MacBreak Weekly explores NPR/station disintermediation
December 23, 2009 by John Proffitt · Leave a Comment
On each MacBreak Weekly — a podcast focusing on all things Mac (and iPhone / iPod) — the host and guests make “picks of the week” in which they highlight hardware or software from every imaginable corner of the Mac and iPhone universe. Some stuff is small, some stuff is big, some is expensive and some is free. This week one of the guests — Alex Lindsay, a videography and special effects pro — picked the tremendously popular NPR News iPhone app (currently #4 in the free News apps category in the iTunes App Store).
In discussing the NPR News app, host Leo Laporte and Alex lavish praise on NPR itself for doing such a great job meeting the needs of Internet users that want access to NPR News and other public radio content and stations. They also rave about This American Life (currently the #2 podcast in the entire iTunes podcast directory) and the heavily revised NPR.org.
But then things get interesting.
Laporte and Lindsay don’t stop with reviewing the app or praising NPR. Together they demonstrate both tremendous insight and notable ignorance of how public radio is architected in the U.S. Here’s what’s right and what’s wrong in their discussion:
Right
- The NPR News app, combined with the new NPR.org, is one of the most advanced distribution approaches in use by a major media company today.
- Livio is offering an Internet-connected radio with built-in NPR branding and features ($200).
- NPR was afraid to offer fully atomized programming elements via the web in an on-demand fashion for many years due to fears of station backlash, and resisted that through the early days of podcasting, despite prodding from Laporte and others in the tech world.
- Donations from listeners are still primarily directed toward stations, not NPR itself, and national producers reinforce that notion currently.
- NPR has done what many media entities have not done: face the future and make significant changes to the way they distribute content, answering the requests of listeners, even if it means stepping on local station toes.
- NPR produces industry-leading audio programming; it’s the “gold standard” in audio production and other professionals use it as a benchmark for their work.
- This American Life includes advertising in its podcast (it may be “sponsorship,” but it sounds to listeners like advertising). Laporte also realizes that advertising in a podcast gets around FCC regulations governing nonprofits and broadcast advertising.
- This disintermediation — content flowing from producers to listeners directly, without local stations — could be “the beginning of the end” for NPR stations across the country.
- Given the way content is produced and distributed in this new model, there needs to be a “reversal” of how the system works, in that NPR should pay local station reporters for news gathering (this is also listed below in the “wrong” section).
Wrong
- Alex says the app is “either free or $0.99″ — it’s free, no question about it.
- All Things Considered is not produced by a network other than NPR — it’s not from APM, it’s not from PRI, etc.
- Lindsay suggests that NPR should be paying local reporters for their reporting. What he doesn’t know is that NPR already does this, it just does it on a pay scale and frequency that’s not sustainable for local journalists.
Given how badly most people understand the public radio system in the U.S., they get a ton of this stuff right. And they instinctively know how the disintermediation game works — Laporte used to work on the defunct cable channel TechTV but today has built his own network of audio (and now video) podcasts and streams, amassing more than $1,000,000 in annual revenues for his 2-4 person multimedia production house. (For the record, he’s also a commercial radio broadcaster.)
“The Reversal”
I was shocked by Alex Lindsay’s suggestion that the economic model on which the network/stations system works should be turned on its head. That’s something I’ve been saying since about 2006, once I realized that the content power rests with NPR, but the radio distribution power and the social relationship power rests with geographically-bound stations.
I’ve been laughed out of more than one conversation when suggesting NPR should pay stations to distribute their content. Or at the very least, NPR should be passing its content to stations for free or for the cost of operating the distribution system (PRSS / ContentDepot).
Today, stations pay anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars annually to NPR for the “privilege” to carry their content (depending on market size and lots of other factors). That’s the bulk of NPR’s income: fees collected from local stations. That’s why you pay your local station and not NPR (although NPR does sell advertising space nationally and they do seek high-dollar gifts from rich donors).
Some think the annual CPB operating grants go straight to NPR and PBS, but they do not. Only tiny bits go to a few specialized programs or services at the networks — the vast majority of CPB’s money goes out to 600 public radio stations and 350 public television stations every year (67% to TV). That model has been in place for decades.
But it’s time we rethink this model. Maybe we don’t need a total reversal of all the flows. But the balance of power has shifted dramatically into the hands of the major national producers at the same time they’ve sucked the life out of most local public media outlets in the country with their incredibly hefty (extortionary?) fees. Money collected locally keeps the lights on and pays the national producers, but it affords precious little local production of any sizable amount or quality.
This has to change. Or we might as well just nationalize the system, a la BBC, and get it over with. Either approach can be made to work, but the current model doesn’t match how the world works in the 21st century.
