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.

Following a quick 8 weeks in the shadow of the Gateway Arch, I’m left humming one of Ella Fitzgerald’s signature Cole Porter songs:

http://www.youtube.com/v/MoiLkCojxAM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0

And with Ella reverberating through my head, allow me to share a bit of the story.

By the way, for anyone seeking dirty laundry: I’m going to disappoint you. But I will unpack what I’ve learned and perhaps that can help you in your career. Because I’ve got new insights into job situations I’d heard about, but hadn’t personally experienced until now.

Doubts

The trouble started in January.

I participated in a weekend project kick-off for KETC’s new immigration-focused public service media engagement, a follow-up to the successful Facing the Mortgage Crisis. I flew down from Anchorage to partially advise and pseudo-interview for an online media role in the project.

Sounded great. But from the get-go I had several intuitions things weren’t quite right, at least for me. And I promptly ignored every sign, assuming I was being excessively cautious or pessimistic or silly or… something.

Some of the early signs I ignored:

• I was never excited by the project’s topic: immigration. Yes, immigration is a major national topic these days and it has interesting dimensions, but it’s not something that ignites a passion for me. I figured that didn’t matter because I was interested in the work, the methods, the tools and approaches, if not the topic itself.
• Pure-play public TV stations make me nervous — I’m not a fan of the current programming or fundraising models (declining cultural relevance and revenue), yet that was the core nature of the host station. I figured this, too, didn’t matter because the project was something very new and it was isolated from the TV business.
• I’m a huge fan of news as a public service, yet most public TV stations, including KETC, have no local news capacity. In this case I consoled myself with the knowledge that the St. Louis Beacon lived within the walls of the station, despite:
  • being a separate nonprofit;
  • having a written-word focus rather than video focus; and
  • having little to do with the project.
• The project had funding only for 1 year. This created two concerns:
  • I’d likely lose my job in a year (though I was willing to absorb that risk for the opportunity).
  • I struggled with the conflicting ideas of building long-term community engagement online when the project has a definite end in the near future (i.e. please join us online, see ya later).

Any one of these doubts was minor and I easily rationalized them away. But I failed to see them as a whole. And the pattern of doubts continued.

I won’t go into every issue, because it doesn’t really matter now. But there were niggling concerns that popped up all along the way. Conversations ahead of my arrival felt either rushed or delayed. Project goals remained nebulous (which I thought was a good thing for a while). I felt “wanted” for the project, which was great, but then my concerns about fulfilling the outsize expectations grew.

On the Ground

Once I arrived the first week of March, I started to get settled, but never felt at home, either at the office or in my apartment after-hours. The team’s space wasn’t done. I was using my own computer at the office and had WiFi problems. I had a noisy upstairs neighbor at home. I was working on team collaboration stuff rather than public-facing web stuff (which turned out to be a big mistake). The project goals were still being defined. My wife and I were adjusting to the separation. I spent too much time making social media contacts in the area, looking too far down the road. I learned there were factions within the company that resented my hiring. Nothing felt grounded for me.

There was even personal stuff getting in the way. It began with the drive down from Alaska — my driving companion effectively started divorce proceedings via text messages, emails and phone calls in the car. That was odd. But I also took time to attend my mother-in-law’s funeral in April, while seeing my wife for the first time in 6 weeks. Then I fell ill while visiting CPB and was effectively out of commission for a week with strep throat — the first time since I was a kid.

All in all, from March 4 to May 6 I never felt safe, whether at home or the office. And let’s be clear — I’m just recounting my perceptions. I never felt anyone was “out to get me” or felt unwelcome. Indeed, my coworkers were delightful people and were sympathetic to the challenges I was facing.

Communication, Priorities, Goals

Meanwhile, in the project work, there were things that needed to be done. Quickly. Yet my communication with my supervisor seemed to skip a beat each time we talked. I’ve never had that experience before. Looking back now, I would call it what I’ve heard others say about other jobs and people: “it wasn’t a good fit.” I never really believed in that notion until the last couple of weeks. But it’s real, and it was disorienting. Whatever the reason — or maybe no reason at all — we talked past each other when it came to priorities or speed or goals, or maybe I simply wasn’t listening.

As I told my boss just last week: I’m not used to failing at things, I’m used to succeeding. My typical approach is to take on something new and delight people with better-than-expected results. But that didn’t happen this time. I felt horrible about it, which only compounded the situation.

At the end of the day, I was deeply unhappy with the job. And they were deeply unhappy with me. Sadly, I was starting to see ways forward in the final week-and-a-half. But it was too late to recover — the ship had taken on too much water.

Lessons Learned

As I shared a brief version of my story with a friend late last week he said, “When you get older, you’ll learn to listen to those voices in your head that warn you there’s something amiss.” Well, I’m older now. About 8 weeks older on the calendar, but a few years older in experience.

What have I learned that you might be able to use?

