But, back to my story. I finally listened tonight to the first two parts of Merlin’s interview with Jesse, and it’s just brilliant. Part one is good, but it seems like a warm up compared to part two, which is incredibly funny and offers up some great riffs on the sound of public radio, its tragic unhipness, and a little ditty on hip-hop at the end of segment two that’s really quite funny.

I started paying attention to The Sound of Young America a few months ago after John Barth and Arvid Hokanson talked it up, and it’s fascinating. Jesse is a great interviewer, there’s an easy-going vibe to the show that makes it accessible, it’s funny, and he talks to people that public radio almost never talks to.

I met Jesse Thorn briefly at the PRPD Conference, and monopolized about 10 minutes of his time, gushing incoherently like a drunk fanboy. It was pitiful, but Jesse was gracious.

This guy has a lot of talent, PRI has picked up the show, and a few stations have jumped on board, too. I’ve spent my programming budget for this year, so I have to wait to put my money where my mouth is, but The Sound of Young America is an excellent show and if you can’t hear it on the actual radio, you can always hear the podcast.

I would pay $100 to be in a bar listening to Merlin Mann and Jesse Thorn talk. About anything.

Kling focused on the leadership, vision and money we’ll need to marshal to fulfill this expanding mission. Are we finding the best, smartest people or are we merely making convenient promotions? Are we creating powerful, influential boards to challenge our thinking? Do we have a vision? If we do, are we able to communicate it?

On those measures, Kling said, “I would give us a grade of C. Not D or F, but also not A or B. And I include myself in that assessment.” One colleague whose opinion I greatly value said to me later, “If Bill rates himself a C, where does that leave some of the rest of us?”

I think one of the principle challenges of Bill Kling’s address was his leveling of the playing field. The challenge to maintain democracy, increase civic literacy, and preserve arts and culture is not just APM/MPR’s responsibility; it’s not just NPR’s responsibility; it’s every station’s responsibility. Finding the best and smartest people, seeking the most effective strategies, creating strong oversight of our operations… that’s every station’s responsibility.

And here’s something else he said: “I’m not satisfied.”

It was an interesting juxtaposition to a theme that surfaced a few times during this conference: “Your listeners love you, you’re going to be just fine.”

We’ve experienced close to 10 years of upheaval and uncertainty – the Internet, the new portability of audio, the explosion of listening options, the flat or slightly falling audience for public radio: I suppose it’s only natural for us to be heartened by glimmers of an end to audience decline or the assurance that “you’re going to be just fine.”

But, really?

Yesterday, Larry Rosin of Edison Media reported the massive decline in listening for traditional formats: adult contemporary listening is down 19% since 1998; rock is down 26%; alternative is down 31%; oldies is down 24%. Public Radio is one of the few success stories: since 1998, our listening has risen 31%.

That’s great! Except that in the same time period, total radio listening has dropped 13%. And consumption of media other than traditional radio and television is growing quickly.

Does that make you feel fine?

I don’t have my copy of Clayton Christensen nearby, but there’s an “innovator’s dilemma” feel to this. I bet the executives of many of those once-leading companies felt threatened in some way by the disruption that took place in their industry. Then, after a while, they took heart. The disruptor wasn’t producing a product that was anywhere near as good; the high-end customers would never defect to it. Fear and uncertainty was replaced with relief; we’re going to be alright after all.

Bill Kling reminds us that satisfaction won’t get us anywhere.

UPDATE: I should clarify: Larry Rosin wasn’t telling us that “everything is just fine.” His message was more nuanced: “In this sea of media change, you’ve been much smarter and more forward-thinking than your commercial colleagues, but given the change that’s coming, don’t rest on your laurels.” However, I think a number of listeners summarized it as “everything is just fine.”

