Presented with the “mess” of a cancer diagnosis, and its resurgence, she got to work and created an action plan, complete with a team of traditional and alternative care providers to address each aspect of the disease. Presented with the “mess” of three not-so-friendly station groups, factions engaged in mini-wars ranging from petty to damaging, she sat down and created an action plan for Iowa Public Radio.

That was a crowning achievement in a long career of achievements. By the time she left Iowa Public Radio earlier this year, every element of her plan was complete or nearly so. The sad part is that most action plans against cancer can only lead to battle victories; cancer gets to win the war.

Cindy passed away last night.

Her strong opening line: Nonprofit public media–and most especially public broadcasting–will embrace interactive Web tools that connect companies, producers and distributors of content and their target consumers in ways they once considered “commercial.” Three words of advice: Get over it.

She proceeds to list a number of those “formerly commercial” opportunities, each of which arises from either the quality content we’re already creating, or new initiatives we have underway to explore other platforms.

Her recommendations include better systems to acquire and process donations and contributions, stepping beyond the traditional concepts of membership, perhaps even a central fundraising mechanism; monetizing the connections we’re building with new tools like twitter and Facebook; and getting content out to third parties like Hulu and iTunes, where people can purchase it.

Mermigas offers only a couple examples of ways we’re currently generating revenue from our content, but in truth, there are only a few. She notes there are a lot of interesting things we’re doing that could be revenue generators, from our social engagement on twitter, to signature content we create.

And: An estimated $3.5 trillion of available investment funds are on the sidelines in the U.S.–as much as $40 trillion worldwide–as a result of the credit crunch, cautious lending and economic turmoil. There is a precedent for conditional, nonprofit investing that simultaneously advances social goals and business interests.

Mermigas isn’t giving us all the answers; her post encourages us to think again about what we’re doing and how we might pay for it.

It’s worth a close read.

Dennis Haarsager has introduced me and perhaps many others to the excellent analysis of Diane Mermigas through his blog Technology360. Some of you will remember Diane from her appearances at the Public Media Conference, most recently this last February.

Note: Here at WFPL/Louisville Public Media, we’re pleased to be listed among her examples of public media engagement.

NPR News has been here for several days in preparation for everything. Steve Inskeep, Robert Siegel, Michele Norris and Neal Conan flew in ahead of the storm on Saturday. NPR CEO Ken Stern rented a car in Chicago on Sunday when his connecting flight got canceled, and drove at what must have been a near-law-breaking rate of speed to arrive in Iowa City for an evening reception. NPR’s leader addressed a group of major donors wearing jeans and a t-shirt (his luggage arrived the next day) but no one cared – they hung on every word.

Talk of the Nation aired live from Des Moines yesterday – with thoughtful discussion about immigration among the topics covered. If I’ve ever been down on TOTN (who me?!? ok, I have occasionally) about some of its topics, I was more than impressed with the quality and tone of yesterday’s discussion.

We had another major donor event afterward, followed by a smaller dinner. It’s always fun seeing how public radio listeners absolutely love seeing the hosts and engaging with them, and Robert, Neal, Michele, and Steve were positively charming.

Today, the Democratic debate takes place – in about an hour. Then, tomorrow, after seven hours of management meetings, we’ll all take a breather on Thursday and jump back in for more caucus preparation.

While I’m not getting important work done, let me give a shout out to Abby Goldstein, Keith Shields, Laura Knoy and all the other great folks at New Hampshire Public Radio. We’ve collaborated on two live one-hour call-ins, The Iowa/New Hampshire Exchange (we both have shows called “The Exchange”), to discuss issues in the campaign and allow voters in the two first-in-the-nation states to speak directly to each other. The first two shows have been fascinating, and the third airs on December 12th at 2pm ET on both our networks.

It’s been an exciting, and occasionally unnerving period of change. We’re still in the middle of the change, but we’re beginning to see external signs of success. Membership numbers have held steady across the network; our first audience data is now in-house, and it shows solid gains. We don’t live or die by a single book but now, when I’m asked how things are going, I say “very well” rather than “alright.”

What have we done? We (and by “we” I mean the 50+ employees of Iowa Public Radio) have accomplished a lot. We launched our unified statewide news network on January 1, 2007; created a single team covering Iowa news, which these days consists largely of chasing candidates; we continued the work of unifying the operations of three different station groups, and 13 stations; and we got approval from the FCC for eight new stations.

Our unified classical service will launch on September 10th across Iowa; and in the months to follow, we’ll be working on expanding our 10-hour a day triple A service to a new 24 hour a day home.

And, of course, when that’s finished, there will be several more layers to the onion. We’re working with Jim Russell on a careful rethinking of our talk shows; we’ll soon open the hiring process for a permanent news director; we’re devoting  more time to the “sound and feel” of the service, the micro-formatics of both our news and classical services. And since we’re participating in the CPB/PRPD Classical Study, we’ll be testing the results of that study over the next two years.

