Tech / Media / Strategy / Culture
If you’re not already subscribed to the Pew Internet & American Life project reports, go ahead and get the RSS feed or add the site to your browsing plans. They’ve got two reports out this week:
The Pew Internet reports are great for survey data and some broad conclusions about trends of Internet usage in the United States, oftentimes broken down by demographics.
For those of you a little confused by Twitter, everyone’s pals at Common Craft put together this intro video, another in a great series of introductory pieces on popular Internet / Web 2.0 technologies.
One of the things that’s interested me since I entered public media in the fall of 2004 was the relationship between public media today and public media as originally intended under the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act. I’ve wondered, are we still the institution we were meant to be? If not, is that good or bad?
Sparking more of this thinking today was a video linked by Gerd Leonhard. It was produced by Denver OpenMedia and explains the TV and mass media landscape of today and looks at how distribution, content and democracy are linked via mass media. It also focuses on Public Access television, a distinctly different style of television from public broadcasting, but one that shares at least some DNA with pubcasting’s origins.
It’s a great 30 minute introduction to understanding media — public or commercial. Highly recommended, mostly because it puts the economic model of historic TV into clear relief.
NOTE: The video is after the “read more” link because it auto-starts and I didn’t want to place it on my home page directly.
Robert Paterson has begun a multi-part series on innovation in the public media space around the country. For anyone laboring on new media projects or working to promote new media (especially connective community media), this is a must-read series.
The posts so far…
I’m expecting more posts soon, probably on KETC‘s work in St. Louis (building community around shared media and history), WOSU‘s work in Columbus (bringing the online community into station engagement), and Ideastream in Cleveland (blending a dual licensee with fellow nonprofits and the community).
Back in the midst of the IMA 2008 conference Doc Searls posted a brief, yet deep, article on what he sees for the future of public media (with an open source perspective).
For anyone looking to find a way forward for public media — whether inside legacy public broadcasting companies or in new freestanding nonprofit entities — this listing of core assumptions and tenets is critical to know and see.
My own favorite excerpts:
- The market for public media will finally become… conversational and participatory.
- There will be a new business model for public media, based on the ability of listeners and viewers to pay as much as they want, for whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want.
- Membership will mean more than schwag and promotion payoffs. We will cease to conflate transaction with relationship, and start relating to listeners and viewers in ways that conform to the shape of their wants, need an habits as well as ours.
- Cell phones will be the new radios and televisions.
- Websites will become as inadequate as transmitters. That is, both will remain necessary but insufficient means for reaching listeners and viewers, and for relating to them.
- Archives will be the ultimate killer kontent. … Bigger inventory, bigger income.
- The end of analog terrestrial television will be a big mess and a wake-up call in more ways than we can name.
- Brands and reputations will matter more than ever. …they will be enriched or impoverished by the degrees to which they participate in a marketplace sustained by real relationships, and not just by marketing that goes by that name.
But those are just my highlights. Be sure to read the entire article for the full effect.
Gravity Medium 