Robin Gehl of Cincinnati Public Radio, talked about the station’s recent expansion of service through HD Radio – 2 new channels of service: Jazz and a partnership with WOXY.com. Jennifer Ferro of KCRW detailed some of KCRW’s internet strategy, from the web platform to its streaming and on-demand options. And Jon McTaggart of Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media spoke about APM’s strategic approach to broadcast and non-broadcast channels.

McTaggart talked briefly about the three legs of a tripod that will support APM and help it sustain itself: broadcasting – anything related to radio; new media – any service delivered to an IP-enabled device; and face-to-face engagement with the audience. Each has to be treated differently: new media can’t be treated like it’s a broadcast channel. McTaggart says APM takes a generational view when planning and developing its services.

He also offered a list of seven questions that he says he asks when APM is faced with an opportunity, whether it’s a new platform or a new station.

McTaggart’s Seven Questions of Effective Audience Planning

• Who do you want to serve?
• Why do you want to serve this audience? What’s your motivation? strategy?
• What do you know about them? – describe the target individual, give them a name
• What do they know about you?
• How many ways do you reach and serve them?
• What response do you want or expect from them? Do you want them to consume the product? What revenue do you expect from them?
• How will you know that you are succeeding with this audience?

Speaking only for myself, I’ve looked at a number of opportunities in the past few years, and have asked – at best – only one of those questions. This is one of the big take-aways from the conference.

The news isn’t new; and it’s not very good. Broadly, listening to local talk around the country is dropping, even as the number of local shows is increasing. (180 shows now, up from 160 in 2004) Loyalty to the local talk lags the overall loyalty for news/talk stations (27, compared to 31.7). Of all the shows studied, only 6 shows have higher loyalty than the average loyalty for that station.

If that’s just not surprising enough: out of the current roster of 180 shows, just 20 stations with 38 programs account for 81% of all listening to local talk shows. The rest of us? Pretty much nowhere in sight.

The study tried to get at what’s not working, and there don’t appear to be any easy answers: the financial investment in each of the top shows varies widely; the producer “body count” varies widely, too; time of day isn’t a factor. The years of experience a host has had does seem to correlate to success, but not always.

What about the other side of the coin – the intangible benefit a station gets from having a local talk show, beyond the quantifiable performance? The study tried to develop a way of measuring the “core power” of local talk and arrived at what it calls “Community Value Ratings” – basically, is the core listening for the program above or equal to the core listening for the station over a seven day period?

The study identified a number of keys to community value – the usual suspects: personality of the host, topic selection, community connection, host/producer relationship, core values.

How do we do by this benchmark? Still not good: only one out of 3 talk shows in the sample surpassed the community value benchmark.

- – -

We’re currently looking very carefully at our local shows, none of which meet or exceed this benchmark. We could probably defend them on the basis of the intangible benefits they bring us, and we have no intention of turning away from local talk. But we also have to invest more in them. “More” doesn’t always mean more money; certainly that can help, but we’re also discovering that we need to invest more time and energy to invigorate the shows: make them more compelling, to become less reliant on the standard model of a couple guests plus call-in, to develop segments that give us more options to explore a variety of topics, without compromising too much on depth.

I think the intangible benefits of local talk, and the drive to re-imagine ourselves as public media, will push more of us to get into the business of local talk. But it’s already apparent that most of us have a real problem on our hands: the local talk shows we’ve created to meet community needs, are not producing a tangible audience increase; and one may conclude that some of these shows actually work against our effort to increase our core loyalty and, in turn, our membership revenues.

American Public Media has announced the purchase of WMCU, a 100,000 watt FM station in Miami. At present, the Christian station is owned by Trinity International University. APM paid $20 million for the station, which it says will broadcast classical music.

PRI has named John Hockenberry to host the new morning program it’s creating, in association with WNYC and the BBC. There will be a second host, to be announced. The show is expected to launch daily in early 2008, but the launch will be preceded by a series of election specials. The very capable Graham Griffith is the Executive Producer of this show, which is another reason why we should be paying close attention to it.

