Be sure to check out the source post — Ethics Guidelines for Public Media Employees – and related documents first. Got it? Then here are my comments.

I’m glad someone is thinking about this in the public media world, but I’m disappointed that traditional journalists got their hands so deeply into this document.

We don’t need a replication of existing “view from nowhere” positioning in journalism. We need fairness and disclosure, yes, but objectivity is not increasing public trust. NPR maintained traditional objectivity right through the right-wing attacks of the last few years and it neither illuminated those situation nor generated more trust in any corner. Objectivity-worship sucked the teachable moment right out of those manufactured controversies.

I could go on for a long time about the perils of objectivity, but Jay Rosen has that waterfront covered, so just read his stuff. Instead, I’ll focus on the real flaw I see at the heart of this document.

It’s related to the objectivity thing, but it’s much simpler. It’s right there in the Principles at the top of the list: “Seek public trust“. Three simple words.

• Trust is good. We all want that. We need it. It makes the mission of public media organizations easier and more supportable. Trust is an unvarnished good.
• Public is a pretty good word. I think we’ve lost touch with that word through its overuse; we don’t know what it means anymore. Does “public” mean upper-middle-class college whites? It certainly seems that way in public media. But let’s leave that old argument aside and assume the best around the word “public.”
• Here’s the problem: “Seek“. You’re telling people to seek public trust. You’re advising that people angle for it, grasp for it, hope for it. By choosing the word “seek” you’re admitting that public media organizations must position themselves, marketing-style, as being trustworthy. They don’t have to BE trustworthy, they just have to seek the perception of trustworthiness. (It’s time to post more “PBS is #1 in public trust” press releases!)

When it comes to social media and real life — and I would argue when it comes to news — you either are trustworthy or you are not. You earn trust. You have trust. You can lose trust. But you don’t seek it. You don’t plan for it. “Seeking” to me sounds like someone who’s trying too hard to be my friend. It feels contrived. And contrivances are not trustworthy.

Those three words — “Seek public trust” — flow from a major problem public media organizations (and newspapers) face today: a collection of older executives that are working to protect an anachronistic empire, managers who’ve inherited a system that has a lot of trust built up from 30+ years of valuable public service, most of which was built before their time. They’re seeking public trust because they’re trying to preserve their own income and status.

Early public media leaders didn’t seek public trust. They just did trustworthy things. They were trustworthy people. Trust adhered to them over time based on the things they did. It wasn’t the color of their logos, it was the content of their characters that made a difference. Do you think Fred Rogers sought public trust? He schemed for it?

To take an unrelated example, look at Apple. Apple has tremendous levels of trust built up with millions of customers. They have a brand with worldwide respect. They’re the best at customer service. They have unparalleled product quality, design, and ease of use. People love Apple. Dis Apple “seek public trust” to get where they are? Did they market their trustworthiness? Or do they instead earn their trust with each well-executed product, each simple service, each box opening? Go look at the last 10 years of Steve Jobs’ presentations. Did he ever talk about trust? No. But he and the company earned it billions of times over.

In the case of social media, public media organizations should ask their employees to be trustworthy, be nice, deal in truth, share the spotlight, and promote — at least some of the time — a better world.

The long list of ethics rules should really be shortened to look like this:

• Be trustworthy (e.g. think before you post, respect privacy, practice transparency, strive for accuracy and truthfulness, use your “real” voice, be nice, share)
• Either maintain a healthy congruency between personal and professional behavior or at least recognize that your capacity for maintaining separate personal and private lives is inversely proportional to how public your professional position is
• Keep in mind your public associations, even fleeting ones, may affect whether others are willing to trust you, so associate carefully for positive and negative returns

And that’s it.

The extra rules in the proposed document are designed for managers of an earlier era. I understand why they’re there. They’re all part of “seeking public trust” through manufactured objectivity and too-earnest striving for legitimacy. Which is a losing game in the long run.

Public media actors should be trustworthy, and let the rest take care of itself.

