I hate the word “community.” It’s a catch-all word that means so many things it feels like it means nothing. When I use it I feel a little silly.
Yet there’s not really a good replacement for the word. Or at least I haven’t found one I like.
Check out a thesaurus — is there anything that can both refer to a geographically-bound collection of individuals while also referring to a group of individuals that are naturally cohesive around a shared affinity?
Society has too many connotations of snootiness or political implications (“The Great Society”). Association is usually attached to the name of a lobbying group. Neighborhood is nice and informal, but it’s too geographically-bound and too small-scale. Nothing else quite matches “community” in terms of flexibility and meaning, right?
If anyone has a better term, please share it in the comments. I really would like to find another word I can use interchangeably with this term.
This Week in Tech (TWiT) is a great little tech-oriented podcast with a broad international following (somwhere north of 200,000 weekly listeners). But on the March 31 show they went off the tech industry track and tackled issues related to news, newspapers, news radio, NPR, podcasts, blogs, Twitter, reporting and more.
Public media folks may be interested to hear how folks that work in media — but outside our industry niche — talk about what we’re doing and the major trends affecting everyone publishing everything.
You can listen to and/or download this week’s episode here.
Robert Paterson continued the hit parade of great writing while I was away and there are two do-not-miss pieces that public media folks should have read. If you haven’t yet be sure to check these out…
Look deep into the idea of Membership and you will find it is usually about if you do this we will do that. Or it may be if you don’t do this we will go off the air. The word Tawdry comes to my mind.
But he’s not really writing about membership or pledge or ratings, in the end. His piece talks about building relationships through shared experiences and values. It’s the essence of “social media” and what we do when we’re at our best today and what we must do to build a sustainable future that has shared meaning for a media outlet and a group of media consumers.
If you want to get a handle on how/why social media will trump mass media in time, this is where you start reading.
The Mystery of Attraction on the web – Luis Suarez This piece is a little more personal and for public media folks requires a little more reading between the lines. While Paterson describes an experience of meeting a new person via social media tools online (which in itself is fascinating), the real meaning comes later as he discusses how online media is closing the loop on human social patterns that began before recorded history. Technology may in fact be recreating social models that have been broken (by technology) over the past 100 years or so.
I know — that sounds really big and really out there. But be sure to read the piece in full and all the comments. My own experience is beginning to parallel Paterson’s due to three changes in my life: first, I live in a smaller community than in the past; second, I work in public media (which is a tiny community); and third, through online tools like blogs, Twitter and more I’m finding others that are grappling with issues similar to mine and interacting with them. My “community” is deepening at a time when society as a whole is becoming much more shallow.
Some choice passages:
We most of all wish to live in a village – in a tribe – the web enables us to find the best village and tribe possible as it offers us the choice of the whole world to find the best matches rather than having to make the best of our blood and local pool.
…
It means that we have to rethink the whole idea of “local”. My village is made up of people who live all over the world. I have closer ties to them than to most that live 10 miles away from me.
It means that community as far as My Community cannot scale beyond a small town. Otherwise there is too much noise.
It means that those who wish to design for community would be advised to follow the rules of community in real life – In real life, we scale out from those that mean the most to us to the noise.
…
So if you worked for a TV or radio station and you accepted this realty – how would you approach connecting to your city?
For public media folks that wish to move from mass media to social media, these ideas are critical. The tribe — as described here and repeatedly by Seth Godin — is not just some marketing-speak. It’s about shared experience and shared values, and it’s a path to establishing a new and enduring meaning for public media. After all, haven’t we promoted the idea that public media are the beacons of quality in a world of crass quantity? Well, now we have the chance to live up to the talk.
We won’t be everybody’s best friend, but we can aim to be in the smallest, tightest circle possible with those that share and value our public service ideals.
I’m assuming that everyone in the public media universe (especially those with FCC licenses of one kind or another) already knows about the Broadcast Law Blog published by law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP.
If it’s not already in your RSS reader or list of sites to review regularly, be sure to get it in there. The FCC, under the direction of telco-loving politico Kevin Martin, has been very busy in the last year proposing new rules on all kinds of stuff related to broadcasters. And it’s not little niggling things — this is big stuff that will impact operating costs, reporting activities and more.
Naturally, you should consult with your own attorney before embarking on any changes or new plans, but this is sound coverage of FCC changes and how they relate to broadcasters.
Just a quick editorial note. I’ve been away for a week, taking a brief vacation with family in sunny southern California. So the site’s been kind of sleepy. But I’m back now and getting into the swing of things.
Just for fun, here’s a little Flip video I shot on the beach. A little Zen moment to start out the week.