• If you have doubts, don’t minimize them. Logically evaluate them as best you can, but keep in mind some doubts are not logical on the surface, relying instead upon subconscious cues linked to your values, perspectives and experience.
• When you wager your career on a risky opportunity, you can, in fact, lose the game. Good intentions, though important, aren’t enough.
• Know what levels of risk you can live with comfortably. If you stress yourself out over the risks you’ve taken, the situation actually gets riskier.
• You cannot think creatively if you don’t feel “safe” in your life. Get to know what it is that makes you feel “at home” and get those things in order first.
• Find out what is driving your boss and CEO forward. “Driven” people upstream from you can be a boon to your career if you share a common vision and communication style. Or they can be dangerous. Ignore their motivations at your peril.
• Yes, there is such a thing as a “bad fit” in the working world, even between hard-working and otherwise successful, well-meaning people. Bad fits make everyone unhappy, and it’s better to figure that out and make changes quickly than to drag it out indefinitely.
• It’s up to you to get specifics on desired work outcomes up front. Know how fast an employer wants things done, and to what level of perfection. Know how you will be evaluated. If you can’t figure these things out, skip the opportunity.
• Never let anyone hire you if they think you walk on water. Because you don’t. And when you don’t walk on water, you’ll feel bad about it and they’ll be disappointed. Everyone loses.

What’s Next?

The first question I’ve gotten from close colleagues is, “Will you stay in public media?” The most honest answer: I don’t know. With dwindling budgets, drifting missions and more than a smidgen of drama here and there, it’s certainly an open question. I maintain my passion for public service media — there’s a need out there and a tremendous opportunity to serve community needs in new ways — but I may be able to serve in ways beyond employment.

For now, I’m focusing on opportunities in the Information Technology (IT) field, whether in nonprofits, healthcare or other businesses. I’ll remain open to public media options, but I have a much longer history in working with IT infrastructure projects and services (networks, servers, security, desktops, telephony, etc.). Not to mention I enjoy the work.

As for location, I’m in St. Louis at the moment, and I’m looking for work here, but I’m also looking at cities all over the place, including back in Anchorage, where my wife is still living and working. Other potential cities include (in no particular order):

• WEST: Spokane, Boise, Denver
• SOUTH: Austin
• MIDWEST: Columbus (OH), Kansas City, Indianapolis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Madison, Des Moines, Louisville
• EAST: Asheville and Raleigh, NC

Just One of Those Things

As I look back over the past 8 weeks I’m realizing just how fast everything happened and I’m amazed. I’ve never moved from new hire to former employee in 2 months before. I’m disappointed with the way things turned out, but I’m also deeply relieved that the stress is over and everyone can move forward.

Plus, Cole Porter’s lyrics have a new meaning for me:

If we thought a bit of the end of it
When we started painting the town
We’d have been aware that our love affair was
too hot not to cool down

So goodbye dear and Amen
Here’s hoping we meet now and then
It was great fun
But it was just one of those things

I wish the team at KETC the best. They’ve got a great project on their hands, they’re good people and I’m sure they’ll pull it off.

Up for discussion amongst a small group of public media tech types? Collaboration and community, or at least that’s what I’m expecting.

Many of you can probably list conference after conference and presentation after presentation, especially in the digital media space, where we all swear to stay in touch and share project ideas and methods, but it just never seems to happen. And I’m as guilty as the rest!

Lots of smaller projects have popped up over the years, including the #pubmedia chats happening each Monday evening with the help of some public media Twitter luminaries.

What each of the projects have lacked is either staying power or depth of collaboration, mostly driven by a lack of time to pursue collaborative work instead of individual (station-focused) digital production.

With the help of Allen Gunn, I’m betting on a great meeting and some sustainable work to benefit our communities and colleagues across the public radio, TV and web universe. Hopefully there will be more to report by the weekend.

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

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

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

So check out the webcast here.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8326319&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=ff9933&fullscreen=1

Final Cut Presentation Material

• View the video above at Vimeo (and get embed codes, etc.)
• Download a copy of the video (MP4, 1024×768, 570MB)
• Download the final cut slide deck, complete with embedded links (PDF, 11MB)
• Download the Keynote presentation deck (requires Keynote ’09, ZIP, 85MB)

Additional Material

• Pirates, legless dogs and public media — first in a three-part set of posts on my thoughts leading up to the presentation
• Do your own work — the second post
• The Future of Public Media — the third post in the series
• Presentation: The Future is Public Service Media — the original presentation content, as given at WOSU in Columbus
• Video from WOSU Presentation — this is a YouTube video of me giving the presentation in Columbus, as provided by WOSU (it cuts out after 1 hour, however)
• Additional links from WOSU presentation — a very long list of links to articles, references and other presentations I used when preparing for the talk

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.

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.

CPB will seek unified case for reauthorization
Current, 23 Nov 2009

FTC should consider policy reform to support public media
MediaShift, Dec 2009 – Jessica Clark makes a case for changes in federal rules to increase public media funding while simultaneously requiring public media do more public service work and less broadcasting.

New Public Media
The public broadcasting system is getting pressure — and ideas — from outside the system, and this is one of the more prominent sources.

Future of Public Media (Center for Social Media)

Library Bytes / Helene Blowers
Columbus Public Library’s digital strategist is one of the foremost leaders in new library thinking nationwide and keeps her thoughts — and presentations — on her blog. WOSU Public Media and stations nationwide trying to make the leap to public service media need to be working with libraries. And libraries need to be working with public broadcasters. It’s a match made in heaven and I hope to be writing more about this.

The End Game for Traditional Media (25 Nov 2009)
Public media consultant Robert Paterson writes about the point at which things change, and how public broadcasters — and all of the traditional media — are at a major historical inflection point. Great ideas, as always.

Sagan: TV Survival Means Hyper-Local Online Video (25 Nov 2009)
Diane Mermigas writes incessantly about media and especially the TV business. Here she makes the point that the TV world is about to get the same disruption that has rocked the recorded music business.

