Todd Mundt

I wasn’t able to get away for the Beyond Broadcast gathering this year - a shame because I went the first two years and was excited and overwhelmed by all the great stuff. There’s always next year.

Dennis Haarsager, NPR interim CEO, was among the speakers yesterday and AU’s Center for Social Media blog has an excerpt of his comments:

“We’re trying to envision a world in which everyone can be a producer, but thinking about how to visualize this new world can be a challenge. Haarsager said his organization is looking at thei work in layers, the top being the goal of “enhancing human understanding.” The next two layers that are considered, then, are “what we do and where we do it,” Haarsager said.

“I don’t know that there’s any one of us, even a national network, that’s going to be able to set an agenda for public media. We’ve now given voice to anyone that has an internet connection,” Haarsager said.

The bigger challenge is finding the voices out there and making sure they’re heard. “You can nominally distribute something by throwing it on YouTube, but making sure someone finds it requires techniques that are beyond the capabilities of many individual content producers. So there is still a role of an aggregator.”

– News from the Future of Public Media

I know a number of us were following the proceedings from afar yesterday on twitter. If you weren’t able to be there, here’s the main blog. There are some great demos there, related to the theme “Mapping Public Media.” I’ve not seen video of the sessions posted - perhaps I’ve missed it, or it’s not yet uploaded.