How to get there: 400 jobs at CBC, more than 330 at Radio-Canada (the French side) and 70 admin positions. Most of the cuts look to come at the network level, with the regions bearing less of the burden (70 job cuts). CBC/Radio-Canada will also sell more real estate and other assets. CBC will announce a voluntary retirement program and leave open positions unfilled, which will reduce the actual number of layoffs; they’ll be announced in May.

Canadians who know, correct me if I’m wrong, but this looks different from the massive cuts of the late 1980′s, which went deep into the regions. After that bloodletting and additional cuts in the 90′s, CBC had slowly rebuilt some of the regional newsgathering/production capability, using supplemental funding from Parliament and other money from cost savings and real estate sales.

It looks as though much of this capacity will stay in place, pending deeper cuts: the supper hour TV newscasts will continue, for instance, and no stations will close. Also relatively unaffected: the CBC Radio One schedule and the regional noon radio talkshows; and the local morning shows, many of which are at or near the top of the ratings.

Again, correct my errors here, but this looks like an effort to cut in such a way that the rebuilding process will be easier once the economy improves. You don’t have to reopen stations you’ve closed down, for instance. It also looks like the way to proceed if one wants to maintain (in some way) the recent increases in local/regional service.

So… what about Radio 3? And, if Radio One emerges somewhat unscathed, does that mean Radio 2 gets a low and tight haircut? Also, the French cuts might be proportional, but Radio-Canada produces more of its own content. Will cuts here be more damaging to the leading position of Radio-Canada in Francophone Canada? Oh, and whither Newsworld? Radio 2′s auxiliary online streams?

All of this will get more clear tomorrow.

Sullivan writes that blogging is jazz to established journalism’s classical music. One doesn’t replace the other, but each requires a different way of performing, a different way of listening and interacting. Each complement and enhance appreciation of the other.

In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane.

Sullivan says that the platform defines the style and interaction.

Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.

This drags us to a bigger question, one that goes beyond the rather petty distraction of bloggers vs journalism:

Why are we publishing our public radio journalism on a computer screen in almost the exact same way as we publish it to an electrical signal transmitted through the air?

Television requires a different kind of journalism than does radio. So what is the appropriate, legitimate and journalistically sound way for public radio and TV to translate its reporting to the web?

By copying and pasting reporter’s scripts to the site? Probably not. This is a big challenge. What are we dreaming up? What experiments are we conducting? Are we being too prissy and unimaginative about the platform?

What will be the impact of this new reality on public media. I’ve been offering some thoughts, hoping they’ll serve as conversation starters.

Now, more than ever, it’s time to engage the community.

I don’t recommend holding off on that cool community engagement concept until your organization is down to its last dollar. But economic difficulties shouldn’t be a signal to lay low until times get better. These times can provide opportunities for you to harness your resources to address key issues that matter most to your audience. Doing so may convince the people who matter in your community that you’re committed to meeting urgent social needs; that enhances your position as a significant community institution, and reminds them that your continued financial health is a core community concern.

Here are a few examples I’m aware of. If you know of others, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Reaching out to families: Iowa Public Television

Dan Wardell is the face of Iowa Public Television‘s outreach to kids. On TV, you’ll catch him here and there in the kids schedule. But if you see him in real life, you realize just how much of a phenomenon he is. Every year, kids (and parents) swarm around him during his appearances at the Iowa State Fair. His shows and story readings are standing room only. This year, Dan went on tour all over Iowa, and you can check out his blog to see the results.

During this year’s horrific flooding, Dan Wardell’s “Reading Road Trip” traveled to libraries in flood affected areas like Iowa City and Burlington. He drew record crowds – families who needed a brief respite from the ordeal.

Now, you can look at this as a heartwarming episode. (“Maybe we’ll do that again sometime, if we can get a grant”). But I’d be very surprised if IPTV’s leadership let it go at that. In recent years, they’ve been a network on a mission to build a sustainable future; I bet this is a defining moment.

Solving Community Problems: KETC

I’ve given several shout outs to KETC‘s initiative, Facing the Mortgage Crisis. I’m highly impressed with the active role the station is taking to help find solutions to a huge problem. Here, an aspect of the downturn itself is an opportunity for 9 St Louis to show it’s an invaluable community partner.

