Todd Mundt

Note: this is very much a working document. It’s a snapshot of a “living” line of reasoning and is likely to evolve over time. This began as a collection of my thoughts, but it’s been improved immeasurably by Mark Fuerst of iMA; I sent this to him and at least a third of this document is his. I think this collaboration of two can grow to include more thoughts. Please submit yours.

Why do we need aggregation and consolidated technologies?

That’s how Mark Fuerst phrased it in a note to stations following the NPR New Realities event in Washington earlier this month. Someone else put it this way in an iMA web conference call: What is the vision that sets the tone for this?

“This” is a loose set of ideas that is broadly transformative of public radio as we know it now. It ranges from a more systematic sharing of online content to a consolidated backend, to ideas for increased social interaction, improved metrics, an alignment of metadata and other infrastructures, to a possible restructuring of the relationship between NPR and the member stations. As many have pointed out, quite rightly, we’re putting the cart before the horse - we’re deciding what we want to do without being able to articulate exactly why we should be doing it. Here’s a suggestion:

A Vision for Public Radio: Essential to America

The past 40 years has been a progression from a public radio service seen as alternative or interesting, to today’s important, core news and music streams, served by about 700 stations nationwide and reaching about 30 million listeners a week. We’ve become important; some of our stations have become market leaders, and we’ve become very good.

Now the issue is: what lies beyond this. How does an important radio service evolve into an essential communications network?  It wouldn’t be merely important to 30 million listeners a week; it would be essential to the cultural and political life of all Americans. This might be (should be?) our guiding strategy.

How might we frame what essential means?  I think this requires examining where we are now.

What do we care about?

1. Providing services that our audiences trust and rely upon
2. Executing those services with a profound respect for our audiences
3. Ensuring that our services offer a diverse array of voices and perspectives
4. Creating and distributing national music and news programs that unite our audiences around common experiences and concerns
5. Creating local music and news services that speak to the common experiences of citizens in small towns, cities, counties, states
6. Demonstrating the courage of our own convictions in non-commercial media, in contrast to the current state of commercial broadcasting, which can be characterized as an abandonment of local service and fact-based reporting

What can we do better than anyone else?

1. We have, at our fingertips, a “newsroom” that extends from international bureaus and a Washington headquarters to “bureaus” in cities and towns all over the country. If we found a way to harness the collective power of our national, regional and local reporting teams, we could create a world-class journalistic enterprise.
2. Our decades-long history of presenting different genres of music, away from the pressures of commercial sponsorship has allowed us to create services where it really is “about the music.” And with the goal of audience service as our primary responsibility, we are uniquely positioned to serve American’s desire for a diverse array of music, reflecting regional cultures and international influences.
3. Our audience is vast (30 million people!) and heterogeneous, but our listeners share common traits, including an insatiable curiosity about their world and a desire to participate in it. If we utilize our leadership in fact-based journalism and culture, we can create new ways of interacting with our audience, on-air, online, and in-person, that will help to secure public radio’s position at the center of American cultural and civic life.

Many of you will recognize this model; I’ve lifted it from Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great.” Now, we want to tie this vision to the pursuit of aggregation and consolidated technologies.

Is technology the driver or the bus?

We would be wrong to assume that technological advancements are the sole driver of the changes we propose. Technology is certainly a factor, in that the pace of change has delivered a powerful wake-up call to our industry. But the primary driver will be our vision of public radio’s place in the lives of the American people - in other words, it will be an initiative built primarily on our strategy and our content. Technology’s proper role is as the enabler for both our content and strategic initiatives.

Why aggregation makes sense:

The basic arguments for aggregation come down to three points:
(a) the need to focus on the user-experience rather than the organizational boundaries;
(b) the cost of the investment required;
(c) the need to invest in content development rather than overhead.

Research initiated by the Online Publishers Assocation shows that people already expect media companies to provide service on multiple platforms.  They view these platforms as various faces of the same company, with each platform giving them some advantages (radio signals are more convenient; websites allow for time-shifting and search).

That research suggests the opportunity to “recycle audience” from on-air to online.  Proper exploitation of search functions would seem to offer great opportunities to expand audience, when people find our content online and come back for more.  What are we seeing?  The most comprehensive study we have of listener use of our websites suggests that the “cume online audience” (unique visitor count) is less than 10% of on-air cume at almost every public radio station.

The problem, at least in part, is a fractured user-experience.  Right now, users get a very satisfying experience from our signals: programs sound great; mobile devices (like car radios) pick up the signal very well, require no buffering, and rarely experience drop outs).  Online the user experience is completely different–highly fractured, incomplete, often frustrating.  For listeners of a station featuring a standard sample of network programs, people can get some things at your station.org site; some at NPR.org; other things, at Echoes.org, Marketplace.org, or ThisAmericanLife.org. This fragmentation does not reflect the user’s sense of what we are (an integrated system).  The end result is low use.

We must continue to satisfy current listener needs and expand to meet needs that are part of the fully-wired world, such as translating news to text and graphics; providing audio on demand; publishing strategically in multiple platforms through multiple partners. We must deliver this content in a way that is focused on the user, and not dictated by the station or the network.  To date, our strategic thinking is dominated by the needs of organizations in our system and not focused (or focused enough) on the needs of our audience. We must install and maintain a delivery platform that is focused on the user—who often does not know or care where the content comes from.

After ten years of effort, only a handful of stations have achieved a strong online franchise that properly complements their on-air service. Most of them are music stations.  Changing this is a very expensive task—if we approach it one station at a time.  Very few organizations in public radio (or TV) are capable of even considering the level investment that might be required to meet state-of-the-art delivery standards.  Yet, over the next decade, media companies will have to develop multi-platform content and marketing services.  It is almost inconceivable that hundreds of public radio and TV stations will be able to achieve this presence without assistance, for two reasons: the costs are too high and the content stations provide comes from so many different sources.  Developing this kind of system requires a type and scale of collaboration as large as any we’ve made to date. In aggregate, station and network expenditures on infrastructure - networks, backend technologies, etc - are considerable.

Development of many discrete systems may give individual stations or networks a sense of independence and control, but the development of multiple infrastructures contributes very little to the actual service experienced by the audience—certainly not in the way that our program services do. (For this reason, I call them non-core services.)  To the extent that there is duplication of non-core services, it is a drain on station and network resources, robbing dollars from content production. While some duplication of non-core services can contribute to innovation (individual stations as test-beds for new concepts), the level of duplication systemwide is unsustainable, and, over time, will leach millions of dollars away from the core mission of producing content.
We face these imperatives:

1. We must diversity our content in a way that we have not been willing or able to do so far, including providing service to minority audiences, and reshape at least some of our content to reach younger audiences whose media expectations will be far different from our own.
2. We must find ways to gain economies of scale, in services, staffing, and investment, that will allow us to put maximum investment into content creation and user-oriented service, rather than overhead.
3. We must install a transaction platform capable of processing millions of requests for a content and service in a satisfying and secure way.

Therefore, we must assess our non-core infrastructure, and make every effort to restructure those operations to ensure maximum cost-savings while providing a common-sense service to the end-user, and while maintaining the local and national brands that are a source of strength to public broadcasting. This includes potentially a wide range of services, ranging from metadata to a centralized online content depot, the “consolidated backend,” etc.