Todd Mundt

I was busy Friday and didn’t have time to say all that I wanted to about The Mediavore. So, another point.

The blog serves a national audience, but the appeal is also local. We want listeners to our three formats (WUOL, WFPL and WFPK) to appreciate public radio more, to discover more of the stuff they enjoy, from segments they may have missed on shows we broadcast, to shows we don’t offer.

But this blog is designed to be national in scope, mining NPR, APM, PRI, CBC, BBC, independent and local shows and pieces from all stations for interesting content. As we grow, maybe you’ll come to think of us as PRX without the massive infrastructure (and royalty payments). The Louisville Public Media brand is minimal because the point is discovering and extending the value of a wealth of public radio (and public TV) content, wherever it comes from.

What do I want from you? Three things.

First, I want tips - pieces you’ve heard, shows that are excellent; particularly local shows. I’m importing every RSS feed from every station and network that I’m aware of (the amount of content we’re generating with $2 billion a year in funding is staggering) but I could benefit from your curation. As the audience for The Mediavore grows, we’ll also depend more and more on readers for suggestions.

Second, if you want to contribute a piece - a single piece, or something regularly - I’d love to talk to you about it. I don’t want to be the sole byline on the site.

Third, once you think it’s good enough, you should place The Mediavore RSS in your web site sidebar somewhere. We hope that The Mediavore will help fans of public radio and TV discover more new stuff, which in turn will deepen their appreciation of public media for the ways in which it enhances their lives.

We’re launching “The Mediavore” today, and we’re excited about where it’s headed.

Public media listeners and viewers have more content available to them than ever before. Hundreds of stations streaming 24/7, and a wealth of talk, newsmagazine and music shows that far exceeds the capacity of local station schedules, and time available to listen.

The Mediavore is designed to weed through the content each day and highlight/aggregate the really great stuff that listeners and viewers shouldn’t miss. It’s launching with a heavy tilt toward news/talk, but we expect to balance it over the next few months with more music and cultural content. We’re also looking to beef up our exploration of content produced by local stations, and we will add much more video content. Our current output is 20-25 posts a week - I expect this to double over the next few months.

Keeping in mind how much work is ahead, we’re still happy to be where we are at launch, and we hope fans of public radio and television will find it useful.

The Mediavore is a service of Louisville Public Media.

Following up on the sad news I posted yesterday, this press release from Twin Cities Public Television:

MEDIA ADVISORY

November 10, 2008

For immediate release                                                                                                                                     Contact: Lorena Duarte

Twin Cities Public Television Mourns the Loss of
Former Vice President and General Manager Cindy Browne

ST. PAUL—Twin Cities Public Television (tpt) is mourning the loss of Cindy Browne, former tpt Vice President and Station Manager.

Ms. Browne’s tenure at tpt was only one part of a very successful career in public media, one in which she championed the leadership of women, inclusion and community engagement.

Ms. Browne earned her bachelor’s degree in history and an MBA in finance, both from the University of Minnesota.

She began her career at tpt in April of 1973 as receptionist, part-time camera operator, and air control operator. She worked her way up to the position of Vice President and General Manager, a position she held until January 1998, when she was recruited by new Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) President Robert Coonrod.

At CPB she served as both Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer.  She led events intended to educate and motivate the leaders of public television (PTV) stations around the country about the coming digital transition and instigated a series of process improvement efforts in grant-making and publishing to upgrade many of CPB’s internal processes. She also significantly upgraded CPB’s strategic planning and budgeting processes.

In 2000, Ms. Browne took the position of President at Leader Evolution LLC, a consulting practice focused on supporting public broadcasters and other nonprofits. Her clients included Houston PBS and Houston Public Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, Public Radio Capital, Michigan Public Media, Wisconsin Public Television, as well as tpt.

In her capacity, she presented at numerous national public broadcasting conferences including one in 2003 for Partnership Continuum Incorporated. The speech, reprinted by Current Magazine, was titled “Women’s Leadership to the Future of Public Television.”  In it, Ms. Browne was quoted as saying, “Women leaders have an important strategic role to play in the future success of PTV.  The beauty of this situation is that we, and only we, have the power to turn this situation around.”

In August of 2005, Ms. Browne was appointed Executive Director at Iowa Public Radio (IPR).  At the time, IPR was a new structure created to consolidate the public radio stations at Iowa State University, the University of Northern Iowa and the University of Iowa into a statewide network.

