In a talk at the World Bank earlier this month, he offered “Rosen’s New Media Maxims,” a set of four rules or observations about the media world in which we now live. And the second maxim was particularly illuminating for me:

Open systems don’t work like closed systems; if you expect them to you’ll get nothing but misery and failure

In the case of public media, the “closed” system represents the old way of doing things: broadcasting from a single control point to a passive mass audience and allowing for virtually no feedback or participation. Or when there is a feedback channel, it’s narrow and tightly controlled. While there are regulatory reasons for controlling broadcast signals in this way, the notion of “we broadcast and you watch” pretty much permeates the culture I’ve experienced.

Online media function differently, however, because by their very nature, they’re two-way or multi-way systems. Top-down still works online, but that misses the point and the power of a networked media system. In an online world, media and conversations flow top to bottom, left to right and back again.

In moving online, most of the stations I’ve seen have done so either in a broadcast fashion or they’ve done tiny projects off to the side that don’t threaten the old system (and consequently can’t lead the company in a new direction). In many ways this makes sense — the money is still coming from broadcast-based memberships and advertising, plus the CPB is, well… the CPB and can’t put too much effort toward non-broadcast service.

Given the sturm and drang I’ve watched (and participated in) Rosen’s open/closed maxim stood out as exceptionally true. In this video excerpt, he makes a full explanation then goes into a lengthy answer to an audience question of how to bring openness to a company that’s always been closed:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11972820&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ff9933&fullscreen=1

Philosophical Differences

So it’s not a technological difference. It’s not a financial difference. Fundamentally, closed and open systems are philosophically different, possibly opposed. One embraces community, drawing in participation and “hosting” conversation and engagement. The other treats the public as a media receiver. Sure, there are some middle grounds here, but this is a big difference that has powered, silently, a lot of conversations in which I’ve participated, without realizing it.

No wonder we struggle with this. No wonder there’s both dismissal of the new as irrelevant to the mission and nevertheless pitched battles over who will control the social network engagements, who gets or shares in the online revenue, and how and when content will or won’t appear online. We’ve been experiencing the “misery and failure” of a closed system trying to adopt an open one, not understanding why it’s not working.

Rosen’s New Media Maxims

In addition to the open vs. closed systems maxim, there are three more Rosen rules, all in this extended excerpt from his talk at the World Bank. Recommended viewing.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11972971&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ff9933&fullscreen=1

The complete talk (more than 1 hour including audience Q&A) is available via YouTube here.

“Tune in” to a special Pew Research Center conference on the Millennial generation starting at 9:00am Eastern on Wednesday, February 24.

I’ll be on the road, driving 4,000 miles from Anchorage to St. Louis, unable to watch. But if I were at a computer with a live web connection, I’d totally watch.

Public media companies and leaders need to understand how younger generations view the world. Others, like Jacobs Media, have done a good job with profiling younger folks. But we seem to forget these lessons.

So check out the webcast here.

Ha! Okay, that’s not going to happen — I can’t really tell the future, especially when it comes to public media.

But I am thinking deeply about it, and a recent post I wrote has me thinking more broadly about the future, with respect to public broadcasting / public media / nonprofit media / what have you. And that post ended with a simple question:

Are public media’s best days behind it or are they yet to come?

Like so many things in life, the answer to the question is driven by your personal history with and perspective on “public media.” But it seems to me the future is either what we make it, or we simply agree to take whatever happens to us.

That’s what I’m thinking I’ll explore with the group at WOSU: are we going to take the future, or make the future?

The Media Inflection Point You Can’t Avoid

We’re in the midst of the biggest media reshuffling in history. Literally. There are more people on the planet today than at any time in Earth’s past. And almost all those billions of people have contact with some form of media every day — print, radio, TV, Internet, and all the forms therein. The 20th century witnessed the mass adoption of electronic media (telephone, radio, TV, Internet), ending with the mass popularization of the web in the industrialized world.

Not since the adoption of the printing press and its mass-produced written material has human society been faced with such an expansion of media to the point of ubiquity. Distribution of the written word fundamentally changed how humans think, gather information, communicate, organize, share, learn and so much more.

Similarly, radio and TV have had a huge impact on human society. But they’ve simply continued the mass distribution (broadcast) phenomenon of print, in which a cloistered few control what media is produced and distributed and how it’s experienced.