Facing the Mortgage Crisis isn’t a segment on the weekly magazine show; it’s not a one hour documentary, shot in true-to-life HD. This is a “get in there and get your hands dirty” effort to help the community.

The station is partnering with local agencies like United Way to channel information to people who’ve lost their homes, or who are facing foreclosure. There are live on-air call-ins, and live on-air community discussions. Check out the blog. It’s not promotional, it’s about getting information to people who need it. And this initiative doesn’t end after a day, a week or a month. It’s a long term commitment to St. Louis.

Imagining Energy Independence on PEI: Robert Paterson

This isn’t strictly a public media example, but I offer it because it’s an interesting approach to the macro-crisis, and it might give you some ideas.

Prince Edward Island depends on oil and gas, like we all do. But with an average household income in the province of $35,000, people are really suffering as prices rise. Robert Paterson (who lives on PEI) and others are asking: if cheap oil will never return, if the joyride is really over, can PEI have a future? They think it can, and they’re thinking about how they can create it, from existing but underutilized alternative energy sources to promoting a resurgence of agrarian culture and local food.

(photo by Raceytay)

Paterson starts with the core concept that the answers to our problems are already out there, in the community; the job, then, is to mobilize the community so people will put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Yes, a concept such as this is bigger than any one public radio or TV station could tackle. But not if public media reaches out to community partners, as IPTV has done in working with teachers and libraries; as KETC has done in working with community agencies.

All of this is big stuff, but it’s tied directly to our long-term sustainability. The community will support us if it listens to us and watches us, and if it sees that we’re a trusted partner committed to addressing the needs of the community.

What do you think? Are you undertaking a similar community initiative? If you are or you have, what have you learned from it? Take a moment to leave a comment.

• Part 1: Virtualizing the Workplace
• Part 2: Social Media for Ourselves

How will you adapt? I’m posting some thoughts of my own on the impact of this new reality on public media, hoping they’ll serve as conversation starters, if your organization is getting squeezed.

Social media: If it’s good for our audience, it can be good for us, too.

Every time I talk to my boss about going to a conference, his eyes glaze over. It’s hard for him to listen and simultaneously fathom the havoc I’m about to wreak on the budget.

Some of it can’t be helped. Some meetings must be in person – the networking opportunities are to good, the shear effect of a collection of brains in one place too important to neglect. But, are we using all those cool web tools out there to maximum effect? Probably not. They won’t replace the vitality of an in-person event, but they fill a big gap for lots of other kinds of interaction. We should harness those tools.

Wikis

They’re almost old-fashioned compared to all the shiny stuff out there, but they’re super effective for collaborations. We just completed work on a grant proposal, in which we partnered with another public media organization. With the exception of two 15 minute phone calls, the entire 3 weeks of work transpired on a wiki. No flyins, no tedious emailing of documents to each other, with the resulting tangle of comments and textual additions and subtractions. It’s all on the wiki; everybody can read it; everybody can comment on it; everybody can change it. Sometimes old-fashioned is just fine by me.

Webconferencing

OK, please don’t let your last experience with webconferencing turn you into a sworn enemy of the technology. Yes, I was on that call, too. The one where the moderator got disconnected for 5 minutes; the web presentation locked up; the Skype call sounded like it was coming from South Ossetia; the PD from Greater Tri-Cities Public Radio put the call on hold and treated everyone to 4 minutes of “Afternoon Classicale.”

There are significant technical hurdles to overcome and the organizer of a web conference spends almost as much time thinking about the technical pieces as the presentation. But it’s like riding a bicycle – eventually, you stop falling off and it becomes pleasurable. I’ve taken part in some IMA, PRPD and other webconferences that have come off with few or no technical glitches. These won’t be a replacement for the annual conference, but organizations like PRPD are making an effort to leverage webconferences more frequently to transmit knowledge around the system and encourage idea sharing. This is a great idea, no matter the state of the economy. For every two people who get to go to a conference, there are probably 10 others who could benefit but have to stay home. (disclosure: I’m on the PRPD board)

Skype/Video Conferencing

There’s probably no easier software to use if you want to use internet phone or (God help us) video chat. Skype’s newest iterations include a much tighter integration of video, and while you can add some other gizmos and make it a big group, multiple location roundtable, Skype is all you need if you want to check in with a reporter at a distant bureau, or other telecommuting staffers. It takes some getting used to. I’ll never forget taking part in a video chat at a station where I worked; the staff at the satellite outpost turned the cam away from them because they didn’t want to be seen. On my side, all of us addressed an empty chair.

