Category: Gravity Medium

More BPP and innovation thinking

Earlier this week I was advised privately to wait for an announcement from NPR about BPP — without any hint of what said announcement might be — and I’m still waiting. I’d love to hear NPR announce a bold new plan to take the BPP straight to the web and change it up somehow. If anyone would care to shed additional light, I’m all ears (as are about 600 commenters on the NPR site).

In the meantime, there’s been some great pieces out there I’d like to point folks to (yeah, I know — you already saw these, but just in case…).

First up are two posts from Robert Paterson, a past NPR consultant and an avid BPP audience participant:

I’m not a fan of Paterson’s claim that the U.S. is heading into a full-blown depression (because that scares the bejesus out of me and I don’t know what to do about it), but the rest of it rings true, even if the economy were booming.

Next up is a post from Jeff Jarvis, one of my perennial faves:

(I love the title — talk about not burying the lede!)

The Jarvis piece is good, but the comments are even better.  When I visited, the first half of the comments were really insightful. And don’t miss Mindy McAdams‘ comment in there, too.

What worries me more and more is that Stephen Hill — that too-smart-for-his-own-good bastard! (and I say that with love) — is going to be proven right if we public media people don’t stop behaving like nitwits and face up to the Innovator’s Dilemma.

I’m not sure whether I have the energy to start my own public media company. Do I really have to? 😉

Web economics vs. Pubradio economics

The Bryant Park Project collapse at NPR sure has had the public media world a-twitter over the last 24 hours. I got one tip to wait for an announcement or something like that from NPR about the future of BPP. Okay. I’m waiting.

In the mean time, I just wanted to point to a simple example of how web economics differ so dramatically from traditional radio production and distribution economics. Because my central take is that the BPP could live on in a new web-focused model, one that it’s already primed to utilize. But to survive it would still need some NPR largesse — though less than it’s gotten to date.

The example I offer here is not a direct analog to the BPP situation, but it’s generally illustrative and great for fueling thought about how new media are different from old media. So here’s the post, by former Apple Computer evangelist Guy Kawasaki:

By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09

Now the $12k figure is a bit hopeful, as the founder himself was not paid for his time. That and other elements make the $12k more fanciful than real, but the point is still valid: it’s not that expensive to start and run a web-based company.

By contrast, NPR reportedly spent about $2 million on the BPP in the last year or so. For public media companies that’s a lot of money. An award-winning 1-hour-per-week radio program in my own shop in Anchorage costs around $350,000 per year to maintain (and we can’t even afford that). $2 million to NPR isn’t that much, but in real terms, it’s a lot.

In a lot of ways, it may have been better had BPP been given only $500,000 to get started.

As pointed out by Ken George in quotes he collected at WBUR’s The ConverStation, the BPP was probably destined to failure if the point was to make a radio-web hybrid. They should have made a web-radio hybrid instead, using web economics as the baseline organizing idea. Web economics scale from small to large. Radio economics, practiced by NPR and others, scale from medium to large only, and often only from large to huge.

Rob Paterson’s got the right ideas. They sound really revolutionary, and I like to think there’s a middle path of some kind where the old ideas and the new ones “can just get along.” But history will likely prove him right and anyone pushing a compromise wrong.

On the death of BPP

Well, the Bryant Park Project has less than a month left. Literally.

Was it too beautiful to live, perhaps? Hardly. I mean, can anyone really feign shock that well?

Let’s recount the strikes against this endeavor:

  • The economic downturn is hitting NPR like everyone else; news budgets are frozen and that’s just the beginning. Like any business looking to cut costs, whoever was hired last will be fired first, whether that’s a show or a person. That’s just the way it goes.
  • One of the original hosts (Burbank) — and let’s be honest, the host with real NPR cred — walked away just as the show was getting started. Talk about throwing off the rhythm.
  • The second host (Stewart) took off for maternity leave six months into the show. That can’t help.
  • Then the news anchor (Martin) left for a cush job at ABC News. (What is it with NPR people leaving a real news operation to go work for a fake news operation? Is it just the money?)
  • Plus the fill-in host (Pesca) has been splitting his time between BPP and NPR HQ the whole time.

I’m sure Matt Martinez was busting his ass every day trying to keep things rolling forward, but with a set of facts like these, what can you really do?

Add it up and can you imagine a show — any show in any format — making it to its first birthday without a hell of a lot of buy-in (political and cash) from the top?

But wait — there’s more!

