One last BPP article (probably) and On The Media's Garfield feels the sting of the hive

Three good pieces of note that I’m finally getting to this evening.

First up (blogged earlier by Todd Mundt) is a take on the Bryant Park Project collapse from someone else that’s young and actually creating public radio programming. Only in this case it’s done on a small scale and is therefore sustainable.

The Sound of Young America‘s Jesse Thorn chimes in on both the BPP and the Fair Game cancellations. He offers lots of insightful commentary (so read the whole thing); here’s one great passage:

Fair Game and especially BPP were designed for a multi-platform future that’s in its earliest stages. Despite speculation to the contrary, both were building very strong podcast audiences. That said, both PRI and NPR are organizations that can’t afford to alienate stations, and that means they can’t really go directly to listeners for money. So the only real option available to them to monetize those online audiences is underwriting, and that’s a pretty modest revenue stream right now. So while both shows were relatively good at online stuff, they weren’t getting much money out of it. Certainly not millions of dollars.

—

Separately, On The Media‘s Bob Garfield is getting a lesson on web comments this week in the wake of the latest OTM show. Garfield went off in the show about web-based comments and commenters, even provoking Ira Glass to refer to him as a “royalist” with respect to how he views comments and the great unwashed masses.

One media commenter and experienced software pro — Derek Powazek — went a step further and wrote two pieces about comments and how they should work, taking Garfield to task for ignoring a long 10-year history of better comments across the web as well as playing the part of Grandpa Simpson.

This is Not a Comment (26 July 2008)

The story completely missed moderation queues, reputation management systems, or any of the hundreds of comment systems built over the last decade to address this very problem. Garfield seems to base the entire story on some bad comments on the OTM site, a site that provides a completely open, no signup required, comment system. But instead of asking “Is there a better way to do this?” he goes for the much easier story: “Gosh internet commenters sure are dumb!”

10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments (28 July 2008)

The real reason comments on newspaper sites suck isn’t that internet commenters suck, it’s that the editors aren’t doing their jobs. If more newspapers implemented these 10 things, I guarantee the quality of their comments would go up. And this is just the basic stuff, mostly unchanged since I wrote Design for Community seven years ago.

Powazek’s seminal book is basically out of print at this point, only available via used book sellers starting at $50 a copy. But the 10 points he offers above are a great condensed version to get you started.

I’m hoping to use his ideas (and the book) to get things rolling (someday!) in my own shop in Anchorage.

And I’m still in the camp that believes your ability to serve your community — online or otherwise — will keep you alive whereas a mass media approach in which you teleport content in from other places won’t make it in the future.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis recounts the many examples in which the web community has responded to Garfield’s notes on comments. He links to no less than 8 cogent comments on commenting.

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.

While you were out…

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…

WETA – Bringing the heart to Radio – Future of Public Radio
There’s a ton of great insight in this one piece. Given that many stations are in pledge at this time, I found one quote to be especially timely:

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.

Share:

Share:

Share:

Share:

Share:

Share:

Share:

Share:

Share:

Share: