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.
If there were an Academy Awards of mission statements or manifestos, Louisville Public Media’s introduction would take top honors in all categories for a public media company.
Luckily Todd Mundt blogged it at his own site, or I would have missed it.
For anyone that cares about the future of public media, this is required reading, even if you read nothing else this year. It sums up the challenges and the opportunities for local public media in one succinct document. It nails the methods (in broad strokes, of course) and attitudes required for a public service company that uses media to connect people to one another, to issues and information and so on.
Even the logo matches the mission — no small task.
Upon reading this intro, I immediately forwarded it to my fellow managers. Next it will go to our board, who will hopefully embrace it as part of a rather gut-wrenching strategic planning process. Fortunately this one-page explanation is based in media reality and explains how we can, indeed, serve our community in the evolving world.
Perhaps I could coax Todd — or someone else — to help answer these questions? I’ll definitely try.
Just in case the introduction is ever taken down, I’ve included it below for safe keeping — after the jump.
In the mean time, congratulations to Louisville Public Media.
Continue reading “And now the award for best public media mission statement…”
I was chatting with the boss this week when I made a shocking suggestion.
I told him that one or perhaps all of the audio (radio) programs we create today — and for which we charge hefty fees to “member” stations — be simply given away to any station that wanted it.
Immediately he shot back: “But someone has to pay for that content!”
I love these situations. I get to try out newfangled business or economics insights to suggest something that’s anathema to the old guard (people and/or ideas). Plus, it’s a little logical fallacy that’s fun to pick apart:
Indeed, someone must pay for the people and equipment (mostly people) required to produce award-winning content, regardless of medium or delivery system. The future isn’t all user-generated content (UGC).
The notion of free has come up a lot for me in the last year, as I’ve ruminated on the idea that PBS and NPR should give away all their content to incumbent pubcasting stations for free. (But someone has to pay for that content!) I’ll explore more of that idea in postings to come.
For now, I’d like to share some FREE readings that have been published within the last week concerning this notion of giving it away, seemingly willy-nilly. The notion of “free” has actually been a viable business option for decades, but in the digital media space the idea is gaining widespread traction very quickly.
Because in the digital media world, where every user is one link away from any other user and everything can be digitally copied to perfection with little or no impediments, maintaining control is becoming impossible. Plus, as media content volume rises toward infinity (or certainly more than any one person can possibly consume), the value of content (in broad terms) falls toward zero.
So, here are my picks for the late February 2008 “free reader” if you want to get schooled in how and why giving it away makes sense in lots of situations:
Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
Chris Anderson / Wired / 25 Feb 2008
Anderson was the author of the article and follow-on book called The Long Tail that’s been cited as much as any Web 2.0 meme can possibly be cited. It’s accepted as a given truth (a little too easily, I might add) at this point. Now he’s been exploring the notion of free as a part of viable business models and this is the opening article in what’s sure to be both a series of thought pieces and, eventually a book. This is basically the seminal article of “free” at this point. There’s even a little intro video included with the article, featuring Anderson himself.
Chris Anderson Takes Up The Free Banner
Mike Masnick / Techdirt / 25 Feb 2008That ‘Free’ Stuff Is Catching On…
Mike Masnick / Techdirt /26 Feb 2008
Masnick is a wizard at both succintcly explaining tech-focused business developments and eviscerating ideas that make no sense. In these two cases, he points out the Anderson article, adds some other links, and in the first article points out the mistake in Anderson’s logic — the notion that the “free” model turns economic principles on their heads. He rightly points out that, no, in fact no laws of economics are broken. Well worth your two clicks so you don’t get sucked into believing FREE is bigger than it is.
Free is the Future
Lee LeFever / Common Craft / 26 Feb 2008
Step aside from the free hyperbole for a moment and read this piece. In this case, the guy that owns and operates the Common Craft custom video development service explains all the ways in which his business — a money-making venture, to be sure — has benefited by using free technologies and services from other businesses. Indeed, his two-person shop is wildly successful today precisely due to the impacts those free services had on their ability to get the word out and share their work. It’s a great piece because Lefever takes you step by step through the ways in which “free” made their profitable business possible.
Free Is A Great Way To Make Money
Fred Wilson / A VC / 25 Feb 2008
This post is mostly a link over to the Anderson article — with one exception. Wilson points to one of his own posts from July 2005 (!) that discusses the notion of free in business models.
Better Than Free
Kevin Kelly / The Technium / 31 Jan 2008
- Immediacy
- Personalization
- Interpretation
- Authenticity
- Accessibility
- Embodiment
- Patronage
- Findability
Sick of discovering how you have to give it all away? Wondering how you’ll actually make money? Well here’s the antidote to the free movement — here’s what can’t be given away, what really carries lasting value. This article probably had more buzz at the IMA conference than perhaps any other because it lays down a conceptual map for the services that public media can provide that are fundamentally undisruptable (yes, I just made that word up).
With the passing of William F. Buckley, I fear an era of American intellectualism may have come to a close. Such a smart guy, even if he made you mad. But I’ll remember him as exquisitely entertaining.
Terry Heaton may have the best line referring to Buckley’s unique style:
“…he raised ‘leaning back’ to an art form.”
Indeed.
I’m finally back home from the IMA 2008 conference (2,300 miles later). I’m tired, I’m Twittered out, and I’m facing both a mound of catch-up work as well as one of the busiest weeks of the year. But I wanted to capture my impressions from the conference, much as Todd Mundt and Tim Eby have done.
Overall, it was a good conference as usual. Interesting projects were profiled from all over the system, but nothing was truly game-changing at a macro level. There were exhortations that we need to do more, reserve more of our budgets, boost traffic and so on. Palpable fear ran through the conference about TV, partially due to DTV in 2009, partially sparked by the universally-hated NY Times article. Radio, while considered at risk eventually, is firing on all cylinders for the moment and doesn’t yet show fear.
But here are, in my opinion, the truly interesting items, borne from meta-issues swirling around the conference but not directly addressed:
In my (current) view, IMA appears to be at an impasse. We seem to have reached a point where integrated media advocacy has given out, where recommendations and demonstrations fail to move our organizations to meaningful action.
To date, IMA has been effective at putting the online services question on the table within public broadcasting and has done so eloquently and repeatedly. But for all the work completed, no significant sea change has yet arrived. Meanwhile, the house of public TV is on fire, we’re losing audience to a fracturing media world across the board and new players (like Wikipedia and others) have stolen “our” web traffic and possibly our raison d’etre.
I’ve been to IMA for the past four years straight. I’ve been excited by the projects and keep feeling like there’s so much opportunity in front of us. But in those four years, not much has changed in my shop nor in the system at large.
I’m left wondering… what now?
Vendor presentations are good for shows like NAB or CES or Macworld or other shows where vendors are supposed to be there to hawk their wares, even on panels.
But at a conference like IMA 2008, this is a bad thing.
I’m sitting in a panel presentation that’s full of vendors hawking their particular services. And they’re not talking about authentic engagement with the audience, they’re talking in broadcast, eyeball-catching terms. It’s not real, it’s marketing.
IMA needs to avoid this in the future. Let the vendors have their booths or even chuck flyers in the conference bag, but putting them on panels wastes time and isn’t illuminating. Put my peers up there — the ones doing the real work with real tools.
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