Tag: mass media

Digital Public Media: From Broadcasting to Leading a Tribe

Thanks to @garyinalaska, I was invited to speak at the Alaskan Apple Users Group (AAUG) on March 4 in Anchorage, on a topic more or less of my choosing, but dealing with “digital media survival.”

I took that notion, applied it to public media, and tried to bring forth my current thinking about how we in the public media space — at least where I am these days — must change in order to better serve our original mission and do it in a sustainable and meaningful way. Broadly, I suggested we must move from being a purely broadcasting-focused firm to leading a “tribe,” as Seth Godin would put it.

Frankly, my presentation needs work. A lot of work. But the core ideas are there. We’re only just getting started on this in my firm, so I should be able to revise this in the future once we’ve got more experience. For now, however, here’s the presentation files as well as lots of links that are the foundational pieces of the notions presented. I’d love to hear your comments or suggestions, and if you take these ideas and expand upon them, drop me a link.

  • Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, by Seth Godin (Amazon.com)
  • Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, by Seth Godin (free at Audible.com)
    Godin’s book on the tribes notion isn’t perfect (there are complaints out there about generalities that aren’t backed up with examples), but it’s quite good and I suspect it will form the backbone of our strategy going forward. It is not a prescriptive book; it has no “instructions” — it’s more faith than religion, if you know what I mean. In any case, as I noted in the presentation at AAUG, if all we in the current public media are doing is talking at people instead of communicating with and connecting people with shared interests and values, we’re not likely to survive. Content is free. Distribution is free. Contact, context, connection and community are priceless.
  • Seth Godin’s blog
    Godin covers the tribes notion periodically and relates tons of next-generation marketing and communications concepts; highly recommended reading for just about anyone.
  • Seth Godin Talking About Leading a Tribe (YouTube, 6 min)
    Audio quality is a little weak, but crank it up and you’ll hear everything you need to hear. Godin succinctly hits the notion that companies are focused on interrupting you enough to trick you into buying their products or services, but they don’t care about you.
  • Seth Godin: Sliced bread and other marketing delights (TED / YouTube, 19 min)
    TED Talks are legendary and Godin does his typically masterful job talking about marketing. This one is not about tribes, but the notions covered are integral to understanding how our historic mass media model is failing. It’s 19 minutes, but it doesn’t feel like it — he’s a wizard of fast presentations that are smart, funny and revealing.
  • “No One Cares About You” (YouTube, 2 min)
    Short and to-the-point advice to companies that think they need to get into social media to tell the world about what they are doing. Surprise: people don’t care about your company.
  • Kevin Kelly / The Technium: Better than free
    This piece set off a ton of blogosphere and public media commentary last year because Kelly sets forth not only the notion that you can’t stop things (media) from being free, but that there are still ways for companies and individuals to create value and gather revenue. Brilliant stuff.
  • Kevin Kelly / The Technium: 1,000 true fans
    Godin refers to this piece in Tribes, and rightly so. It’s a seminal work in the new media world, as it proposes that an artist can surivive if only he or she can find 1,000 true fans/supporters. Godin suggests, rightly, that the number might be 1,000, but it also might be 100 or 10,000 or 1,000,000 — depending upon your situation. But there is a number, and you need those true fans.
  • The Cluetrain Manifesto
    Now 10 years old, the Cluetrain is still being studied as companies of all kinds try to understand how to behave in the new media, interactive world. The 95 Theses are priceless.
  • Clay Shirky: “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus”
    Shirky addresses the rise of television in concert with the industrial revolution and how it acted as a “cognitive heat sink,” yet now people are participating in media creation rather than simply passively consuming it. Critical to understand because it signals and explains how and why people are, more and more, rejecting
  • Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody (the web site)
  • Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody (Amazon.com)
    Subtitled, “The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” this is a critical idea that public media companies must understand. There are aspects of running a public media service that require the power of a formal organization. But engaging with and leading a tribe cannot be achieved by a pure firm (or corporate) approach because it cannot scale. But if we can “organize without an organization,” we can get there. Of special note are his brief references to “cost of coordination” and how and when a firm (a formal organization) is useful and when it stands in the way of progress.
  • Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab
  • Umair Haque / Harvard Business Publishing
    His writing is perhaps the most dense of any of the links here — it’s probably a half- or full-generation ahead of contemporary economic thinking, so it can be hard to follow. But if you’ve got an imagination to see a world that doesn’t quite look like ours and a world that operates on different economic principles, expectations and practices, you should be following Haque. Those in traditional mass media — especially commercial media — will ignore Haque at their peril. By the way, his PowerPoint slides on co-creation of content (at Bubblegeneration) are equally dense, but there’s a kernel of public media’s future in there: a collaborative approach to media capture, editing and distribution that we could never have considered in the past.

