DDC Group, Day 1: Getting Started

A note for readers as I begin blogging the proceedings of the group: This blog is not an official mouthpiece of the group. This is my account. Over the next few days, the group will open a wiki so you can follow the proceedings and contribute your own ideas. We also plan meetings in a few key locations around the country over the next few weeks, including at the PRDMC in New Orleans. We have a lot of work to do and we won’t get much done if all we do is talk about it, but we want this process to be as open as possible. I expect Jake Shapiro will sound off on his blog, and there will be other official and unofficial communications.

Opening day for the DDC Group was partially a matter of working over the housekeeping issues, and dealing with heavy rains in DC and the transportation nightmare which resulted. But we also began a substantive discussion of a set of concepts that, over the next six weeks, will evolve into a business plan for public media in the digital age. Why a business plan? Because we have to back up our proposals with proof that this work we’re doing can result in something sustainable. This process starts with articulating what our audience expects from us, as best we can discern; we’ve also begun considering our other “customers:” content creators, stations and other distributors, rebundlers of our content, and sponsors and advertisers.

Our effort, today and tomorrow, is to describe the services we want to create or enable – the “it” that we’re aiming for. Essentially, this is the first phase of building the business plan for this endeavour.
If we believe, as Mike Bettison (MPR/APM) said during today’s discussion, that “In the US, public media online is underperforming when compared to public media’s broadcast reach,” then what are the tools we need to build a new, more effective online service? How do we create an online experience of public radio that is as seamless as the experience of the radio listener? We’ll need tools to help our users locate content that’s meaningful to them; tools stations can use to aggregate content across the system with content they create themselves; tools to syndicate our content to other providers like Google and Yahoo!; tools to facilitate paying for content, should we move in that direction; an editorial perspective, either from professional editing of content, collaborative editing, or a filtering-rating system.

A big issue we’ll work on is customer ownership. How do we define that? Well, we know it’s changing; for some time now, we’ve seen a movement toward a kind of shared ownership of our audience. So how do we create a shared Customer Relationship Management system, and Digital Identity, so our users and members can be identified as they move from site to site within the public media sphere? How can our stations, producers and networks “share” customers in a way that benefits everyone?

We face significant competition for attention, but our competitive advantage rests upon our relevance, the engagement our listeners have with us, their trust in our brands, our editorial perspective, and the special relationship listeners have with public radio – what Jay Brodsky (NPR) calls the “consumption experience.”

We’re not planning to create a new set of software from scratch; we’re not planning to create content; we’re not planning a single-destination site; nor are we going to create an exclusive aggregator of content. Others may choose to do these things, and our work may make those things possible. But they’re not a part of our brief.

In fact, our work is a lot less about “creating” and a lot more about “enabling.” It’s an important distinction because we already know that there are others in this space who are going related work. The “solution” to our “problem” is likely to include PRX, for instance, and Public Interactive. PI already has great tools for stations like Jukebox, and PI could be one of the launching points for new tools and services developed as a direct result of our work.

Another consideration: there won’t be a “one size fits all” solution. I expect that PI or NPR or someone else will develop a turnkey solution for stations without a significant online investment; but I expect the elements will also be unbundled, so stations with a more developed online presence can pick and choose what they need.

I realize this is all rather vague, but we hope to put some meat on these bones over the next few weeks. We are planning a series of meetings with leaders in our industry and others – one of the keys to this project is information-gathering. We’ll be holding meetings in Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles; I’ll have more information about when and who we’re talking to once we nail that down.