Chat, with or without video

UPDATE: Josh Andrews had some good thoughts in the comments, so let me break off a piece of the chat idea from Skype. Skype functions well as a chat application, but I think most of us use one or more of the Big Four: Yahoo Messenger, Windows/MSN Messenger, AIM or GoogleTalk.

These chat services are excellent even if you’re all working in the same building. As Josh notes, email is not well suited for quick questions, etc. If you’re too busy to track down the individual in person, and sometimes we are, chat can get the job done. To make it work, everyone should decide on a single platform, or everyone can download an application that handles multiple platforms (Adium is one of several) and open all accounts at once. Put everyone’s preferred chat screenname on the internal contact list.

DIY Social Networks

I’ve mentioned these before, but they deserve another mention. I got invited to join the Mortgage Crisis project that 9 St. Louis is undertaking. It’s built on the Ning platform, and it’s a joy to use. From profiles to forums, to mini-social network clusters, everyone working on the project, whether in St Louis, Charlottetown PEI, or Louisville or DC, can follow the development of the project from minute to minute, debate and discuss ideas, share clippings, even view and critique edits of video segments.

This is the same platform that WAMU uses to engage its listeners. KETC has put it to use internally to make their collaboration more efficient and meaningful.

Are you using tools like these to bridge the gap? As costs of travel rise, are you thinking more seriously about these tools? Do they work for you? Or not? If you have anything to add, please share in the comments.

• Part 1: Virtualizing the Workplace
• Part 3: Engaging the Community

So, how will you adapt? This week, I’m posting thoughts on a couple of the many ways this new economic reality might have an impact on public media.

Your star reporter says, “Look, it’s cost prohibitive for me to drive to the station every day. Why do I have to commute to this building every day when I can do my job with a microphone and a laptop?”

We’re going to be squeezed hard in the next couple years. Our infrastructure costs will rise significantly, and it’s likely our membership revenue will remain flat or drop somewhat.

Making big cuts in the services we provide would kill the goose that lays the golden egg. But we are going to have to cut somewhere.

Costs that have been considered mandatory are going to come into sharp focus: how much are we paying for office space, cubicles, heating and cooling… all based on an assumption that everybody needs to be in the building for 8 hours a day, sitting at an expensive desk, using expensive electricity?

If you can’t give your star reporter, or any of your employees, a raise next year or the year after, what are you prepared to do to keep them? Are you willing to consider letting your reporters work from home one or two days a week? They’re still going to drive to cover the news on the station dime, of course, but a 20% or a 40% reduction in commuting costs could be the equivalent of a nice salary increase with $5 a gallon gas. And after you spend a little (very little) cash to equip them to work virtually, your infrastructure expenditures at HQ may fall.

Other staff in various departments may also be able to work from home for a day or two a week. Internet access and other tools could keep them connected to the home office.

What about employees who do have to report to headquarters every day: your on-air staff, among others? They may have some justification in asking for a raise to cover their higher commuting costs.

Can you virtualize the entire radio or TV station? Of course not. But must everyone be gathered in the same physical space from 9am-5pm each day? No.

In most sectors employing knowledge workers, including public media, concepts like flex-time, and performance standards based on accomplishment are going to become more important than occupying a cubicle for 40 hours a week. Other public media organizations that understand and act on this before you do will have something new and compelling to attract your employees.

What do you think? Would you implement workplace changes like these in order to control costs, or reduce employee commuting costs? Would they have a positive impact, or not? What ideas is your organization considering to control rising infrastructure costs? A “green” initiative, perhaps? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

• Part 2: Social Media for Ourselves
• Part 3: Engaging the Community

What we do know is this: even if oil and gas prices don’t go higher than they are right now, we’ve just barely started to feel the ripple effects of current prices in our other costs of doing business.

