His critique is excellent, so you should read it all, but I’ll pull a few highlights: first, the DDC model, which is weighted toward advertising support, is based on the concept of keeping most content free. The DDC does allow for paid access to specialized tiers of content, but Stephen notes that the DDC has a prejudice against charging for content, and he believes that level of dependence on advertising could change the nature of public media.

Stephen makes a number of other interesting comments about certain DDC assumptions – competence at local stations to use the resources properly, and we’re under-estimating the resources need to vet incoming content for quality.

His document advances the discussion, and we need to give careful thought to every one of his points.

If you’ve not read the DDC overview document yet, please download it here. (pdf)

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.

A few nuggets:

The Emotional Experience – In the new model, the member has to have a compelling emotional experience. Public radio has to transcend merely being a trusted news or entertainment source and become an emotional necessity for its members.

All for One and One for All – You are as strong as your weakest link. You stand together or not at all! To do this you will also have to stop thinking that you can allow many stations to operate below the standard by which this experience is delivered. [...] You cannot sit by and passively observe poor performers take down your whole system. Neither can you set out to manage everyone in the system. What you can do is to define standards for stations and for groups of stations as implied in your emergent plan.

Branding Principles in a Cultural Context – Southwest’s brand is not some marketing wheeze. It is the expression of the experienced reality of its culture and what this culture delivers to its employees first and then as a consequence of what its employees deliver as an experience to the customer. In the new model, the brand is driven by how you are as a person and as an organization.

There’s great stuff here – the ingredients that we need in the mix to create the next generation of service for our audience.

Content is nothing on its own. It only exists as part of conversations — understood not in the usual ‘blogsphere’ sense of deliberation, but as shared concerns (not my term), concerns that we must partake in to be part of communities. When I buy a novel I choose it not just because I think I might enjoy it, but also because it is also being read by other people, because it’s part of a larger movement that I’m interested in, or because it is relevant to something else I read. Reading is satisfactory only if I bring with me a certain baggage; and reading will add to my baggage, allowing me to appreciate other works and, crucially, to have more of a shared background with people around me. My point is that content–or, more precisely, the transaction of consuming content–is only meaningful as part of a wider conversation that is made up of countless related transactions.

And here is Terry Heaton, from his latest brilliant essay, The On-Demand Trap:

Doug Rushkoff argues effectively that the web is a social phenomenon, not a media phenomenon or a technological phenomenon. This makes traditional media people uncomfortable, because it demands a response other than the content-provider safe haven. [...]

Involving yourself with real people in a real online community setting takes a skillset and values that most broadcasters don’t seem to possess.

If, as the Cluetrain crowd asserts, markets are conversations, then the web is the new marketplace and all “content” is commoditized to a point where it’s a conversation starter at best or merely a diversion at worst. Either way, the “content” concept is far down the priority list of the marketplace, and interactivity with human beings is number one.

One of the conclusions is that our content requires context to have value. Not necessarily earth-shattering – we public broadcasters have long believed that our content needs ears: Think Audience.

We’re adding a slight twist to the “tree in the forest” – someone needs to hear it and then tell someone else about it. That’s not entirely new, either. Public radio’s growth over the last 15 years has happened, in large part, because people listened and then said, “I heard it on NPR.”

The part that we’re struggling with now seems to be realizing the full implications of Nico’s statement: the transaction of consuming content is only meaningful as part of a wider conversation that is made up of countless related transactions. The web can bring the watercooler, the “I heard it” to us, and it will bring it right to our web sites, if we let it. This makes many of us nervous; we’re afraid of what people might say, how they might say it – how they might contaminate the content we’ve labored over so lovingly. But if we’re willing to accept that our listeners have participated with us in making public radio a significant and growing force in American life – with their attention and their money – then we’re going to have to understand and believe that the online manifestation of their participation with us – this more direct and intimate participation – will also strengthen us and make us greater still.

There are lots of paths – from the very basic (comments), to more developed user-generated content (essays, commentaries, blogs), to the complex and fascinating (MPR/APM’s Public Insight Journalism, and allowing users to create content from our content). This isn’t about choosing one of them. It’s about choosing the form(s) of interaction that works for each element of our online presence, experimenting, making deliberate mistakes, learning.

Ultimately, it’s about realizing public media’s potential as a hub of cultural and intellectual life.

John writes:

My public remarks [at New Realities] were intended to push people beyond their comfort zones and to remember the mission—it is one that demands courage and willingness to do the uncomfortable, to overcommit in order to really make things change for the better.

