Category: Gravity Medium

Fresh coat of paint

Stopped by the old site for the first time in nearly 10 years and did a little sprucing up.

I was thinking of exporting the site content into a PDF and deleting it from the web. But there’s a lot of stuff here, including comments from friends past that I deeply value, and I don’t want to tear all this history down, even if some of it can be a little cringe-inducing.

So I’ve done a little cleanup with a newer theme, fonts, header, and so on. I’m updating the About page as well, to reflect changes in how to find me. For example, I have abandoned Twitter in the wake of the Musk Meltdown of 2022, fully deleting my account (just like I did with Facebook in 2018). That was hard to do — I started on Twitter in 2007 and made a lot of friends, especially in Alaska and across the digital community inside public media.

But life, and the Internet, moves on. (Except, apparently, WordPress, which is still kicking and getting better. They even seem poised to join the Fediverse in some fashion this year.)

These days (early 2023) you’ll find me here:

If you’ve stopped by, say hello anytime, anywhere.

Goodbye #GamerGate

Via Twitter, I happened upon Rob Pegoraro’s post — A grab-bag of #GamerGate responses — and his comments rang true after following the story for a while and after getting attacked on Twitter by sock-puppet accounts operated by the young and the deluded. #GamerGate has been a big deal in the tech world for a while now, but I think we’re finally seeing it die.

Here are my own thoughts after reading Rob’s piece, and after more than a week of watching this train wreck…

You’re either naive or lying

The call for a “pure” form of games journalism — one free of graft or political intermingling of producers and reviewers — is either

  1. driven by hard-core gamers that tend to be young and poorly informed about the world, or
  2. an intentional cover-up of the deep and ugly misogyny that started the whole GamerGate mess, or
  3. a little Column A, a little Column B

Every industry, every job, and every aspect of public life has ethical dimensions. Some people walk one side of the line while others walk the opposite. That’s life. You have to assess which side a given writer is coming from and take an appropriately-sized grain of salt with what they say. It’s true for every form of journalism, commentary, blogging, prognosticating, business, politics, relationships — everything.

People talk about the cozy relationships of the press and the political class all the time. It’s the subject of TV and radio shows, blogs, books, podcasts, speeches… there’s an endless discussion about ethical dilemmas created by these relationships (and rightly so). But they don’t slap “-gate” at the end of every media analysis show and then threaten to kill a few women for participating in the conversation.

So either GamerGaters are deeply naive about the real world — which is lamentable but means we can ignore them — or this violent call to arms over ethics is really just a cover for the violence itself.

Or, again, a little Column A, a little Column B.

When attacking women, the safe word is “ethics”

I suspect this #GamerGate mess can be boiled down to a simple sequence of events brought about when both kinds of GamerGaters (the naives and the misogynists) came together around the hashtag itself. The “pivot” from misogyny to ethics worked like this:

  1. A few prominent games voices took note of several things surrounding the dissolution of the gamer identity via the arrival of new thinkers, producers, and ideas as the games world expanded. With just a few posts, the scapegoating and anger quickly gelled around those “outsiders”: women, and especially women that took public positions out of step with hardcore games culture. There were some interesting elements in this phase that focused on ethics, but they were relatively minor. Still, this is where the naives and misogynists first teamed up, but for different reasons.
  2. The attacks quickly went way over the top, driven by the misogynists, which attracted attention from responsible writers in the games world. Once cooler heads showed up saying, “You guys are disgusting…” the naive attackers realized, “Maybe this doesn’t look so good from the outside…” and turned their attention to the journalists themselves and cried out, “It’s about ethics!” And there’s just enough meat on that bone to make a soup, so it’s the perfect diversionary pivot.
  3. As #GamerGate flame wars continued to expand (and get automated with bots), it even got the attention of mainstream journalism and culture, but not in the way the GamerGaters hoped. Everyone — outside of hardcore misogynists and naive GamerGaters — was utterly horrified. The full-on mainstream cultural backlash began, including articles in major publications that exposed the horror and didn’t give a rip about any #GamerGate reactions. (Sadly the games press was stunned by the controversy and couldn’t mount an effective backlash themselves.)

Game Over. Insert 25 cents to continue.

So that’s where we are today: #GamerGate Over. Even celebrities are speaking out against it.

The only folks still beating the “games journalism ethics” drum at this point are folks that don’t yet realize the war is over and #GamerGate lost: the naives and the folks that feel guilty for saying some truly awful things.

Pro Tip: If you want to discuss games journalism ethics now — and by all means, go for it — you’ll need a new hashtag. This one’s ruined.

