Public Media Strategy – Draft

My main responsibility here at Louisville Public Media is to develop and execute a media strategy. There will be various pieces to this strategy, some quite specific about tactics and goals. Those pieces will get evaluated regularly and tweaked as needed.

But the first piece is more general and broad – a statement of principles, if you will. I’m publishing my second draft here for your thoughts and comments. Some of you are in public media and have been thinking about this, or you’ve developed your own plans. I’d love your input.

We’ll be talking with our board about it this week.

LOUISVILLE PUBLIC MEDIA
Transformation

Radio is likely to continue to play an important role as an entertainment and information medium for some time to come, but in the past decade, the Internet has also become an important source of news, information, opinion, and outlet for personal expression for our listeners. And the younger listeners who are entering the public media demographic view the Internet is a primary source of information, entertainment and engagement; their media habits include little traditional radio listening, even though they consume a lot of audio and video, including content produced by public media, on the Internet.

Louisville Public Media’s response to this transformation is to transform itself. Our commitment to producing excellent content designed for our radio audience is stronger than ever. But we’ll thoughtfully and prudently invest in new technologies and platforms that help us to further our overall goal of serving our audience and making a significant contribution to the community.

The Fundamentals

Service to our audience comes first; technology second.
Our primary business has never been technology – the transmission of radio waves, the ownership of towers; it is service to the community. Radio is and has been the best means for us to offer our quality content to a mass audience. As new technologies become available, public media is presented with an array of new tools to serve its current audience better; those tools can also expand the available audience for public media, increasing our service to the community and our impact.

As we expand to new platforms, relationship-building and community-building remain our core values.
“Old” media or “New,” it’s all Social Media. Radio began life in the center of the living room and family listening, and even now, although many in our audience listen to us privately, through headphones or in their cars, there is a wealth of conversation that takes place at cafes, workplaces, dinner tables, as people talk about what they “heard on NPR.” New technologies open new pathways 1) for us to engage with our audience more directly than ever before, and 2) for our listeners to interact with people who share their concerns and values all over the world.

Building bridges that connect our listeners to each other, and allow them to exchange ideas and opinions, is part of the mandate of this public media organization.

Strategy

1) Use new and emerging platforms to reach our audience with compelling content that represents the diversity of the community.

We will carefully consider technological developments and new platforms to discover opportunities that align most thoroughly with our mission and values. We will prudently invest in technologies and platforms that meet the test, and rigorously assess their performance.

We create a wealth of news, music and other cultural content every day. We will take advantage of new platforms of distribution to reach a larger portion of our addressable audience with this content. We’ll also create low-cost, high-impact content designed to make the most advantageous use of chosen platforms, including, perhaps, content which will allow us to improve service to specific segments of our audience.

2) Use new technologies to increase the quality and depth of interaction our audience has with us.

We need to make sure we’re always listening to our community – whether someone is responding to a story, suggesting a song or an artist or offering criticism. Everyone in our organization needs to be listening… from Membership to our talk show producers, on-air hosts, management, and the News department. This feedback may come directly to us, but often it won’t. We need to “listen” to what our audience says about us on twitter, Facebook, in the newspaper, or word-of-mouth in the community, so we can respond appropriately, and most important, so we can learn. In the same fashion, we should use new technologies like twitter and Facebook to communicate with our audience, in a manner consistent with our Core Values.

3) Use new technologies to make our journalism more transparent to our audience, and to welcome audience participation in the creative of authorative journalism.

In an era when trust in institutions of journalism is at an all-time low, trust in public media is strong. But we’re not entirely immune to the discontent that is causing some citizens to give up on traditional media. We’ll continue to build trust as we accurately report the news; but we’ll also build trust by being as transparent as we can about our reporting and editorial decisionmaking. Tools like blogs allow us to explain more thoroughly our processes to those who are interested; the web is a great place to offer access to the source materials our journalists use as they work on their stories, from documents to unedited interviews. We should “open” our news process to our audience, to the extent that this is possible.

We should explore citizen journalism and forms of audience participation in journalism. Some in our audience will want to contribute stories, too. We should experiment with ways to encourage this form of expression. It may not have the same authority as professional journalism, but this shouldn’t prevent us from exploring ways in which our audience can contribute content, and the appropriate venues for that content.

We must tap into the knowledge reservoir of our audience. American Public Media’s Public Insight Network harnesses this knowledge to improve the quality of professional journalism. It’s a social media approach to professional journalism that preserves (and enhances) the quality of the product our audience has come to expect, while welcoming useful contributions from the audience. This should be a top priority.

4) We must develop appropriate metrics to measure our impact on the community and to guide our investment decisions.

Just as certain technologies won’t advance our goals of increased service, quality interaction and greater transparency, some opportunities will meet these goals and not yet not be sustainable. And in many cases, we don’t have enough information to measure the impact of our services on new platforms. We’ll work with others in our industry to develop benchmarks for our new initiatives.