FreePress: Public Media
The advocacy group freepress has a special focus on public media issues that public broadcasters or aspiring public service media leaders should watch.

The Art of the Start (video / presentation / book) — Guy Kawasaki
Public broadcasters are old businesses, largely stuck in their ways. What we need is a wave of entrepreneurial activity. We need a startup mentality. Guy Kawasaki gave this talk based on his book and it’s got tons of fantastic advice for startup-minded people, and yes, it applies to public broadcasters on the path to public service media.

• Video (at Kawasaki’s blog)
• Book (at Amazon)

KETC
The traditional public TV station in the St. Louis area is evolving beyond broadcast. They started with a major outreach effort surrounding The War a few years back. But they built a break-out project with Facing the Mortgage Crisis — a project later picked up by the CPB and replicated to stations across the country. Their partnership with the new online-only news service The St. Louis Beacon, is also ground-breaking. Finally, they’re building a video training school for the public, getting them involved in media production and helping with distribution. Where everyone else is yapping about finding a new way forward, KETC is actually doing it. Watch them for more cues on how to tackle the mission of public service media.

Center for Social Media

The Reconstruction of American Journalism — Columbia Journalism Review
This is a major report issued late in 2009 that addresses the perceived national journalism problem and goes into some specific recommendations as to what should happen with public broadcasting. Important reading.

The Cluetrain Manifesto
First published in 1999, there are lessons in here that still need to be learned. Of particular interest are the 95 Theses.

Scan and Analysis of Best Practices in Digital Journalism Both Within and Outside U.S. Public Broadcasting — Sep 2009 / Center for Social Media

Digital Public Media Networks to Advance Broadband And Enrich Connected Communities (PDF) — 6 Nov 2009 / Ellen Goodman, Rutgers

In Service of Democracy: Achieving Public Radio and Public Media’s Potential (PDF) — Nov 2009 / Bill Kling, MPR

Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age — The Knight Commission
This is perhaps one of the most important reports on news and public broadcasting’s role in the past 5 years, maybe 10. There’s an outline of the public service media mission in here. Required reading.

Media Re:public – News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age
“a series of papers exploring the potential and the challenges of the emerging networked digital media environment”

Pew Internet & American Life Project
Tons of reports spanning years of the growth of the Internet in the U.S. Charts, analyses, articles, presentations — tons of stuff.

NPR Digital Think In –9 Oct 2009
Presentation from the “Think In” event from this fall. Good info for folks that know and don’t know NPR.

Sustaining Public Engagement: Embedded Deliberation in Local Communities
Elena Fagotto and Archon Fung

Next year’s news about the news: What we’ll be fighting about in 2010 (10 Dec 2009)

Umair Haque

This is the brilliant economist I love to quote. But he doesn’t post dry analytical papers. He a bomb-thrower for creating real, durable value rather than destroying ourselves and our world in the short-term pursuit of profits. A must-read guy almost every time, and with recommendations for anyone looking to develop real community value with media. Here are some of his best pieces from this year alone:

• Generation M Manifesto
• HBR IdeaCast: Can Good Journalism Also Be Profitable?
• The Digital Economy’s Coming Subprime Crisis (And What You Can Learn From It)
• The New (New) Mediaconomy
• The Nichepaper Manifesto

Nonprofit News Projects

I mentioned several nonprofit news projects in my presentation. Here are some links to those projects.

• Bay Area News Project (KQED + UC Berkeley)
  • at Facebook
  • covered by Mother Jones
  • covered by editorsweblog.org
  • covered by NY Times
  • covered by KQED itself (radio piece)
  • covered by PaidContent.org
• California Watch / Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR)
• ProPublica
• Texas Tribune
• Spot.us
• MinnPost
• St. Louis Beacon (in cooperation with KETC)
• Voice of San Diego
• Christian Science Monitor (it’s not new, but it’s definitely a mission-driven nonprofit, and they’ve gone all-online this year)

Books

Tribes — Seth Godin
A seminal book on the thinking of how tribes (communities) are critical to business in the 21st century. It’s not a how-to book, but it’s a fantastic why to book.

Here Comes Everybody — Clay Shirky
Shirky writes about how the Internet and its tools enable communication and communities that could never have existing before now. Lots of examples.

The Art of Community — Jono Bacon
The book is free to download as a PDF (!), and the blog keeps updating community leaders on ideas and discussion around the topic. You can also buy the physical book. This is a much more prescriptive book, explaining how to form and manage communities.

Additional links are provided inside the WOSU presentation from 11 Dec 2009. Download the PDF version and note the URL links posted on the right-hand side of pages that contain data from other sources.

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.

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.

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.

Introducing Britain’s Greenest Town

Now, I’m already inclined to like these stories because I think local food will remain part of a larger localism trend over the next 10 to 20 years as we pass peak oil and go deeper into global warming’s effects.

But there’s a quote in there that caught my eye (boldface my own):

Incredible Edible was originally funded out of the participants’ own pockets. “We were very clear that we didn’t want to look at what grants were available and mould our projects to suit them,” said Mr Green. “We felt that what would work was to start with the town and what it needed. We’d look for money later on.” What the project leaders found was that a lot could be achieved with small amounts of cash. And awards and grants have followed…

This was something I saw in public media (and still see) that drove me nuts: companies taking grant money because it was available and the projects sounded mildly interesting, not because they organically developed a project in response to local needs.