New year, new focus

I’ve been spending a lot of time over on Google+ these days, adding posts, sharing links, and so forth. But that work is kinda of disappearing into the ether, partially because Google+ is not my site — it’s Google’s site — and partially because it’s a giant site with a relatively small number of users.

So I’m going to move back here to Gravity Medium and start doing my commenting, sharing, posting, and so forth on “my own property”, so to speak.

But I’m also going to change focus a bit.

To learn more about the new Gravity Medium for 2014, check out my updated About page.

What’s high in the middle and round on both ends?

Downtown Columbus

BIG NEWS. I will be leaving Alaska at the end of July. I’m headed to the Columbus, Ohio area.

I’m moving south to be closer to family, especially my parents, who live in the Toledo, Ohio area. After the move I’ll be 2.5 hours away from them by car, instead of 12 hours away by nearly-$1,000 airplane flights. Meanwhile I also have family in Louisville, the Twin Cities, western Massachusetts, and Florida. Columbus is a good location for being closer to all of them, not to mention it has a great mainstream American culture and diversified economy. I’m also sorta-kinda from there, having completed high school and graduate school in the area.

I’ve been in Alaska for over 12 years now, which is amazing, because I always thought Alaska would be something I’d try just for a couple years. But those “couple years” kept extending as I got to do some meaningful work in my career, met some great people, and learned how to live in the Land of Extremes.

I will leave in the closing days of July, driving down the Alaska Highway (a favorite experience of mine). My wife Stephanie will follow in the early fall. I’ll share more about the move, my career changes, and so forth in the days to come, both here and over on Google+.

Get ready for 2013. It’s time for some changes.

black-hole-banner

When I left public media I kept up this blog for a while, but naturally it’s fallen out of favor when competing for my time and attention. I’ve since moved back into the IT world, worked almost exclusively with nonprofits, and now I’m working in healthcare IT within a nonprofit. For me, this has been a great move — I like technology, I like working with nonprofits, and healthcare is a fast-moving industry. Put it all together and it keeps me busy.

But I’ve missed blogging. Even my Twitter habit has fallen by the wayside in the last couple years, especially as I worked on a massive project throughout 2012: opening a new healthcare facility with an built-from-scratch IT infrastructure.

The new facility work is wrapping up now, and while there’s always plenty to do at the office, I figure I’ve got some insights I’d like to share, and I’d like to engage in some conversations with folks out there that do the same kind of work I do every day.

So I’m coming back to blogging. It just won’t be about public media.

I thought about leaving gravitymedium.com behind and getting a new domain. Hell, I actually bought a few domain names and even set a couple up. I created new Twitter accounts, even a unique Google+ account and a Google Apps domain. But I kept coming back to my first domain, where I’ve put in so much work over the years, and I just can’t give it up. So I’m not.

Gravity Medium will remain my blogging home online, but since my focus is shifting, so will the blog. New topics will include healthcare and small business IT, nonprofit and technology management, consumerization of tech, data security, privacy, and so on — all the things I’m busy with professionally and want to share. And naturally, I’m hoping some of the folks out there doing the same work I’m doing will be interested in sharing their comments and ideas, too.

So here we go. The new year is upon us. And I’m taking this blog supernova.

I’ve moved… to WordPress.com

This blog has moved. Here’s the short update:

  • Gravity Medium was started back in 2008 on a self-hosted copy of WordPress on a hosting provider.
  • The blog has been pretty much dead since mid-2010 and I don’t really intend to revive it, yet I don’t want to take down the content, either.
  • Keeping the content in a self-hosted solution was costing me money each month.
  • Moving to WordPress.com is my preferred solution — leave all the updates and security to the pros and drop my monthly cost to zero.
  • Meanwhile, in late April 2011, my self-hosted WordPress site — which was outdated a bit in versions — was hacked. I started to clean it up, but figured, “why bother?” and just pulled the trigger on the move to WordPress.com.

So here we are.

One important note — not all the content from the old self-hosted site is going to work perfectly here. Static images and photos moved, but a lot of embedded media (videos, audio clips) didn’t make it correctly. I’ll try to fix most of that in the coming weeks, but no promises — it’s a pain in the butt and all the posts are pretty old at this point.

If you run into a post that’s missing its media and you want to see it, just Tweet me and I’ll reconnect the media for you.

Leaving KETC: It Was Just One of Those Things

Newsflash: I’m no longer working for KETC in St. Louis.

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.

Why Mobile DTV is DOA

This week I’ve been enjoying a private e-mail exchange with someone working in the Mobile DTV technology space. And since I’ve invested some time into shaping my thoughts, I wanted to include everyone in the conversation.