In contrast, the web — with its many-to-many decentralized and self-organizing design, coupled with a capacity for storing and delivering video, audio, text, photos, and structured data — changes the fundamental ways in which we use media. Indeed, all our older forms of media are maneuvering to either combat or leverage the power of the web for themselves.

By the way, let’s remember we’ve only just begun this transformation, we’re only now starting to see possibilities of what this will do to us or for us. Today we’re raising the world’s first generation of children who will never live without the web and its capabilities. For them, instant ubiquitous communication, sharing, and participation is a birth right.

In short, the world is undergoing tremendous change because media — a force in all our lives — is fundamentally changing. The future of media is being created right now, much more so than 10, 20 or even 100 years ago.

Given these changes, do you let the future happen, or do you find a way to make the future?

(Oh, and bad news: you can’t avoid making this choice, consciously or unconsciously.)

The Future: Taking It

Public broadcasting has largely been waiting as this media revolution takes root. Waiting to see the patterns emerge. Waiting to see what commercial media companies do. Waiting to see what the audience wants. Waiting to see the “business model.” Waiting for the CPB to fund this plan or that plan or give instructions. Waiting for NPR or PBS to make it all better.

This approach assumes the future is knowable, and that it’s more knowable the longer you wait. Public media companies using this strategy are betting if they sit back and let the future happen, they can re-engage once everything “settles down” and “success” can be achieved by following an established plan.

The flip side is that if the current business model collapses (as the elderly population supporting public broadcasting dies) but the magical solution hasn’t been delivered yet, then you go out of business. “Oh, well. All good things come to an end. It was inevitable. Nothing I could do.”

The “taking it” approach also presumes a good future is achieved by repeating past success. This is music to the ears of folks that built their careers shooting big TV shows, or built NPR from the ground up, surviving lean times to reach the “safe” place they’re in today. If we just keep pumping out TV shows, we’ll get viewers and advertisers and money, right? If we just keep playing good music or running national news programs that people like, we’ll get enough money to make it and that’s fine.

Finally, using the wait-and-see approach is less messy, more predictable. Sure, as your public broadcasting company shrinks, some people will lose their jobs, but that will be a slow bleed, and you can just hold on longer than anyone else, right? Talk to someone that worked at a newspaper recently — they’ll draw the roadmap for you.

NOTE: This is the strategy in play in Alaska right now: consolidate the community-based stations into a statewide entity to save operating cash and hope by the time the reorganization dust settles a business model will be “blessed” by CPB or “proven” at other stations. It’s the classic wait-out-the-storm strategy. Only this storm will rage for a generation.

When it comes to the future of public media, “taking it” has its charms — most notably predictability and an unquestioned reverence for past success. But it’s an inevitable failure for you, for the company and for the community the public media company ostensibly serves.

The Future: Making It

Where “taking it” passively hopes for a brighter future (despite indications to the contrary), “making it” meets the ambiguous future head-on and searches for ways forward that still fulfill your purpose. Making the future, in such a time of change, also presumes the search for the “best way to do things” won’t end in our lifetimes — an acceptable approach today may not be appropriate tomorrow.

When choosing to make the future, you’ll have to accept some assumptions:

• you cannot know or predict the future with any degree of accuracy
• though you can’t predict the future, you must, however, clearly know your mission and purpose as a public service media firm — that’s what gives you certainty in ambiguous circumstances
• the present and future are significantly different from the past, so repeating past success does not guarantee future success; proposals to repeat past successes must be evaluated as if they’d never been done before
• waiting for a perfect model of the future means you’ll miss opportunities to learn and/or succeed in the present
• unpredictability of the future is scary, but guaranteed failure is scarier
• failure is fine; failure is a teacher; failure is a universal experience and can bring people together
• courage is sexier than cowardice; courage will generate more and better support via collaboration, funding and mindshare; people are drawn to ambitious projects and people

If you’ve opted to “make the future,” it also means accepting the fact that you are not an expert in what you’re doing. That might be the hardest pill to swallow for public broadcasting veterans. “Not an expert? Then why do it?” Here’s why: You can’t be an expert on the never-done-before. No one can. But you can be smart, experimental and you can ask for help. Bonus: Humility builds community respect, which leads to support.

The Best Days of Public Media

Are public media’s best days behind it or are they yet to come?