Listen for Yourself
In any case, check out the conversation to hear these comments and insights from outside the public radio universe. It starts around 1 hour, 20 minutes in the original podcast. Or just listen to the excerpt I’ve clipped here (or click the play button below). The excerpt is about 5 minutes long (MP3).
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Should public media make Education its mission?
October 14, 2009 by John Proffitt · Leave a Comment
UPDATE: I added some comments about what “education” means to me at the bottom of the post.
An interesting new article was posted last week that caught my eye (thanks to @kevintraver):
A More Public Role for Public Broadcasting: Education
by Dale Dougherty / O’Reilly Radar
The gist of the article seems to be that public media — though Dougherty focuses almost solely on public TV — should use it’s ample broadcasting bandwidth to focus on educational content, from traditional kids programming up through lifelong learning and civics topics. Using TV is considered better than using the web for accessibility reasons (which broadly makes sense given the cost of broadband in this country).
While I like the idea in broad strokes, I think Dougherty is missing a lot of insider knowledge of the industry as it exists today and how it’s funded. So I submitted a comment to the site that goes like this:
This is a nice idea that will never happen. At least not without a huge change in direction for public media and government (i.e. voters).
Whether or not education / lifelong learning was in the 1967 PBA is now irrelevant. Public media institutions have drifted far from education over the years and aren’t coming back. Why? Because education doesn’t make enough money to be self-sustaining. Which is why taxes pay for schools and students pay for college.
With all due respect to Mr. Lippincott and other former colleagues in public TV, let’s get real. PBS’s best work is done in children’s programming and it’s marginally educational. The only way it’s strongly educational is with deep parental involvement (rare) or direct classroom tie-ins in schools (limited for political and time management reasons).
To make the Education mission a reality in public media, taxpayers would have to agree to foot the bill of perhaps $1-2 billion annually. That would be cheap for what we could get, but not likely. Further, it’s becoming very clear that education via online video and other means is exploding and to do this work via TV is anachronistic if not downright wasteful.
The short-run plan for PBS: keep doing what it’s doing until it collapses financially (by 2015, I’m betting). Once that happens, the children’s programming will remain in a reformatted PBS, the news content will go to a reformatted NPR, and WGBH will gobble up the rest and become a national superstation.
If, on the other hand, you consider quality news a form of education (which, in truth, it is), then you’re talking about NPR for the most part, and they’re the shining hope for public media.
I’m big on having a bold mission, articulating it and making meaningful community impacts. But my take is that well-done news that intelligently informs the electorate in times of turmoil (say, the next 25 years) is more supportable and more meaningful than trying to take on the education monster, in which everyone has opinions of what should be done but no one is really in charge and everyone is underfunded.
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UPDATE 14 Oct 2009 2:30am EDT
After a Twitter exchange with @MarkRyanWFWA (follow him!) I realized that I may be defining “education” more narrowly than others would like.
For me, education is a fairly systematized approach to providing information and then following up to ensure the information was understood and can be practically applied. So when I say public media should not adopt education as its primary mission, I mean it. I just mean it in my own way.
Of course, “public media” can even be debated as to its meaning. In it’s largest sense it means creating / curating / sharing media in service of a public good. That’s great, but I do think for practical reasons we have to sharpen our missions much more than that. To me, that means news and information aimed at already-educated (to some degree) people to allow them to live their lives more successfully and make decisions as citizens that have positive impacts.
Education is definitely a public good. I just don’t think public broadcasting, as it moves to public media, should focus exclusively on that mission.
And now, the NPR Dancers
November 17, 2008 by John Proffitt · 1 Comment
Tip of the hat to Duncan Moon for sharing this little gem.
Back from the dead / digital collaboration
September 15, 2008 by John Proffitt · Leave a Comment
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:
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.
Not to be repetitive, but… NPR + PI = ?
August 11, 2008 by John Proffitt · 3 Comments
Back on the 31st I mentioned the NPR purchase of Public Interactive (PI), wondered what the meaning was and hoped for some announcements or details from NPR. Since then there’s been more discussion out there, including a rather long post by Robert Paterson as well as a short one from Sue Schardt. The NPR CEO himself, Dennis Haarsager, posted on the topic as well, including…
I will have a lot more to say about this, how we got here, where we hope to go with it, and who the key players have been in this multi-year effort to extend public media’s impact in a future post. PI will continue its current range of services, but it would also be useful to think of it as the beginnings of a new digital division within NPR which will operate with the same culture of neutrality as has characterized public broadcasting’s satellite distribution systems for decades.
That’s encouraging, but vague. Knowing Dennis’ capacity for system design and strategic thinking, I definitely feel better that he’s at the helm, but I sure would like more details on what’s behind the purchase.