This means the smartest organizations are approaching the next year conservatively: at American Public Media, Jon McTaggart has told staff: “we are assuming that the current weakness in the economy will be significant and sustained.”

Regardless of which economic forecast or guru you believe, it’s fair to conclude that, things aren’t going to be like they used to be for awhile.

So, how will you adapt? This week, I’m posting thoughts on a couple of the many ways this new economic reality might have an impact on public media.

They’re starting points for a discussion we should be having, not definitive statements on the topic at hand.  I hope you’ll read them, but more important, I hope you’ll comment and add your intelligence to this discussion.

• Thursday Part 1: Virtualizing the Workplace
  
• Friday Part 2: Social Media for Ourselves
• Monday Part 3: Engaging the Community
  

I attended BB in 06 and 07 but couldn’t make it because of schedule conflicts this year. If you found yourself in a similar situation, then check out the very complete report here.

I’ve just started digging into this, but it looks like some of the deepest discussions came in the afternoon during the Mapping the Money panel, which included Ernest Wilson, Walter Annenberg Chair in Communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California… and board member of the CPB. He chided public media for not keeping up with the pace of change. “If you don’t get this right pretty soon, the quality of democracy will decline and stagnate, and it will be our fault.” Strong stuff, leading to robust discussion.

I’ve always thought this conference was particularly provocative and invigorating; the other “public media” conferences belong exclusively to the wealthiest branch of public media, the radio and television stations that serve a well-educated and largely passive audience (in the case of television, a mostly diapered audience).

I’m happily a part of that elite public media segment and I like those other conferences (I’m a PRPD board member and we put on a pretty good conference ourselves), but as someone who is supposed to be making decisions about the future of public media, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded that public media is much bigger than Public Radio and Public Television; that there are smart ways that we can all work together, if we’re willing to experiment thoughtfully; and that we bear the special burden of preserving democracy in a country where it’s under attack on many fronts.

Rob Paterson mentioned his plan to use Ning for a project in the comments, and now he’s posted in great detail on how he and KETC, and a larger community of public media folks (myself included) are using Ning to track an important initiative that KETC is undertaking to address the sub-prime mortgage crisis. This project is one to watch.

So, you have everyone at KETC, you have Rob, you have other partners, and you have a small group of public media “advisors” around the country – how do you keep everyone on the same page? Rob’s screenshots shows the power of Ning’s platform – you can see how they’re making use of internal blogs, asking questions and fomenting discussion in the forums, embedding clips of content as it’s created.

This is exciting stuff. You can do it with Basecamp and other tools, but Ning adds a social wrapper the project management that’s going on here.

I’m not a paid Ning spokesperson, nor do I wish to be, but I’m enthusiastic about the potential uses for this tool.

Rob offers some thoughts on how he thinks public media can leverage its high quality content online, partnering with new media companies who are starving for this kind of stuff, find more creative and engaging formats for that content, and market it. That way, quality audio and video from public media “infects” a marketplace that needs it and wants it.

Rob dropped me an email yesterday and said he’s finding that his work with One Economy is starting to intersect with public media, which reminds me of one of the meta-discussions at Beyond Broadcast: what is public media? There’s a growing recognition that it’s much bigger than the government sanctioned media outlets that call themselves public broadcasting.

Here’s his post.

Her strong opening line: Nonprofit public media–and most especially public broadcasting–will embrace interactive Web tools that connect companies, producers and distributors of content and their target consumers in ways they once considered “commercial.” Three words of advice: Get over it.

She proceeds to list a number of those “formerly commercial” opportunities, each of which arises from either the quality content we’re already creating, or new initiatives we have underway to explore other platforms.

Her recommendations include better systems to acquire and process donations and contributions, stepping beyond the traditional concepts of membership, perhaps even a central fundraising mechanism; monetizing the connections we’re building with new tools like twitter and Facebook; and getting content out to third parties like Hulu and iTunes, where people can purchase it.

Mermigas offers only a couple examples of ways we’re currently generating revenue from our content, but in truth, there are only a few. She notes there are a lot of interesting things we’re doing that could be revenue generators, from our social engagement on twitter, to signature content we create.