If you think public media = public broadcasting, then the best days are behind you. Broadcasting, while not worthless, is worth less — it commands less attention and loyalty and gathers less money, while the cost of operation (especially for TV) grows and broadcast loses political power to broadband. There’s a place for broadcasting, to be sure, but it’s not at the leading edge of a public media company that’s making the future. What company puts a weakening, shrinking and economically tired division at the forefront of corporate strategy? Put in the team with new ideas, courage, and a hunger for dynamic growth in the driver’s seat!

If you think public media can only succeed in a calm, cool, collected, neatly organized and predictable organization, then the best days are behind you — because the future, like the present, is messy and unknown. A public media company waiting for the future can only decline while a public media firm exploring new media horizons and new relationships will have to take risks.

But if you think we’re living in an age where public service media can achieve more than in any prior time in history, then the best days are ahead of you. Costs for media creation, distribution and collaboration are falling rapidly, and many are effectively zero. It’s easier to maintain deeper relationships over extended space and time and gather masses of niche interests for public good. There are things you can organize and do today that would have been impossible 20 years ago, and public media firms — if they choose to make the future — can create and enable tremendous value using network effects and a blended influence of broadcasting, digital media, social media and community relationships.

We stand at the edge of an ocean of opportunity — and risk — for ourselves, our companies and especially our communities. The ocean’s waters are rising as the mediated world grows. We can stand firm as the waters rise, or we can try our hand at swimming.

If we swim, we might die. But if we stand firm, we’ll die for sure.

In it, Tompkins talks about how — via Twitter and Facebook — he may have found a way around the dismal comedy club circuit and made direct connections with fans. He stumbled into it, and it’s not a formal business plan by any means, but he’s basically setting up paying gigs around North America using fans to power the choice of cities and ensuring that his tickets will sell even before he starts any promotion.

The premise: You gather 300 people that will commit to buying tickets and attending the show in your town. I will show up and entertain.

That’s connecting. That’s context. And it’s participatory.

The fans promise support. The artist promises a good show. Everyone gets together. The fans get a far better show because they know, definitively, they share something in common with each other and the artist.  And the artist knows that the fans are really there to see him — they aren’t random ticket winners or other marginally-interested folks — they had to do something tangible to get there (even if it’s something small). It makes for a more intimate event and everyone gets more from the experience than they would via any other means.

I had this kind of experience in my home this past summer, when I hosted a Tweetup and House Concert. It was a fabulous experience.

So what, in public media land, are you doing to connect people, either to you or to each other? What are you doing to make your media palpable, interactive, participatory and “real” for your community?

“More than a few traditional media executives fervently believe Google aims to conquer the world. By obsessing about Google’s ‘evil’ intentions they spend too much time playing defense and not enough time figuring out their own digital offense.”

Hat tip to @matthewfelling for the find.

For those that may not yet have seen a promo for this webcast, here you go — this is a good one:

From Broadcast to Broadband: Redesigning Public Media for the 21st Century

• Ellen Goodman, Rutgers University School of Law
• Jake Shapiro, Executive Director, Public Radio Exchange (PRX)
• Presented by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• Tue, Nov 3, 2009
• LIVE webcast: 12:30 p.m. Eastern / 9:30 a.m. Pacific
• Archived webcast to be posted later

Get the full description here

Watch the live webcast here

See the archived copy of the webcast here (later)

I worked with some journalists in public radio for several years. And public media managers. And while there was plenty of lip service given to new media, the truth was no one wanted to change their methods or outputs and would, when pressed, criticize new journalism work as merely partisan blogging by people with no sense of professional journalistic ethics or objectivity. Sadly, the non-movement to digital models was happening while mass media everywhere was missing story after story while the Bush administration and Fox News led them astray.

What’s been your experience? Are most broadcast and print journalists you know troubled by slow adoption of new media reporting? Or is the resistance still overwhelming?

You can download the 4MB PDF report here.

And he’s done a wildly smart thing by sharing his premise in a semi-lengthy but very listenable speech, billed as perfect for marketing, PR and media folks who are already inside a disruption wave.

Excellent listening and good viewing.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6873200&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

The Chaos Scenario from Greg Stielstra on Vimeo.

How about you public media? Do you understand how the web isn’t broadcast? There are a few at NPR that get it. What about the local stations?

http://www.youtube.com/v/6ILQrUrEWe8&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0×999999

Link

This week the conversation offered this little gem from Shira Lazar, a young pro in both new and old media (at time index 5:14):

“For me, I say I’m in the Audience Business.”