Of course, this is only my side of the discussion, as I don’t have permission to post the full thread.

In short, I was pitched on some points of why I’ve been wrong about Mobile DTV so far. Needless to say, I haven’t changed my opinions. But I have fleshed them out a bit…

On Spectrum Efficiency

Mobile DTV is often touted as being highly spectrum-efficient when compared to delivering video via the web and 3G/4G wireless networks, and technically I agree it is. But consumers don’t care. And carriers don’t care. Indeed, carriers would rather consumers “waste” their spectrum than allow usage to shift to broadcast spectrum — which is beyond their balance sheets.  Better to build out spectrum capacity and charge for it than allow free over-the-air broadcasts if you’re AT&T or Verizon or Sprint and so forth. The spectrum argument is attractive to engineers and engineering-minded bureaucrats. But it’s a non-starter in the broader market.

On Consumer Usage Patterns

Consumers use video in a fairly limited way when mobile — they consume it in little bites here and there, they don’t generally watch whole shows. You won’t watch a full episode of Judge Judy standing in line at the bank (hopefully!). To effectively serve that narrow niche, broadcasters would have to engineer new niche program streams separate from their core broadcast services. But local broadcasters don’t know how to do that efficiently and I would argue the business models of niche markets are so different they can’t do it. National third parties could do programming and distribute it, but they can do that via the Internet already, so why negotiate with hundreds of cranky terrestrial broadcast corporations already losing money? Bite-sized program streams and content snippets are tailor-made for web economics and direct distribution.

On Technology Changes

Broadcast companies are setup around long-term business models — buy your transmitter and run it for 20 or 30 years.  When I worked in public TV in Alaska I discovered this problem: the business leaders and engineers were repeatedly upset by the fact that they had to buy and re-buy equipment, software and services endlessly as the DTV and HD systems came in the door and were upgraded / replaced as fast as every 2-3 years (because those systems were built on rapidly-changing IT gear). Sure, those engineers are learning to cycle faster, but the balance sheets of these corporations likely aren’t keeping pace. Mobile DTV would be yet another rapidly-cycling technology cost depressing profits.

Furthermore, mobile devices are undergoing incredibly rapid development. The arrival of the iPad, the new iPhone (presumably in June), constantly-improving Android devices and so forth are changing the game far too rapidly for Mobile DTV — a niche technology — to keep up. Chipsets would have to change too fast, software would have to change too fast and that would affect both users and broadcasters. Consider the problem of adding H.264 to the ATSC standard — when will that reach consumers?

When there are already perfectly good ways to deliver video online to millions of users, making the argument for yet another layer of complexity and cost for manufacturers, carriers, software developers, broadcasters and users just doesn’t make sense. Mobile DTV is an awesome buggy whip for an age when cars are rapidly taking hold.

On Interactivity

My correspondent suggested Mobile DTV 2.0 (the next revision, not the current one) could bring interactivity to the mix. Stop right there — I’ve heard this before! It was one of many hyped ideas in standard DTV and it has never come true.  In an age of the web — the ultimate interactive platform — the notion that Mobile DTV can out-web the web is delusional. That’s what a salesman from a Mobile DTV vendor will tell you: “Wait until version 2!”  I’d give up on the interactivity notion right away because that platform is already built. It’s called the Internet (and you’re soaking in it!).

On Killer Devices and Use Cases

If Mobile DTV is to be useful to a mass audience, it’s likely to be as a supplement to the in-car DVD player we see today, assuming the chipset is cheap enough to add to these devices.  (HD Radio / iBiquity made a huge mistake by charging upwards of $50 per device for licensing, thus stunting adoption to this day.)  But if you can get “TV” on your in-car DVD player, that would make sense to me.  A combined DTV / Mobile DTV chipset would be ideal, to allow for stationary and mobile viewing. For an RV user, that would be great.

As for uses, anything real-time is ideal. Traffic, weather, news alerts, sports, etc.  Sadly, traffic updates are already available on GPS devices, which is where they’re more useful anyway (though some have suggested GPS and Mobile DTV functions could be merged in one device).  And weather would be nice, but it’s not critical because it’s rare that real-time weather alerts are all that important.  News alerts would be good, but that’s available via news radio programming, so you have built-in competition there.  Sports is okay, but again, there’s radio. Finally, at some point you’ll have a computer in the car hooked to the Internet that will gather and share ALL that information and more via voice command and display.

So while we can imagine some applications for Mobile DTV, the use-cases proposed are either too narrowly-defined to be market-relevant or are duplicated via web-based functionality.