And: An estimated $3.5 trillion of available investment funds are on the sidelines in the U.S.–as much as $40 trillion worldwide–as a result of the credit crunch, cautious lending and economic turmoil. There is a precedent for conditional, nonprofit investing that simultaneously advances social goals and business interests.

Mermigas isn’t giving us all the answers; her post encourages us to think again about what we’re doing and how we might pay for it.

It’s worth a close read.

Dennis Haarsager has introduced me and perhaps many others to the excellent analysis of Diane Mermigas through his blog Technology360. Some of you will remember Diane from her appearances at the Public Media Conference, most recently this last February.

Note: Here at WFPL/Louisville Public Media, we’re pleased to be listed among her examples of public media engagement.

There are two great pieces on this: Mark Cuban goes at this story from a business angle, arguing that Hulu is kicking YouTube’s butt because it has better content, controls the content, and therefore can monetize it effectively. Very interesting argument.

Robert Scoble looks at it from the view of a content producer. He writes that YouTube’s decision is smart because long-form content draws fewer viewers at present, but far more engaged viewers, and that means an audience that’s arguably more receptive to an advertiser’s message. “Longform wins and wins big.”

Public Media takeaways:

• *If you have a content partner relationship with YouTube, you may now have, or might soon have, the option to offer more long-form content on YouTube. That’s a good thing because we have a lot of that stuff – more long than short – in our archives.
• *There is an audience for long-form video. Yes, it’s a smaller audience than the millions who might view a 2-minute clip of a cat playing the piano. But, the audience is more engaged… cares more about that content… has likely sought it out… and wants to see it all.
• *The widespread availability of the “full-screen toggle” and the media center systems that marry the TV with the computer are making for a much different online viewing experience – one that’s closer to TV, and one that’s likely to result in longer average viewing times for online video.
• *Better broadband in the home and on the go is creating the possibility of two very different kinds of video consumption experiences. Video viewed on mobile devices is often short-form; even with EVDO and HSDPA, it’s still easier to download and manage shorter clips on mobile devices (although this is changing). At home, there are a small but growing number of users (myself included) that get almost all their video from online sources like Hulu and iTunes. The two minute clip is cute, but we’re searching for the real thing, not a tiny slice.

There is a market for the long-form stuff your station or network is producing, and although it’s small, these folks are your core – your members (or should-be-members) – and the audience for long-form will only grow.

Here’s the online video I’ve watched in the past three days:

• The Cook and the Chef (ABC Australia) 26 minutes
• Check Please Bay Area (KQED) 26 minutes
• ScobleizerTV: Bluepulse (FastCompany.tv) 30 minutes
• WineLibraryTV (WineLibrary) 20 minutes
• TED Talks: Chris Jordan (TED) (in HD) 12 minutes

Last week, I watched Top Chef online (60 minutes) and I have an hour-long video lecture sitting on iTunes, waiting for this weekend.

I’m not going to try to pass myself off as the mainstream of society, but I want to make this point:

We should be prepared to recognize that it’s quite likely the 5-minute video podcast of our hour-long show is reaching people who either don’t really care that much about our content, or it’s angering our core audience who have accessed it hoping to see all of it, and who are willing to engage with our content on a deep level, and derive deep benefit from it.

We’ve gone through this already with audio podcasts. Some stuff is just made to be short – Story of the Day, alt.npr’s Groove Salad Pick of the Week, etc. Some pieces of long-form shows are discreet elements – perfect for excerpting. But most of the time, if we package 5 minutes out of an hour long show and upload, all we do is make people mad.

Public media, in aggregate, has the deepest, richest, most important content archive in the world. People want to hear and see this stuff like you wouldn’t believe. That’s why initiatives like the BBC’s, to make it’s ENTIRE archive (kind of mind-boggling) available online are so important, or PBS’s agreement with Hulu to put several shows online. And have you seen all the stuff on iTunesU? Tons of video, including lots from public media, much of it long-form.

I don’t want to downplay short-form content; but I want to emphasize that there’s an audience for both – and when it comes to the kind of people we want to reach, as public media entities, there’s tremendous opportunity in long-form content that we’ve not tapped.

That’s what I think… but, more important, what do you think? Please comment!

