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Farewell Alaska. Hello St. Louis!

February 10, 2010 by John Proffitt · 4 Comments 

Announcement Time!

As of this week I accepted an exciting new position with public service media company KETC in St. Louis, Missouri. Starting in early March, I’ll be their new Director of Digital Engagement.

Historically KETC has been, and to this day is, a public television station in a TV market of roughly 3 million, broadcasting national PBS programming as well as locally-generated shows, some of which are distributed nationally on occasion. Amongst public TV stations, KETC is one of the oldest on record. Seriously — check out their amazing timeline going back to 1954, a full 13 years before the Public Broadcasting Act. Now that is history.

Yet for all that rich history, KETC is becoming something very new today: a public service media company, not simply a broadcaster. Over the past few years they’ve embarked on a remarkable transformation, developing closer relationships with their community and using media to solve problems.

It started with outreach around The War, in which KETC set the national standard for gathering local veteran stories and integrating it with the Ken Burns documentary.

This new way of working and thinking culminated with the local, then national, Facing the Mortgage Crisis, in which the station literally networked nonprofits, government agencies, banks and homeowners in a united effort to slow or even stop the wave of foreclosures hitting the area following the financial meltdown. The project included social media, broadcast, old-fashioned networking, live events and lots of online work. The accomplishment in St. Louis were so impressive the CPB expanded the program to selected stations nationwide.

Now a new project is beginning; one focused on issues around the topic of immigration. They’re even remodeling part of the building to house the new local nonprofit news service — the St. Louis Beacon — and the cross-functional multiplatform digital media team… all together in the same space. And I’ll be there to help.

I can’t tell you how exciting this is. I’ve watched KETC from afar, oftentimes through consultant Rob Paterson’s postings. This is an opportunity for me to put up or shut up on digital engagement and public service media. And I will do my best, for the good of St. Louis (a town I knew as a child, as it turns out), and hopefully for a broader public broadcasting community looking to understand how to move into what CPB’s Rob Bole calls “public purpose media.”

Sadly, this means I will be leaving Alaska very soon indeed, having lived on the Last Frontier for the past 9 years. The departure is made all the harder because I must leave behind a vibrant social media community I helped create over the past year. That community has gone on to raise money for a friend in need, form a local Ignite chapter and, from what I’m told, a wedding may be in the works. :-)

So farewell Alaska. I will miss your Chugach mountain skyline and the warm embrace of entertaining and thoughtful friends all too soon.

And hello St. Louis! Let’s make something meaningful together.

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Media Evolution

January 24, 2010 by John Proffitt · 1 Comment 

Seth Godin on the evolution of every medium, when applied to the television industry:

TV used to be driven by the guys who knew how to run cameras and transmitters. Then it got handed off to the Ernie Kovacs/Rod Serling types. Then the financial operators like ITT and Gulf + Western milked it. And finally it’s just a job.

Yep. TV has become predictable.

Though I wasn’t part of the early days of public broadcasting, every account I’ve heard or read suggests it was a time of remarkable innovation and experimentation. There wasn’t a lot of money, but there was a lot of passion tied to a powerful mission. These days public TV doesn’t do commercial-style media well.  But it also doesn’t do mission-based media well.

There are outstanding examples of great media creation within the pubcasting world, but as a whole we’ve blanded the place up and disconnected it from our communities. Time to rethink the mission and re-energize the work. And it might just have to start with the engineers.

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Yeah, we’re a sensible business. What of it?

January 18, 2010 by John Proffitt · Leave a Comment 

One thing I cannot abide is prevarication. It’s why I’ll never be a successful politician (or an unsuccessful one, for that matter).

So it irks me every time a public broadcasting leader gets up in front of a crowd and trots out the old chestnut of how public broadcasting — especially public TV — is so much better than commercial broadcasting because we produce “Masterpiece Theater” and they produce “Dog the Bounty Hunter.” Recently PBS CEO Paula Kerger took to one of these many stages and talked about how PBS kids programming is so much better than the commercial kids garbage out there, especially since PBS doesn’t attach kids merchandising to the broadcasts.

Too bad someone blew the bullshit siren. [Hat tip to Current for the find.]

And please, let’s not slice-and-dice this story into “well, it wasn’t PBS that did it, it was WGBH, the producer…” yadda, yadda, yadda. The public does not understand these distinctions and we all know it. The conservative blogger also busts out the old Sesame Workshop example, which has dogged the network for years because  no one has had the guts to speak the truth without blushing (which I’ll get to in a minute).

