Hello, I’m an unidentified person. So, having a problem?

If you have bad news to tell your audience, a canceled program, a big format change… Apple’s MobileMe Status Updates blog shows you how not to do it:

Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe, and I’m working directly with the MobileMe group to ensure that we keep you really up to date.

Unidentified Person then dumps some unwelcome information on the (small) number of MobileMe users who have had trouble accessing their email for the past two weeks: it might be another week; and we may have lost 10% of your mail forever.

This bad news affects only 1% of the MobileMe “audience,” we’re told. But bad news should come from a real person. It’s best if it comes from the person who ordered the change, or is the chief person responsible for fixing the problem. Maybe NPR shouldn’t let the New York Times be the first to report a program cancellation, if it can be avoided, and you should never let someone else deliver your bad news to your audience.

The end of BPP is a real learning opportunity for all of us, not just NPR.

Has everything changed? Probably not. Social media in public radio didn’t begin 2005 – it started almost a century ago with WHA and WSUI, when people first started gathering to share the headphones around the crystal set. Even without the Internet, every show built a social network. These were social networks without a “brain” perhaps – thousands or millions of small networks of two or three fans of a show, and none of the nodes had a way to discover others and see the big picture. Every program cancellation disrupted the lives of individual listeners and ended the social networks they built around favorite shows.

What has changed is the scale and vitality of these social networks, now that the Internet has collapsed time and space and provided the “brain.” The social networks around our shows are bigger than ever, connected better than ever, and our interaction with those networks has to scale up.

What does this mean when we cancel a show? Let’s face it: over time, we will cancel many, and perhaps the majority, of shows that we create.

It might mean that those of us in executive positions will need to speak more personally and directly than before. Our program directors will need to more readily attach their names to decisions, and CEO’s may have to type out a blog post, too. We might need to consider helping an online community transition to a new home – something Rob Paterson did so graciously this week, when he helped set up a new homebase for BPP on Ning. (That’s the other piece of this, of course: the network no longer has to go away; it might continue to exist independently of the program that gave birth to it.)

Are there other ways in which we’ll need to engage with our audience more authentically when we make changes? What have you done at your station? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.