I love the Common Craft series. This one seems like the longest of all of them, which is understandable, given the complexity of a huge topic like “social media.” It’s a good intro, as usual.
Get more Common Craft videos at their web site. You can even buy them for use at the office.
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.
(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.
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.
Great little summary of the present and near-term tech developments related to TV and video distribution technologies by Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg.
I’m so glad the newspaper industry is blazing the trail to either self-transformation or self-immolation in this new media world. Public media companies are being given a very close look at an industry in gut-wrenching transformation just before our own will undergo the same. The trail before us has been blazed, and we should be thankful.
Recently in Online Journalism Review, Robert Niles wrote a great link-bait article — It’s time for the newspaper industry to die — in which he explains why newspapers need to dump the word “newspaper” from their internal lexicon and psychology. He offers several reasons for this.
But the best reason centers on that favorite word of mine: Community. And the reason applies to public media, too.
Niles recognizes a fundamental shift in newspapers over the last decade: they’ve cut back on real community service while maximizing shareholder profits.
Great content and great tools are not enough to build the large, habitual audience that content publishers will need to maximize their opportunities to make money online, through advertising and sales. Even more than those two things, a website needs great engagement with its readers. And engagement with the public is something that’s been budgeted out of too many newsrooms over the past generation.
It’s time to bring that back. It’s time to do that online. And if a beloved label needs to be sacrificed to inspire the innovation that will enable this effort, so be it. It’s time for the “newspaper” industry to die. Because we all need the news industry to survive.
I would submit the term “public broadcasting” can take the same route to oblivion. One-way broadcasting can no longer be the point, even if that’s the most comfortable thing to do. Community engagement, public service, gathering, convening, whatever — that’s got to be the goal. Broadcasting is a tool, a means to an end of public service.
What we want from a “newspaper” isn’t fish wrapping or bird cage lining, it’s news, information, connection to events. What we want from broadcasting is pretty similar. But let’s not confuse the delivery system with the purpose. And let’s not believe for a moment that retransmitting someone else’s non-local, marginally-relevant content is something worth preserving in a world of on-demand access to all content anywhere.
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Since entering the public media world professionally almost four years ago, I’ve always thought the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was ripe for transformation (and not because of that Bush administration weasel Kenneth Tomlinson). Why? Because they need a name change and a mission reevaluation. It’s too bad the purpose of the CPB — funding and fostering public Broadcasting — has its instructions enshrined in law. It’s making it difficult, if not impossible, to fund new projects. Consider this Q&A between IMA’s Mark Fuerst and CPB’s current president, Pat Harrison, at the recent IMA 2008 conference in Los Angeles (audio clip, about 1 minute):
Harrison gets it. Sure, she’s referring to reauthorization for CPB in Congress, but that’s just cover for avoiding talk about shifting funding out of pure broadcasting and into community engagement. (In fairness, the CPB has spent millions over the past several years on new media research and projects, but as I’ve noted before, we haven’t really seen any transformations.)
This is really too bad. Because while newspapers are stuck with an old term and a psychology that’s hard to shake, we have those challenges plus actual laws that govern a significant portion of our funding. To change the laws or create new ones to foster and fund community building and interaction via all available media may be politically impossible.
This Week in Tech (TWiT) is a great little tech-oriented podcast with a broad international following (somwhere north of 200,000 weekly listeners). But on the March 31 show they went off the tech industry track and tackled issues related to news, newspapers, news radio, NPR, podcasts, blogs, Twitter, reporting and more.
Public media folks may be interested to hear how folks that work in media — but outside our industry niche — talk about what we’re doing and the major trends affecting everyone publishing everything.
You can listen to and/or download this week’s episode here.
Great show today on Kansas City’s public radio station KCUR with guests Robert Paterson, Todd Mundt and Andy Carvin. The topic? Surprise! New media and public media.
Worth a listen, especially if you’re a little confused about how public radio and public TV can engage the world in an online context.
Total time: about 51 minutes. Download the MP3 here.
(By the way, I’d link to the web page at KCUR, but it appears it won’t be available after this week due to the way it’s published using the Public Interactive CMS.)
If you’re not reading Seth Godin, you’re not paying attention to the future of successful public media. Godin doesn’t address public media directly, but he does address issues of marketing and community and the economics of making money through the products or services a company provides in a new media world.
Godin talks a lot about tending to your “tribe” — that group of people that love your product/service and who share your values or perspectives and interests. If you’ve been in public radio or TV for any length of time, you know these folks. Most likely you’re already a member of this tribe yourself.
Recently Godin gave a talk at a music conference and his comments, while aimed at a music marketing audience, are applicable to all of us in public media — news, music, radio, TV, whatever — because the trends affecting the music business (disastrously) today are the same ones rewriting the rules for all media. And the rules for success in the next generation will be the same: serve your tribe; be indispensible; be the best.
Here are some highlights from Godin’s talk, pointed out by Gerd Leonhard and partially chosen by digitalwaveriding (the boldface highlights are mine):
… if I asked you for the name and address of your 50,000 best customers, could you give it to me? Do you have any clue? [No?] Then what happens every day is you go to a singles bar and you walk up to the first person you meet and propose marriage and if that person won’t marry you, you walk down the bar to every single person until someone says “I do.” That’s a stupid way to get married. A better way to get married is to go on a date. If it goes well, go on another date. Wait to tell them on the third before you tell them you’re out on parole. Then you meet their parents, they me your parents, you get engage, you get married. Permission is the act of delivery. Anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.
