New Realities: John Barth Comments

By Todd Mundt • May 13, 2006

John Barth of PRX sent comments on my recent New Realities ~~rant~~ post, and now that I’ve rescued them and others from WordPress moderation purgatory, I want to bring them to the front page so you don’t miss them.

John writes:

My public remarks [at New Realities] were intended to push people beyond their comfort zones and to remember the mission—it is one that demands courage and willingness to do the uncomfortable, to overcommit in order to really make things change for the better.

I admire some of what Rob has noted: at least there was the rhetoric of common purpose and common dreams.

Let’s see if the house remains on fire, in perilous terms, or if the house is on fire with the passion of new ideas, workable strategies and the urgency to get things done.

My fear is that we didn’t get to the critical items we need to address if we have any chance of success:

* where to find the next generation of passionate producers, creators and managers
* where to find the talented people who can do better than we have
* how to rethink all of our structures and operations so we have faster and more open ways to advance the best ideas
* how do we engage people’s hearts and passions
* as concepts of trust change (the next generation has different defintions than we do), will be be there? What is our response to the ‘Jon Stewarts?’
* what is our role in regard to preserving, presenting, respecting culture in all its forms?
* can we address real threats from within to our credibility? Should we push for no more university licensees?
* why shouldn’t NPR, PRI, APM and PRX all merge? Martin Neeb opened that window and it was powerfully provocative. We do all waste a lot of money, resources, time and talent on competition with not much distinction.
* Can we accept a different defintion of public radio and public media..one not defined by the past and from the top down, but defined more by the listeners who now have the capacity to produce and create?
* We should have the courage to name those stations and centers of innovation that ‘get it’ and ‘do it’ everyday. Hold up models of the best, regardless of offending those who are not on that list. We have to be brutally honest about what works and what we have to do. We need to be courageous.
* We don’t pay enough attention to our audiences except in terms of what they pledge, what checks they write and the aggregate behavior of ratings. We need to listen to those who are listening.
* How can we make risk taking less frightening? Failure is ok if we learn the right lessons and apply them. Failure is not ok if mediocre performance is an excusable standard.
* Public service — mission and leadership mixed with humility and openness — will make public radio and public radio a bedrock of society. Who has the guts to work on that balance every day?

We need to act smartly and quickly.

Some of the smartest people in our industry are working at PRX.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: newrealities, pubradio, web2.0

Viewing 3 Comments

John Proffitt 2 years ago 1 point
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Barth made the comment "why shouldn’t NPR, PRI, APM and PRX all merge?" but I'd take that one giant leap forward. Why can't PBS and APTS and others in the TV realm join in that merger?

In fact, I'd be more specific. We need to create a new metaphor and model -- public media -- and we need to absorb all the old players into this new system. It would be the replacement for NPR and PBS and all the other national players, and it would be the replacement for all the "stations" out there from one edge of the country to the other.

All the "stations" (radio and TV) would be collapsed into local and regional public media aggregators and distributors that focus on providing the best mix of public media -- sourced from all over the system -- to their particular audiences.

The localized branches of this public media ecosystem would produce their own media and collect it from producers in their area, whether paid professionals or amateurs. It all gets tagged and dropped into a distributed content management system that has a common backend but a distributed design that does not store all the media centrally but leaves it in a distributed net.

Anyway, the design would roll on from there, but my central point is, why should we merge all the radio units and leave TV behind? Let's finally take on the banner of "public media" in the broadest sense and learn how to both serve and engage the public nationwide with text, audio, video, still pictures and other data, and serve it up via broadcast, download, stream, search, physical distribution, etc.?

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Laura Harbert Allen 2 years ago 1 point
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Amen...

Blown away by all of John's points. As a young (less than 40) pubrad producer/PD...I have been asking many of these same questions.

The fear of risk/failure is a biggie. It's so institutionalized in pub rad right now.

I am sure of one thing: If we as an industry don't address many of these issues...they will be addressed in ways we may not like.

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http://www.weku.fm

Administrator 2 years ago 1 point
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John, I want TV in the mix, too, for a variety of reasons, including public TV's need to find millions of additional dollars to invest in new and existing programming strands. Some of this money could come from a re-imagining of the system. I think it can be argued quite persuasively, that the current models are weighing us down.

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