Because of a minor issue (let’s call it Autosave), these notes are adapted from Jessica Duda’s excellent summary on the Beyond Broadcast blog. I summarize them here not to pass them off as my own but to have a record here of the sessions.

Diane Mermigas, The Hollywood Reporter

Both commercial and public media need to do the following:

• change their orientation and embrace interactivity
• understand how technology empowers the consumer
• redefine the concept of content
• deepen advertising and commerce
• reinvent business models
• view the process with an entrepreneurial spirit

Focus on the strength of public media – strong content

Public media needs an organized effort of producing content that is creative, independent, diverse, credible, and in-depth, with links to education and problem-solving. This will ensure public media’s survival and their ability to make money.

Media property rights are in flux. Currently, the web is a deliberate system with most online companies posting content through a filtering system and users consuming only what they specifically seek, which narrows their interests and creates an information vacuum. BBC, MTV are examples of the passive broadcast model of web delivery services; they could be more interactive – and more profitable.

The role of public media is thus to fill the void of the marketplace and monetize these ideas. Public media should learn from these models to create the services and interactivity:

• TiVo
• Ipod
• Open TV
• Visible World

Seek strategic partnerships

There are a variety of partnerships that public media should pursue. Serving as a content provider to other businesses can include providing local content, such as to Google. At the April 2006 National Association of Broadcasters conference, they discussed working with cable operators to obtain local advertisers as these operators have a local connection. Media companies with such partnerships have increased local advertising revenue growth by 30 percent in the past four years – as opposed to the usual three to four percent. Public media should do the same and align with consumer technology companies to expand digital delivery options.

There are also many unknowns, especially as old media financial targets and benchmarks are used to evaluate and set new media goals – without knowing how consumers will ultimately use the quickly-evolving technologies that will also affect new, unanticipated forms of expression, [such as Second Life.] Thus, making assumptions is challenging and focusing on the consumer is key. Overall, for every challenge, there are at least two opportunities.

Dan Nova, Highland Capital Partners

There is a problem of the “needle in a haystack” of online media companies/services. A new online firm is funded every day and they are all excited about the Web 2.0 world. Audience trends show that new outlets of public participatory media can grow exponentially as early as the first year, such as YouTube growing up to 6.5 million users and Technorati reaching 1.5 million users.

Low costs of participatory media and attractive business models

The old adage of “If you build it, they will come” has changed to “if they build it, they will come.” Participatory media presents many attractive low cost and high value content that in turn affect the criteria investors use to fund new participatory online sites.

Participatory media costs

• Low costs to attract participatory media
• Low customer acquisition costs
• Low customer retention costs
• Low marketing costs
• Low content development costs
• Low technology costs (open source)

Characteristics of quality content

• Easy to use
• Effective
• Entertaining
• Participatory

Acquisitions are increasing

Traditional media are being squeezed – being cash rich can be a liability. New media have had financial success, but the business models are moving quickly. Now, old media is competing with new media to buy new-new media.

How to evaluate participatory media websites through three main development stages

New opportunities

• Focus on the team
• Assess how the idea compares to the existing competition
• Review the development time and cost
• Don’t emphasize the business model specifics – it is premature
• Look at a valuation range of 0-5 million upfront

Mid-stage value drivers

The mid-stage of participatory media development is a tenuous time and is dangerous for investors as the valuation is based on the initial ‘buzz’ – not hard numbers of tried and true audiences.

Later stage companies

Assessing later stage companies, look for the same fundamentals as the new opportunities.

• Focus on the team
• Assess the revenue streams and sources
• Review the margins
• Confirm the financial sustainability
• Critically assess the business model – very important
• Assess where the biggest windows exist

Other characteristics of the successful later stage companies include: an “insane” customer focus, simple content presentation, huge market, active/missionary leaders, and constant improvement.

Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation

Business models discussed at this conference have largely been based on charity or advertising. In order to for them to be sustainable, public media must have a public purpose. The trends all show the revolution has arrived, especially as the two biggest commercial TV stations are putting their content on the web for free. Once measured by the household (radio, television), media consumption metrics are per the individual (internet, on demand); thus, changing the benchmarks and terms of media.

Changes in the public media audience – new creators

Public media should go to VOD on the internet as attention is the challenge – distribution is not the problem. Of course monetization is another problem for public media. Media cannot be a one-way company in a two-way world. The old media presented a push approach and treated the audience as mute. Now they can see the explosion of self-expression. The old media cannot ignore the public are creators, users, and speakers. The old media will try to make the public ‘feel’ as though we are interactive which may not be the case. A new way to assess media delivery is that old models are broadcast, cable TV, public TV and the new is “Independent Noncommercial TV” and the “networked individual.”