We did it in Alaska when the stations took money to create a replication of the “Portal Wisconsin” project from several years back. No one really wanted to do the project — hell, the company didn’t even believe in the web as a viable platform to begin with — but there was $10,000 in cash sitting there, waiting to be taken. We ended up not doing the project and returning the money (thankfully). But that wasn’t the only time funny funding came along.

I worry about other projects (one in particular comes to mind right now) that drives public media firms to do work they shouldn’t really be doing.

Heres a concept:

• find out what the community wants or needs; do a “listening project” like IdeaStream did a few years back
• develop a project or service that would fit the community’s needs
• if you really need cash to get started, then start smaller so you need less cash and can fund it out of pocket
• get some early successes, then take your story on the road to raise more money if needed

Social media works this way, too. First, you listen. Then you talk. Then you get together to do something new as a team. Later you raise money.

I know there’s an additional desire to ingratiate one’s public media company with the CPB or with the Knight Foundation, so people sign up for projects that don’t quite fit but are “close enough.” And I know these projects are a time-honored tradition in the public media system — it’s just what everyone does.

But maybe that’s one of our problems. We’re not working for our communities, we’re working for someone else, somewhere else.

Let’s do our own work. And let’s start by listening.

For those that don’t know, British radio was pretty tightly controlled just at the time that British rock and roll artists exploded onto the international pop music scene. Youth and music enthusiasts were basically deprived of rock on the radio. So a natural reaction appeared: enterprising young scallywags set up radio transmitters on ships floating in international waters off the British coast, beaming prohibited rock music and youth culture back into the mainland.

It’s not a great “film,” but it is a fun movie. And it reminded me of what I see so little of in public media circles today: Passion and joy and revelry. More on that in a minute.

Meanwhile, back at the office, I read the new column by IT strategy writer Bob Lewis: Legless Dog Syndrome. In it he asks the provocative question: What if you had no authority, as a manager, to make any of your employees do their jobs? What if you were a leader, but you weren’t “in charge?” He then goes on to talk about how, in a well-run organization, you don’t need control, because why you’re there and what you need to do are so patently obvious to everyone. To wit:

In well-run organizations, everyone understands:

• What the organization exists to accomplish — the mission.
• How the business works and how it connects to the external marketplace — the business model.
• How the organization is supposed to evolve over time — the vision.
• How the organization is supposed to get there — the strategy.
• How they fit into the mission, business model, vision and strategy.
• How to do their jobs exceptionally well in order to make it all happen.

And in well-run organizations they buy into all of this, have good reasons to want it to happen, find it energizing, and have no “perverse incentives” to take them in different directions.

Put together, these two scraps of media — Pirate Radio and Lewis’ take on the old legless dog joke — spell out to me what’s missing in much of the public media universe today: Passion and Purpose.

Passion

The “pirates” of Pirate Radio were there for the love of the music. They didn’t care about the privations of living on a rust bucket in the middle of the North Sea. Their mission — bringing the joys of a new age of music to millions across Britain — sustained them, gave them purpose, kept them engaged. They had a shared view of the inherent value of cultural expression through music (even if they’d never describe it that way) and were willing to do almost anything to participate in that process.

Passion gave them power, made them real to the people listening hundreds of miles away on land. Sure, there were advertisers and money involved, but these folks loved their work because they believed in it, not because they were getting rich (which they weren’t).

Is this true of most people working in most public media firms in the country today? Are they (or we) passionate? Really passionate?

It’s hard — if not impossible — to measure, but I’d wager that folks working in startup public media firms, like spot.us or the Texas Tribune or even specialty pubmedia firms like WXPN have more passion than most, and it gives them power. Maybe the passion will last for them, maybe it won’t. But they’ve got something that the average town’s local NPR affiliate isn’t likely to have: deep-rooted affection for the change they’re bringing to their world. They’re making a difference, an impact. They’re not working on the status quo; they’re creating something new.

How much change can you bring into the world by inserting local weather into Morning Edition? How much passion does it take to rearrange PBS programs into a broadcast schedule that’s virtually identical to 300 other stations around the country? Sure, the biggest legacy stations have pockets of creativity where old-school media types get to make media the way they always have. That’s a passion pursuit.

But for a wide swath of professionals working in public broadcasting today (some 40,000+ people), I’ll bet most are going through the motions at this point. Too many are fixated on a proud legacy (and there are still things to be proud of today, of course); many have lost their way and don’t know how to make “big media” on eviscerated budgets (because you can’t). One year you have a staff of 150 people and do all kinds of crazy projects that you love. A few years later your staff of 75 is shell-shocked and just hanging on to what vestiges are left of a passion borne of a long career in the old media world.

Under circumstances present in most (by number) public broadcasting outfits, it’s hard to muster passion when you’re watching your work diminish in scope, impact and value. And it must be especially galling to see your high-craft work disappear into the ether as new media forms get so much more buzz — buzz beyond their “real-world” value.

But here’s the deal: Passion will almost always beat proficiency. And in an age where old-school media economics are collapsing (as less advertising spreads across an expanding media universe), the New is sustainable because of its passion, but the old is not because of its baggage. The asteroid has hit, and the small mammals have a distinct advantage over the dinosaurs.

Of course, you can’t win on passion alone. The radio pirates still had to broadcast their work. They still had to keep the ship afloat. They still had to buy fuel and food. But had Rupert Murdoch started a pirate radio operation with PR, accounting and lawyers on the payroll, it would never have made it. Passion powered those boats, not cash.

Public media people need to find their passion.