  • This was fundamentally a Gen X show inside a Boomer network. What Boomer on the Board of NPR is going to protect a show they don’t air on their station, they don’t listen to and/or they don’t like?
  • This show never made it to the bulk of the listeners out there. The only people that knew about it were NPR junkies that took the time to browse the NPR web site, trolling for goodies. More might have liked it but never knew it existed.
  • In a risky economic environment, what local station program director is going to broadcast BPP instead of Morning Edition? Show of hands, please… yeah, that’s what I thought.
  • Assuming you’re a station with an HD Radio transmitter and you could program BPP onto a secondary channel, great! But who will hear it? Right: no one, because no one has an HD Radio. (BPP could be an Internet success because iPods and computers far outnumber HD Radios.)
  • Though BPP was successful on the web (something like 1,000,000 monthly uniques), we must remember that NPR is not a media company, it is a radio company. Arbitron numbers will always be bigger than Google Analytics numbers to a radio company. NPR may be trying to change to meet the challenges/opportunites of the web (and are making huge strides for a company that size), but it’s still a radio entity, so building a show specifically for the web is not a strategic option for them. At least not today.
  • Compared to an out-of-the-garage web startup, the cost of producing BPP was astronomical. Sure, web startups in Silicon Valley can devour $2 million at a power lunch, but for NPR and public radio that’s a huge sum, especially given all the other factors noted above. Web startups don’t need that much money, but to do BPP “the NPR way” requires big salaries and budgets. It was a radio economic solution applied to what was essentially a web economic problem — that makes it unsustainable on its face.

All in all, it’s a sad day for NPR. Not so much because it lost a program that was, in truth, faltering from the start, but because the Board appears to have missed a key opportunity here.

NPR could have taken a revised BPP straight to the web and made it the flagship show of a new web-scale innovation unit. BPP could have led NPR into a future not bound by the FCC, Arbitron, legacy stations, transmitters and more. For about $1 million a year they could have jump-started the next stage of their evolution.

I’m beginning to think Gen X and Gen Y need to band together and start their own national public media service — without the parochial split between radio and TV and web. Because PBS kills quality Gen X projects, too. Oh, and Fair Game was axed by PRI recently.

By the way, read the comments on the brief BPP blog post about the cancellation. There’s an audience there, to be sure. And it’s one that could easily sustain a web-based (and web-scaled) program and service. If I had $1 million to invest, I’d definitely put it into this audience.

How people behave as their ivory tower collapses

I have no vested interest the “old order” of journalism, be it at newspapers, in public radio or elsewhere. I don’t have a journalism degree (though I do have the kissing cousin degree: English). I’ve collected a paycheck from the media world for less than 4 years now, having spent many years before that in a variety of businesses.

But I would hope that even if I had studied journalism in college, spent a 20+ year career in the field, won awards and so on that I would show a hell of a lot more professionalism and simple human decency than the ugly curs trolling one newspaper intern’s blog this week.

Admittedly, it’s a volatile situation as people are losing their jobs at the Tampa Tribune and the newspaper company is confronting the facts: if they change nothing they’re definitely dead, and even if they change everything they might still be dead. That’s a tough situation for everyone.

It’s terrible to be laid off (it’s happened to me). Layoffs cast all reason out the window in favor of pain and fear. But come on. That doesn’t give you either the right or the moral authority to attack an intern as your personal scapegoat for everything that’s “wrong” with the media industry (in your eyes).

It’s been nearly 24 hours now since I read the post — a fascinating insider look that most journalists wouldn’t share with the public (oh, the delicious irony!) — and I’m still floored by the nasty and even threatening comments made in response to the post.

If your ivory tower is collapsing, shouldn’t you be looking for a safe way out or a safe place to land?

Mr. Hooper must be turning over in his grave

Leave it to the Colbert Report to make Cookie Monster cool. I suspect the button-down types at PBS or CPB would have nixed this appearance if they owned the character rights. Luckily the folks at Sesame Workshop seem to be a lot more hip. Who knew?

The Monster appears about 2:15 into the clip and delivers lines worthy of a politician caught in a scandal. Priceless!

And just where can I buy that car that runs on imagination? Oh, the dealer’s on Sesame Street, right? Damn.

Breaking the silence; looking back, looking forward

(This is a more personal post than most. It’s not the normal fare for this blog, but I need to explain what’s been going on recently. I would put this all in Twitter updates, but I can’t do the story justice in 140 characters.)