Thanks again to @garyinalaska for the invite. The crowd was great!

Another nail in the AP coffin

There have been so many great news services popping up in the last few years in the online space. Politico.com has been one of the big success stories. They make most of their money on a print edition distributed on Capitol Hill and K Street in DC, but their web property is followed nationally and their writers and pundits regularly appear on talking-head shows.

Now they’re undermining the Associated Press. Good for them.

At the rate things are changing for the AP and the news business in general, you’d think the AP would unleash a new plan to get folks interested in their services again. But I think not. The AP is still a juggernaut in the news business with a long way to go before their execs begin to freak out over lost customers and revenue. It sure is interesting to watch, though.

Back from the dead / digital collaboration

It’s has been — and remains — insane at the office these days. We’re in the midst of a pledge period for TV, we’re preparing for another one in FM, and for the most part it’s my first run-through these events as the person ultimately in charge of our streams, so there’s a learning curve. I’m finding it easy to pick things up — it just takes time. Plus, the company is still shaking out some of the changes from about a month ago as we radically redesigned the management structure. So far, so good.

I’ve been neglecting Twitter and Facebook and this site for nearly a month as these events have played out. Luckily, it’s kind of a quiet period in public media as folks work through pledge drives and just get back into the non-summer swing of things.

Yet this past week a critical post went up from Dennis Haarsager that’s required reading for pubradio folks and I think for public TV folks as well:

It makes a good deal of sense to me, as it gives a revitalized reason/purpose for national/local collaboration, as opposed to simple distribution. I’m not quite convinced it can be successful, but it’s got a shot if a critical mass of system leaders get on board. I know I’m paying attention.

That said, I’m concerned about future collaborations of all kinds, especially in the wake of a semi-private discussion in which I participated recently.

It seems public media’s chief difficulty today is not one of distribution, but one of mission. Why are we here, really? And do we all share the same response to that question? “Public service,” is not a real answer. We need a product, a specific service that can bind all of us together.

Personally, I think that’s news. I’ve railed against the national TV news media before for their lack of real public service, and I’ve suggested that public media’s greatest strength comes from news.  Not music, not arts and culture, not high society, but news. (Those other things are nice-to-haves, but they aren’t core things around which we can easily collaborate on various geographic or business scales.)

What does news, as a primary mission for public, have going for it?

  • The Associated Press is breaking down as newspapers and stations — including my own — tell the AP to take a flying leap with their high costs and their regurgitated stories
  • Newspapers are distracted as their profits crumble and they seem unable to find a way forward
  • TV news is an abysmal, rancid landfill of time-wasters and poor information
  • New low-cost journalism methods (not necessarily bad stuff, by the way) is on the rise, both in video and print, offering us new opportunities
  • Digital exchange of information and finished media products has never been faster, cheaper or easier
  • We have a public service mission unparalleled in the commercial world — a world setup to distribute commercials, not thoughtful information

NPR grew as media consumers discovered that quality news and information was, in fact, a good thing to have around. It grew in an otherwise toxic radio environment.

We have a chance, now, I think, to develop this shared mission and build collaborative structures around that. At the moment, Haarsager’s initial diagram (PDF) speaks to a broader service set than news alone. But keep the mission focused and the distribution / collaboration system begins to make sense.

Anything new that proposes to simplify collaboration in an ecosystem of diverse and often competing missions probably won’t get us very far.

How network effects disrupt the liberal elite world of mass media

Here’s a fast and tight 25 minutes of thinking that everyone confronting the disintegration of mass media should view. It’s Mark Pesce speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum just last month (June 24).

http://www.viddler.com/player/aa10e87e/

I’ve certainly felt an increasing pull of networked social structures in the 21st century. There’s something new happening today, something unprecedented. Pesce puts words to that feeling and it sounds largely right. Plus it dovetails nicely with Clay Shirky’s ideas in Here Comes Everybody, a seminal work for broadcasters getting shoved around in this new media world.

My concern, however, is that other factors will derail these social network developments. For example, even given all the cell phones in the world, there are still tremendously autocratic / dictatorial leaders that the masses, supposedly connected, have not yet overthrown. Even in our own country, one of the most connected, we’ve been unable to defeat or marginalize a President that has acted repeatedly against our own national best interests.

Pesce’s ideas also seem to ignore the upheaval I’m betting we’ll see with the end of cheap oil, partially due to depletion and partially due to global warming controls. Seems to me a fundamental upheaval like that would disrupt the social order that’s supposed to be disrupted by the network effect. And what about global warming effects — with predicted mass extinction events (starting with ocean acidification) that will have unknown effects on the rest of our ecosystem?

In any case, it’s a fascinating talk. Well worth the time of mass media folks trying to understand why they’re no longer the center of the universe.

Is this your public TV station?

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.

Continue reading “Is this your public TV station?” →