Organizational must haves: Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Information Architect, Chief Social Officer and Chief Search Engine Optimizer.

It’s important to set online targets. Innovation doesn’t happen on its own. MPR doesn’t set its pageview targets by comparing itself to others in public media: it compares itself to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which still has much higher monthly traffic.

Their innovation plan: “enough with web pages.” Because the next horizon is mobile, organizations should stop building new static web pages, and instead structure and break out content for microformatting. The structure helps create meaningful search results for users and causes your content to rise higher in search.

This thinking extends to site design. Reszler says about 40% of all traffic to the site comes from search engines, so your next redesign must begin with the article page and NOT with “home” because that will be the landing page for close to half of your users. What navigation and links do you have on the article to encourage 1) deeper exploration and 2) a click to the home page?

Reszler recommends the following internal process: Invite, Innovate and Instruct. Brainstorm with staff: what do we have to do in next 3 months to meet audience needs? Empower staff to act on the good ideas.

Interesting aside: MPR mobile site traffic is <1% of all traffic. It’s a growing component of online service and has shown huge growth in the past year, but not yet at MPR.

Thanks to the following twitter people: @candacejeanne, @jsheppa, @mcranevt, @aschweig, @stacybond, @beyondbroadcast, @juliaschrenkler, @matthewtift

John Palfrey
co-director, Berkman Center
author, Born Digital

It’s time to get in front of this mob and call it a parade

There are 1 billion people with access to the Internet. There’s an access gap but there’s also a participation gap.

It’s not just kids who use these tools in sophisticated ways – there are digital settlers who were born in an earlier era, who understand where the Internet is going.

Digital Natives – children born after 1980, who have an environment where they have access to the network.

• * the extent to which identity is created online as well as offline: the two are converged. There is no difference
• * multi-tasking and switch-tasking, and the impact on attention as a result
• * young people presume that the content they’re interacting with is digital. The idea is to share the content
• * young people are very good at working in teams. But the standard education environment is built around competition. Interestingly enough, once students get into the world of work, they’re expected to collaborate

- there’s an international dimension to this community (Global Voices Online is an example)

Myths That Are True

Young people do, in fact, share too much personal information in networked environments, and they don’t understand the consequences of sharing it with unintended audiences.

Young people do take content without paying for it, and share it with others. They know it’s illegal – they’re sticking it to the man. They’re confused abut their rights when it comes to using and remixing content.

Digital natives dip into news they’re interested in, or content that’s been recommended to them by their friends. They don’t go to libraries to research information – they go to Wikipedia and other sources for information, and a small percentage do additional research to verify what they research.

We’ll see people continue to turn to peers to help them discover important things, as a tool to manage information overload.

Young people can be the creators of information, as well as consumers, and we need to provide them with opportunities to do so.

Takeaways
It’s clear that the audience includes young people, and they don’t consider themselves to be just the audience. We’re all creators and audience, and everything is global, even if it crosses local, regional or national lines.

The power in public, private and other collaborations is enormous. There’s so much going on in the public sector that can connect to public media.

Bigger bets are called for at this time. This is, in fact, how people are interacting wth media. So we need to put more wood behind the arrows. This is much more mainstream than we’ve admitted so far

IMA General Session
Joaquin Alvarado
Founding Director of the Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University

Technology doesn’t create communities; communities create technologies to stay connected.

National Public Lightpath
There is a solution to the problems of expanding broadband to more Americans
Universities are connected to next-generation networks – Regional Optical Networks
- so many of our stations are on university campuses, connected or potentially connected to these networks

People are searching for information from YouTube – it’s now the second largest search engine on the Internet.

We need to use the word “networked” rather than “digital.” We’ve had digital for 50 years, but are we ready for the network?

Is everything your doing right now ready to be modularized? Your job is not to figure out how people will use it but to make it possible for people to use it.

Stations: Start talking about 10GBps – and start talking about it right now. You want uncompressed video and a superfast network to collaborate with other stations and producers
Schools must have this kind of connectivity – we don’t have the network effect with schools

National Public Lightpath would connect public media, schools, universities
Stations should work with NPL to write an NTIA grant that connects the station, the local schools, adds vital non-profits, and then work with the city or with private contractors to build the network.

We need to get into the networked environment because others are moving very quickly in this space

It’s clear that audience includes young people, and they don’t consider themselves to be just the audience.

The power in public, private and other collaborations is enormous. There’s so much going on in the public sector that can connect to public media.