… The next thing is what I call the Seinfeld curve. The Seinfeld curve shows us Jerry’s life. If you like Jerry Seinfeld you can watch him on television, for free, in any city in the world two or three times a day. Or, you could pay $200 to go see him in Vegas. But there is no $4 option for Jerry Seinfeld. This is death. You can’t make any money in here. Because if you’re not scarce I’m not going to pay for it because I can get it for free. And one of the realities that the music industry is going to have to accept is this curve now exists for you. That for everybody under eighteen years old, it’s either free or it’s something I really want and I’m willing to pay for it. There is nothing in the center — it’s going away really fast.
… The next thing is this idea that people care very much about who is sitting next to them at the concert. They care very much about the secret handshake. They care very much about the tribal identification. “Oh you like them? I like them!”
… It’s really important to people to feel like they are part of that tribe, to feel that adrenaline. We are willing to pay money, we’re willing to go through huge hoops, trampled to death in Cincinnati if necessary, in order to be in the environment where we feel that’s going on.
… I want to argue that the next model is tribal management. That the next model is to say, what you do for a living is manage a tribe, many tribes, silos of tribes. That your job is to make the people in that tribe delighted to know each other and trust you to go find music for them.
… There is a lot of music I like. There is not so much music I love. They didn’t call the show, “I Like Lucy,” they called it “I Love Lucy.” And the reason is you only talk about stuff you love, you only spread stuff you love. You find a band you really love, you’re forcing the CD on other people, “You gotta hear this!” We gotta stop making music people like. There is an infinite amount of music people like. No one will ever go out of the way to hear, to pay for, music they like.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the future for public media companies will involve considerable “tribe management” and will involve a smaller audience than we have today, either locally or collectively — all media will have far more fragmented communities than in the past. Now is the time to identify who’s in and who’s out of your tribe and figure out how best to serve the community that gathers around public media content and values.
This may sound elitist or even fatalistic to the traditional mass media thinkers out there: “But I want the biggest audience possible!” Well, you can’t have it. Large audiences of mildly engaged viewers or listeners or readers are the old model. The new model requires deep and authentic engagement with that “tribe” of people. You can still invite everyone into the tribe, and you should. But in a world of infinite tribes, folks will naturally gravitate to the tribes that best serve their needs and interests (and they will have multiple tribes, of course).
Personally, I think this is an incredibly exciting time for public media folks that embrace this new approach. There’s new opportunity not only for sustainable businesses, but for truly meaningful, impactful and interactive work. The only problem is developing the courage to let mass media thinking fade over time, even though it’s been tremendously successful for the last 40 years.
Dennis Haarsager, new interim CEO at National Public Radio (NPR), appeared on the NewsGang podcast this past Friday. He spoke fairly openly about the unusual CEO transition and about how NPR may change as it deals with an audience that’s moving to new media distribution channels and interaction platforms.
In addition to Haarsager, the guest list included Stephen Hill from Hearts of Space, Steve Gillmor (the host), and Doc Searls, who also appeared on a panel at the recent Integrated Media Association conference along with Haarsager and others.
UPDATE: Highly Recommended Listening. Haarsager and friends go into depth talking about new media economics and public media’s entanglements — or lack thereof — with new platforms. Money quote from Stephen Hill: “Show the stations how you’re gonna keep them in business and they’ll be very happy to cooperate with [NPR].”
Running time of the MP3 file is about 1 hour, 25 minutes.
The link to the NewsGang podcast has also been added to my (still growing) list of Ken Stern articles.
One of the things I’ve found my traditional pubcasting colleagues have trouble understanding is the difference between the words community and audience when it comes to discussing Media 2.0 strategies and modes of action. It’s a critical distinction, as understanding which type of group you’re serving completely changes how you’ll approach what you do for them (or with them).
Mindy McAdams, online journalism professor, pulling a quote from Clay Shirky’s latest book, points to the key differences between having an audience and participating in a community.
I’m a week late blogging it, but I wanted to make sure I highlighted the interview with Clay Shirky on WNYC’s On the Media right at the end of February. Plus I wanted to plug his book, which I’m ordering right now.
One of the points made in the interview is that just 10 years separates this new mode of Internet activism and participation from the old model that didn’t allow people to easily find one another and co-create social action and original media around shared values and interests.
In a world like this — where the audience (or community) is in control as much as the old gatekeepers (perhaps in even more control) — what is the role for public service media?
While I do appreciate Robert Paterson’s take on the leadership issue that’s likely below the surface of the NPR / Stern debate, I’m struggling to believe that that’s the core of this week’s story — that Ken Stern just ruffled too many feathers and it was time for a different leader. Sure, hard-charging generals are not the best leaders in all situations, and after 10 years of whip-cracking you might need a smooth operator. That makes eminent sense.
But in the shifting media environment about which so many of us write and ruminate, isn’t a hard-charging general needed at the top? Someone that has both the vision and the drive to push through to a new way of thinking and doing. The media environment changes in play today are not just operational in nature, where a COO might fix this, improve that — they’re strategic shifts. Seismic shifts. World-upside-down shifts. Only a CEO and her or his board of directors can handle those issues and realign the company. And given the time-to-market pressures of new media on old media, NPR probably didn’t (and doesn’t) have the time for all the required dinners and socials and private meetings, nor could it afford compromise after political compromise on the way to a new strategy.
NPR — like all media companies, for-profit or nonprofit, operating in any or all media formats — must grapple with the fundamental changes in progress. The relationship between producers, distributors and consumers is completely inverting.
Of course, this entire discussion could be moot. Public media’s future may have to be created outside the voluminous corpus of NPR (or APM or PRI or APT or PBS or …). Developing a new model with fundamentally different DNA may not be possible inside the system, either with a hard-charging general or a sweet-talking politician.
Media 2.0 Reader