A Thousand Stories on Public Media

Public media is a fertile plain, teeming with stories, interviews, and unforgettable music.

The Mediavore began 7 months ago as an all-volunteer shop, with two guys who already have too much to do.

But Graham Griffith and I think that there’s so much interesting public affairs, music, interviews, discussions, and documentaries on NPR, PBS, APM, PRI, BBC, CBC, TVO, and dozens of select local stations across the country, that we should share what we discover with the smartest and most curious audience there is – the millions of us who consume information voraciously and who count public media as our primary source.

An hour ago, we published our 1,001st post. We’re still an all-volunteer shop of two, communicating between Louisville and Boston via email, Google Talk and Campfire, and we’re still just as overwhelmed by all the great content that floods in every day. We have far more than we have time to post.

It’s a lot of work, but we’re still convinced that it’s important. The value of public media’s content is directly proportional to how widely it’s heard and appreciated. The technology we have today puts nearly everything that every radio and TV station produces in the hands of anyone who wants it.

Seven months ago, we wrote that there’s a real need to curate this stuff to surface the best content; and there’s room for many curators. But, oddly, there are very few. The Newshour with Jim Lehrer consistently discovers resources from radio and TV stations, helping it to cover stories better on its web site.

Then there’s NPR.org, which consistently, perhaps unintentionally, sends the message that there’s no value in offering a video discussion from The Newshour next to a related report it’s produced. NPR implies that listeners who enjoyed a great interview on Fresh Air wouldn’t appreciate watching a video of a different interaction with that same guest on Charlie Rose. NPR implies that a lively discussion about a national environmental issue on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning is only important to Minnesotans.

We use NPR.org only because it’s a prominent example. PRI.org is pretty much all about PRI. MPR.org has unveiled a great new web site today, focusing on what’s important to Minnesotans, but apparently only stuff produced by MPR is important to Minnesotans.

This isn’t criminal behavior; it’s simply a failure to recognize that putting some of the pieces together makes all of it more valuable to our audience. Or maybe it’s a recognition that this is hard to do. And it is – it requires a lot of listening – not only to make basic recommendations, but to make connections that jump across shows, stations, networks.

But is the effort worth it? Yes, we know it is. We have a working model: every public radio and TV schedule in the US.

We say all this not to complain, but to point out an opportunity.

We’re spending somewhere close to $2 billion a year on public media in the US; another $1.5 billion in Canada, and around 4 billion Pounds in Britain. Are we leveraging $10 billion in impact? Couldn’t we leverage much more than that?