Bigger bets are called for at this time. This is, in fact, how people are interacting wth media.

Hal Plotkin
ReelChanges.com/reelchanges.org

crowd-funded documentaries
Maryland Public Television and ReelChanges
http://mpt.org/reelchanges

We need new funding mechanisms for high quality, public media projects. Maryland Public Television has launched it today. MPT has developed spots that air before local productions that encourage viewers to see trailers of new shows in production and to support them to make them possible.

Mark Fuerst: We accept that users will have more control over our content. But we continually say you can only support us in very particular ways.

http://spot.us/ is a similar site that hires reporters to report stories once they’ve been funded by listeners.

Maintaining the Firewall and Making Money
Mike Reszler
Tim Roesler
Bryan Moffitt
Tim Olson

Roesler: this [maintaining the firewall] has been less of an issue than we’ve made it out to be. I’ve become very optimistic about public media.

MPR Finance Channel

stock quotes info – very basic, but has generated about $30,000

The Current – enhanced playlist

ecommerce is built into the application
$1,500 monthly package
Reszler: this is also all about search – the search for an artist

“The Current do Groove Mix” – connected to Blue Cross “do” campaign to get people to exercise more. iTunes playlist of local musicians created for users to buy and download

Tim Olson
KQED’s #1 ad sale is the listen live application. it’s sold by week in flat fee chunks.
there is no value-add inventory on the site. There are packages but nothing is “thrown in”

The content verticals on the site conform to the content priorities of KQED – arts, food, science

KQED is doing some interesting work with sponsors to showcase their message – special sponsor messages, and special advertising sections

LENS on Atlanta
Public Broadcasting Atlanta
Milton Clipper, Wayne Sharp and PBA team

the challenge
- how do we evolve as our audience is involving?
- how do we promote discourse and interconnectedness in out increasingly sprawling metro?
- how do we re-connect with our original democratic process?
- how do we use PBA to reconnect the city?

PBA engaged IBM to create a web site and a concept video to demonstrate the potential of LENS

The Lens on Atlanta (in alpha) site focuses on community discussion, groups based on subject and location, blogs, wikis
Fuzebox built the web site platform
LENS will be packaged as an open source package for other stations to use

LENS is working to engage the community to guide the conversation and act as bloggers – reaching out to existing bloggers, using tools and techniques to manage the tone of the conversation. profanity filter, etc., prominent messaging about the rules of engagement, plus user moderation.

Implementing a content strategy that, at least at first, avoids controversial content. PBA won’t introduce this content, but others may do so, and the site will use tools where necessary

PBA will use its brand to establish an independent platform, partner with diverse organizations who will join in the discussion on the site and provide content and answers, host physical gatherings

Sustainability:
- The question is not how do we justify a new business venture, but how can we justify business as usual when everything around us is changing?
Full business plan in place, looking to different funders and donors

Robert Williams
National Public Media
Introducing Public Media Interactive (PMI)

now, NPM is governed and financed by NPR, WGBH and PBS

PMI is announcing an outsourced operations facility on its web site, announced today

page views per month are commonly used as the main metric for underwriting sales.

Ad servers:
- Google Ad Manager: free. a hosted ad management solution
- Atlas, small cost: operated by Microsoft
- DART for Publishers: hosted solution, owned and operated by DoubleClick, now Google.

PMI Network
New network of unsold banner inventory on station/network web sites
sold in conjunction with NPR and PBS display proposals
65/35 revenue split with stations (stations get 65%)
12 founding stations in network
currently >5 million+ impressions/month
$125,000 booked YTD in first 60 days
small up front effort and no work involved after setup
all creative approved to NPR/PBS standards

NPM provides an Atlas tag to stations, which prioritizes local ads and promotions, then fills in with served ads

Outsourced Operations announcement
pilot program launching this month with 10 stations
Goal: to help stations get selling locally without the hassle of managing an ad server or operations team.

