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.

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.