It’s been an exciting, and occasionally unnerving period of change. We’re still in the middle of the change, but we’re beginning to see external signs of success. Membership numbers have held steady across the network; our first audience data is now in-house, and it shows solid gains. We don’t live or die by a single book but now, when I’m asked how things are going, I say “very well” rather than “alright.”

What have we done? We (and by “we” I mean the 50+ employees of Iowa Public Radio) have accomplished a lot. We launched our unified statewide news network on January 1, 2007; created a single team covering Iowa news, which these days consists largely of chasing candidates; we continued the work of unifying the operations of three different station groups, and 13 stations; and we got approval from the FCC for eight new stations.

Our unified classical service will launch on September 10th across Iowa; and in the months to follow, we’ll be working on expanding our 10-hour a day triple A service to a new 24 hour a day home.

And, of course, when that’s finished, there will be several more layers to the onion. We’re working with Jim Russell on a careful rethinking of our talk shows; we’ll soon open the hiring process for a permanent news director; we’re devoting  more time to the “sound and feel” of the service, the micro-formatics of both our news and classical services. And since we’re participating in the CPB/PRPD Classical Study, we’ll be testing the results of that study over the next two years.

One area that hasn’t moved forward with anywhere near the speed at which I thought it would – our online effort: our web sites and social media. Eventually, our web sites will unify but that timeline has lengthened considerably under pressure from other higher priority deadlines and limited staff resources. Our experiments in social media will begin later and on a smaller scale than I expected, but such is the balancing act when you’re doing many things at once.

It’s easy to get immersed in the mundane and miss the miraculous. Iowa Public Radio is the result of three independent station groups deciding – in the absence of a financial or administrative crisis – that it was in their long-term interests to join forces, that the whole could be greater than the sum of the parts.

Those three station groups were, and still are, licensed to three universities, with three sets of institutional goals, university practices, and university politics. Amazingly, the three universities have worked together, clearing roadblocks for this new hybrid that crosses old boundaries. The state has done the same; this year, for the first time, the Iowa Legislature made a direct appropriation to public radio, providing support for the capital needs of the network.

The creation of Iowa Public Radio, and its early success, should send an important signal to a public radio system that is vastly overbuilt. Maintaining local public service is not the same thing as maintaining hundreds of independent stations. The duplication of Internal operations costs us millions of dollars each year – millions that we could invest in things our listeners really care about, if we’re willing to ask some hard questions, be creative, and resist maintaining old fiefdoms. For every KUOW-sized surplus, there are dozens of stations that are experiencing a slow but steady impoverishment; the end result of that glacial process won’t be good for anyone.

There’s no single answer; we don’t a dozen new Iowa Public Radio clones out there. But what we do need is a class of mature public radio managers and executives who will ask hard questions, question long-standing institutional frameworks, and define their legacy as the creation of a strong, stable public radio service, whatever that takes.

I might be wrong, but I’ll bet Santa Barbara is the largest city in the U.S. with a major university and no local public radio station. This is an embarrassment severely in need of correction. Now’s our chance.

Format switching and the potential sale of some commercial stations leads him to wonder if one of those AM or FM stations might provide the opportunity he and others have been waiting for.

Why local? Some of the public radio station’s that Doc mentions carry the hallmark NPR and other national programs. That experience is important, but  it’s probably readily available. What’s missing is the web that forms around community service – news, talk and music from a city or a region or a state.

Good luck, Doc!