Costs
$500 setup
$85/mo up to two display units in each of three web zones

PMI Ops
small to medium stations
stations with little or no local online sales activities or are looking to ramp up
40,000 – 500,000 monthly pageviews

Bryan Moffett, Director Digital Sponsorship Ops
bmoffett@nationalpublicmedia.com

The new study Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics is released today

What is Public Media 2.0?
Mission: providing content/context for publics to form around shared issues, using new tools and new platforms
Doc Searls – the customer is the new platform
a People-Centric public media

Where is the market failing now?
- investigative reporting
- local news
- public culture, arts
- civic engagement

Two ways to thrive:
- create/curate public media content
- forming partnerships with other organizations

Hybrid projects are beginning to flourish
- professional/amateur
- non-profit/for-profit
- multiplatform

New partners can include policy organizations, cultural organizations, commercial media

What’s needed at the national level
- support for content
- coordination of participatory platforms (should we always depend on YouTube etc)

New roles for stations
- local hubs for public participation
- conveners and collaborators
- aggregators of quality content
- nodes in the national network

The core function of public media 2.0 is to generate publics around issues

Applications
twitter
Ushahidi
Big Art Mob
WhiteHouse.gov
cctvcambridge.org
theworkinggroup.org – built around and extending the PBS “Not in our Town” series on hate crimes

An interesting conversation about partnerships that work and that don’t.

KQED: Tim Olson: blogger network – Bay Area Bites, Quest, Arts – successful model of paid bloggers
Milton Clipper, Public Broadcasting Atlanta – public media should be threaded throughout all aspects of the community
Rob Paterson: Social capital is one of the most important factors in a community; if we can show that we are making an impact in improving/healing the community’s social capital, we’ll have a tangible way of making a difference.
Bruce Theriault: we need to make sure that we can justify continued federal investment, as others claim the mantle of public media
Jake Shapiro: There are organizations that want to work with public media but are growing impatient while public media works out its own issues.

An Overview of Online Activity
Lee Rainie’s slides are available here.

2000
46% of adults use internet
5% broadband at home
50% own cell phone
0% connect to internet on wifi
<10% use cloud
slow stationary connections built around computer

2008
74% adults use internet
58% broadband at home
82% own cell phone
62% connect wirelessly
59% cellphone data
42% pc data card
>53% use cloud
fast, mobile connections, outside servers and storage

IDC says there is 10 fold growth in digital info created, captured, and replicated worldwide from 2006 to 2011

The internet has now surpassed newspapers as the source for national and international news

Forrester: to advertisers, the value of people online is one-tenth the value of people who read magazines and newspapers

News Consumer Typology
traditionalists 46%
integrators 24%
net newsers 14%
disengaged 16% (this cohort is growing faster among the young)

young people rely on their social networks more to keep them informed

The venues of intersecting with information and people multiply and the availability of information expands to all hours of the day and all places we are. – Nielsen Co

People’s vigilance for information changes in two directions:
attention is truncated (continuous partial attention)
attention gets elongated (the age of expert amateurs- Terry Fisher)

The vibrance and immersive qualities of media environments makes them more compelling places to hang out and interact
Metaverse Roadmap Project
virtual worlds
mirror worlds (virtual representations of things that exist in real life- Google Earth)
augmented reality (additional rich data around the virtual representations)
life-logging (Gordon Bell, justin.tv)

The relevance of information improves — search and customization get better as we create the “daily me”

The voice of information democratizes and the visibility of new creators is enhanced. Identity and privacy change.
This is a new 5th Estate, and so far, it’s more Left than Right. Statistically, there are more Republicans online than Democrats, many because of the socioeconomic profile.

Voting on and ventilating about information proliferates as tagging, rating, and commenting occurs.

Social networks become more vivid and meaningful. “Networked Individualism” – Barry Wellman

64% of online teens have created their own profile on a social network site; 35% of adults have done so. Fastest growing cohort on Facebook is women 55+

20% of online adults say they remix content they find online into their own creations

Homo Connectus
Different species with a different sense of…
1) expectation about access to information
2) place and distance
3) presence with others (conversations never end)
4) social networking possibilities
5) capacity to build community
6) possibilities of play
7) time use
personal efficacy

The two-step flow of information has been transformed to at least a four step flow

Challenges of attention
- leverage your traditional platforms
- offer alerts, updates, feeds
- be available in relevant places
- find pathways through users’ social networks
Challenges of acquisition
- be findable in a long-tail world
- pursue new distribution methods
- offer link love for selfish reasons
- participate in the conversation about your work
Challenges of assessment
- honor the ethics of your kind of storytelling
- be transparent, link-friendly, and archive everything
- aggregate the best related work
- when you make mistakes, seek forgiveness
Challenges of assistance
- offer opportunities for feedback
- opportunities for remixing
- opportunities for community building
- be open to the wisdom of crowds