What is it? Making good video? Great! Then you need to find a way to make video, even if that leads you away from your career at the local PBS affiliate. Are you all about kids education? Awesome. Then dig in where you are if you can, but if you can’t, move on. Is creating trustworthy news and information, to help educate the electorate, hold officials accountable and sustain democracy your passion? Fantastic! Get to it, and keep in mind your best work might be achieved outside the legacy public media companies — some of the most innovative work in journalism isn’t happening at established companies.

It’s not that public media needs a talent exodus. But we do need those that are just biding their time until retirement to move along early, along with those that just wanted a “safe” job where little is expected of you and no one is ever fired. We need a passion explosion. And it’s not about age. You can be passionate at any time in your professional life.

But the passion argument demands more than just ecstatic devotion — there must be a reason for it. We need to work passionately on something together…

Purpose

I’ve told this story more than a few times…

When I moved into the public media world a few years back, I felt like I was joining a company, and a national community, composed of people on a mission. I’d worked in nonprofits before, and I’d always liked putting mission above sheer profitability, but this was the first nonprofit where I felt like there was a real underlying purpose.

These were the days, however, when the web was so ascendent that even the old school public broadcasting managers were realizing that a generation was growing up with less of a need — or maybe even no need at all — for public radio and public TV. The iPod came out in fall 2001. By the time I joined public media just 3 years later, podcasting was introduced soon after, broadband penetration in the home passed 50% and it was clear the world was not the same.

So I, and so many others around the country, began to ask…

Well, okay… there are new media outlets appearing all the time now, so maybe we need to go back to the drawing board and ask ourselves: “Why are we really here?” Because if we can answer that question, then we’ll know what things we should bother doing and which things we can ignore as new media outlets and formulas develop. Because we can’t sustainably be all things to all people. We need a clear mission so we know what’s in and what’s out.

With that in mind, I started to ask my colleagues — most of whom had worked for decades in public media — Why are we here? What’s our true mission? Who are we here to serve? If there were only one thing left we could do, what would it be?

I thought these were marvelous questions. We could all read the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act again, with fresh eyes, and envision a present and future that’s reimagined, probably staying true to core principles from 1967, but without being bound to 40-year-old technologies or notions of public service. What freedom!

Yeah. It didn’t work out like that.

Instead, my questions were irritating to those that literally built their careers over the same time span in which public broadcasting developed so successfully.

“What’s our mission?”

“Our mission is public broadcasting!”

“Right. But what does that mean, especially now — now that everything is changing?”

“It’s public broadcasting! Look, you just haven’t worked here long enough to understand. But the rest of us know what it means.”

“Then why can’t you explain what it is, simply, clearly, and without using the words public or broadcasting? Can you tell me what the mission is without listing what the company does?“

“! ! !”

I never intended to frustrate, but I did intend to provoke, to start a deep conversation about Purpose. I feel my questions remain unanswered to this day.

Coming out of that experience, I think there are three critical questions for public media companies (and any company, really) to answer for themselves:

• Who are you? (identity, not branding)
• Why are you here? (mission or purpose)
• Why do you deserve my — or anyone’s — support or participation? (case for support, call to participation)

And the challenge isn’t getting some disengaged committee trapped in a conference room for half a day to give any old answer; the challenge is giving good answers to these questions. Simple, clear answers in human-scale English; answers that are inspiring, trustworthy, honest and needed.

We need Purpose. Shared purpose. Reasons for getting out of bed in the morning. Reasons for showing up at work early and working late. A purpose to power us when it feels like the ship is sinking.

Is continuity enough?

In The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki says that one mission a startup can have (among others) is, “Prevent the end of something good.” It feels like that’s much of the Purpose out there in public media land today. Budgets shrink. Staffs shrink. Advertising income shrinks. And so on. So pubmedia professionals are working doubly hard to keep the ship afloat.

But I would say Kawasaki misses a point: Continuity of something old, something anachronistic, is not enough to keep people energized; it’s not something many people can get Passionate about.

People can get passionate about making something new: a house, a baby, a business, a painting. They can even be passionate about preservation in some cases (which is probably why pubcasting membership receipts are flat even as membership rolls shrink).

But media is not merely a monument to the past — it’s a living thing. We create it every day. We consume it every day. How do you gather passion for continuity of the old in perpetuity?

Personally, I think public media simply maintaining past practices until they collapse under their own economic weight is not enough, and it’s an insult to that part of the community that has moved on, media-wise, and is waiting for us.

Passion + Purpose = Meaning

Imagine a public media company that has a clear purpose. A purpose that everyone knows and understands. Imagine it filled with people passionate about that purpose. That’s a group of people making meaning for their community and for themselves. It could be music or news. It could be public service via information curation and distribution. It could be community building. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

More than anything else we seek Meaning in our lives, which to me is a unification of Passion and Purpose. I haven’t found it yet in a public media firm (though I’ve experienced flashes of it here and there — sparks and smoke that suggest a fire).

It’s time public media firms get off their duffs, articulate a clear purpose and gather a crew that’s willing to head out on the proverbial rust bucket in the North Sea to share their passion with the world.

The kids programming folks at PBS seem to have it. The news folks at NPR seem to have it. There are other pockets out there, too, I’m sure.

But the broad swath of “stations” out there need to stop whining about losses and changes and how things just aren’t the same anymore and “if only” we could do this or that “everything would be fine.” Here’s a news flash for ya: Everything IS Fine. The present is what it is. Hoping for the past to come back is a waste of energy, money and time. Give it up. Make a great future with the resources we have right now.