Tech writer David Pogue has a great little piece up today explaining why using Web 2.0 (interactive) technologies and methods are important for any company. Public media is no different, of course, and if we are supposedly community-focused, then it means even more sense that we open the doors to the public. (It’s always surprised me how little the “public” appears in public media.)
He has a particularly funny example from an internal — yet open-to-the-public — disussion at Microsoft regarding whether the game Minesweeper should be included with Windows.
Bottom line?
Yes, you’ll have to moderate this stuff. Yes, it means spending money with no immediately visible return on investment. Yes, it’s more work for everyone.
But you’ll gain trust, goodwill and positive attention. You’ll put a human face on your company. And you’ll learn stuff about your customers that you wouldn’t have discovered any other way.
Funny how trust comes up first in his list of benefits. Sound familiar?
Current published an in-depth article on the NPR / Ken Stern story this week. I’ve updated my list of articles to include it, and it’s a great read on its own. It summarizes a large swath of the Stern history at NPR and points to several core reasons why things just didn’t work out.
I actually came away from this profile liking Ken Stern quite a bit. Did he fit well into the CEO slot? Perhaps not. But he did some great work for NPR. And to everyone’s credit — except a sour-grapes Bob Edwards — the comments from board members and others were incredibly even-handed.
TV stations and professional staffs — commercial and noncommercial alike — have been around for more than a generation. Television started in the middle of the last century and since then thousands of people across the country have built careers upon the technologies, processes and the advertising dollars that flowed freely for decades. A complex art and science, TV demanded workers develop expertise with an arcane and complex set of tools for their unique work. Creating a high-quality TV show was impossible without armies of specialists to turn all the required knobs and punch all the required buttons at synchronized moments.
Money from national and local advertisers flowed easily to television stations — the mass medium of choice that gave advertisers access to an impossibly huge audience; an audience bigger than the daily newspapers; an audience bigger than any single radio station. Advertising money built the industry, dollar by dollar, viewer by viewer. It’s been a great ride.
But those days are coming to an end. Actually, they’ve already ended. Advertisers and TV execs have simply been slow to realize it and are only now starting to act. (Think of it as the music industry, circa 1995.)
Why? What’s happened in the TV market to make stations swing from cash-rich to cash-poor in just the last 10 years? What’s bankrupting the system? And is this a permanent trend or just a temporary blip? Here’s the answer in less than 5 minutes:
The economic model of traditional TV has imploded as the viewing options have exploded (not to mention all the competing technologies that have emerged in the last 10 years, exacerbating the problem). And as the money for TV broadcasting goes away, the ability to produce programming similarly dries up.
For small and midsize public television stations (not the rich behemoths like WGBH) that want to produce original programs of public value, the path ahead is actually pretty clear and comprises two primary modes:
Big TV. Large-scale high-end TV productions will be few and far between. They will be funded as independent projects, will mostly involve outside contractors rather than inside employees, and will draw most of their funding from external one-off granting sources. Public media companies might manage or “host” these projects, but we won’t fund them from operating cash. When 1 or 2 hours of “PBS quality” video costs $250,000+ to produce, it’s clear the economics are beyond the meager budgets of smaller stations.
Small video. Ongoing local productions must scale back to one person + camera + laptop, in variations of the VJ (video journalist) model, as espoused by Michael Rosenblum and others. These small productions must be aimed at multiplatform niche distribution rather than mass entertainment. Plus — an important second fact — we won’t produce all this content by ourselves. We’ll curate and collaborate in ways that will make the traditionalists scoff and sputter. In the end, “TV” folks will either become multifunctional “video” folks or will have to leave for production jobs at specialty video houses.
And that’s just the short-term transformational model (up to 5 years), focused on video content production. It’s quite possible that owning an actual television station (the licenses, the towers, the impossibly heavy technical infrastructure) will become economically unsustainable rather quickly as new technologies chip away at TV’s traditional dominance. Indeed, owning a local over-the-air TV station is likely to be financially dangerous to all but the most efficient regional or national network owner-operators by 2015.
If we in public media believe it’s our mission to serve the public interest using digital media, then video must be part of the equation. But does “TV” have to be in the mix? In the short term, definitely. In the long term, maybe, but probably with significant strategic changes.
For now, we may not know the fate of local TV stations, but traditional TV production models are already dead. The revolution is underway. Click below for another 90-second forehead slap:
So these are the market realities. It’s up to us to decide whether these are exciting or threatening developments. Should we engage and evolve or should we hunker down and hope for a different future?
Google’s whitespace proposal makes big promises. But I know at least one TV broadcast engineer that will fight it with his dying breath. Make that two engineers. Too bad the mobile web offers a better value proposition than broadcast television.
Gravity Medium 