I believe there is a wide-ranging group of benefits, [...] accruing to public broadcasters from a multi-pronged web strategy:

• Stations can serve existing listeners and viewrs more deeply. This is by far the guiding principle behind most station web sites as well as the NPR and PBS sites, and is the focus of most current station interest in web innovations. Although it’s sometimes put down as a “glorified program guide” approach, it’s totally rational and is likely to remain a top priority for stations for some time. On-demand content can serve this need well — more depth, more quantity, etc. — with tangible benefits in traditional sources of revenue. But this isn’t enough.
• Stations can improve their standing as important institutions in their communities by serving a community aggregation function for public media. More and more organizations and individuals in our communities are producing or trying to produce public media. At my university, there are 8-10 video editing stations available to students for their use in doing class assignments in lieu of or in addition to writing term papers. One high school student I know of in California has some 40 video features produced and edited. Schools, colleges, universities, museums, libraries, archives, government agencies are all in need of production, aggregation and distribution services. No, most of this stuff doesn’t belong on the air when time is dear, but to apply that standard to web-based distribution is to deny the public its own voice. Nothing will provide a better demonstration to corporate, foundation and tax-based sources of your lasting value in your community, regardless of how you define it.
• Recycling the audiences from our own stations between air and the web will not be sufficient to provide the economic kryptonite we need to survive the disruptive changes in the media industry. The NPR podcasting pilot with iTunes has ably demonstrated how we can hitchhike with other brands to provide distribution into the yellow area of the universe above and beyond — for pay if we want that, and I think we do in many cases. There are many of ways of providing services for compensation and tools available to make it successful. How-to programming could “hitchhike” with a brand like Home Depot, outdoor programming with REI, and more. Musical and news genres can be made available by subscriptions exposed through other partnerships. Get creative.

He covers a lot of important ground in a handful of paragraphs. I find myself challenged in another way by this: my cherished multi-stream strategy for television and radio doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if I’m not doing something new and thoughtful with it, if I’m not engaging my community in the content production for it. Do I really want a “Create” or a “World” channel if they simply fill several megabits per second of spectrum with repeats of programs I’m struggling to find an audience for on the main channel? Is that audience service? Is it fulfilling the promise of public media?

There are some smart people who believe that over the next few years, we’ll reach a tipping point in on demand video that will disrupt linear cable and satellite television and most of those niche channels created over the past 15 years will fade away, many of them shifting to an online, on demand presence. It’s possible that in the not-too-distant future, our universe of television could comprise 30 channels, with hundreds of online niche content providers. This may happen or it may not. What I do believe is that the end-game for public media isn’t going to be the broadcast of wasteful streams of the same old crap. It’s going to be about the creation of new content; the creation of new content with partners – including citizens with some equipment, skills and a point of view; and it’s going to involve a serious re-think of the lavish production model that has come to characterize everything public television does. We don’t have the money to play by the old rules anymore, and we don’t have any excuse for not trying some new things. We have great examples out there, from TPT’s Minnesota Channel to WGBH Forum to ‘GBH’s 6:55 to WNBC’s Independent Producer Showcase. There’s room for more experimentation.
Note: this is a true Haarsager Mashup: all the links point to content he’s referenced in the past 6 weeks.

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.

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

Diane Mermigas, The Hollywood Reporter

Both commercial and public media need to do the following:

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

Focus on the strength of public media – strong content

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

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

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

• TiVo
• Ipod
• Open TV
• Visible World

Seek strategic partnerships

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

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

Dan Nova, Highland Capital Partners

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

Low costs of participatory media and attractive business models

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

Participatory media costs

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

Characteristics of quality content

• Easy to use
• Effective
• Entertaining
• Participatory

Acquisitions are increasing

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

How to evaluate participatory media websites through three main development stages

New opportunities

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

Mid-stage value drivers

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

Later stage companies

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

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

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

Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation

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

Changes in the public media audience – new creators

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

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

Recommendations for membership-based participatory media

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

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

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

Nesson delivered a brief and powerful address about the rhetorical space of the Internet, the central value of openness and the challenge posed by those who would curtail that openness. He spoke about universities and the mandate to create an “open commonwealth of knowledge.”

“Be confident. There is an optimistic future ahead. And the challenge is to be gentle to your enemies.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Buzenberg spoke about Public Insight Journalism: “for every story, someone in our audience knows more than we do”, their use of “idea generators” like The Future of Small Towns. Those ideas become reports and series on-air, become comments online, become townhall meetings and symposia, and eventually generates more content. American Public Media has created the Center for Innovation in Journalism to offer Public Insight Journalism to public broadcasters around the country.