She was forced to step down on June 30, 2008 due to the progression of her illness.  At that time, Art Neu of Carroll, chair of the IPR board of directors said, “We are grateful to Cindy Browne for her efforts. In a relatively short time, she brought these stations together to create a unified organization … It’s been a period of tremendous change and tremendous success.”

Ms. Browne will be remembered by her colleagues at tpt as a gracious, powerful and committed leader.  Executive Vice President Bill Hanley says, “Cindy saw leadership not as the top of the mountain, but as one point in a circle.  She accepted both victories and defeats with equal grace and humility.”  And President and CEO Jim Pagliarini says, “The public broadcasting family has lost a beloved friend and an important leader.  Cindy had a quiet passion and commitment for both the cause and the people of public television and radio. One that, all who knew her will remember and cherish.”

Memorial Service to be held 4-8 p.m., Friday, November 14, at Holcomb Henry Boom Funeral Home, 515 Hwy 96, Shoreview. In lieu of flowers, memorials preferred to Twin Cities Public Television, 172 East 4th St., St. Paul, MN 55101 or Iowa Public Radio, 1200 Grand Ave., Des Moines, IA 50309

ABOUT tpt
The mission of Twin Cities Public Television is to “harness the power of television and other media for the public good.” A not for profit educational, civic, and cultural resource, tpt presents original television productions for national and state broadcast. Productions include the Emmy Award winning Benjamin Franklin? the Emmy winning The Forgetting: A Portrait of Alzheimer’s? the Emmy winning Suze Orman: The Laws of Money, The Lessons of Life? the DragonflyTV science series for kids? the popular public affairs program Almanac, and the innovative Minnesota Channel, which magnifies the impact of Minnesota’s finest public service organizations using the power of television. One of the most watched PBS affiliates in the nation, tpt is based in St. Paul and operates seven digital stations in addition to analog channels tpt 2 and tpt 17.

Cindy was the most courageous person I ever knew; throughout her life, she confronted change, in her career, in her health, some of it unwelcome, and yet she was a fount of optimism, and maintained a laser-like focus on what she needed to do.

Presented with the “mess” of a cancer diagnosis, and its resurgence, she got to work and created an action plan, complete with a team of traditional and alternative care providers to address each aspect of the disease. Presented with the “mess” of three not-so-friendly station groups, factions engaged in mini-wars ranging from petty to damaging, she sat down and created an action plan for Iowa Public Radio.

That was a crowning achievement in a long career of achievements. By the time she left Iowa Public Radio earlier this year, every element of her plan was complete or nearly so. The sad part is that most action plans against cancer can only lead to battle victories; cancer gets to win the war.

Cindy passed away last night.

If you want a good, 20 minute explanation of the concept of Flow, here’s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to provide it. It’s great if you’ve not been exposed to this idea about states of intense, sustained creativity. But even if you have a basic working knowledge of Flow, there are still nice tidbits here.

One of my takeaways is a kind of mashup: where flow meets Gary Vaynerchuk’s impressive and arresting talk about personal branding and pursuing the vocation you truly love and desire, at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Watch them back to back and see what you think.

Is that a real term? Might be. Did I invent it or did someone else? I don’t care.

Whatever it is, we’re experimenting with it at WFPL.org. This is the first of two posts about it.

The experiment is a first stab at trying to address three problems: first, public radio web sites are really quite static. Yes, most of us publish all our news there, and WFPL reporters are churning out a lot of stuff every day. Yes, we switch out the boxes and pretty pictures and we update the text.

But compare any public radio web site to a blog like Talking Points Memo. Ignore the point of view, and look at the site. Two thirds of the page is the basic grouping of content call-outs, ads, RSS feeds, etc. It’s the near-static stuff that’s common on most public radio web sites. But what’s the heart of the site? The blog that’s squeezed in the left hand side. New stuff appears there all day, sometimes way into the night. Sure the content is compelling to partisans, but the pace of content itself drives audience. Technorati’s regular State of the Blogosphere reports make that clear: generally, the more fresh content, the bigger the audience.

Second problem: there’s a lot of stuff squirreled away on our internal pages, some of it good, some of it really good. There should be a better way to call out that great stuff on the one page most everyone arrives on (and leaves) than an auto-generated list. Sometimes it’s worth putting the graphic designer to work on a tile box. But often, it’s a piece of content that’s interesting or important right now, not yesterday, not tomorrow.

