh? –Glenn Wonacott

[31] Thank you [Haarsager] for responding to us directly. Like the others who’ve posted, I appreciate the difficulty of your position, but I am not satisfied with your choice. –Julie Morton

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!

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?

In the mean time, I just wanted to point to a simple example of how web economics differ so dramatically from traditional radio production and distribution economics. Because my central take is that the BPP could live on in a new web-focused model, one that it’s already primed to utilize. But to survive it would still need some NPR largesse — though less than it’s gotten to date.

The example I offer here is not a direct analog to the BPP situation, but it’s generally illustrative and great for fueling thought about how new media are different from old media. So here’s the post, by former Apple Computer evangelist Guy Kawasaki:

By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09

Now the $12k figure is a bit hopeful, as the founder himself was not paid for his time. That and other elements make the $12k more fanciful than real, but the point is still valid: it’s not that expensive to start and run a web-based company.

By contrast, NPR reportedly spent about $2 million on the BPP in the last year or so. For public media companies that’s a lot of money. An award-winning 1-hour-per-week radio program in my own shop in Anchorage costs around $350,000 per year to maintain (and we can’t even afford that). $2 million to NPR isn’t that much, but in real terms, it’s a lot.

In a lot of ways, it may have been better had BPP been given only $500,000 to get started.

As pointed out by Ken George in quotes he collected at WBUR’s The ConverStation, the BPP was probably destined to failure if the point was to make a radio-web hybrid. They should have made a web-radio hybrid instead, using web economics as the baseline organizing idea. Web economics scale from small to large. Radio economics, practiced by NPR and others, scale from medium to large only, and often only from large to huge.

Rob Paterson’s got the right ideas. They sound really revolutionary, and I like to think there’s a middle path of some kind where the old ideas and the new ones “can just get along.” But history will likely prove him right and anyone pushing a compromise wrong.

Well, the Bryant Park Project has less than a month left. Literally.

Was it too beautiful to live, perhaps? Hardly. I mean, can anyone really feign shock that well?

Let’s recount the strikes against this endeavor:

• The economic downturn is hitting NPR like everyone else; news budgets are frozen and that’s just the beginning. Like any business looking to cut costs, whoever was hired last will be fired first, whether that’s a show or a person. That’s just the way it goes.
• One of the original hosts (Burbank) — and let’s be honest, the host with real NPR cred — walked away just as the show was getting started. Talk about throwing off the rhythm.
• The second host (Stewart) took off for maternity leave six months into the show. That can’t help.
• Then the news anchor (Martin) left for a cush job at ABC News. (What is it with NPR people leaving a real news operation to go work for a fake news operation? Is it just the money?)
• Plus the fill-in host (Pesca) has been splitting his time between BPP and NPR HQ the whole time.

I’m sure Matt Martinez was busting his ass every day trying to keep things rolling forward, but with a set of facts like these, what can you really do?

Add it up and can you imagine a show — any show in any format — making it to its first birthday without a hell of a lot of buy-in (political and cash) from the top?

But wait — there’s more!

• This was fundamentally a Gen X show inside a Boomer network. What Boomer on the Board of NPR is going to protect a show they don’t air on their station, they don’t listen to and/or they don’t like?
• This show never made it to the bulk of the listeners out there. The only people that knew about it were NPR junkies that took the time to browse the NPR web site, trolling for goodies. More might have liked it but never knew it existed.
• In a risky economic environment, what local station program director is going to broadcast BPP instead of Morning Edition? Show of hands, please… yeah, that’s what I thought.
• Assuming you’re a station with an HD Radio transmitter and you could program BPP onto a secondary channel, great! But who will hear it? Right: no one, because no one has an HD Radio. (BPP could be an Internet success because iPods and computers far outnumber HD Radios.)
• Though BPP was successful on the web (something like 1,000,000 monthly uniques), we must remember that NPR is not a media company, it is a radio company. Arbitron numbers will always be bigger than Google Analytics numbers to a radio company. NPR may be trying to change to meet the challenges/opportunites of the web (and are making huge strides for a company that size), but it’s still a radio entity, so building a show specifically for the web is not a strategic option for them. At least not today.
• Compared to an out-of-the-garage web startup, the cost of producing BPP was astronomical. Sure, web startups in Silicon Valley can devour $2 million at a power lunch, but for NPR and public radio that’s a huge sum, especially given all the other factors noted above. Web startups don’t need that much money, but to do BPP “the NPR way” requires big salaries and budgets. It was a radio economic solution applied to what was essentially a web economic problem — that makes it unsustainable on its face.

All in all, it’s a sad day for NPR. Not so much because it lost a program that was, in truth, faltering from the start, but because the Board appears to have missed a key opportunity here.

NPR could have taken a revised BPP straight to the web and made it the flagship show of a new web-scale innovation unit. BPP could have led NPR into a future not bound by the FCC, Arbitron, legacy stations, transmitters and more. For about $1 million a year they could have jump-started the next stage of their evolution.

I’m beginning to think Gen X and Gen Y need to band together and start their own national public media service — without the parochial split between radio and TV and web. Because PBS kills quality Gen X projects, too. Oh, and Fair Game was axed by PRI recently.

By the way, read the comments on the brief BPP blog post about the cancellation. There’s an audience there, to be sure. And it’s one that could easily sustain a web-based (and web-scaled) program and service. If I had $1 million to invest, I’d definitely put it into this audience.