Todd Mundt

Worth a read, if you’ve not done so already, is the big chunk of an email to the staff of Bryant Park Project, from NPR’s interim CEO, Dennis Haarsager, who completed the cycle by posting it to his blog on Tuesday.

It’s exceptionally good, written with the tone you’d expect from someone who is a visionary, and yet approves of ending what some saw as a visionary experiment.

We’ve/I’ve learned — or relearned — a lot in the process.  Sustaining a new program of this financial magnitude requires attracting users from each of the platforms we can access.  In this case, radio carriage was inadequate and web/podcasting usage was hampered — here’s the relearning part — by having an appointment program in a medium that doesn’t excel in that kind of usage.  Web radio is growing very rapidly (much faster than FM did, for example), but it’s almost all to music and, increasingly, to attention-tracking music.

Perhaps the future of news on the web is in the same user-programmed direction.  I’d like to see good minds like those of the BPP staff think about how we can do good journalism delivered via the web using techniques beyond just throwing up another portal-type web site and expecting people to come to it.  Our new open API release is a great tool for that.

The realities of how people use the web, how web audiences grow through search, and technologies for tracking attention and tailoring content delivery to match how people spend their attention all need to be considered.  Portals still have a place, just as their close cousins radio transmitters do, but we can no longer put all our eggs in that basket.

The cost of this experiment was considerable, on the scale of a traditional radio program, and that created great pressure to achieve the traditional results - primarily, significant station carriage to justify the expense. That’s not precisely the result of “an old way of thinking.” It might be that it’s the result of executing on a scale that ensured that BPP’s web/social media success couldn’t sustain it.

As Haarsager notes, he and others at NPR have learned a lot from this experiment, and there are still plenty of questions to answer about how a news program might derive its life from the web.

NPR has also learned that, while a major expenditure of cash couldn’t make this program successful on the radio, the expenditure of almost nothing garnered a social network of thousands of fans - a big success (how much did NPR spend on Facebook and twitter? basically nothing).

How might they approach such an experiment again? Perhaps with a budget and expectations more carefully tailored to ensure success on the web. That’s one way to do it, and there are others.

This subject has all kinds of layers… from a large successful network built on risks, that some think won’t take risks anymore, to a board that mainly represents traditional radio stations (where the money and audience is right now), to the Innovator’s Dilemma, to demographics, to NPR’s great success with podcasting, etc. Simple it ain’t.

Frankly, there’s more here than any of us can easily synthesize. That’s where a lot of voices is a good thing. Here’s Haarsager; here’s Paterson; here’s Proffitt… and this is just scratching the surface. If you’re interested in the subject, read as many perspectives as you can.

Simple rules never get at the complexity of this stuff, but I’ve come up with a simple rule anyway, and you can take it or leave it as you see fit:

Those of us inside public media, as well as those of us who listen to it, need to encourage and expect NPR to innovate and embrace the future, even when it scares a few among us. We also need to expect that NPR will invest as carefully and thoughtfully as it can in these ventures, and create the conditions that will lead to success.