The last few weeks have been unusual for me. Stressfully fraught with disappointment, excitement, opportunity, new ideas, reversals, and finally a resurrection of hope.

A little over a week ago I teased my Twitter friends that I had a “big announcement” to share. Then I delayed a day. Then another day. Then a couple days. Then I went silent — because I realized I had no idea how long it would take for this announcement to go from “expected” to “official.”  Now, a week later, I have a totally different announcement.
Continue reading “Breaking the silence; looking back, looking forward” →

Bob Lewis: Thirteen web commandments — from 1995

This week Bob Lewis, consultant to the information technology stars, posted a list of 13 “commandments” for the World Wide Web. It’s actually his take on a list created by a friend of his back in — get this — 1995!

The list is great, but it’s unfathomable to me that anyone understood web economics and impacts so early in the game. I mean, we’re still just figuring this stuff out, right?

Anyway, i think I’ll call this required reading: The thirteen commandments of the World Wide Web

Local public service cannot be mandated by a remote corporation

One more article about the LoudonExtra.com collapse at the Washington Post (covered originally by the Wall Street Journal) and I might just scream (yes, I know — I’m not helping).

Steve Yelvington was the first I’ve found this week that understood the problem clearly and organically.

It wasn’t a “hyperlocal” problem; it wasn’t “too local” to be interesting or useful. It wasn’t a management issue. It was this, as Steve summarizes:

If you want to be a convener of community, you’d better be ready to get off your duff, away from the computer, and out in front of people. This is something you have to build by selling it in person to the people you want to engage.

Thank you! This was the primary mistake of the Washington Post Company with respect to LoudonExtra.com. “If we build it, they will come. We are the Washington Post!” Right.

Hyperlocal efforts require too much effort for too little payback in a for-profit top-down everyone gets paid a full-time wage corporate context. In other words, you can’t make money using traditional media methods.

Small local newspapers, by contrast, are different animals. They’re out there, in the community, visible and they have a physical manifestation in the life of the community (newsprint products distributed around town). They’re real. And they make money. Sometimes lots of it.

If all you have is a web site and you never go out and meet anyone and make real friends, you’re gonna have a tough time of it for two reasons:

  1. Your approach to covering the community will be “false,” because you’re never actually out there participating.
  2. No one will trust you because they have no idea who or where or what you are.

Rob Curley‘s success in Lawrence, Kansas was partly driven by his love of the community itself, his long history and innate knowledge of it, and then his technological and managerial chops on top of all that. He simply kicked ass there because he knew it and loved it and lived it.

Since then he’s bounced around, landing briefly in Miami and then Washington, DC at the Post. But now he’s off again, this time to Las Vegas, taking his whiz-bang web abilities (and his team) with him.

I have to wonder how “connected” you can be to a community where you’ve parachuted in — with your own entourage in tow — just to do “web stuff” and get paid big bucks. Hyperlocal efforts just can’t sustain those economics, nor can they make the designers or coders or writers develop a deep connection with the community.

The future of local efforts will be a blend of paid, professional efforts and unpaid amateur efforts and everything in between. But I don’t believe you can build a geographically-bound service without having a deep affection for your geography.

Internet memory lane

Great piece in Vanity Fair this week… How the Web Was Won.

It looks back, via personal interviews, at the founding and founders of the Internet itself, from ARPANET forward.

Thinking about public media, I was especially impressed with the following passage:

In 1985, a company called Control Video hired Steve Case, a product manager at Pizza Hut, to help market its fledgling electronic-gaming service. In a few years Case became its chief executive and pushed the company further into interactivity and communications. The company was ultimately re-christened America Online, and the catchphrase “You’ve got mail” became a salutation for a generation of computer users.

Steve Case: We always believed that people talking to each other was the killer app. And so whether it was instant messaging or chat rooms … or message boards, it was always the community that was front and center. Everything else — commerce and entertainment and financial services — was secondary. We thought community trumped content.

In public media we always talk about content. Content, content, content! We compare our content to the Discovery channels. We compare ourselves to commercial radio. But I (still) maintain that context trumps content, and Steve Case — way back in the 1980’s — agreed, though he talked about community (an expression of context).

If all we do is great content, I think we’ll be failing our public service mission in an age where the value of content itself is falling to near zero. We talk a good game about building community, but now we have to actually do it.

The good news is that there’s still time for us to grab this brass ring of community-building, of context development and sharing.