Once newspapers, magazines, radio and TV all move to a web that supports video, which of them will not be, in some degree, in video? Take a look at NYTimes.com or Washingtonpost.com. Increasing amounts of video share the space with text and photos. Can NPR.org afford not to have some video capacity when it tells stories on the web? In truth, we have moved from a world of discrete print, radio and television journalism to an increasingly integrated world of digital online journalism. The distinctions go away. We are all in the same business now.

Audio downloads from the Public Media Conference are coming soon. As John Proffitt notes in the comments here, Conversations Network will offer them as part of a new series called “Media Conversations.”

What follows are my somewhat fleshed out notes from Scott’s presentation:

He warned us that many of the advantages we feel we have in our industry can work against us in a time of innovation. I won’t go too deeply into the theory of Disruptive Innovation because Clayton Christensen has written a lot about it and so have others. But there are a few key elements: (and please excuse my paraphrasing)

1) Companies that fail are often the very companies that were leaders in their field just before the disruptive innovation.

2) When innovators appeared in their industries, companies ignored them because their products weren’t highly developed or they offered limited feature sets.

3) Through an iterative process, those innovators managed to create a compelling product that captured a segment of the market the leader had chosen not to serve. Also through that iterative process, the innovator’s product improved.

4) This is probably the most compelling observation: when you look back at the failed companies, they appear to have done everything right: they paid attention to their core customers and focused on serving them better. And yet they no longer exist or they’re a shell of their former selves.

Anthony laid out a series of keys to disruptive success

1) Enable Nonconsumption – focus on reaching people who aren’t consuming your product, and ask this important question about them: what constrains consumption? Why aren’t they using your product? It might be skills, wealth, access, time.

2) Nail down the job to be done – finding the problem that isn’t adequately solved. We can use our demographics because it gives us information but we should also have an understanding of the circumstances in which our customers use us.

3) When we begin to roll out new services, delight but don’t overshoot. The disruptive solution you’re creating need not be perfect. “Good enough” is not a dirty word.

4) Master emergent strategy – that strategy says, invest a little, learn a lot. Start simple, limit your fixed cost investment, seek early wins. Don’t be too certain that any solution you create is right; the losers generally believe they’re right in the beginning.

5) Break the sucking sound at the core – the core business of the company is a center of gravity that will pull resources away from new, disruptive products. There needs to be a commitment from senior management to the project, there must be resource allocation to match that commitment (the way resources are allocated determines strategy), and there should be specialized approaches, recognizing the special position that the disruptive innovation has in the organization.

Anthony stressed a change of thinking in our companies/industry:

A shift from a monolithic product – to a portfolio of products.
A shift in how we understand our users: they’re no longer just readers – they’re consumers/audiences/contributors.
A shift in focus from advertisers – to customers.

In summary:

What is our plan to reach the nonconsumer?
What’s our plan to reach the nonconsuming business partner?
What’s the plan to master new business models?
How will we make innovation systematic?

Anthony also offered this thought, which is intriguing: if we spend all of our time trying to collaborate with each other, the effort to force or enforce collaboration can be stifling. It would be better to encourage broad innovation with the understanding that the doors to conversation and information sharing will remain open.

• IMA put on one hell of a conference. There was a high caliber roster of presenters from both inside and outside the system. What’s especially notable is the number of outside presenters – Doc Searls, Jeremy Allaire, Sue Gardner, Michael Rosenblum, Doug Kaye, Dave Winer, and Tom Gerace, among others. In a time of convergence, the world outside public media can teach us a lot. And it did, this week.
• Andy Carvin knows a lot of stuff. In fact, if you hold the conference schedule at arms length and squint, you’d think that he and Brendan Greeley hosted all the sessions. With Carvin, Greeley, Jake Shapiro, Julia Schrenkler, and others, we have a strong home team for social media. And that’s the real point of this observation – IMA made a heavy investment in social media at this year’s conference. It’s the right choice because it should be part of our future.
• We’ve accomplished little or nothing since last year on a number of important fronts. Mark Fuerst led that chorus this week. He’s been frustrated for months, and I’m sure he’s not the only one. A year ago at IMA, we talked about things like federated search and a consolidated digital distribution system. At New Realities last year, we pledged to make them happen. This year, we’re back again talking about them. The DDC did a lot of work over the summer, leading to a report, but as Tim Eby rightly noted in a session, “So you killed a tree. What did you accomplish beyond that?”
• No action, but some incubation. More people are nodding their heads in the sessions this year. More people get it.
• Our broadcast presence is not the same as our online presence. This is somewhat obvious, but I mention it because I’ve said a lot over the past year about how our online presence must be as rich as our on-air presence. This is true because it creates the potential for significant service to our audiences. But this doesn’t mean that online is simply an extension of on-air; that’s only the starting point. Our on-air world is broadcast; our online world is a conversation. Our presence online should start with broadcast and build into new territory, new collaborations, new creations. What defines what we do and how we do it? Our values and our mission.
• Public Media professionals need get a clue about the web. I understand that many of our listeners/viewers are still trying to grasp what blogs, podcasts, rss, etc., are. But these are the new tools of our trade, and not understanding them at some basic level is like not understanding AM and FM.

Other Resources:

• Wikipedia: Web 2.0
• Robert Scoble: What is Social Media?