Separately, the issue of PBS buying Nielsen ratings data came up in this Washington Post column (scroll to the bottom), in which Kerger attempts to politically sidestep the fact that the network bought the access to help it sell air time to sponsors. The columnist said Kerger’s explanation of the Nielsen deal “sounded suspiciously like a CBS sales exec at a pitch with potential advertisers.”

Good grief. The problem isn’t that Kerger sounded like a CBS sales exec, it’s that she sounded suspiciously like a CBS sales exec! It’s suspicious because her language was deliberately double-talky. We’ve been taught to be apologetic for operating like businesses, and her roundabout language gives away our cultural discomfort with bottom-line considerations.

I’m tired of the song-and-dance promoted from the tops of our public media ecosystem. Our leaders attack commercial media and praise noncommercial despite the fact that the differences are not so stark; there are good programs in commercial media, and we have some dogs of our own. We rag on “Ice Road Truckers” but secretly sit transfixed for hours during a weekend marathon. We despise the rampant commercialism of kids programming but align ourselves with companies that participate in the same TV-industrial complex.

Let’s get real. Here’s some of what I would like to see in print and hear from our leaders when they talk to the public:

  • Nonprofits are still businesses. If they’re run without good business practices, they will fail. If a nonprofit corporation fails, the public good they were organized to pursue will be lost. So it’s good to operate like a business. Stop acting like this is a bad thing!
  • Sesame Workshop makes money from character licensing? Good for them! Money they make in that way offsets the cost to PBS and stations. Without that separate income, that show would cost stations a metric ton more to produce, meaning that show or others would be canceled. Nonprofits are specifically allowed to make unrelated income — they just have to pay taxes on that income. So guess what happens…
    • kids get “Sesame Street” products they like, attaching them to a program with great educational value
    • people are employed in making, transporting and selling the products
    • taxes are collected on the profits, helping pay for government programs (like public broadcasting)
    • actors, directors, producers, writers and other artists are paid a fair wage
    • the cost to PBS and stations is reduced for a beloved program
    • …and this is bad how?
  • Corporations used to be more openly philanthropic, but now they want something for their money — we can’t change that. So we can either take their money and create “advertising lite” options for them, or leave the money on the table. Maybe it is wrong to take the money and add corporate messages to our content. If you’ve got a better idea, we’re all ears.
  • Yeah, we don’t like the slide toward advertising either. But watch 1 hour of PBS and 1 hour of Discovery and compare the number, frequency, length and stridency of the commercials you see. There’s a difference and you know it.
  • Buying Nielsen data is standard practice in the TV world. It helps us get sponsorship dollars. Frankly, you should be shocked it took us this long.
  • Don’t like our mild commercialism? Push for legislation to fund public media at a level where corporate sponsorship isn’t needed, BBC-style. We don’t like selling ourselves anyway.
  • We produce “Antiques Roadshow” because it gets ratings (and dollars) not because it’s programming that consistently lives up to our mission.
  • We broadcast “Lawrence Welk” because old people like it and we want their money when they die.
  • There’s quite a few programs on commercial media we like and respect — it’s not all garbage. For example, we’re mad we didn’t think of “Mythbusters” first.
  • Sometimes we will use marketing tactics to make people aware of our programs. Deal.

Would I phrase all the messages exactly this way? No, of course not.

But the messages must be clear: we’re businesses, we do good things for our communities and we use a variety of tactics to achieve our goals, some of which involve trade-offs of mission and sustainability.

And if you can suggest ways in which we never have to make trade-offs, let’s talk.

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The mission problem

January 7, 2010 by John Proffitt · Leave a Comment 

On December 6, 2009 Rob Bole, the CPB’s VP for Digital Media Strategies, wrote a great post: The Mogul’s Dilemma: Our Mystic Guideposts to Failure. Highly recommended reading. I was reminded of it today in the MediaShift post that actually started with me and then ended with Rob while talking about the infrastructure needed for modern public service media.

Back in late December, when I finally read Bole’s post, I posted my own comments. I saw my notes again today and was surprised to see just how much I wrote. And rather than let the comments sit there alone, I wanted to capture them here on my site for reference. Here’s what I had to say in response:

I totally agree about operators and strategic thinkers as you’ve presented in your thoughts here. When I started in public media in 2004, I was taken aback by how risk-averse the system was in technology, but also in core services and mission. So while I’ve personally beaten the drum for moves toward web services, I’ve also come to realize there’s a very deep-seated problem in “the system” that hasn’t yet been solved in most places.

It’s a mission problem.