In the mean time, I’ve exchanged private Twitter messages and e-mails with a few folks outside and inside NPR. To date, either no one knows what’s going on with the purchase or they’re not willing to say. Very odd. A major purchase like this would, presumably, be backed up with a “big idea” or a plan for the future, and you’d think people would be excited to talk about it.
So I’m still in the camp of “huh?” when it comes to the NPR / PI deal. I’m not against it, but I’m not seeing the value yet. I’m hoping Haarsager in particular can shed some light in the coming weeks.
–
But I’ll be more specific: I’m not interested in more web templating services from PI or any other vendor. They don’t really help me provide valuable, organic, human-scaled interactive experiences for — and with — my community.
My station’s use of any media platform must be authentic and must be “tuned” to the rhythms of the platform and the needs of the community.
So if I’m providing interactive web services, they need to feel organic, natural, part of the web’s fabric and not a “patch.” The PI offerings have, in my experience, felt like patches. They were designed for stations that had no “digital natives” on board and could not or would not invest in next generation services, but still had to have something on the web. A noble goal in its way. Unfortunately, such services encourage stations to treat the web as an afterthought, as a necessary evil, not as a next-gen media platform that operates on a new set of principles.
As tools on their own, the PI services are fine. They work as advertised (which is more than can be said for a lot of software). But they all have the feel of “made somewhere else” and “commodity package we bought just to get this done.” It feels hollow. Ning sites feel more organic.
If NPR bought the PI toolset and services with the idea of just selling them to stations as PI has done since inception, then this deal makes no sense; then it’s just a game: PRI owns it, then NPR owns it, maybe APM is next or PBS or whatever. But if NPR plans to use the skill sets resident in the PI staff to go in some new directions — more like API stuff, less like web templates — then this might make a ton of sense, and it’s a service I’ll want to use.
Too bad NPR already had a smart web services team in-house, unencumbered by the legacy PI business model. NPR could have started in-house with the team they have. Although I suppose buying PI gives you political cover while you develop these services. NPR Board and management can focus on traditional PI operations while substantial behind-the-scenes API / utility development costs are incurred. Maybe the PI purchase is just a new media red cape keeping the old media bulls distracted.
Am I being too cynical here? What am I missing? And when do we think NPR will come out and say what their plans are for the PI purchase?
NPR + PI = ?
July 31, 2008 by John Proffitt · 3 Comments
I started writing Thursday afternoon about the NPR purchase of Public Interactive, but I figured I’d better stop. I have experience with both entities, I’ve read the press release, but I’m going to give the NPR and PI community 24 hours to express their thoughts first.
Because, at face value and based on the PR piece, I’m baffled as to why this is such great news.
The only way this purchase makes sense is if there’s something new NPR is planning that didn’t get described in the press release.
Please, public media blogosphere and Twitterverse, educate me! Can you complete the equation in this post’s title?
Former NPR digital chief Thomas moves up at Etsy
July 26, 2008 by John Proffitt · Leave a Comment
Back in April I mentioned the departure of Maria Thomas from her digital post at NPR. She left to join handmade crafts marketplace Etsy as their COO.
Well, just a few months laster she’s now CEO, as noted on the Etsy site and by Fred Wilson, venture capitalist and blogger extraordinaire.
Congratulations to Maria and Etsy on great news!
It makes me wonder what might have been had the stations and NPR actually agreed to do something in the wake of the New Realities conversations a couple years ago, conversations in which Thomas participated deeply. Had Thomas stayed at NPR, she could have kicked (even more) serious online ass for the network, but instead NPR, via the Board, has signaled the importance of the “R” over all things digital, especially in the BPP cancellation.
–
Someone I bumped into late this week with knowledge of the public radio system commented that the stations need to get out of NPR’s way and let it grow and mature. I couldn’t agree more — and I work at a station, one that ostensibly could be “hurt” by NPR’s evolution. A strong, vibrant, changing NPR would be good for everyone.
Here’s the thing… NPR’s future success cannot come at the expense of local stations if they are truly engaged with their communities. If NPR built direct relationships and funding deals with the public, that would only cut stations out of the picture if their local community relationships were weaker than the ones NPR could build. If that’s the case — if NPR’s success really would be your station’s death — then just what are you doing in public media anyway?
Favorite BPP reaction comments (so far)
July 24, 2008 by John Proffitt · Leave a Comment
When the announcement went out about the cancellation of the Bryant Park Project, the comments on the NPR site numbered in the hundreds. The counts I saw stopped around 600, yet there may be more (who wants to count?).