Beyond Broadcast used it for yesterday’s conference; WAMU also uses it for its forum called “The Conversation.” Check out the sites. They look great. They have all kinds of functionality – profiles, discussions, groups, among other things.

The set up is just familiar enough that attendees won’t be scared off by it, and can interact with that at whatever level they prefer. Beyond Broadcast has always made great use of these tools – essentially handing them over to conference-goers and letting them make their own online/offline groups, enter their information, etc.

The first two years, the conference relied on a wiki. Using a social network is a step forward: some people are afraid of the arcane wiki markup language, and products like Ning have more versatility.

IMA used a wiki for its last Public Media Conference; for the next one, they might want to try a social network. PRPD is always looking for ways to keep members connected – hmm… I’m just saying…

You can explore all kinds of stuff tagged by attendees here.

UPDATE: Rob Paterson says KETC is going to use Ning for its Mortgage Project.

Dennis Haarsager, NPR interim CEO, was among the speakers yesterday and AU’s Center for Social Media blog has an excerpt of his comments:

“We’re trying to envision a world in which everyone can be a producer, but thinking about how to visualize this new world can be a challenge. Haarsager said his organization is looking at thei work in layers, the top being the goal of “enhancing human understanding.” The next two layers that are considered, then, are “what we do and where we do it,” Haarsager said.

“I don’t know that there’s any one of us, even a national network, that’s going to be able to set an agenda for public media. We’ve now given voice to anyone that has an internet connection,” Haarsager said.

The bigger challenge is finding the voices out there and making sure they’re heard. “You can nominally distribute something by throwing it on YouTube, but making sure someone finds it requires techniques that are beyond the capabilities of many individual content producers. So there is still a role of an aggregator.”

– News from the Future of Public Media

I know a number of us were following the proceedings from afar yesterday on twitter. If you weren’t able to be there, here’s the main blog. There are some great demos there, related to the theme “Mapping Public Media.” I’ve not seen video of the sessions posted – perhaps I’ve missed it, or it’s not yet uploaded.

VPR seems to have gone the distance on this one, with pages devoted to information about saving energy, including ways for listeners to add their own tips. And they’re showing how VPR is taking steps to reduce its environmental impact – among them, avoiding redundant or incorrectly addressed mailing, using recycled paper… and, yes, encouraging people to pledge online.

I’ll try to be a good person and get back to PD Jody Evans about how it all went and what VPR has learned from it. For now, good luck!

I’ve already written about John’s excellent question: where are the female public media bloggers? This gets to the wider question of who is blogging about public media. A few of us are working on a couple of ways for you to tap into the stream of thinking in our industry.

Here’s one way to do that – I call it the “Robert Scoble Turn on the Firehose” method. I’ve created a master feed of public media bloggers. The feed shows every post from every blogger in the feed. You can step into the stream at any time and see what your colleagues are thinking about.

• Click here to see it.
• Click here to subscribe to it.

Do you blog about public media? Are you an active user of del.icio.us with a publicmedia or similar tag? Let me know and I’ll add you to the master feed.

• email me: toddmundt [at] gmail
• or use twitter: @toddmundt

Guys (and I mean that in a gender-specific way),

I was exchanging e-mail with a public media colleague of the older persuasion and mentioned the names of the various bloggers / thinkers that I follow — and each of you was mentioned — and he asked me, “Where are all the women bloggers? Is this just a guy thing?”

I know there are women out there in pubmedia that are on Twitter, as I follow some of them there, but are there active female bloggers in public media? I don’t know I know of any off-hand (although I’m sure I’m missing some).

So two questions come to mind:

1. Who are some public media female bloggers out there?

2. (assuming #1 is a short list…) Why is it predominantly men blogging about public media?

Good questions. The admittedly lean blogroll of public media bloggers on my site doesn’t include any women (although I have some in my feed reader), and that’s my loss.

I don’t know if there’s a gender-specific way of looking at public media (hey, maybe there is), but I do know that any list of the most influential people in public media includes a lot of women.

So… are you a blogger? Are you in public media? Are you female? You’re reading me – at least at this moment… and I should be reading you. Add your name and URL in the comments. Heck, if you’re male, and you’re in public media, then I should be reading you, too.