What I’ve found is a lot of folks who built their careers and even their personal identities within broadcasting. To ask them or — if you dare — tell them to change, to learn new things and to act in new ways is pretty much an insult to their finely-crafted sense of selves (even if you deeply respect their past work).

But I found more than just entitlement along the way. I also found a loss of Passion and Purpose.

Public broadcasting became a system, an industry, a business. It became broadcasting, it became TV, it became radio — the platform was the thing and identities were inextricably intertwined with the platform. I’ve worked with TV engineers that were irritated when asked to solve radio engineering problems because TV Mattered and Radio Didn’t. In a world defined by technology platform, how do you have a serious conversation about ethereal things like “mission?”

It seems to me that over the years the high-minded notions of the Public Broadcasting Act have been lost. There’s been a failure to renew the mission, to redefine it in modern terms and to find people passionately committed to it. “Broadcasting fulfilled that mission, so why does it need to change?”

It’s taken me 5 years to reach the conclusion that the Internet, TV, radio, newspapers — none of that matters. Those are all technology choices, and they’re all commodities now. What matters is what you do with them, and frankly, most public broadcasting companies and leaders haven’t committed to this new perspective yet.

But there’s one that’s on the way. KETC in St. Louis is transforming itself, little by little, into a company on a mission for its community. They’re learning the best ways to be the “operator” you call for in this post, and they’re doing it across media platforms and out in the community. They originated the “Facing the Mortgage Crisis” project, and they did it because their community needed help and they felt a calling to deal with the issue, not to curry favor with the CPB or other funders.

And it’s not been easy. Each of the projects they’ve undertaken in the last couple of years have been big risks. They didn’t have complete funding. They had to bring together teams from legacy and new units to get the work done. They had to invent new methods and go out into a community that they, like most stations, had largely ignored for many years, preferring to broadcast, broadcast, broadcast.

I would encourage you to help stations find their Purpose and build Passion around that. With those two things, the right operators will magically show up — they’ll want to be a part of that Purpose. The strategic thinkers will join up, too, because there’s plenty of strategy to work out once you have your broad Purpose defined (or re-defined).

Here’s something practical:

Ask stations the two questions I first asked when I joined a public media company back in 2004:

  1. Who are you?
  2. Why are you here?

Very simple questions. You might be surprised how many people across the “system” don’t have good answers.

But if they can’t answer those questions — without quoting a tired mission statement — none of the rest of the debate over operators or strategy will really matter.

–

P.S. I’ve never gotten a good answer to my questions. But KETC may be the first to at least SHOW us some answers.

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Public Service Media requires decentralized action

January 4, 2010 by John Proffitt · 2 Comments 

Let’s start with an insightful quote from David Brooks writing in the NY Times this past weekend:

For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time.

In this case, Brooks was talking about centralized agency performance in the face of terrorism threats, but his talk about the powers — or lack of powers — in centralized government agencies got me to thinking about public service media. It seems to me that if we’re serious about public service media, we’re going to have to act locally and work to deemphasize national content distribution, services and cash flows. We’ve gone too far into centralized, and we’ve lost our way in our hometowns.

It strikes me that, more than anything else, those who will successfully practice public service media in this new decade will rely upon themselves and their communities, rather than waiting for solutions or directions to arrive from national agencies or media producers. Local solutions can’t come from somewhere else (though ideas can). The age of centralization and top-down service is over for now. Such approaches don’t scale down to real problems and palpable action well, and they smack of paternalistic “do this and do it this way” directives. We’ve put too much faith and power into centralized systems, enfeebling our abilities to act in our own communities.

Serving community needs almost always must be done on a localized basis. Yet over the past 20 years the public broadcasting universe has concentrated more and more power, intelligence, money and experience in the core networks and stations: PBS, NPR, APM, PRI, WGBH, KQED, WETA, WNYC and so on. Donors to local pubcasting stations are really helping pay Paula Kerger (PBS) more than $500,000 a year and Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne (NPR) more than $600,000 a year combined, not to mention so many others. Yet the services they individually provide, while nice, are not vital to solving community problems where we live (they don’t even solve problems in the Washington, DC metro area, for that matter).

Consider what could be done with the money spent on the centralized networks in a local area. In one market with which I have passing familiarity, with about 2.8 million people in the MSA, the local PBS station sends more than $1.2 million annually to PBS alone. That’s money leaving the community, going to PBS (and ultimately to program producers) and what that community gets back is national PBS content. I’m not sure that’s a good return on the community’s investment, not to mention the duplication of effort that happens across 300 cities nationwide — stations do pretty much the same thing everywhere: create a PBS station that looks like all the others, save for the logo.