Much growth still needs to occur within the new media users as the current 40 million bloggers amount to less than one percent of the world population – public media need to reach the other 99 percent. At the same time, the internet, while useful, timely and convenient lacks public trust – to the extent local television ranks higher.

Recommendations for membership-based participatory media

One out of every two Americans are apart of member of a cooperative – namely credit unions which are a trust institutions. Information is also trust issue and we can use this concept of a membership-based, participatory organization to create our own credible content. The public should form and pay dues to media membership organizations to create their own local news so that the people can decide what is newsworthy. They should look for a base in civil society organizations and ask people to pay to join a group that allows them cooperatively provide their own content.

Ironically, civic society groups are pushing back on this idea – they believe the government should fund such public media. However, “you can’t speak to power on power’s nickel.” Professional journalists are also suspicious of citizen journalists and such membership organizations. Professionally-trained journalists should conduct the investigative work but media organizations should also have a space for citizen journalists to report other types of news and information.

Overall, the old media format is to report, edit, and control responses and have such [limiting] mottos as “All the news that is fit to print.” The media presented at this conference seek to break this top-down approach – from Google to Wikipedia. All of these models have different functions and are open and closed to varying degrees. If you give participants the chance to be a member and use more functions, the more they will be willing pay dues to have an impact influence beyond their community. We can have a chance to make that revolution.

Josh spoke about Chicago Public Radio’s plan to launch a second service next year. The service will be targeted to a new, younger demographic that doesn’t regularly listen to public radio now – a more web-savvy, non-traditional radio listener. Josh described the radio station as an outgrowth of the web site, rather than the other way around, and their plans to make user-generated content one of the centerpieces of the service – content modules that might include essays, discussions, and live or recorded music.

Todd Broadie is a part of the upcoming WYMS launch. The station plans to be heavily music-oriented, aimed at a younger demographic that doesn’t regularly listen to public radio now. Todd described their plans to insert user-generated content into the mix, with short-form news features, as well.

And Rhod Sharp of BBC 5 Live talked about the overnight show he hosts on 5 Live, BBC Radio’s News/Talk/Sports format; he and the show’s producers encourage listeners to submit podcasts, and they use portions of those podcasts on the show.

Our group felt that getting the best possible content from our audience will require:

• Encouraging, training, critiquing and commissioning them. This is a level of engagement, perhaps, that many of us haven’t fully factored into our calculations of the monetary and staff costs of such an initiative. But it’s clearly on the minds of Josh, Todd B., and Rhod, who described plans to offering training on storytelling, gathering natural sound, conducting interviews, and finding good equipment.
• Nudging your citizen content producers out of their bedrooms and dens and into the real world. That’s how they get to the issues in their community that are important and how they find other voices that can add to their stories.
• An extensive filtering system to find, fact-check, and rate all this content. Josh and his colleagues at Chicago Public Radio will have to mine existing content libraries like PRX, as well as process the stories filed by citizen producers, and the material generated by the station’s planned outreach into the community (ex. the StoryCorps booth concept). Everyone agreed that this is going to be very important to ensure an expected level of quality, although Rhod brought an interesting counterpoint to the discussion from his BBC perspective: NPR strives for a standard of perfection in audio production that’s unrealistic in this new kind of audience interaction. For instance, some engineers may reject mp3 audio for broadcast, but those standards will have to be reconsidered.

Should we pay them? Everyone rejected the idea of a general payment system, but thought that payment could be a part of commissioning work from citizen journalists. Rhod says the BBC constantly “trolls” for content, looking for people writing good blogs or making great podcasts and commissioning content from them.

Josh expressed a concern that others seemed to share: the “MySpace generation” doesn’t see public radio as a creative outlet; they can take their work elsewhere.

Brendan Greeley explained Radio Open Source’s approach to community media. The goal was to have the blog be the center, with the show as the outgrowth. Blogs are the new talk radio. Blogs make decisions – you decide what you want to talk about. A blog has motion – quick pace of topic to topic. The webpage is structured with comments posted under articles – so the listeners who want to comment aren’t pushed into a comment ghetto. We need to act like blogs – use permalinks; use Technorati; actually read blogs; act like you mean it; write fewer, more personal emails; don’t ask for links, ask for opinions; link out.

Tom Gerace of Gather: users create content, tag it, comment on it, etc. How to create value in this? You can transform your audience into a broad source network; apply editorial oversight: content selection and fact chekcing; guide the community engaged discussion around diverse and contemporary topics.

Rhea Mokund of Listenup.org: Listen Up is a network of youth media organizations, also funds them to produce content. This is designed to be a real world space for youth media. Site is largely curated by the young people who use the site.