I admire some of what Rob has noted: at least there was the rhetoric of common purpose and common dreams.

Let’s see if the house remains on fire, in perilous terms, or if the house is on fire with the passion of new ideas, workable strategies and the urgency to get things done.

My fear is that we didn’t get to the critical items we need to address if we have any chance of success:

* where to find the next generation of passionate producers, creators and managers
* where to find the talented people who can do better than we have
* how to rethink all of our structures and operations so we have faster and more open ways to advance the best ideas
* how do we engage people’s hearts and passions
* as concepts of trust change (the next generation has different defintions than we do), will be be there? What is our response to the ‘Jon Stewarts?’
* what is our role in regard to preserving, presenting, respecting culture in all its forms?
* can we address real threats from within to our credibility? Should we push for no more university licensees?
* why shouldn’t NPR, PRI, APM and PRX all merge? Martin Neeb opened that window and it was powerfully provocative. We do all waste a lot of money, resources, time and talent on competition with not much distinction.
* Can we accept a different defintion of public radio and public media..one not defined by the past and from the top down, but defined more by the listeners who now have the capacity to produce and create?
* We should have the courage to name those stations and centers of innovation that ‘get it’ and ‘do it’ everyday. Hold up models of the best, regardless of offending those who are not on that list. We have to be brutally honest about what works and what we have to do. We need to be courageous.
* We don’t pay enough attention to our audiences except in terms of what they pledge, what checks they write and the aggregate behavior of ratings. We need to listen to those who are listening.
* How can we make risk taking less frightening? Failure is ok if we learn the right lessons and apply them. Failure is not ok if mediocre performance is an excusable standard.
* Public service — mission and leadership mixed with humility and openness — will make public radio and public radio a bedrock of society. Who has the guts to work on that balance every day?

We need to act smartly and quickly.

Some of the smartest people in our industry are working at PRX.

Why do we need aggregation and consolidated technologies?

That’s how Mark Fuerst phrased it in a note to stations following the NPR New Realities event in Washington earlier this month. Someone else put it this way in an iMA web conference call: What is the vision that sets the tone for this?

“This” is a loose set of ideas that is broadly transformative of public radio as we know it now. It ranges from a more systematic sharing of online content to a consolidated backend, to ideas for increased social interaction, improved metrics, an alignment of metadata and other infrastructures, to a possible restructuring of the relationship between NPR and the member stations. As many have pointed out, quite rightly, we’re putting the cart before the horse – we’re deciding what we want to do without being able to articulate exactly why we should be doing it. Here’s a suggestion:

A Vision for Public Radio: Essential to America

The past 40 years has been a progression from a public radio service seen as alternative or interesting, to today’s important, core news and music streams, served by about 700 stations nationwide and reaching about 30 million listeners a week. We’ve become important; some of our stations have become market leaders, and we’ve become very good.

Now the issue is: what lies beyond this. How does an important radio service evolve into an essential communications network?  It wouldn’t be merely important to 30 million listeners a week; it would be essential to the cultural and political life of all Americans. This might be (should be?) our guiding strategy.

How might we frame what essential means?  I think this requires examining where we are now.

What do we care about?

1. Providing services that our audiences trust and rely upon
2. Executing those services with a profound respect for our audiences
3. Ensuring that our services offer a diverse array of voices and perspectives
4. Creating and distributing national music and news programs that unite our audiences around common experiences and concerns
5. Creating local music and news services that speak to the common experiences of citizens in small towns, cities, counties, states
6. Demonstrating the courage of our own convictions in non-commercial media, in contrast to the current state of commercial broadcasting, which can be characterized as an abandonment of local service and fact-based reporting

What can we do better than anyone else?

1. We have, at our fingertips, a “newsroom” that extends from international bureaus and a Washington headquarters to “bureaus” in cities and towns all over the country. If we found a way to harness the collective power of our national, regional and local reporting teams, we could create a world-class journalistic enterprise.
2. Our decades-long history of presenting different genres of music, away from the pressures of commercial sponsorship has allowed us to create services where it really is “about the music.” And with the goal of audience service as our primary responsibility, we are uniquely positioned to serve American’s desire for a diverse array of music, reflecting regional cultures and international influences.
3. Our audience is vast (30 million people!) and heterogeneous, but our listeners share common traits, including an insatiable curiosity about their world and a desire to participate in it. If we utilize our leadership in fact-based journalism and culture, we can create new ways of interacting with our audience, on-air, online, and in-person, that will help to secure public radio’s position at the center of American cultural and civic life.