Now, the notes:

It’s worth taking a moment to consider cognitive linguistics because we understand everything in terms of something. We talk about the web in static terms – sites, addresses, etc. And there is a part of the web that is static. But there’s another part of the web that’s live. The Live Web is social and dynamic, among other things. Searls: if your put your static web people in charge of the live part, you won’t succeed.

The web wants to reduce the distance between individuals – the medium – the zero. We’re zero distance from each other. Searls: so where is public media in this?

We need to be aware that demand can now supply – our audience can now join us as creators.

Fundraising: public broadcasting conflates “relationship” with “transaction.” If we uncouple the two, we might go a lot further.

We are authors of each other. Public media, ultimately, isn’t about delivering information; it’s about changing people.

Jake talked about public media understanding its larger role in the community – we’re more than a public radio station.

Daniel Ash: We’re far behind in implementing many of the technologies others have embraced. Why should we do it? We shouldn’t do it merely because others are doing it. We did it because of how we wanted to be positioned and how we wanted to be perceived.

We’ve encouraged staff members to establish their own blogs. We’ve not had great success getting them to do it, but one or two have. Allowing listeners to submit photos through Flickr that would be featured on the front page of the website has been extremely successful.

Chicago Public Radio is launching a new service this year that will focus heavily on social media, making use of content coming from listeners, and letting it exist on-air and online.

Julia Schrenkler: We’re willing to try everything. It’s important to remember to start small, but keep an eye on expansion. Make sure that whatever you do is useful to everyone: producers, your users, you. Julia spoke at length about a couple of Minnesota Public Radio’s efforts – Minnewiki and the communities it’s established on Gather.

When experimenting:

• Check your mission; it’s your guide
• Verify: does your audience want it?
• Identify your champions internally; they might not be obvious
• Try temporary or small things

Ken Freedman: WFMU had a highly successful message board for 8 years. As its effectiveness faltered, they took it down and replaced it with a blog. They felt it could better represent the station than the forum did. But what they discovered is that the blog isn’t there to serve the station – it’s there to serve the audience, and users took ownership of it. Freedman noted that a blog is very “radio-like” – it’s a constant stream of ideas, and the authors are “text jockeys.”

Social media is under-hyped. What is driving it and why are audiences growing so quickly? What is public media’s role? The true potential is the knowledge of each individual on one or more of thousands of subject; social media connects those individuals to each other and the aggregate knowledge created is immensely valuable.

What is it we do?

• Define a voice
• Bring together engaged, informed audiences
• Create a critical mass around topics of interest
• Bring experts, our own and of those outside, to inform the debate
• Play a key editorial role

Brendan and Andy talked about both WordPress and Movable Type software – the hosted and software versions. Radio Open Source is currently using WordPress, but Brendan says they’re migrating to Drupal, which has some very interesting possibilities beyond the blogging platform. Andy talked about NPR’s use of Movable Type, some of the limitations of MT, and more broadly, the kind of IT support you might need for either.

Comments

Comments are immensely valuable. Brendan and Andy stressed that content providers need to allow comments, make the process of entering a comment and seeing it appear as simple and quick as possible. Brendan: clearly state, from the outset, the commenting guidelines because if, over time, you change those guidelines, it can break trust with your users, some of whom will be your best users. Brendan says the best comments are personal stories. Nobody’s opinion is very interesting, but their stories are. So end the post with questions and let those questions guide readers in making their comments. Carvin: have a mission statement so people know why you’re blogging and why you’re looking for input. Registration is a disincentive for commenters, but it allows a two way conversation. Radio Open Source asks for a zip code and a valid email address.

Community

As communities grow around your blog, those individuals will become aware of each other and they will understand their power. They gain a place at the table in terms of making suggestions for site improvements, etc. You ignore them at their peril.

RSS

This part of the presentation was a bit more torturous, as Brendan and Andy tried hard to help the audience understand the principles of RSS and the utility of feed readers like Bloglines. This is hard stuff to explain.

UPDATE: The wiki entry for the session is here.

Carvin and Greeley need to do a roadshow to stations.

By the way, Radio Open Source’s Blogger-in-Chief, Brendan Greeley, is the keeper of the Public Media Conference blog.

Public Media’s Advantage:
1) A commitment to high quality, deep educational content
2) Our position as nearly the last of the locally owned and managed media
3) We are not beholden to corporate interests
4) Our environment is now one of abundance (bandwidth, not resources)

The Challenges We Face:
1) We’re captive to our own success in engaging a particular demographic
2) The value we place on excellence sometimes hurts us, when lower-cost production methods can get the job done
3) Our decentralized structures and fiefdoms
4) Rights/intellectual property issues
5) New demands on the attention of our current and potential audience

New Media at WGBH
WGBH’s current focus is more on marketing, research and branding – getting a better understanding of the audience and what it wants; encouraging a culture of experimentation. Becton noted that we’re curators of a library of content – content that is valuable for years and years after. He pointed to the concept championed by APTS, to create an American Archive of public media content available, forever. APTS is lobbying Congress for funds to digitize the library of public tv content. Other WGBH priorities include finding new ways to harness ancillary revenues, discovering how to bring the audience into the creation process, and looking for new ways to collaborate internally.
Becton named a couple specific goals for public media in the short-term – ones we’ve heard before: federated search and creating a common customer service platform.

Henry Becton set the tone perfectly for the work that was to follow.