Todd Mundt

Sometimes I write posts here that are less public statements than “waves of thinking” about a particular issue that I’m pushing around in my head. This is one of them. In other words, this is mainly about gathering the wisdom of others and ruminating. Add your own thoughts if you’d like.
Dennis Haarsager consistently fires on all cylinders; this piece from his recent larger work on Public Media Strategies is a recent example:

I believe there is a wide-ranging group of benefits, [...] accruing to public broadcasters from a multi-pronged web strategy:

• Stations can serve existing listeners and viewrs more deeply. This is by far the guiding principle behind most station web sites as well as the NPR and PBS sites, and is the focus of most current station interest in web innovations. Although it’s sometimes put down as a “glorified program guide” approach, it’s totally rational and is likely to remain a top priority for stations for some time. On-demand content can serve this need well — more depth, more quantity, etc. — with tangible benefits in traditional sources of revenue. But this isn’t enough.
• Stations can improve their standing as important institutions in their communities by serving a community aggregation function for public media. More and more organizations and individuals in our communities are producing or trying to produce public media. At my university, there are 8-10 video editing stations available to students for their use in doing class assignments in lieu of or in addition to writing term papers. One high school student I know of in California has some 40 video features produced and edited. Schools, colleges, universities, museums, libraries, archives, government agencies are all in need of production, aggregation and distribution services. No, most of this stuff doesn’t belong on the air when time is dear, but to apply that standard to web-based distribution is to deny the public its own voice. Nothing will provide a better demonstration to corporate, foundation and tax-based sources of your lasting value in your community, regardless of how you define it.
• Recycling the audiences from our own stations between air and the web will not be sufficient to provide the economic kryptonite we need to survive the disruptive changes in the media industry. The NPR podcasting pilot with iTunes has ably demonstrated how we can hitchhike with other brands to provide distribution into the yellow area of the universe above and beyond — for pay if we want that, and I think we do in many cases. There are many of ways of providing services for compensation and tools available to make it successful. How-to programming could “hitchhike” with a brand like Home Depot, outdoor programming with REI, and more. Musical and news genres can be made available by subscriptions exposed through other partnerships. Get creative.

He covers a lot of important ground in a handful of paragraphs. I find myself challenged in another way by this: my cherished multi-stream strategy for television and radio doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if I’m not doing something new and thoughtful with it, if I’m not engaging my community in the content production for it. Do I really want a “Create” or a “World” channel if they simply fill several megabits per second of spectrum with repeats of programs I’m struggling to find an audience for on the main channel? Is that audience service? Is it fulfilling the promise of public media?

There are some smart people who believe that over the next few years, we’ll reach a tipping point in on demand video that will disrupt linear cable and satellite television and most of those niche channels created over the past 15 years will fade away, many of them shifting to an online, on demand presence. It’s possible that in the not-too-distant future, our universe of television could comprise 30 channels, with hundreds of online niche content providers. This may happen or it may not. What I do believe is that the end-game for public media isn’t going to be the broadcast of wasteful streams of the same old crap. It’s going to be about the creation of new content; the creation of new content with partners - including citizens with some equipment, skills and a point of view; and it’s going to involve a serious re-think of the lavish production model that has come to characterize everything public television does. We don’t have the money to play by the old rules anymore, and we don’t have any excuse for not trying some new things. We have great examples out there, from TPT’s Minnesota Channel to WGBH Forum to ‘GBH’s 6:55 to WNBC’s Independent Producer Showcase. There’s room for more experimentation.
Note: this is a true Haarsager Mashup: all the links point to content he’s referenced in the past 6 weeks.