Do you blog about social media? plain vanilla public media? fundraising? audience? pubmedia news and gossip? There’s a lot of knowledge floating around that more of us can tap into.

Andy Carvin seeded a massive list of public media twitter folks; maybe we should draft him to come up with a similar list for bloggers. There’s all kinds of knowledge out here that we can tap into.

• #1 What if they leave negative comments on my site/blog/forum? Owyang’s view: people are going to say things about you online, positive and negative. It’s better to know what they’re saying, and use the opportunity to engage people when they’re pleased or peeved.
• #2 What does it mean to be authentic, transparent or human? Among other things, Owyang says it’s about being more open about your strengths and weaknesses as an organization; and (this is important) realizing your brand is partially owned by your community.
• #3 How do I measure ROI? This gets to impact, and Owyang says you begin with the goals you set that led to the social media engagement, and measuring them against such attributes as authority, velocity and sentiment.
• UPDATE: #4 is now available: How do I launch my social media program? Owyang writes about the options, including tapping into existing social networks.
• UPDATE: #5: How do I talk to my executives about social media?

Five pieces so far, an excellent primer if you’re thinking about how your public media organization can and should engage more directly with your audience online. And for those of us who are already experimenting, it tries to get at this difficult piece of measuring the “impact of public service offered” – if I can be excused for mangling a concept on which Jon McTaggart and others at American Public Media are working.

BTW… I included these pieces on my link blog a few weeks ago; the link blog captures the things that I’m reading that I think are worth sharing. You can check out the blog, and if you use Google Reader to track the web, you can subscribe to it and share your links with me, too.

1. It’s not a fight, but listeners and viewers will win anyway. They have far more choice about what they hear and watch. They can produce media as well as consume it. And they have the means to take the lead not only in the choice and supply of media and content, but in participation with stations, networks, program producers and everybody else who plays a role in the system. The market for public media will finally become, truly, conversational and participatory.
2. There will be a new business model for public media, based on the ability of listeners and viewers to pay as much as they want, for whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want. We’ll call this new model VRM, for Vendor Relationship Management. It will supplement rather than supplant the old fund-raising systems. It will enrich and deepen the relationships between the consumers and producers of media, by working on terms provided by both sides, and not just by the supply side alone. This will not only increase the percentage of listeners and viewers paying for public media, but a new and vital source of funding for non-broadcast media — such as podcasts.
3. VRM will reform CRM. Once we have tools that that will allow any of us voluntarily to pay for music and everything else we call “media” — and beyond that to relate with suppliers on terms that work for us as well as for them — CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems will cease to be one-way marketing vehicles and start to become two-way means by which real relationships between individuals and institutions are supported.
4. Membership will mean more than schwag and promotion payoffs. We will cease to conflate transaction with relationship, and start relating to listeners and viewers in ways that conform to the shape of their wants, need an habits as well as ours. That means, if listeners care more about This American Life than about our stations, we help with that, rather than insist that listeners relate only to stations and silo’d CRM systems.
5. The Intention Economy will happen first with public media. This is the economy that will grow around customers’ and users’ actual intentions — rather than guesswork about those intentions, or efforts to capture or drive people’s attention. As a result, the advertising boom will come to an end, simply because the supply side will know more about what the demand side wants, and will have better ways of relating to it. Advertising won’t go away, and never will. But wasting money time and money with guesswork about what people might want will fade as a value system, simply because a system that starts the actual intentions of users and customers will be in place.
6. Cell phones will be the new radios and televisions. This will start to happen in a big way the minute Apple opens its iPhones to independent developers of native applications (rather than just ones that run in a browser). Then it will get a huge boost when carriers start selling open phones developed on Android, OpenMoko, Maemo, Trolltech and other platforms — all Linux-based, by the way. (Nokia buying TrollTech is a huge harbinger here.) The carriers will resist this development at first, and complain about how much bandwidth gets used, but they’ll deal with it because demand will drive supply, and openness will outperform the closed alternatives.
7. Websites will become as inadequate as transmitters. That is, both will remain necessary but insufficient means for reaching listeners and viewers, and for relating to them. “Live Web” methods such as streaming, file sharing, social networking and “rivers of news” will all play roles as well.
8. Archives will be the ultimate killer kontent. Stations and networks will come to value not only their own archives, but will work to make those archives as easy as possible to find, consume and otherwise use — and to open CRM systems for VRM tools to make it as easy as possible for listeners and viewers to voluntarily pay for the privilege. Bigger inventory, bigger income.
9. The end of analog terrestrial television will be a big mess and a wake-up call in more ways than we can name. The loss of analog TV’s familiar channels, and in countless cases their signals as well, will go beyond annoying millions of people who never asked for DTV, and will barely understand it. In the long run it will help break everybody free from the ancient model of broadcasting as a system defined by limits in time and distance. No longer will everything need to be “live” — and constantly to hog bit paths to listeners and viewers who are tuned in to something else. No longer will local be a strictly geographical concept.
10. Brands and reputations will matter more than ever. Familiar call letters, program names, personalities and institutions will have countless new ways to leverage their incumbent advantages, and to relate to their listeners and viewers, without both real and conceptual constraints imposed by transmitters and entailments such as “range”. What will matter most about those names and reputations, however, will not be limited to their familiarity. Instead they will be enriched or impoverished by the degrees to which they participate in a marketplace sustained by real relationships, and not just by marketing that goes by that name.