Thomas Kriese of Omidyar talked about managing the community they’ve built.

Asked for the one piece of advice he would give to broadcasters, Gerace said, “Understand that you have to throw out what you know about your audience, and rebuild your understanding based on your audience interacting with each other rather than just with you.” Mokund’s advice was one word: “Intentionality.”

I think the social networking aspect of these and other sites has less potential for public broadcasters – at least for now, while our main demographic is still late-GenX/Baby Boom. This generation discovered the internet as adults and although it’s changed how they interact, it’s not been the revolutionary shift that our next generation of listeners is living through now as teens and 20-somethings.

So to my mind, that pushes networking down the list – and makes interaction the most important concept for us to aim for. And I think it’s hugely important because interaction goes to the heart of what public broadcasting is about. The kinds of experiences that our “founding fathers” envisioned in 1967 – the multi-way conversation that would entwine broadcasters, listeners, culture-makers and public policy-makers – are the experiences we’re actually able to deliver with the Internet. This isn’t just the logical next step, it’s core to our mission as public service broadcasters.

So far, the main model for interaction that we’ve implemented has been comments. It’s a great first step, but it doesn’t fulfill the promise because while it’s a form of interaction, it takes place within a highly-controlled environment – listeners can comment on what we do. And while comment threads may veer off in other directions, they’re forced to exist within the rigid structure we’ve imposed – the original story that sparked the conversation, the thread’s title and category and keywords. The infrastructure of comments channels the river, so to speak.

I think the key to living up to our promise is to open the gates wider and invite listeners to be partners with us in generating content. This causes a lot of fear and consternation but it needn’t. And frankly it shouldn’t since this kind of interaction is really a part of our mandate.

Gather

Gather doesn’t have the strongest interface; it’s cluttered, and despite my efforts at customizing my account, I still don’t feel like I’m finding out about stuff on the site that might interest me. I can’t easily track topic areas with RSS, for instance. I’m not terribly interested in seeing the latest photos people have posted to the site on the front page, etc.

In talking to some people in pubradio about Gather I’ve consistently heard two things: it doesn’t feel like public radio; and a lot of the stuff that users submit isn’t that good.

Here’s what I think, having spent some time on the site: some of the content isn’t that great. But some of it is. The writing that people are doing about current events, politics, arts, restaurant, books, etc, and the comments others submit to these pieces are high level stuff.

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that works and what doesn’t work on Gather, and here’s my opinion: to the extent that Gather is a place for people to share their thoughts on ANY issue they’d like to; to the extent that Gather is a place for others to comment on that work; to the extent that Gather is a place where people can find others who share views or ideas or interests and form sub-groups, it’s great.

It boils down to this, in my view: to the extent that Gather is a public square, it’s a success.

Here’s where I think it doesn’t work as well: it also tries to be your blog. When Gather becomes the place for your pictures of your dog, your daily ramblings about going to the grocery store, etc., it falls down. The blog dilutes its effectiveness as a public square.

Public Action

This is hard to talk about because I’ve seen so little of it, but based on those brief views:

Public Action is trying to be the compromise tool for public broadcasters who feel like they need to have some kind of comment function open and the others who think it might be good, but are afraid of it. It offers a wide range of customization – you can moderate comments, you can let them go live immediately, you can approve groups, you can let listeners vote on groups, you can let a thousand groups bloom.

Users are encouraged to play the social networking game to a certain extent – they can create profiles, I think they can upload a picture, they can choose as their “icon” a favorite show or their station. It’s acceptable, not particularly over-the-top on the Friendster scale of networking.

At stations that follow a more open model, listeners should find it easy to comment on stories, form groups, etc. But I think Public Action – at least as it “exists” now – misses the boat on User Generated Content. The architecture is comments on stories, and not on original content. Yes, someone could write a thoughtful essay on banning smoking in restaurants and bars, and if the station has published a story on that topic, the listener has a place to put it. If there isn’t a story on that topic, where does it go? How does it ever get noticed or read? Do I have to create a “Smoking in Restaurants” group to ever have a chance of seeing that piece? That listener has broken out of the architecture of comments and promptly falls into a black hole.

Comments and groups are the tip of the iceberg of UGC, and it’s hardly the most important part.

The true value of our capability to generate interaction online isn’t the “I agree” or “you’re full of crap” comment. It’s allowing our website to be the place where our smart, thoughtful listeners, with their range of experiences and views, can share that intelligence and experience – a true public square. Some of our listeners will never contribute but will drop by to read what other people are writing. Some people are going to be happy enough leaving a comment. But I think plenty of our listeners are going to feel strongly enough about a topic that they’ll sit down and write 300-500 words of well-reasoned prose about it; or maybe they’ll make an audio or video story. We need to be the place where they go to present this kind of stuff; and the place where they can expect to be engaged by others at that same level.

