Todd Mundt

Henry Becton, the President of the WGBH Foundation, opened the CEO Seminar yesterday. What followed were two mind-expanding and, in my opinion, heartening days of discussion and information sharing. From my notes on the Becton talk:

Public Media’s Advantage:
1) A commitment to high quality, deep educational content
2) Our position as nearly the last of the locally owned and managed media
3) We are not beholden to corporate interests
4) Our environment is now one of abundance (bandwidth, not resources)

The Challenges We Face:
1) We’re captive to our own success in engaging a particular demographic
2) The value we place on excellence sometimes hurts us, when lower-cost production methods can get the job done
3) Our decentralized structures and fiefdoms
4) Rights/intellectual property issues
5) New demands on the attention of our current and potential audience

New Media at WGBH
WGBH’s current focus is more on marketing, research and branding - getting a better understanding of the audience and what it wants; encouraging a culture of experimentation. Becton noted that we’re curators of a library of content - content that is valuable for years and years after. He pointed to the concept championed by APTS, to create an American Archive of public media content available, forever. APTS is lobbying Congress for funds to digitize the library of public tv content. Other WGBH priorities include finding new ways to harness ancillary revenues, discovering how to bring the audience into the creation process, and looking for new ways to collaborate internally.
Becton named a couple specific goals for public media in the short-term - ones we’ve heard before: federated search and creating a common customer service platform.

Henry Becton set the tone perfectly for the work that was to follow.