Terry Heaton said disruption is an opportunity for growth.

• Media is unbundled at the point of origin and rebundled at the point of consumption. (media is embracing the first part of this, but not the second.)
• Mediated people make their own media.

David Liroff spoke about WGBH’s new media and interactive efforts. “This is less about technology and more about engagement.”

We’re bad at predicting the future of technology; we have to understand that and the policy implications of it.

The inability to see the potential of commons-based media: we are blind to the opportunities this kind of media offers at every level; there has to be a balance between proprietary and open source. How open should it be? How closed? These questions apply from user-generated content to internet protocols.

We tend to undervalue the potential of openness.

We undervalue the costs of locking up content with extended copyright.

Why? Our understanding of “property” is still based on physical things.

The Internet is the story of an anomaly – the creation of an open structure when, if it had been created in the conventional sense, would probably never been as open – more like Mini-tel than the Internet.

Where is the balance of “open” and “control”? We need to be aware of our cognitive biases and how they shape our decision making.

Boyle: Leave as open as possible, as long as possible, so others can see possibilities that you can’t and make them real.

I left more hopeful. My concern as you so accurately stated was that the work for the people there was to leave childhood and to become adults responsible for themselves and leave behind their old wounds.

In the closing open session I saw evidence of a shift in culture to a more self suffficient, confident and adult way of being

For me, the breakout sessions – all 49 of them – were the warm up. What I was waiting for and experienced in the closing last 90 minutes of the Open Space was the following:

1. That many made a decision to take responsibility for what was to happen

2. That no station alone and not NPR alone could do this unilaterally There was powerful affirmation that Public radio had to strengthen itself by coming together as a real system that had a structure that would help the parts and theewhole become healthier and more effective

3. That many acknowledged that NPR, including NPR itself, did indeed have a role in initiating the birth of such a structure. There was acceptance that the work of setting the principles for such a structure would be the work not intially of all but of a few. That such a design process would be open ansd transparent.

4. That as many who could would start to work to do things that would take us down the paths that have emerged from the NR process

Rob Paterson

Thanks, Rob.

Consultant Robert Paterson began yesterday’s session with this warning:

It’s time to grow up and take responsibility for the things you’ve blamed others for all these years.”

The room was silent when he said that, and I thought, “wow, this is really sinking in.” Indeed, it did. People looked inside themselves, paused to reflect, and determined that, in fact, they were blameless and everyone else was at fault. What followed was about 7 hours of venting, whining, blaming, talking without listening, fighting old battles, and defensiveness.
Actually, the second session I attended, on disruptive technologies was quite good: a collection of smart people in the room and good facilitators. But based on my experience, and others I talked to, this was the exception to the rule.

Some may blame the Open Square concept on which this conference is based. I don’t think it’s the problem. From what I can tell, Open Square seems to be designed to reveal what people are thinking rather than breakthrough ideas. If that’s the case, it worked.

Now, none of is a genius; none of us is perfect. But if there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s mediocrity buttressed by self-satisfaction. And I’ve seen and heard enough of it in the past day to last me a lifetime.

New Realities isn’t jeopardized by this ridiculous display; the right players and thinkers will come together, consider the facts, think of solutions, test them, change them, learn from their mistakes, and slowly change public radio as we know it. Neither is my station directly jeopardized; I and my colleagues will go back to our jobs, make good decisions, quickly correct the bad ones, and do our best to maintain and grow our station.

But here’s what bugs me: a group of pioneers made public radio interesting; then, many of those same people, as well as others, made public radio important. Now, we have an opportunity to make public radio essential to the lives of the American people. A collection of three “generations” of public radio professionals is committed to creating news and music services that will place public broadcasting at the core of American culture and civic life. Unfortunately, one of the realities we face is an old one: many of us aren’t ready to grow up.