Third problem: Our radio stations succeed because they have a distinct voice, personality, point of view (I’m not talking politics). Our web sites are like a stainless steel room. All the “furniture” from the radio station is there, but it’s been scrubbed clean of any scuff marks, photos, curtains - all the personality and voice that is the connective tissue of public radio.

Now, users of public radio web sites connect with them for different reasons than they listen to the radio. Their “handling” of the web and radio are different. The architecture of the web is different than the architecture of radio, and we build each differently. But do they have to be that different?

Blogs help because, by their very nature, blogs are more personal (even when authored by many), off-the-cuff, they have a distinct voice. So our ancillary blogs help us create a kind of stationality on the web.

But why does that sense of life and personality exist in a separate place from the main web site? Why couldn’t we find a way to combine them? Community tools do this very nicely, but we think we can approach it from the content side, too. Naturally, I’m not talking about turning our journalism into blogging. But our journalism co-exists with our stationality on the radio; at WFPL, we think it can co-exist on the web.

We’re experimenting with the WFPL Content Concierge as a toe in the water to begin addressing these problems. On Monday, I’ll write about what we’re trying.

Featuring host (and vocalist) Marion Dries of 91.9 WFPK Radio Louisville.

Oh, and to illustrate how great minds think alike:

from The Essential 885 XPN Songs

Compared to other news organizations, NPR has come late to community engagement, but it’s done a good job of it. The first tools rolled out for listeners a few weeks ago, and station pages launched last week.

With fundraising in full swing, we didn’t fully activate the WFPL page until last weekend. (NPR is allowing station groups to operate multiple pages, so our other stations, WFPK and Classical 90.5, will launch as soon as NPR gives the go-ahead.)

NPR has wisely decided to let station pages launch with all community features turned off; stations that don’t have time, personnel, or an interest in pursuing this can let it be, and listeners who choose WXXX as their favorite will still see a page with basic information about the station.

But, more adventurous stations can turn on a number of features - an events listing, blog, photo and video upload - and listeners who “favorite” the station can directly contribute to some of the features.

At Louisville Public Media, we’re throwing a few darts at the wall to see what sticks. As soon as we decompress from the membership campaign, we’ll be actively encouraging listeners to join the community on-air, on our web site and on our twitter feeds. Our blog on the Community site will feature 2 or 3 posts a day on weekdays, and we’ll be adding more pics and videos. We’ll also encourage our staff to join the community - some already have.

I wish community membership at npr.org could port over to our station sites, and there are a number of other quibbles (no html view in the blog editor makes embedding video very hard) but this is a great start and it’s exciting to see a lively community already developing.

Sullivan’s piece in the November issue of The Atlantic is the best think piece about blogging I’ve seen, and its connections to, as well as its extension of the practice of journalism.

Sullivan writes that blogging is jazz to established journalism’s classical music. One doesn’t replace the other, but each requires a different way of performing, a different way of listening and interacting. Each complement and enhance appreciation of the other.

In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane.

Sullivan says that the platform defines the style and interaction.

Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.

This drags us to a bigger question, one that goes beyond the rather petty distraction of bloggers vs journalism:

Why are we publishing our public radio journalism on a computer screen in almost the exact same way as we publish it to an electrical signal transmitted through the air?

Television requires a different kind of journalism than does radio. So what is the appropriate, legitimate and journalistically sound way for public radio and TV to translate its reporting to the web?

By copying and pasting reporter’s scripts to the site? Probably not. This is a big challenge. What are we dreaming up? What experiments are we conducting? Are we being too prissy and unimaginative about the platform?

From this week’s New Yorker:

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I watched Torturing Democracy last night and it’s stunning - meticulously researched, utterly amazing, devastating. I don’t feel like getting into the whole discussion about PBS’s inability to schedule the documentary before January 21, 2009: it’s perfectly understandable, given more pressing considerations, like Click and Clack’s As the Wrench Turns.

But a number of public television stations have broadcast the documentary and it’s available online for viewing anytime. Without getting too cliche-heavy, this is something you should see.

Lest I get too prickly about PBS, let me know note how they continue to advance their public service mission by pushing some of their best stuff to other places where people can discover and view it. Frontline’s latest installment of “The Choice” is on YouTube and Hulu, and probably other places. (Hulu directs you back to PBS.org to watch the video, as it does with CBS programs, etc.). And WGBH pushed a few gigabytes of the American Experience presidential profiles to iTunesU, where you can download them, free.

This is the kind of stuff (the content AND the strategy) that makes me proud to be in the business of serving the American people.