Meanwhile, that’s $1.2 million that isn’t being spent to provide services that are locally relevant and useful to the community. What if that money paid for 12 people to write, shoot video, take pictures, interview people and gather and post information and host interactive communities that solve real problems? And what if those 12 people helped organize a community of 48 people that were actively and collaboratively involved in solving problems, multiplying the positive effect? That would be a major, real-world impact — well worth $1.2 million in local funding from a community of 2.8 million ($2.30 per citizen per year).

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “What do we do about Antiques Roadshow?” Well, that show can go to A&E. Oh, except they already have that show, called Pawn Stars. Zing! But seriously, I can address the restructuring of public TV funding and programming in a future post. For now, my point is that local public service media companies must focus on local needs and solutions. Leave the nationals to do their work (in new ways, in new funding models).

When the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act came along, there was a deep-rooted need for local media creation that served local needs in a noncommercial way. Over the years, the professionalism of the system has destroyed local capacity, concentrating capacity at the national level, where both PBS and NPR are competing with national media outlets and behaving in ways disconnected from local needs. In many ways, the dreams of the 1967 PBA writers were attained, but have been steadily lost.

It’s time to swing the pendulum back the other way.

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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.

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FINAL CUT: The Future is Public Service Media

December 22, 2009 by John Proffitt · Leave a Comment 

Here’s the final cut of my recent presentation for WOSU Public Media in Columbus. This time I’ve got a video I created myself plus a complete set of slides and links back to all the original material.

In this case, the video is a revised presentation deck with a brand new voiceover track. This way, if you couldn’t see or hear the presentation clearly in the video shot at WOSU, now you can get the slides and the talk directly.

First, the video, then I’ll follow up with a final collection of links.

Final Cut Presentation Material

Additional Material

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Public Media’s ‘Dreadnought’ pulling into port at KETC

December 21, 2009 by John Proffitt · Leave a Comment 

Run, don’t walk, to Robert Paterson’s blog to read his new post on the transformation in progress at KETC in St. Louis.

No one knows exactly what forms public service media companies will take in the future, and it’s likely that several successful forms will appear. But KETC looks to be the first in the nation to have commissioned the construction of a new model.

Paterson has been working with KETC since before the launch of the Facing the Mortgage Crisis project, which started at KETC and then expanded to 30 more public broadcasters across the country with the help of the CPB. He’s been lucky enough to work with CEO Jack Galmiche and crew and to see this transformation up close. The plans — physical and logical — are remarkable.

What KETC is doing is revolutionary in the public broadcasting world. While the particulars may not fit every station nationwide, the themes should. Whether or not each element in the plan is “perfect” is irrelevant — the most important thing is that they’re experimenting, all within a reformulated goal. KETC is getting passionate about public service media, and not merely public broadcasting.

Read that post. It’s insightful and exciting.

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Additional links from WOSU presentation

December 19, 2009 by John Proffitt · 2 Comments 

In prepping my presentation for WOSU Public Media last week, I spent a lot of time reviewing other people’s recent presentations, stories, blogs, data and so on. Really, I read stuff every day related to digital media, so tracking it all back down is kind of hard. But I wanted to make sure I gathered a list of links and other resources folks could review if they wanted to dig deeper than my presentation alone allowed. So here they are, in no particular order…

From Broadcast to Broadband: Redesigning public media for the 21st Century
Discusses how public media must change to meet the challenges of a 21st century media universe. Jake Shapiro, PRX and Ellen Goodman, Rutgers; presented at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Note: The pie chart showing CPB expenditures is incorrect. There’s an extra $71M included in the TV programming slice that shouldn’t be there.

The Future of News
This was a conference held at MPR in St. Paul, MN in November 2009 bringing together journalism leaders and pundits from public and commercial media in all formats. Lots of video and other resources. Props to Julia Shrenkler for tons of work on this one.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Michael Rosenblum offers a critique of the folks that appeared at The Future of News, as linked above.

A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009 (Jeremiah Owyang)
A frequently-updated list of social media statistics, including links, for all the major services.

The Chaos Scenario (video)
The Chaos Scenario (blog / book)
Bob Garfield, co-host of NPR’s “On the Media,” has written a book and built a wide-ranging presentation on how current media companies are faced with a chaotic world that’s changing the fundamental models of media economics. It’s a long video, but a good one.

