Todd,
I love this approach. As long as we’re grounded in authentic and multi-platform exchanges with our community, we’ll be best able to reflect what’s relevant to its members.

There are a lot of interesting experiments going on right now and some of them are working great. But most have issues, like participation (low interest), etc. Then there’s the time commitment. I’m sure KPBS is taking a similar approach to us – any new idea, even a “free” idea, gets a budget attached to it because employee time isn’t free, nor is the training required. On the other hand, if our ideas, are too “timid” then staff and funders don’t get excited about them.

There’s a lot of balancing and experimenting.

1) Emerging Platforms — I’m curious which services you consider to be “low-cost, high-impact.” Most emerging services are free, but there’s still the staffing question to factor into overall cost. I think Twitter and Blip.tv are some of the two most practical services for public media. A year ago, I would have listed Flickr as one of the top services, but after the wildfires here in October, we found that Twitter was far more integrated into the community. Flickr still serves its purpose, but it also has a small fee to get full use. Blip has so much power and flexibility, you can’t go wrong. I’d also add Ustream.tv for live streaming. Facebook pages are nice, but impact seems minimal.

2) Quality Interaction — @kpbsnews is now following active San Diego users to keep an open ear (still adding more every day, there are over 2k San Diego users). The other day, we saw chatter about a building explosion and got a source for an upcoming newscast. Stations should also be on the lookout for face-to-face meetups. Facebook and Flickr groups have potential, but we’ve seen minimal acceptance. May be more useful to monitor the most active forums in your area even though they may be hosted by another organization.

3) Transparency & Participatory Journalism — I agree with you about Michael Caputo’s Public Insight project. It seems like the most effective use around. We launched a “behind the scenes” blog but find it difficult to foster buy-in from busy reporters. We’ve also launched a “citizen journalist” blog but struggle to find the time to mentor them (six authors). I think both could be more successful, but require a larger time committment than originally considered. New output requires new staffing considerations.

4) Measuring Impact — It’s so important to find way of doing this, but so difficult and terribly slow. Looking forward to continuing discussions on this point.

Todd –

Of course, we at Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight effort agree with you on this point. I would like to point out that five public radio stations (Colorado, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon and Seattle) have become pilot partners in the Public Insight initiative. There is room for more….

Michael Caputo