One area that hasn’t moved forward with anywhere near the speed at which I thought it would – our online effort: our web sites and social media. Eventually, our web sites will unify but that timeline has lengthened considerably under pressure from other higher priority deadlines and limited staff resources. Our experiments in social media will begin later and on a smaller scale than I expected, but such is the balancing act when you’re doing many things at once.

It’s easy to get immersed in the mundane and miss the miraculous. Iowa Public Radio is the result of three independent station groups deciding – in the absence of a financial or administrative crisis – that it was in their long-term interests to join forces, that the whole could be greater than the sum of the parts.

Those three station groups were, and still are, licensed to three universities, with three sets of institutional goals, university practices, and university politics. Amazingly, the three universities have worked together, clearing roadblocks for this new hybrid that crosses old boundaries. The state has done the same; this year, for the first time, the Iowa Legislature made a direct appropriation to public radio, providing support for the capital needs of the network.

The creation of Iowa Public Radio, and its early success, should send an important signal to a public radio system that is vastly overbuilt. Maintaining local public service is not the same thing as maintaining hundreds of independent stations. The duplication of Internal operations costs us millions of dollars each year – millions that we could invest in things our listeners really care about, if we’re willing to ask some hard questions, be creative, and resist maintaining old fiefdoms. For every KUOW-sized surplus, there are dozens of stations that are experiencing a slow but steady impoverishment; the end result of that glacial process won’t be good for anyone.

There’s no single answer; we don’t a dozen new Iowa Public Radio clones out there. But what we do need is a class of mature public radio managers and executives who will ask hard questions, question long-standing institutional frameworks, and define their legacy as the creation of a strong, stable public radio service, whatever that takes.

I’m proud of the schedule – we set out to create the best possible schedule of news and information programs for Iowa, and I think we got pretty close. We’ll watch audience reaction and tweak the schedule in the coming months.

All of these stations have offered news before during the daytime hours, some of them 24 hours a day. But they operated in competitive environments. They programmed their stations and counter-programmed each other. The result was more choice for listeners when it comes to talk programs, but it also meant the focus wasn’t necessarily on creating the best schedule – it was on creating a different schedule. Unifying the news stations allows us to focus on the best possible service, and it allows us to operate more efficiently, in terms of program acquisition costs and staff devoted to announcing breaks, etc.

This schedule represents a certain amount of dislocation for listeners, as they get used to new programs and new times for some favorites. It also means some local productions are going away. Individually, Iowa Public Radio stations do a lot of local production, more than many stations their size. Some of it is quite ambitious. We want to remain committed to local programs, and we want to increase our investment in local programs, and over time, increase the amount of content we create; but our commitment to excellence in local production means we need to focus our efforts on programs directly related to the core mission of the network, and that means not every local show is going forward. We also made a couple of program cuts based on the need to make some cutbacks now, in order to focus on future growth.

This has a direct impact on staff, who have done good work on these programs over the years, and on listeners who have built relationships around them. One of the toughest things to talk about internally is ending programs that aren’t bad. If they were terrible, it would be easy. I think we’re asking a lot of our hardworking staff – we’re asking them to endure difficulties and uncertainties now, and to trust that we’ll hold to our stated commitments around formats and services.

I feel very strongly about this idea of stated commitments. In making this round of changes, and in beginning the planning for our Classical and our Triple A services, I’ve set one firm rule for myself: if I need to end a local program or a network program, if I need to cut out a block of programs, whatever I need to do, I will do it, and I will do it now. Of course, circumstances can change, and a program I think is a valuable addition to our schedule today might not be valuable a year from now. But I won’t squeeze programs out of existence; I won’t marginalize them and then kill them; I won’t bleed them to death after inflicting a thousand cuts; and I certainly won’t allow them to remain in the schedule, just because they’ve been there forever. If a program needs to go, I’ll cut it now and take the heat – from fellow managers, from staff, from listeners, from the media.
I’m not exactly sure how that makes staff feel. I hope it gives them some assurance in times of change. Ultimately though, it’s the way I want to conduct the business of programming Iowa Public Radio.

I know I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet here, but that’s been for two reasons: lots of work preparing for Iowa Public Radio’s consolidation of the stations, and the work preparing this new outlet for communicating with our audience.

Iowa Public Radio is embarking on a project that’s going to involve lots of change and growth, and we’ve decided that we’re going to do it in a manner that is as open and transparent as possible. Our 200,000 listeners have come to trust NPR and their local public radio stations, and as our Executive Director Cindy Browne might say, you don’t build on that trust by making all your decisions behind a locked door.

We have a multi-pronged communications strategy and this blog is one of a few public-facing elements. We’ll communicate what we’re doing and the sometimes difficult decisions we’re making. We’ll accept praise and criticism openly. Any change requires a certain amount of processing. Iowans will be able to talk back to us, and they’ll be able to talk among themselves.

The next few weeks and months will be especially important to the future of this network. I’m excited to see what comes of it.