We have more opportunity in front of us for public service and community building now than ever imagined 40 years ago, or even 10 years ago. When you look past legacy systems, the cost of creating and sharing media today is cheaper than it’s ever been. Recording, editing, curation, distribution, aggregation, sharing — it’s unbelievable what we can do these days.

All ahead, or all reverse?

In Pirate Radio, the “Count” character (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman), remarks that these are the best days of their lives, and it’s a pretty depressing realization for him. He knew he was at the center of Passion and Purpose meeting for a brief time on a ship in the North Sea and he’d never forget it.

So here’s your takeaway question…

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

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

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

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

Get the full description here

Watch the live webcast here

See the archived copy of the webcast here (later)

by Elephants on Bicycles (Flickr)

It took longer than expected, but I finally posted notes from my PublicMediaCamp session “Creating an Online Unconference“ to the PubCamp wiki.

It’s packed with details from the session and links out to relevant materials. Not to mention two funny / instructive videos from recent Intel commercials.

From here, though, the real work begins.

I have a ton of handwritten notes I took while flying home from DC. And I’ve been thinking about this for two weeks. I plan to convert my additional notes next, fleshing out the ideas that emerged in the session in much greater detail. However, I’m concerned the project would become too wrapped up in my own thoughts of what should or shouldn’t happen with this site. I need more input.

For example, I had a good e-mail exchange recently with Kristin Calhoun at PBS. She gave me more ideas on what we could do with this new site / online service. And I’m sure she’s not the only one.

So here’s what I propose:

• You and I reach out to anyone we think might be interested in participating in the leadership of this new online community. We make them aware of what we’re talking about — point to the wiki entry — and see if they’d be interested in not only hearing more, but in shaping the future of this service from the beginning.
• Ask that everyone take this survey about the formation of the community
• We exchange e-mails, building a list of interested parties and probably moving that list to a Google Group or similar system
• We set a date for a live phone conference with everyone that’s interested in materially participating
• Meanwhile, I write up my additional notes on the community idea and post them either to the wiki or this blog, then share them with everyone
• Finally, if you’ve got ideas for the community, you take a few notes, too!

I’m excited! I think we’ve got something here. The new/digital/social media community inside public media has needed something like this for a long time — the conference that never ends, a support group and a resource for ideas and new technologies.

Let’s do it!

There are two scarcities that public service media firms can utilize immediately, and probably more that haven’t yet quickly come to mind:

1. unparalleled-quality news / information / data / analysis, especially when coupled with excellent curation
2. leadership and convening of tribes by geography and public service interest

News, even top-quality news, is not enough. Because once it’s released into the digital world, the price falls to zero or near zero, so you can’t monetize it directly. You can ask for donations to support your public service (sound familiar?), but the appeal to altruism — while it works to a degree — doesn’t achieve full financial support. (Look at the balance sheets of public media companies across the country; they don’t live by altruistic donations alone).

But just as the musician makes money from t-shirts and live events and other opportunities to “experience” the music beyond simple recordings, so too can public service media gather money via events and participation in limited-access tribes or communities of interest. Plus, the simple creation of those events and communities is a new service for most pubmedia outlets. The communities can be created online and the tribes can be led and organized offline.

I know — some of these terms may be confusing if you haven’t read Seth Godin or Jono Bacon. But that’s where public media has to go. Broadcasting is not enough. Publishing online is not enough. The public needs more, wants more and will part with money to get it.

I’m currently in Washington, DC, about to board a flight home to Anchorage. I’m still thinking about the weekend’s activities at PublicMediaCamp. I have session notes to post to the wiki, I need to edit up and post the video I shot and I need to get rolling on the project I agreed to start. Sheesh!

But for now I have 14 hours of flying, a short night, and then back to my day job. In the mean time, thanks to @corbett3000, @acarvin, @jdcoffman and everyone else that supported and attended the event.

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.

You may be wondering, “What — or who — in the world is Gravity Medium?”

Well, the short version is this:

• my name is John Proffitt, I currently live in Anchorage, Alaska and this is my blog
• I’ve worked in public media in the past (radio, TV, web and news)
• I’ve been blogging here since early 2008 on public / digital media topics
• I’ve been on Twitter — @jmproffitt — since early 2007; I also have @gravitymedium on Twitter
• I lead a Twitter community called Alaska Tweets
• I’m a huge fan of Umair Haque, Seth Godin, Robert Paterson, Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and all the hard-working web pros in public media today
• more than anything, I want the legacy values and services of traditional public media moved to the web, where I and the generations that follow me already live most of our lives

And perhaps most importantly…

• I’m damn excited to be attending PublicMediaCamp 2009 in DC!

I chose to become a “sponsor” because, well… it’s going to be a great conference (or un-conference, if you prefer) and I feel kinda bad about getting in for free. And, c’mon — let’s get real — a little blog traffic wouldn’t kill me.

Blogging & Tweeting

Right now (early October), I’m firing the blog back up with a revised site design and more postings. Plus, I’m expanding my Twitter community via @gravitymedium. Gravity Medium has been largely quiet for months as I’ve made some professional changes and as I’ve worked heavily on building a social media community in Anchorage.

The PublicMediaCamp has given me new energy to fire things back up. And I owe special thanks to both Karen Olstad, COO at WOSU Public Media and to the Energizer bunny of digital media at NPR — Andy Carvin — for suggesting I attend. They moved me from “meh” to “Yeah!” and I can’t thank them enough.