There’s a truckload of interesting stuff in there. You can read as well as I can, but let me highlight a few elements:

1. Doc and a group of colleagues are doing some great thinking around this concept of VRM – and it gets to the evolving relationship of “customers” with their public radio and TV stations. Forging deeper relationships with our members and opening doors to new forms of support that speak directly to the desires of our members is a key piece of the puzzle. If members want to support your station, make it happen. If they want to support a program and not a station, make it happen. If they want to give money to NPR, and not to a station, make it happen. We create so much value, and yet we offer a one-size-fits-all way for people to support us.

2. Web sites are important, but they’re not enough. If only a tiny fraction of our audience is spending even a few seconds with our web sites, well then, there are a few things we need to be thinking about: first, what is wrong with our web sites that leads our audience to believe that there is nothing compelling there for them; but also, second, are we prepared to understand that our online efforts are going to have to be platform-agile… reaching our audience in the places where they congregate, from Facebook to widgets, etc.

This piece is interesting. Anderson isn’t simplistic; he understands the current public radio model – national shows don’t get made without local stations providing the bulk of the money – but for him, liking a set of public radio shows translates to loyalty to the shows, and not to the station on which he (now rarely) hears them.

I don’t really support my local affiliate. I love some of the shows it broadcasts and hate others (have you heard the California Report? Dreadful). My attachments are to individual shows, not to a broadcast station.

So what’s under fire? Our cherished models. In a world of scarcity, a listener’s appreciation of a program easily translates to an appreciation of the station that exclusively presents it to her. Introduce ubiquity – public radio on iPods, cellphones, satellite radio, etc., and the connecting tissue between Favorite Show X and Station Y begins to fray.

I’m not breaking new ground here – this is one of the underpinnings of the theory that stations need to be producing new, original, unique content. The theory goes – create more interesting stuff that will tie listeners to you.

But three other under-fire models make this a more difficult charge to programmers.

First, radio is and has been a mass medium and even public radio largely operates in niches that aim for millions of listeners nationally – news, talk, classical music, triple A, etc.; the niches are now dividing and subdividing.

Second, our production model is lavish – sound-rich pieces, developed over long periods of time, meticulously edited, etc.; our audience is telling us that this matters, but that compelling content not quite at that high standard can also be great.

Third, there’s our legacy distribution infrastructure, which is still invaluable to millions of listeners, but how soon might this change? It’s already started to. I listen to more radio programs and music than ever, but I listen to radio stations on an actual radio roughly 2-3 times a month.

Public television is in a world of hurt right now because, despite the efforts of a lot of really smart people, the mass media model, the production model, and the bloated, decentralized distribution model (among other things) are under attack. We public radio people shouldn’t be too smug: we’re on a similar path.

UPDATE: Rob Paterson reads Chris Anderson’s post and asks how can local radio survive the trends? He recommends doing things locally that will attach people to you, and making national content into a local social object. Great post!