Many of you will recognize this model; I’ve lifted it from Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great.” Now, we want to tie this vision to the pursuit of aggregation and consolidated technologies.

Is technology the driver or the bus?

We would be wrong to assume that technological advancements are the sole driver of the changes we propose. Technology is certainly a factor, in that the pace of change has delivered a powerful wake-up call to our industry. But the primary driver will be our vision of public radio’s place in the lives of the American people – in other words, it will be an initiative built primarily on our strategy and our content. Technology’s proper role is as the enabler for both our content and strategic initiatives.

Why aggregation makes sense:

The basic arguments for aggregation come down to three points:
(a) the need to focus on the user-experience rather than the organizational boundaries;
(b) the cost of the investment required;
(c) the need to invest in content development rather than overhead.

Research initiated by the Online Publishers Assocation shows that people already expect media companies to provide service on multiple platforms.  They view these platforms as various faces of the same company, with each platform giving them some advantages (radio signals are more convenient; websites allow for time-shifting and search).

That research suggests the opportunity to “recycle audience” from on-air to online.  Proper exploitation of search functions would seem to offer great opportunities to expand audience, when people find our content online and come back for more.  What are we seeing?  The most comprehensive study we have of listener use of our websites suggests that the “cume online audience” (unique visitor count) is less than 10% of on-air cume at almost every public radio station.

The problem, at least in part, is a fractured user-experience.  Right now, users get a very satisfying experience from our signals: programs sound great; mobile devices (like car radios) pick up the signal very well, require no buffering, and rarely experience drop outs).  Online the user experience is completely different–highly fractured, incomplete, often frustrating.  For listeners of a station featuring a standard sample of network programs, people can get some things at your station.org site; some at NPR.org; other things, at Echoes.org, Marketplace.org, or ThisAmericanLife.org. This fragmentation does not reflect the user’s sense of what we are (an integrated system).  The end result is low use.

We must continue to satisfy current listener needs and expand to meet needs that are part of the fully-wired world, such as translating news to text and graphics; providing audio on demand; publishing strategically in multiple platforms through multiple partners. We must deliver this content in a way that is focused on the user, and not dictated by the station or the network.  To date, our strategic thinking is dominated by the needs of organizations in our system and not focused (or focused enough) on the needs of our audience. We must install and maintain a delivery platform that is focused on the user—who often does not know or care where the content comes from.

After ten years of effort, only a handful of stations have achieved a strong online franchise that properly complements their on-air service. Most of them are music stations.  Changing this is a very expensive task—if we approach it one station at a time.  Very few organizations in public radio (or TV) are capable of even considering the level investment that might be required to meet state-of-the-art delivery standards.  Yet, over the next decade, media companies will have to develop multi-platform content and marketing services.  It is almost inconceivable that hundreds of public radio and TV stations will be able to achieve this presence without assistance, for two reasons: the costs are too high and the content stations provide comes from so many different sources.  Developing this kind of system requires a type and scale of collaboration as large as any we’ve made to date. In aggregate, station and network expenditures on infrastructure – networks, backend technologies, etc – are considerable.

Development of many discrete systems may give individual stations or networks a sense of independence and control, but the development of multiple infrastructures contributes very little to the actual service experienced by the audience—certainly not in the way that our program services do. (For this reason, I call them non-core services.)  To the extent that there is duplication of non-core services, it is a drain on station and network resources, robbing dollars from content production. While some duplication of non-core services can contribute to innovation (individual stations as test-beds for new concepts), the level of duplication systemwide is unsustainable, and, over time, will leach millions of dollars away from the core mission of producing content.
We face these imperatives:

1. We must diversity our content in a way that we have not been willing or able to do so far, including providing service to minority audiences, and reshape at least some of our content to reach younger audiences whose media expectations will be far different from our own.
2. We must find ways to gain economies of scale, in services, staffing, and investment, that will allow us to put maximum investment into content creation and user-oriented service, rather than overhead.
3. We must install a transaction platform capable of processing millions of requests for a content and service in a satisfying and secure way.

Therefore, we must assess our non-core infrastructure, and make every effort to restructure those operations to ensure maximum cost-savings while providing a common-sense service to the end-user, and while maintaining the local and national brands that are a source of strength to public broadcasting. This includes potentially a wide range of services, ranging from metadata to a centralized online content depot, the “consolidated backend,” etc.