Bingo. This is the future for nearly all media (but not absolutely all). If you don’t have or can’t maintain control over media distribution in a 1-to-many distribution model, then you must learn to engage an audience.

This is also known as building and leading a Tribe.

Be sure to listen to TWiT 190 from about 3:20 to 13:00 for the complete old/new media and audience conversation. Plenty of relevant ideas for public media leaders.

I took that notion, applied it to public media, and tried to bring forth my current thinking about how we in the public media space — at least where I am these days — must change in order to better serve our original mission and do it in a sustainable and meaningful way. Broadly, I suggested we must move from being a purely broadcasting-focused firm to leading a “tribe,” as Seth Godin would put it.

Frankly, my presentation needs work. A lot of work. But the core ideas are there. We’re only just getting started on this in my firm, so I should be able to revise this in the future once we’ve got more experience. For now, however, here’s the presentation files as well as lots of links that are the foundational pieces of the notions presented. I’d love to hear your comments or suggestions, and if you take these ideas and expand upon them, drop me a link.

• My presentation deck in PDF (5.6MB)
• My presentation deck in PowerPoint (9.3MB)
• My presentation deck as a set of JPG images, zipped (3.7MB)
  These are all the same materials, I’m just sharing them this way so everyone can get their preferred format on the first try.

• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, by Seth Godin (Amazon.com)
• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, by Seth Godin (free at Audible.com)
  Godin’s book on the tribes notion isn’t perfect (there are complaints out there about generalities that aren’t backed up with examples), but it’s quite good and I suspect it will form the backbone of our strategy going forward. It is not a prescriptive book; it has no “instructions” — it’s more faith than religion, if you know what I mean. In any case, as I noted in the presentation at AAUG, if all we in the current public media are doing is talking at people instead of communicating with and connecting people with shared interests and values, we’re not likely to survive. Content is free. Distribution is free. Contact, context, connection and community are priceless.

• Seth Godin’s blog
  Godin covers the tribes notion periodically and relates tons of next-generation marketing and communications concepts; highly recommended reading for just about anyone.

• Seth Godin explains why you need a tribe (YouTube, 12 min)
  A little long, but Seth speaks directly to questions about why to form a tribe (and who shouldn’t).

• Seth Godin Talking About Leading a Tribe (YouTube, 6 min)
  Audio quality is a little weak, but crank it up and you’ll hear everything you need to hear. Godin succinctly hits the notion that companies are focused on interrupting you enough to trick you into buying their products or services, but they don’t care about you.

• Seth Godin: Sliced bread and other marketing delights (TED / YouTube, 19 min)
  TED Talks are legendary and Godin does his typically masterful job talking about marketing. This one is not about tribes, but the notions covered are integral to understanding how our historic mass media model is failing. It’s 19 minutes, but it doesn’t feel like it — he’s a wizard of fast presentations that are smart, funny and revealing.

• “No One Cares About You” (YouTube, 2 min)
  Short and to-the-point advice to companies that think they need to get into social media to tell the world about what they are doing. Surprise: people don’t care about your company.

• Kevin Kelly / The Technium: Better than free
  This piece set off a ton of blogosphere and public media commentary last year because Kelly sets forth not only the notion that you can’t stop things (media) from being free, but that there are still ways for companies and individuals to create value and gather revenue. Brilliant stuff.

• Kevin Kelly / The Technium: 1,000 true fans
  Godin refers to this piece in Tribes, and rightly so. It’s a seminal work in the new media world, as it proposes that an artist can surivive if only he or she can find 1,000 true fans/supporters. Godin suggests, rightly, that the number might be 1,000, but it also might be 100 or 10,000 or 1,000,000 — depending upon your situation. But there is a number, and you need those true fans.

• The Cluetrain Manifesto
  Now 10 years old, the Cluetrain is still being studied as companies of all kinds try to understand how to behave in the new media, interactive world. The 95 Theses are priceless.

• Clay Shirky: “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus”
  Shirky addresses the rise of television in concert with the industrial revolution and how it acted as a “cognitive heat sink,” yet now people are participating in media creation rather than simply passively consuming it. Critical to understand because it signals and explains how and why people are, more and more, rejecting

• Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody (the web site)
• Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody (Amazon.com)
  Subtitled, “The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” this is a critical idea that public media companies must understand. There are aspects of running a public media service that require the power of a formal organization. But engaging with and leading a tribe cannot be achieved by a pure firm (or corporate) approach because it cannot scale. But if we can “organize without an organization,” we can get there. Of special note are his brief references to “cost of coordination” and how and when a firm (a formal organization) is useful and when it stands in the way of progress.