On Smartphones

Mobile DTV has been heavily promoted as an add-on chipset and feature for smartphones. The resolution of Mobile DTV is so low (less than 480p currently) that’s not an issue. Indeed, the latest Android devices and the next iPhone have very high resolution screens, making native Mobile DTV images small enough to fit in a “window” on these devices! Indeed, on the next (rumored) iPhone you’ll be able to both shoot and watch HD video (720p) on an HD-capable screen (960×640).

For Mobile DTV to even approach viability for broadcasters and users, it will have to be ubiquitous in smartphones — the soon-to-be-dominant interactive platform for the next 10 years. But to really catch on, Mobile DTV broadcasters and programming would have to be ready on Day 1 across most of the U.S. (highly unlikely). Even assuming that feat were accomplished, just compare the coverage patterns of terrestrial TV and 4G/3G/2G wireless. I think we can already see the Internet will beat local terrestrial broadcast for smartphones.

Predictions

My own predictions in the mobile space related to Mobile DTV:

  • Smartphone devices (from iPhone-size to iPad-size) will be the central interactive communications platforms for a majority of the U.S. as laptop and desktop PCs begin to decline (Apple already knows this, HP just recently figured this out). Mobile media creation and consumption will be centered on these highly mobile devices. They will trend toward being smart devices hooked to data pipes with increasingly smart traffic management, prioritization and multicasting to profitably manage traffic growth.
  • In-car entertainment will remain dominated by radio (not HD Radio) for 10-15 years, but will have strong growth in 3G/4G-based Internet application platforms (Pandora, etc.) as car manufacturers spread those devices and subsidized connections (a la OnStar) to more car models. Entertaining kids in the car will be done via DVD and/or stored video on smartphone-lite devices (iPod Touch, iPad) because parents want control over what the kids watch and broadcast doesn’t offer that control.
  • Any other devices that gain wide adoption will be single-purpose simple devices that prove their value on their own, not in combination with other devices. Smartphones will be the primary multi-function devices (convergence devices). Everything else has to stand alone (divergence devices).
  • Satellite radio will survive, but will never be as dominant as terrestrial radio.
  • Internet radio — via mobile devices — will grow, but will not surpass terrestrial radio for 10-15 years and may never surpass terrestrial radio if programming evolves appropriately.
  • Mobile DTV will not gain significant traction with broadcasters (engineers love it, business people don’t) or users (the use-cases are too weak). At best it can hope for penetration rates similar to HD Radio.
  • Mobile interactivity (or interactivity in general) will be more important than mobile passive media consumption. That is, people would rather interact with social networks than passively consume media while mobile.

Conclusions

I have nothing technically against Mobile DTV. It’s a significant achievement in that sense. But I can’t see how it makes it big in this mediasphere. The stars are aligned against it. It’s Dead On Arrival.

Our TV engineering friends shouldn’t feel bad, though. Even the brilliant engineering minds working at Google make amazing technologies that just don’t catch on (Knol, Buzz, Wave, Profiles, Voice, Chat, etc.).

Sadly, this is getting to be a pattern in the TV world… DTV was a great idea 15 years before it was finally implemented. Now it’s mostly irrelevant because the vast majority of mainstream America is already on cable/satellite and has been for years. Mobile DTV is just a weaker echo of DTV: too little, too late.

Given this analysis, all I can do is hope public TV people out there avoid spending too much time or money on this distraction.

That said, if lobbyists get to Congress and force-feed you Mobile DTV via “free” CPB appropriations (that won’t cost you later), take the money and run! Hell, HD Radio was similarly “free” to most public radio stations in recent years — no harm done there (but no realization of HD Radio’s promise, either).

Of course, pull out this post and rub my nose in it 5 years from now if I’m wrong. I could easily be wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Why RevolutionPBS should be engaged, not dismissed

1. Treat insularity as a weakness. If you don’t seriously consider your opponents’ best arguments, you’ll be unprepared to answer them. If you don’t engage people whose premises differ from yours, you’ll never learn to persuade them and broaden your movement. If you don’t heed changes in the country’s needs and political climate, you’ll fail to adapt and survive. A conservative who matches wits with the New York Times every day is stronger than one who mainlines Fox.

via slate.com

Great piece over on Slate from William Saletan focused on the notion of “echo chambers” and how to break out of the trap of groupthink. He focuses on the conservative / liberal thinking divide, but the 10 tips on how to escape the chamber apply to all fields of debate.

In the case of public media, and specifically public television, this is why I’ve advocated that we engage the conversation with Revolution PBS. Let’s keep the conversation going. Otherwise we’re just maintaining history without a thought given to why.