But not at NPR. And good for them! They’re having a good enough time to laugh at themselves and share the jokes with us.

Others might consider this kind of tomfoolery a waste of resources, but based on my past experience in large companies, this kind of video is the mark of a company that’s firing on all cylinders and is being led by someone with a grounded sense of reality (not to mention a sense of humor).

There’s an unstated corporate culture message here: We work hard, we play hard; we enjoy our work and you should, too. I wouldn’t mind hearing — and seeing — that corporate culture at the office.

When you and your team are grounded like this, you’re much more likely to make good business decisions. Sadly, I’ve worked around some people in public media that take themselves way too seriously. For some, the media crisis times we find ourselves in are beyond our control. While no one asked to have their world disrupted, to believe you’re at the mercy of these times is debilitating and will lead, over the coming years to many public media failures.

So try a sense of humor. Work hard and play hard. And enjoy the video. I SAID ENJOY IT.

Note to any NPR web editors: I tried to use your embed code, but it wouldn’t work – the video wouldn’t show. So I’ve had to re-host the source video. If you get the embedding working again, let me know — I’d prefer to use your embed than host the video directly.

NPR CEO Vivian Schiller

Radio towers gone in 10 years?

The most surprising comment she made was her assessment that the business of distributing audio programming via radio towers would be largely gone in 10 years. Though not a direct quote, here’s the transcript-like version:

Some smaller affiliates weren’t really set up for digital, so we had to provide tools for them so they could be part of the process. Some of this was tools for photos, etc. But fundamentally, helping them deliver audio streams. Radio towers are going away within 10 years, and Internet radio will take its place. This is a huge change and we should embrace it. Mobile will play a big part. [emphasis added]

I’m as big into new media as anyone, but even I was shocked that NPR’s CEO would make such a bold statement. Perhaps it was a heat-of-the-moment kind of thing. I don’t know.

Certainly Internet-delivered audio streaming and audio programming (not to mention, video, text, etc.) is gaining ground on old-school delivery technologies. But a 10-year countdown on radio transmission strikes me as a bit fast. This is a generational change, a slow process. Consider the strikes against this prediction:

• Audio programming, as practiced by NPR and her affiliates, is still a mass media experience — it’s not personalized or socialized to individuals. “We report, you decide” is the model. For that, mass distribution via radio makes a lot of sense. It’s more efficient for most use-cases in play today (listening during “down times” to and from work, running errands, at the desk, on weekends).
• Car-based Internet access remains experimental today. Yes, I can take the iPhone in the car, keep it hooked to the Internet and stream audio, playing it back on the car stereo. But that’s still a wonky process only geeks could love. My 70+-year-old mother has an iPhone and loves it. But she’s not listening to radio on it. And certainly not doing that while hooked up in the car.
• Mobile Internet access, especially at mass quantity, is getting more expensive, not less. AT&T’s repricing moves announced yesterday are part of that trend. Carriers, knowing the incredible capital expenditures required to build out towers, backhaul and more, can price their service in ways that lock out casual users. For those casual users, radio remains a free alternative.

And there’s more. But there are also factors that support Schiller’s contention from the user perspective:

• New cars are already starting to get live Internet and “sync” capabilities. It’s still rare and a little pricey, but it’s here and it will grow. When your car has a simple media center in it that syncs (downloads podcasts) via WiFi when it sits in your garage or driveway, new possibilities appear.
• The staggering majority of news is not real-time in nature and does not need live streaming. Therefore, a fast record/deliver model could supplant radio broadcast for almost all NPR programming. What if Morning Edition was delivered to the car very, very fast, and it was ready for you when you turned the key in the ignition for the morning commute? A super-fast podcast may be all you need 99% of the time. Local station? Not needed for transmission. Indeed, a local station would just get in the way.
• It’s easy to imagine a phone/car ecosystem that will unite the two in consumer-friendly ways. I’m not talking about hands-free speakerphones, but much more. Consider the possibilities when a car with WiFi, Bluetooth, media center and GPS functions unites with a WiFi/Bluetooth/3G smartphone and Internet access that’s both broadband (WiFi at home) and narrowband (3G) in nature. Non-live programming goes broadband. Live programming — when needed, which is rarely — comes in via narrowband on demand.