Read more

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Rosenblum Resurrected

December 18, 2009 by John Proffitt · Leave a Comment 

Back in February 2007 I was blown away by Michael Rosenblum, keynote speaker at the Integrated Media Association conference in Boston. I’ve shared this video on DVD, shown it to colleagues and helped the IMA post it to their web site back then. But it’s buried at the IMA site and it deserves much more play. So I’m resurrecting it here.

I was actually running the cheap camcorder at the event, in a dimly lit hotel ballroom from about 50 feet away off to the side — so the video itself is blah. But the audio is awesome because it was professionally recorded and I was able to merge the blah video with the fantastic audio. Makes all the difference.

Blurry and dim video aside, Rosenblum’s presentation is mesmerizing. His grip on historical stories brings to life the peril that’s present for traditional TV broadcasters and TV producers, including public broadcasting companies. This is must-watch stuff if you’re in any way involved in TV or video.

Length: about 1 hour. Introduction by KQED’s Tim Olson. Download a QuickTime copy here (113MB).

Rosenblum on Video News

Sing it brother! Rosenblum instinctively understands the next wave in both local video news production and local advertising production. While working at the stations in Anchorage, I proposed that we develop a democratized advertising platform to allow folks to write their own material, submit it online and pay for it instantly. Why aren’t we doing that today?

Brian Lehrer Live Interview from Rosenblum TV on Vimeo.

Rosenblum on TV Economics

Everyone in the PBS community knows that stations and the network screwed up when cable became a major national media distribution force. PBS should have been allowed an encouraged to develop a multi-channel national content distribution system tailored to the cable world. Too bad we missed that boat. And now, with hundreds of cable channels and millions of web outlets, video economics have jumped and it’s time we rethink our work.

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Presentation: The Future is Public Service Media

December 15, 2009 by John Proffitt · 7 Comments 

UPDATE: In the comments, Tom White from the CPB noted that the math for TV production and operations noted in the presentation — stating that 84% of CPB’s annual appropriation goes to TV — is incorrect. In fact, for both FY2009 and FY2010 it’s about 67% of the total, not 84%. I based my 84% figure on the presentation slides offered by Jake Shapiro and Ellen Goodman in their November 3 talk. The figures in their presentation — on slide 15/32 — miscalculated CPB’s allocations by more than $70,000,000. I apologize for the error and will attempt to update my slides soon. In the mean time, keep in mind that 84% figure is wrong.

Last week I gave a presentation at WOSU Public Media in Columbus, Ohio, sharing with them some of the trends in media generally, talking about the economic pressures of a changing media landscape and sharing some ideas of how the station might change to meet the needs of the community in ways that transcend mere broadcasting.

WOSU was kind enough to gather a great group of people from across the company, plus one visitor from ThinkTV in Dayton and one from WYSO in Yellow Springs. (I’m not listing names here because I didn’t get permission to mention anyone specifically.) I’m hopeful some of the elements in the presentation were at least thought-provoking. One person told me afterward that he came away with three new ideas. Awesome!

I’m posting a ton of presentation links here so anyone can view and download the materials as desired. As I mentioned to a former colleague of mine, the materials are free for the taking, remixing and so forth under a Creative Commons license.

If WOSU posts a YouTube video of the live presentation itself, I’ll embed it here later. And I may just do another version of the presentation in voice-over style anyway.

I’ll start off with the embeddable SlideShare presentation, then include more links below.

The Future is Public Service Media
View more documents from John Proffitt.

 

Presentation Downloads

The Future is Public Service Media – Keynote (Mac) format (242MB zip)
This is the complete presentation in its native format, including all embedded videos, graphics, transitions and so on. Playback requires iWork ‘09 on a Mac.

The Future is Public Service Media – QuickTime format (638MB mov)
Complete presentation in a clickable “movie” format (click to advance, click links to get to the web) that includes the complete video files inside the presentation. Playable on any Mac or any PC with QuickTime installed.

The Future is Public Service Media – JPEG images (8MB zip)
This is all the slides from the presentation as individual JPEG images.

The Future is Public Service Media – PDF (6MB PDF)
This is all the slides from the presentation in a single PDF document, readable on all computers with Adobe Reader or another PDF application.

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The Future of Public Media

December 3, 2009 by John Proffitt · 1 Comment 

foggy highwayIn a little over a week, I’m supposed to appear at WOSU Public Media in Columbus and tell them what the future of public media will be.

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

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

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

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

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

The Media Inflection Point You Can’t Avoid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future: Taking It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future: Making It

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

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

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

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

The Best Days of Public Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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