UPDATE: As we all know by now, the second day of the conference was more successful, with NPR and the stations agreeing to work together on the change initiative, with the details to be worked out as we go. See these thoughts from Robert Paterson here.

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

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

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

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

Gather

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

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

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

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

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

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

Public Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need to let our listeners be partners with us.

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

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

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

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

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

The money quote comes from Ashley Highfield, BBC’s director of new media and technology:

“We want to allow Internet users to go into their own BBC space containing all the content they’re interested in, all the TV shows they like and all the things that they’ve played with on the Web,” said Highfield. “We need to come up with a personalised BBC home page that will provide users with a starting place for their journey through BBC content and beyond.”

That’s significant. Obviously, the site will still overflow with BBC content – news, weather, audio, video, etc – but the BBC space that I experience will be my creation… BBC’s stuff I like, my stuff, perhaps my mashups of BBC content, my network of friends also interacting with BBC content. Behind this is a radical re-visioning of what BBC is.

Here’s a piece I want to keep – ABC and the Future of Media by John Hagel.

I’m going to summarize it here. You should read the whole thing.

… rebundling of media will be where the bulk of value capture occurs in the media business. It will certainly be the key to building scalable and sustainable media businesses.

That is one of the consequences of the growing relative scarcity of attention – anyone who can help audiences connect with the most relevant and engaging content will be richly rewarded.

Branding in the traditional media business still remains largely with the talent rather than the intermediary. Few people go to a movie because of the studio that produced it, watch a TV show because of the network that broadcast it, buy a CD because of the music company that produced it or read a book because of the publisher that issued it. Magazines and radio are partial exceptions that prove the rule – it is not accidental that these are the two traditional media businesses with the most “micro-chunked” content.

As content proliferates, this is going to change profoundly. The most powerful brands in the media business will be held by successful intermediaries that help to consistently improve return on attention for audiences. In the process, the nature of the brand promise will change in a profound way. It will be a massive opportunity for media companies that understand the shift in economic and competitive dynamics and that focus on the rebundling plays required to build these brands.

There’s another way to frame the strategic opportunity/challenge for media businesses going forward. In addition to unbundling and rebundling of content, media companies face a choice: do they want to remain product businesses or do they want to become audience relationship businesses?

Here’s the test: how open is the media company to providing access to third party content on behalf of their audiences? If the answer is not very open, the company is primarily a product business. If the answer is very open, then the company is primarily an audience relationship business.

Audience relationship businesses take… proliferating content options as an opportunity, rather than a challenge. The more options there are, the more value that can be created by organizing, packaging, presenting and adding to these options for specific audiences. It’s a completely different mindset, skill set, culture and economics. Media companies that want to make the transition from a product business to an audience relationship business don’t have to do this overnight. There is a pragmatic migration path that evolves from product mindsets to platform mindsets and then eventually leads to a full blown audience relationship mindset.

I think the power of this piece is Hagel’s understanding that the greatest potential lies in rebundling content, a good portion of which may not be your own, to build a strong relationship with your audience. This reminds me of Terry Heaton’s belief that media companies need to come up with entirely new business models online. Many of his ideas are totally unrelated to the content those companies currently offer – but the content is tied to the needs of your audience – those who already engage with you in your mainline business and those who have no previous experience with your mainline business but will develop a relationship with you based on your new models.

I don’t want to be accused of oversimplifying, but this strikes me as a powerful argument for the role of trusted aggregator.

The idea that podcasts are going to reduce contributions to public radio is a bit far-fetched. Dennis Haarsager argues, rightly in my opinion, that having favorite programs on-demand increases audience loyalty and helps to extend the programs to others who haven’t heard them before. I won’t even get into the ways you can use podcasts as tools to generate corporate support or as tools to encourage on-demand users to become members. Suffice it to say, podcasts drawing away support from public radio is a low-level threat.