10 years sounds like a short time. But in the technology world, it’s a near-eternity. Consider what Google looked like 12 years ago (1998):

All in all, you can count me as a skeptic on the “gone in 10 years” idea. But I’m delighted someone in a powerful leadership position is thinking big. To me, the real question is when will we cross the line at which point radio technology investments become a liability rather than an asset?

The Battle Royale of Network vs. Stations

Aside from the user-centric and technology issues are the financial and “power” issues. Be sure to read John Sutton’s post where he starts to look at this. Though Schiller talks about collaboration in the news production and distribution business that includes local stations, those notions remain largely ethereal. Setting aside the Argo Project — it’s both too tiny to demonstrate meaningful results and it’s being done with Bryant Park Project-style largesse that cannot be sustained — what work is NPR preparing to do to bring station leaders along when it comes to mission and revenue? Not much that I can see today.

Because the problem isn’t with NPR. They’ve got the digital talent. They’ve got the lion’s share of reporting capacity. They can aggregate advertisers and listeners at scale. Though they couldn’t stay the same size, they could make it on their own without the stations. The problem is with the stations.

Stations have gotten fat and happy buying NPR stuff (even at highway robbery rates) because the audience loves the content and enough of them give money. Plus advertisers like pubradio demographics. It’s working. TV is struggling to survive while radio is largely doing okay. But stations aren’t doing what Schiller appears to want: significant local reporting that would allow for news collaborations network-wide. For her notions of a news network to work, someone outside NPR has to be producing news content and sharing it. Too many stations have too little capacity (or none at all) in this area. And many stations funded by CPB are music-primary or heavily music-based, taking them further from public service news.

So we’re left with a hinted-at battle between the network and the stations over money, power and mission. Or rather, it’s a re-ignition of an old battle that started when the Internet burst onto the scene 10 years ago. Given that NPR’s Board is largely populated with station management, Schiller could be in for some interesting conversations in the months to come.

All this said, readers should note a portion of the Q&A session from her appearance at D8:

Is there a way to support NPR without supporting the local station?
Schiller: No, not really. The lifeblood of NPR is the local station. You’ll note we always route the membership drives through the local station. However, we do have a philanthropic support through the NPR Foundation, but that’s not for small individual donations.

But the listener can go directly to NPR in the Web model, and doesn’t need to go to the local affiliate. So what’s the local affiliate’s role in the new paradigm?
Schiller: The fact that so few journalists are covering state and local news is scary. We’re committed to providing that local coverage via the affiliates. “We’ve got to have that local coverage, and NPR can’t do it….To the extent that [local coverage] doesn’t suit your needs, then we have to work together to make it meet your needs.”

News Collaboration and Revenue Streams

While we’re on the subject of Schiller’s comments, be sure to check out this video clip in which she talks about collaborating on news content and on pubradio’s revenue streams:

http://s.wsj.net/media/swf/main.swf

Personally, I’m enamored of Schiller’s vision for the future, of a true news network in which the far-flung nodes are as active in the news process as the central, and to each his own strengths.

But I think that model, and the business operations required to make it go, look extremely different than what the system looks like today. So different that current station management will likely fight it with all their remaining power.

Because yes, the towers will go (too expensive), the middle management will go (too wasteful) and you’ll be left with journalist-bloggers focused on community news that operate local public service networks and both report and instigate reporting from others. Plus you’ll have some sales people and technical web people. In many communities it won’t look like public radio at all.

We just don’t know how fast all this will happen.

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).

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.