PublicMediaCamp Tweetup: Friday

Thanks to @acarvin and @jdcoffman for organizing one of my favorite things: a Tweetup!

Photos

My photos from the conference are all posted to Flickr. Check out my photos or all the photos in the Public Media Camp group.

Finding me online

If you’re looking for me anywhere online, you can find pretty much everything on my Google Profile.

So when I saw, via FriendFeed, a post from Beth Kanter — Seth Godin’s Non Post About Nonprofits: Deers in the Headlights? — I was curious. I like both Kanter’s and Godin’s work and this seemed to be generating some buzz. So I clicked over to both Kanter’s post and to the original Godin post: The problem with non.

Quite a bit of the conversation was on Kanter’s site, so I joined the fray with the following post-length comment…

I was, until recently, trying to develop engagement media practices inside a public media company. It was a disaster, but not for the reasons most nonprofit managers would point to.It wasn’t about the tiny budgets or the excessive time required. It was about EXACTLY what Godin was talking about: resistance to change and slothful, good-enough-for-a-nonprofit management practices. It was also because the traditionalists liked their ivory tower positions; they liked speaking from on high to the little people in the audience. I was told we didn’t want to get the public involved in public media — that’s too messy.

Godin has nailed it and the reason for the violent response is precisely because he nailed it.

Lots of nonprofit workers, after a while, develop a sort of victimization mythology that serves the stagnation problem. “I don’t have enough money, so I can’t do this, so I can’t make more money… woe is me. But I’ll keep at it because I’m such a nice person. And maybe someone rich will come along and notice me. It could happen!” I saw that all the time.

Is it all nonprofits? Nope. But it’s a lot of them. Of the 2 million out there, how many are really creating engaging relationships with donors or their constituents regularly? Maybe 10,000? Whatever the number is, it’s not enough.

Here are the key nonprofit organization questions you have to answer:

1. Who are you, why are you here, and why should anyone care? (And if you spit out a mission statement, you just failed step 1.)
2. What are you doing today to build authentic, meaningful relationships with donors and potential donors? (Mass mailings via any means don’t count.)
3. What are you doing today to build authentic, meaningful relationships with the individuals, firms or communities you serve? (Look up the words “authentic” and “meaningful” before you answer.)
4. What are you doing today to connect your donors and your beneficiaries, either directly or indirectly, so the donors feel energized and involved and the beneficiaries feel supported and involved, too? Or in other words, how are you building a community around your mission? (And broadcasting doesn’t count as connecting.)
5. Given #1, what tools will best help you handle #2-4? (Notice I made no mention of Twitter or any other social media tool.)

charity:water is just the beginning. There’s a new generation of donors growing up right now and they won’t take your call or your e-mail or your mass mailing. But they will respond to an earnest call for help, especially from a friend they know. The next-gen trick is to be that friend first.

Nonprofits had best start making new friends. Because the old ones are dying and the broadcast campaigns (e-mail blasts, newsletters, appeal letters) will largely die with them. There’s still a place for building awareness, but action will come via relationships.

Godin’s pointing all this out through this post, his recent Tribes book and plenty of other posts. It’s a tough message, especially if you’re a “victim” inside a change-averse nonprofit (or a for-profit, for that matter!).

From here, you can deal with it — seeking new ways to engage your community — or just hope he’s wrong.

Frankly, I think it’s more fun to engage with your community regardless of what Godin says. But if proving Godin wrong sounds more fun to you, enjoy.

What I didn’t mention in my comment was my own immediate experience with fundraising for a cause via social media — via connections built across my own “community.” It was a small, first effort. But it was the collective action of a group of people with no nonprofit organization whatsoever. We came together to help a friend we’d literally never met.

For my generation and especially for Generations Y and Z, the old impersonal “broadcast” approaches used in public media and across the nonprofit spectrum will have diminishing returns.

But if I know you and you know me and we know we care about one another in some meaningful way — if we’re engaged in each other’s lives — the support will be there.

–

Things are tough all over the public media world these days. But if you think you’ve got it bad, you should try working in the Alaska public media world. It’s brutal.

In case you hadn’t heard or figured it out, I was fired from APTI back in March, along with our news director, ostensibly for failing to “align” with the CEO’s preferred — and secret — strategy of merging all the public radio and TV operations in the state into a single company (there are roughly 25 separate companies). We were firings #3 and #4 from a management team of 7, all in less than a year. The GM hired a personal friend to replace us literally the next day. Oh, and the rest of those 7 managers? Only 1 is left, and that position was demoted below management level last year.

So if you’re feeling down about pay freezes, furloughs or being laid off, just be glad you’re not living with this series of unfortunate events (and these are just the ones from memory)…

August 2008

• APTI (Anchorage): Reorganization – General Manager (GM) fires Communications/TV and Development directors; no one hired to replace them

December 2008

• APTI (Anchorage): Award-winning and beloved statewide program, “AK” is canceled, staff terminated

February 2009

• APTI (Anchorage): GM decides a statewide merger of all public radio and TV stations into a single company is the strategy of the future; GM doesn’t announce his intentions to the rest of the company or the other stations in the state — stations that have been suspicious Anchorage would try this one day
• KTOO (Juneau): It’s revealed — privately — that the Juneau-based stations are roughly $250,000 in the hole due to falling underwriting sales and other issues
• KUAC (Fairbanks): It’s revealed — privately — that the Fairbanks stations and statewide TV service (AlaskaOne) lose roughly $1,000,000 per year, but the University of Alaska Fairbanks fills in the financial hole annually

