Todd Mundt

The annual Integrated Media Association conference takes place in Boston this week. I’m about to begin a long day of flying to get there. IMA is repositioning itself as the public media conference, and I feel excited and weary about this year’s conference. Excitement because of the convergence of factors that Mark Fuerst notes so eloquently here; weary because public media has moved at a snail’s pace to respond.

NPR, APM, PRI, PRX, PI and some station representatives spent a chunk of last summer working on a potential framework for public media’s entry into a new relationship with our audience - a relationship that includes program producers and stations large and small. The basic premise is that providing a wealth of rich content online, from a deep archive, will be of tremendous value to our audience, and will create tremendous value for public media.

Member of the DDC (I was one) finished up their work in the fall; since then, there’s been some talk, but not much, and we have accomplished, approximately, nothing. Why the hesitation? It’s not going to be easy. It will require organizations with long-standing arguments and gripes to work together, and it will likely change the relationships among networks and stations. That will take a fair amount of time (there’s not a lot) and trust (precious little). But our chief concerns should be that we move quickly and that we work together.
Why should we be concerned? Yes, there is a risk that we’ll become irrelevant, as a wealth of media choices fight for our attention. I think the greater risk is that someone else will control the relationship that we’ve built with our audience -  the thing that’s most valuable to us. You can’t find a better writer on this subject than Stephen Hill. He makes a compelling argument that if aggregators like Google and Yahoo become the primary distributors of our content, we’ll forfeit millions of dollars from our own listeners - support that could have come to us. Millions? Yes. Hill notes that if just 2 million of our listeners paid $10 a month to get access to a catalogue of public radio content, we’d gross $240 million a year. The DDC’s less aggressive underwriting-based approach will bring in $80 million in the first year.

Argue with the numbers if you will, but we can’t achieve the maximum service and the maximum return on investment unless we work together. We’ve already invested millions in technology through NPR Digital, PRX, and PI, to name a few. Not to make use of these technologies in a new shared digital distribution infrastructure would be wasteful.

This is an opportunity to build on, and strengthen, the relationships stations have with their listeners, while giving listeners more reasons than ever to value the service they receive.

Getting there is hard work, but should it be that hard?