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):
Haarsager on BPP, plus reactions
July 23, 2008 by John Proffitt · 7 Comments
Well, I guess the NPR shoe I’d been warned about has dropped, with respect to the cancellation of BPP.
It was not a satisfying thud.
The comments on the BPP blog site, reacting to the memo, have begun rolling in. They are not, one would expect, positive. There’s some respectful language in there, but the overall feeling is that this formal response missed the point(s).
My own comment, submitted to NPR (and it may be up by the time you read this):
For all those saying NPR should have raised money directly for BPP, there’s a political mess you’re not aware of here.
If NPR openly attempted to raise money for any program, with large or small station carriage, the nationwide collection of stations would revolt. And please note the Board of NPR is majority-controlled by stations.
In short, it would never be attempted and would certainly be killed if it were.
There are indeed structural and cultural problems within NPR that make a project like BPP fail and put all forms of new media engagements at risk. But never forget that many of NPR’s most anti-new media anti-innovation qualities are inherited from the codependent relationship with the stations. In a sense, it’s no one’s fault, yet it’s everyone’s fault. And that’s the center of the problem.
The entire system is trapped by its own success in the radio medium — not the web. Asking it to change in fundamental ways (e.g. embracing direct funding, using the web innovatively and as a medium of first resort, building real community) is asking for a revolution in which heads would most certainly roll.
But public radio has not historically been a head-rolling collection of institutions.
If you want to change public media for the better, focus on your local station — volunteer, get on the Board, ask tough questions, demand new services, and prove to your station there’s money to be saved and made in engaging the community in new ways, especially online. And tell your station to let NPR grow and mature — even if that means audiences want direct relationships with the network rather than the station. Local stations need a reason to exist beyond rebroadcasting NPR anyway. It’s time they learned how to be local (again).
Or, failing all that, strike out on your own and create a new media entity with the soul of a public radio station but the structural DNA of a Google.
There’s a future for public media, to be sure. But only time will tell whether NPR will participate in it fully and faithfully.
Naturally, I have more thoughts, but didn’t want to post them at NPR’s site.
Overall review of the memo? Disappointing.
Haarsager’s memo language does not, as so many commenters already noted, ring true. There’s something wrong here; something out of place.
Canceling BPP doesn’t bother me per se (this kind of thing happens from time to time for many reasons, and BPP was cursed with bad luck from the start). But NPR’s handling of the cancellation has the feeling of political talking points about it, and that won’t fly in a new media era. Words like “misdirection,” “willful ignorance” and “politically convenient” come to mind very easily here, and they shouldn’t. That’s not what I want to think about NPR.
But if you think my take on the situation is harsh, head over to the Huffington Post where Daniel Halloway has his way with the story.
For me, the upshot is that NPR is fundamentally flawed due to the nature of the relationships between stations and network. There’s no long-term-successful way forward unless that flaw is corrected, either by renegotiation of the relationship or by breaking free of the relationships entirely.
While it’s not an exact analog for where newspapers were 10 years ago, it’s close enough: a medium…
- trapped by its own success
- unable to innovate into a new model, even in small ways
- finally dismantled by market forces beyond its control
I really hate this. This isn’t what I want for NPR specifically or public media broadly. Will someone please tell me I’m wrong? I don’t want to lose NPR!
More BPP and innovation thinking
July 16, 2008 by John Proffitt · 2 Comments
Earlier this week I was advised privately to wait for an announcement from NPR about BPP — without any hint of what said announcement might be — and I’m still waiting. I’d love to hear NPR announce a bold new plan to take the BPP straight to the web and change it up somehow. If anyone would care to shed additional light, I’m all ears (as are about 600 commenters on the NPR site).
In the meantime, there’s been some great pieces out there I’d like to point folks to (yeah, I know — you already saw these, but just in case…).
First up are two posts from Robert Paterson, a past NPR consultant and an avid BPP audience participant:
- A rescue plan for Bryant Park Project and also for NPR
- A rescue plan for Bryant Park Project and also for NPR – Part 2
I’m not a fan of Paterson’s claim that the U.S. is heading into a full-blown depression (because that scares the bejesus out of me and I don’t know what to do about it), but the rest of it rings true, even if the economy were booming.
Next up is a post from Jeff Jarvis, one of my perennial faves:
(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? 
Web economics vs. Pubradio economics
July 14, 2008 by John Proffitt · Leave a Comment
The Bryant Park Project collapse at NPR sure has had the public media world a-twitter over the last 24 hours. I got one tip to wait for an announcement or something like that from NPR about the future of BPP. Okay. I’m waiting.
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:
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.
On the death of BPP
July 14, 2008 by John Proffitt · 10 Comments
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.