–

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.

http://www.ucbcomedy.com/videos/embed/f19628c3680fe09073ccb2901345c089

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a world where…

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

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

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

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

Qualities of the Mind and Intellect

Qualities of the Heart and Spirit

Qualities of Craft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I actually came away from this profile liking Ken Stern quite a bit. Did he fit well into the CEO slot? Perhaps not. But he did some great work for NPR. And to everyone’s credit — except a sour-grapes Bob Edwards — the comments from board members and others were incredibly even-handed.

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.)

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.

Written by Dave Slusher, Public Radio Fails Me explores at length the ways in which Slusher was first captured by public broadcasting and especially public radio many years ago. But it goes on to lambaste public radio for what he feels its become — populist when it comes to cash, elitist when it comes to control, and tired when it comes to programming.

Written by any person on the street, it’s a damning indictment of some of public radio’s (perceived) trends over the past 10 years or so. But this was not written by any random man on the street — it’s written by a man with experience inside the system as a producer as well as consumer.

While I’m not entirely in agreement with Slusher, I do think there are some truths in there with which public radio (and all of public media) must seriously grapple. Slusher’s comments on the changes in the flagship NPR newsmagazines in particular I find fairly accurate. Of course, those changes may account for the doubling in NPR’s weekly audience over the past 10 years. But it’s definitely changed, and for those with an interest in deeper news coverage, it’s not all positive changes.

In any case, it’s a long post but worth a read and a comment at his site, whatever your opinions.

• “…Mr Stern chose the time and day when he left the building.”
• “…no malfeasance or misfeasance should be imputed.”
• “…transparency is an important ideal; [Stern's] privacy is a right.”

These quotes are very important to understanding the events.

First, he blows the malfeasance idea out of the water. When the news hit about Stern’s departure, I know folks around my shop assumed there was something sinister about the change. Had there been embezzlement? Sexual harassment? Physical confrontation? Why else would the termination be so abrupt? Well, it wasn’t something like that. (And those with personal experience of Ken Stern couldn’t imagine such a scenario anyway.)

Second, Haarsager notes the mutually exclusive issues of transparency and privacy. We observers want transparency in these affairs, but the departed — Stern — has a right to privacy. Personal privacy trumps corporate transparency in this case, and rightly so.

If you’ve ever been in a managerial position, you know there are things you can and can’t talk about when it comes to hiring candidates and terminating employees. Indeed, mostly you can’t say anything. Even if you’re mad at the employee, even if you’d like to give them a swift kick on the way out the door, you say nothing. To say anything negative is an abuse of your power and opens the company up to lawsuits. Besides, the employee is gone now — it’s time to look ahead.

Third, and most importantly, the departure was abrupt, but the timing was Stern’s choice. In other words, Stern could have played this game entirely differently — even leading to a multi-month golden parachute process, I suspect — but he chose to go out this way and at this time. This tells us a tremendous amount without giving details (an excellent balance of transparency and privacy, I think).

Consider how most CEO departures play out: there’s usually a transition period, often a significant one. The Bill Gates departure from Microsoft has been in the works for more than 2 years and he even left the CEO role several years prior to that. Many nonprofits have written succession plans, allowing for smooth transitions either over time or in emergency situations. And even when a CEO departs to “spend more time with his/her family,” there’s at least some degree of hand-off, like a consulting gig with the company until the new CEO is seated. But not here.

So the fact that there’s no transition, that the change was so abrupt and surprising, and the fact that Stern more or less set the timetable speaks volumes. And not to Stern’s credit. In my experience, even if you’re disgruntled, you don’t walk out and cut all ties with the company instantly.

So Haarsager’s statement that the reasons for Stern’s departure were “multivariate” is probably the most accurate, albeit the least satisfying. And from what I’ve gathered privately, it really isn’t all about the new media angle (though that’s one of the variants to which Haarsager is likely referring). But the way this went down — the suddenness of it — suggests much of the problem existed inside the CEO’s office. It didn’t have to end this way.

Personally, I’m ready to move on — we’ve got so much to do in public media. But I’ll continue to update the articles list as needed.