We need to let our listeners be partners with us.

So, what is this architecture of participation? I’m certainly no expert, but I think it has to include:

• The ability to comment on anything we do or anything anybody else writes;
• The ability for listeners to submit lengthy content – text, audio or video;
• A system that allows open submission but also a level of curatorial responsibility – someone at the station who reads this stuff, pushes the good stuff to the front of the line;
• A process for users to nominate or recommend stuff they see that’s really good;
• A showcase for this great stuff;
• A mechanism for the station to not only ask for submissions in general, but in particular. If you’re working on a series on poverty, its outlines don’t need to be a secret. You can tell your online users what’s coming, what the focus of the series is, and ask them to submit their views on poverty. What you end up with is a richer exploration of the issues of poverty – far richer than you as a station can yourselves create because you’ve drawn on the expertise of your vast audience. (mind you, I don’t mean this to be “tell us how to cover the story”; certainly, this “public insight journalism” component is really good and we should all pursue something like this; but what I want to avoid is always forcing the issue to float around the station; the issue is poverty and its impact on the community, and while some people will express their views to you about how you should cover it in your series, the issue of poverty is bigger than you and your station and its series.);
• A mechanism to feed some of the very best of what listeners submit back to the air – from reading excerpts of essays, to airing portions of audio commentaries;
• At the end of the list, a way for users to get to know each other better, discover people with similar interests, discover others’ personal blog sites, etc.

I feel all of this is important for a few reasons:

• As I said earlier, it’s not a nice thing to do – it’s core to our mission.
• We must respect our audience enough not treat them as the great unwashed. We are taking their money; we are thinking of ten different ways to have a deeper relationship with them, all of them designed to benefit us. We’d better make sure it’s not all one-way. They are our partners.
• Haarsager, Hagel and others have talked about serendipitous discovery, and have reminded us that our podcasts can bring us entirely new audiences. So can this content, if it’s allowed to escape the straitjacket of comments to become a community public square – the website that your community comes to believe is the first place to check out when they want to know what people think about an issue or a hot topic of local discussion. (does this mean the public square should escape your station’s website ala Terry Heaton? Maybe.)

I believe public service broadcasting should be the hub of all important discussions in the community, the place listeners AND citizens look to for leadership in promoting arts and culture, discussion of public policy issues – in short, the vitality of the community.

• Citizen journalism is, in a significant way, about owning your own words. That implies responsibilities as well as freedom. We asked people to read and agree to a “pledge” that briefly explained what we believed it meant to be a citizen journalist — including principles such as thoroughness, fairness, accuracy and transparency. Although some cynics hooted that this was at best naive, we’re convinced it was at least useful.
• Limiting participation is not necessarily a bad idea. By asking for a valid e-mail address simply in order to post comments, you reduce the pool of commenters considerably, but you increase the quality of the postings. And by asking for real names and contact information, as we did with the citizen journalists, you reduce the pool by several orders of magnitude. Again, however, there appears to be a correlation between willingness to stand behind one’s own words and the overall quality of what’s said.
• Citizen journalists need and deserve active collaboration and assistance. They want some direction and a framework, including a clear understanding of what the site’s purpose is and what tasks are required. (I didn’t do nearly a good enough job in this area.)
• A framework doesn’t mean a rigid structure, where the citizen journalist is only doing rote work such as filling in boxes.
• The tools available today are interesting and surprisingly robust. But they remain largely aimed at people with serious technical skills — which means too ornate and frequently incomprehensible to almost everyone else. Our tech expert, Jay Campbell, did a heroic job of trying to wrestle the software into submission to our goals. We still felt frustrated by the missing links.
• Tools matter, but they’re no substitute for community building. (This is a special skill that I’m only beginning to understand even now.)
• Though not so much a lesson — we were very clear on this going in — it bears repeating that a business model can’t say, “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.” There must be clear incentives for participation, and genuine incentives require resources.
• On several occasions, PR people offered to brief me on upcoming products or events that they hoped I’d cover in my capacity as a tech journalist, but were happy to give the slot to our citizen journalists. This testifies to a growing recognition among more clued-in PR folks that citizen journalism is here to stay.
• Although the participants — citizen journalists and commenters — are essential, it’s even more important to remember that publishing is about the audience in the end. Most people who come to the site are not participants. They’re looking for the proverbial “clean, well-lighted place” where they can learn or be entertained, or both.
• If you don’t already have a thick skin, grow one.

Read Gillmor’s full post, if you can… and don’t forget Glaser’s interview over at MediaShift.