March 2009

• APTI (Anchorage): Strategy change! News/content and broadcasting/web directors fired; GM’s personal friend hired to replace them (a print journalist and professor with no broadcast or public media experience)
• KUAC (Fairbanks): GM quits to take a job out of state; he’s not replaced

May 2009

• KTOO (Juneau): Company scales back operations, eliminating positions and cutting pay/benefits due to cash shortfalls
• APTI (Anchorage): Long-time HR manager and financial analyst (the kind that knows where all the bodies are buried) retires
• CoastAlaska reporters are secretly asked to make reporting contingency plans, in case the statewide news network — APRN, run by APTI in Anchorage — collapses in the new fiscal year due to lack of payment from disgruntled and financially distressed stations

June 2009

• KUAC (Fairbanks): Radio station goes off the air due to busted automation system
• KUAC (Fairbanks): Company is officially reported to be $450,000 in the hole; station cuts staff and more
• APTI (Anchorage): CFO quits to take a job out of state; Director of Engineering quits to take a job out of state; new hire for HR/Finance position quits a couple weeks after starting
• KYUK (Bethel): GM — a nationally-known pubmedia veteran — literally dies on the job, only a few months short of retirement, shocking the station and community

About that last item… I met with and worked with KYUK’s GM a few times. He was one of the good guys. He resurrected the station’s finances and dealt with the privations of living in rural Alaska — a far cry from his decades of work in the Lower 48. I won’t name him here as that’s not really my right to do so — you can look him up if you’d like. But I can say I sure wish he had taken the GM job in Anchorage back in mid-2007. Things could have turned out very differently for a great group of people that have persevered through so many challenges in the last few years. They don’t deserve the chaos they’ve inherited.

Crystal Ball Time

I have no idea what the future holds for public media in Alaska. Public radio — of the rebroadcasting NPR variety practiced in Anchorage — is probably pretty safe, barring straight-up mismanagement. Pubradio gathers a good chunk of change in Anchorage and the cost structure is comparatively light. Public TV is another story. The cost of merely rebroadcasting prepackaged material is excessive and traditional TV production is out of the question for pretty much all the stations in Alaska (without special project funding, which goes to outside contractors anyway).

Internet effects on the business models are definitely coming to urban Alaska, as are demographic shifts that represent brand new media consumption habits for which public media outlets aren’t really prepared, at least not here on the continent’s edge. Those changes will occur slowly, accumulating quietly until, one day, it’s just too late for the old guard to meet the new challenges, and that’s when public media either gets more government funding (a bailout) or it just disappears.

For the Alaska stations, and especially APTI in Anchorage, the biggest problem remains the same one I identified when I started working there in late 2004: You must answer two questions: [1] Who are you? and [2] Why are you here?

Those questions remained unanswered for my entire career in Alaska’s public media world, no matter how many times I asked or how hard I pressed for an answer. (The current GM thinks he answered those questions with a “strategic planning” process everyone regarded as a waste of time.) But without knowing, deeply, the answers to those seemingly-simple questions, it doesn’t matter what “strategy” you have — you’ll drift, you’ll live off the good intentions of past supporters. Without those two answers your future will be created by fate, happenstance, luck and disaster rather than by coordinated effort around a shared, meaningful goal that’s relevant to the world today.

But enough of all that. What happens next in the 49th state’s 50th year? Hopefully nothing worthy of adding to the harrowing list above. Public media up here needs a breather.

And maybe, one day, new leadership.

–

UPDATE: 15 Sep 2011

A few weeks back, the other shoe dropped. APTI and the other Alaska stations officially gave up on merging the stations together into a unified company. They are continuing to look at unifying the TV service.

This is both a relief and a vindication.

In the months leading up to my ouster, I was clear with the CEO in that I opposed the organizational merger concept, though I agreed that the TV services should be unified since they were so deeply and unnecessarily duplicative.

In place of pursuing a merger, I specifically recommended the organization spend its energies on reconnecting with the local community, not trying to create some mythical “all Alaska” media firm. There were so many things we could do to create meaning and value locally, in Anchorage, that we didn’t need to create a bunch of new work, namely beating back the obvious wishes of those local Boards and communities we’d have to take over.

Now that the merger push is dead, Alaskans that favor local public media can breathe a sigh of relief. Too bad it took 3 years of dragged-out talks and $88,000 of CPB money to get here. I should have just charged CPB $44,000 for the advice I gave on Day 1 and they could have pocketed the other half.

The last thing still under consideration: merging the TV signals into one. This is a slam-dunk and should have been pursued years ago. Oh, wait… it was!

Many years ago (the mid-1990s) 3 of the 4 Alaska public TV stations merged their signals into AlaskaOne. Anchorage was the only hold-out — they wanted to retain local control and — the real reason — local fundraising (cha-ching!). Back then, local PBS stations were pretty localized and raised a lot more money. But over the years all the stations converged on the same schedules as PBS tightened control over common carriage and everyone gave up local production and scheduling capacity as their fundraising and ad sales collapsed.

Today, merging Anchorage into the AlaskaOne family should just be done. The schedules are carbon copies anyway. Hell, I’ve been in favor of PBS just going all C-SPAN and taking the signal national and being done with it. But that’s another story. For now, let’s hope AlaskaOne finally captures Anchorage public TV and APTI turns its attention further and further toward local media and local public services.

Well, except for all the money made by rebroadcasting NPR stuff.