If you read that Wired article a little more carefully, you can see the real threat – to business-as-usual in public broadcasting. Public radio in America is an uncommon mix of national networks and program producers, with local stations and producers, and local control as the central feature. Ask most American public radio listeners and they think this is the best possible solution; many in public radio agree.

But this model rests on a set of assumptions and compromises, including that local public radio stations are the sole purveyors of “NPR” or public radio in their respective areas. This worked for a long time, until the natural barriers began falling: other distribution paths opened up, beyond the radio signal. Streaming brought distant public radio stations to computers everywhere; streaming now extends non-radio public radio listening to your handheld or your smartphone. Podcasting brings listeners their favorite programs on-demand, freeing them from their local station’s schedule. And satellite radio has opened up an opportunity for public broadcasting to offer multiple flavors of nationwide service.

This is disruption. It worries us and it should. But how we respond to it determines whether we ride the wave or get buried beneath it.

So far, we’ve seen two categories of reponse from public radio (besides the classic ignore it and hope it will go away): 1) it’s paramount to preserve the current model and any new technologies we embrace must adhere to the model; and 2) an embrace of change, acceptance and assimilation of new technologies, and experimentation.

Who is doing #1? Well, let’s not start a fight. Let’s talk about who is pursuing #2: KCRW, WGBH, KQED, WNYC, Northwest Public Radio, Michigan Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, NPR, PRI – by no means a complete list.

The disruption has brought new experimentation to public broadcasting, on a level that we haven’t seen in a long time. It’s producing good data, some great early success stories, and potentially some new business models for the industry.

But the disruption is just beginning.

The technologies continue to develop. My Sprint card frees me from WiFi and lets me listen to uninterrupted Internet streams while I drive. When I stand in line at Starbucks, I might be listening to Morning Edition streaming on my cellphone, but it doesn’t have to be my station – WNYC or Minnesota Public Radio or WCPN or KPBS might be just as enticing as choices for Morning Edition.

And the biggest disruption of all is likely to be to our way of doing business – that strange, special, often dysfunctional, but viable model we fashioned out of national producers and local stations. And that’s why, yet again, we’re hearing some local managers use public radio’s dreaded word: bypass.
John Sutton wasn’t the first to throw down the gauntlet, but his provocative post about access to Morning Edition and All Things Considered on satellite radio frames the issue very well, and he makes his biggest and best point in another post:

It’s not bypass, it’s listener choice.

The disruption we face now is driven by technology and by listener choice. Meeting these new challenges requires serious and deep discussions within public broadcasting – discussions that may topple our safe, decades-old business model. But if we try to maintain our old way of doing business at the expense of service to our audience, we will pay a huge price.

It’s time to start talking.

CBC’s English Television receives a little more than a quarter of the Corporation’s total Government funding. The rest of its budget, more than 50 per cent, is derived from commercial operations — advertising, subscription fees, program sales. How can you call yourself a public broadcaster when over 50 per cent of your budget comes from competing with the private sector? The reality is that CBC Television is only partly a public broadcaster.

This tension between the commercial and public missions of the network has never been resolved, and perhaps it never can. The result is a network that presents a confusing picture to Canadians. You can see it in the audience statistics and in the lack of viewer loyalty to CBC English Television. Canadians see CBC Radio and the French Radio-Canada radio and TV channels as distinctly Canadian – the services that tie the country and culture together. CBC TV is the oddball. The key here isn’t the commercial nature of the TV network. Radio-Canada’s TV network is commercial. The problem is a lack of distinctiveness at English Television.
Rabinovitch suggests greater investment by the government to buttress the corporation’s services, and a major new initiative to develop Canadian drama for television, much as Radio-Canada has launched on French television.

Major initiatives will be expensive to launch, however. Over the years, CBC has succeeded in wringing significant cost savings out of operations; Rabinovitch quotes impressive numbers in both one-time and continuing savings. But savings have their own costs, so to speak… and CBC English Television is a weaker organization today than it once was.