• People Power / Clay Shirky on NPR’s On the Media
  Shirky lays out, quickly, the core notions behind his book. Transcript and complete audio available.

• Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab
• Umair Haque / Harvard Business Publishing
  His writing is perhaps the most dense of any of the links here — it’s probably a half- or full-generation ahead of contemporary economic thinking, so it can be hard to follow. But if you’ve got an imagination to see a world that doesn’t quite look like ours and a world that operates on different economic principles, expectations and practices, you should be following Haque. Those in traditional mass media — especially commercial media — will ignore Haque at their peril. By the way, his PowerPoint slides on co-creation of content (at Bubblegeneration) are equally dense, but there’s a kernel of public media’s future in there: a collaborative approach to media capture, editing and distribution that we could never have considered in the past.

• Follow me on Twitter:  @jmproffitt
  I’m no source of inspiration, but at least you can try to get to know me via my ramblings on Twitter. Join the fray!

Thanks again to @garyinalaska for the invite. The crowd was great!

By the way, don’t dismiss The Oakland Press as some tiny suburban paper. It’s a pretty big paper, given the size of the communities they cover. Detroit is “big,” but the areas north and northwest of the city proper are huge.

Don’t miss it. Thanks to Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) for the find.

APRN Chaordic Organization Option

This presentation was made to several managers of public radio stations in Alaska and then again to the Board of APTI a couple days later. It concerns the future of collaborative public media efforts in Alaska. Developed in cooperation with the unequaled Robert Paterson, and using ideas pioneers 40 years ago with Visa International, it’s a proposal for starting conversations statewide about finding a new way for us to collaborate and compete in a more natural way than we’re organized today. It’s kind of hard to follow without the narration/explanation, but I wanted to share it anyway. I’m happy to answer questions.

Twitter for Stations, Programs, Journalists and Fun

This presentation was made to a group of Alaska public radio journalists in Anchorage during an annual conference. The idea was to expose them to the Twitter service and suggest they try it out and see what others around the country — especially NPR — are doing with it. The reaction was… tepid. I think Alaska pubradio journalists are really saddled with a lot of responsibilities that just aren’t present in the rest of the country, and taking on new forms of media is just so hard for them. And then journalists also tend to be a skeptical lot — as they should be, of course. Again, narration helps, but there’s lots of links in it for reference.

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

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

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

Allocating resources to web development and maintenance is critically low:

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

Top of the development list–stations are looking for:

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

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

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

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

Now they’re undermining the Associated Press. Good for them.

At the rate things are changing for the AP and the news business in general, you’d think the AP would unleash a new plan to get folks interested in their services again. But I think not. The AP is still a juggernaut in the news business with a long way to go before their execs begin to freak out over lost customers and revenue. It sure is interesting to watch, though.

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

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

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

• NPR’s digital distribution strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Community Media Streams
• Media Production
• Advancement
• Operations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1466612&server=www.vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
How Do You Use Twitter? from biz stone on Vimeo.

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

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

As we prepare for an overhaul in Anchorage, I find myself thinking more and more about community, “tribes,” interactivity and relationships.

If you’re at a local station, especially in a mid-size to smaller market, this is defintely worth a quick scan.

A few years back I had a meeting with our TV manager and our Radio manager and we talked about the web. Specifically, I wanted to develop some kind of taxonomy of topics into which all our content — locally-originated or national — could fit. We could post extras, our local stuff, links to national stuff, all in different topical areas that would be of interest to our audience both broadly and in specific niches.

Of course, we never had the resources to actually develop the taxonomy into something useful online, but the dream was there…

Well, KQED has gone and done it. They blended it into their site redesign, and it looks fabulous. Todd Mundt scooped me earlier this week but I couldn’t let the week pass without throwing in my own congratulations. And, yes… I’m jealous.

But to make myself feel better, I’ll pick one nit: The columns of content in the footer do not line up with the columns of content in the body of the page, indicating that the site is not built on a traditional graphic designer’s grid. So there.

Seriously, though, it’s hard to blend a multiplatform service into a unified web site. I’ve actually done it both ways and it’s harder to do it this way. Lots of competing interests get involved, making a designer’s life tougher. So big congratulations to the KQED web team.

I hope to steal all their ideas before the end of the year.