Public Media 2007

I spoke on a panel Friday morning at Public Media 2007, the Interactive Media Association’s annual conference.  The conference brings together the folks from the public broadcasting (radio and TV) communities who are focused on interactive (read: online) communications.  While the public broadcasting community has been an innovator in many ways online, the conference was appropriately focused on figuring out how NPR, PBS, and all their member stations and partner groups could make the leap from being public broadcasters who have operations online to being leaders in the broader public media space, and leveraging technology to do that.

Here is a quick excerpt from the conference overview on what was driving this discussion:

For one thing, all media is taking a digital form and “public service publishing” has expanded dramatically–if you extend the definition of public media to any individual or organization creating and distributing media “in the public interest.”  Technical advances and innovations have eliminated barriers to entry. The cost of audio and video production has spiraled downward. Podcasting and media aggregation sites, where you don’t need a license to distribute audio and video, now reach millions of desktops and iPods.  With ubiquitous blogging software, everybody can be a journalist, a critic, a pundit at a cost of no more than $20 a month. 

The speed of this change has been nothing short of revolutionary.

I sat on a panel entitled “Leveraging Social Networks” which promised to answer the burning question: “How can public broadcasting stations can leverage social networks to increase engagement and build audience?”  The panel was moderated by Vinay Bhagat, the Founder and Chief Strategist of Convio and featured Dick McPherson, a consultant to the public broadcasting community, Heather Holdridge from Care2 and David Woodrow from Gather.com.

I was generally disappointed with how the conversation was framed.  The easy way to think about social networks is to look at the existing technologies in the field and figure out how to use them.  In other words, since MySpace has more than 50 million users, they must be a place we can go looking to engage our audience.  Or, since more than 65,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube every day, we should be uploading our shows because that’s where the marketplace is headed.  There is not enough consideration about why these properties may or may not be valuable and not enough thought about what makes online social networking function successfully.

I kicked things off with a presentation (here is my iMA Presentation) that framed social networking and new media in a broader format.  My point was simply that social interaction online, and social networking more specifically, has been happening for a long time in many different formats — and innovations in technology will only expand on that.  Successful communities are built and fostered online not because of the technology that facilitates the interaction, but rather its the content and experience that people create and share that drives interest.   Public media organizations need to think strategically and creatively about what they produce, how if they want to truly engage their target audience.  I think I resonated with the audience, but honestly am not sure.

Dick McPherson followed me and challenging the audience to focus on specific goals they wanted to achieve online (i.e. build community and membership, not raise money) and broadly about how to creatively execute on those efforts.  Heather and David offered case studies about what works within their networks. 

Now, I do not mean to disrespect either Care2 or Gather.com, both of which I think are terrific organizations and both of whom were well represented by my fellow panelists, but they are only two of the dozens of options currently available to consider.  I am not a big fan of presenting personal case studies on panels because it should be obvious that I would biased towards the things that I have done.  That was the case with both Gather.com and Care2, who have been working with public broadcasting groups to build out social networking efforts.  It just seemed to me that the message of the panel was too much about how public media groups could use those two platforms and succeed.  Maybe they are the best two networks for public media.  Or, maybe the public radio community should be looking at more examples, and more opportunities.  I don’t know, but most people probably left that room thinking about launching Gather.com groups or launching petitions through Care2 and not enough of them were considering all the other venues available to them.

I did make one point at the end that was good, and I think resonated.  A woman in the audience asked for our opinions on how many social networks should a station target and what kinds of resources should they put into the effort.  A good question.  However, in asking the question, she referenced ‘us’ (meaning the station) and ‘them’ (referring to the audience members who would be part of the community).  After everyone else had offered specific answers to her questions, I jumped in, adding something to the effect of: Its very important for you as an organization, for your staff, your talent, whoever, to see themselves as a part of these communities.  You are not separate.  It cannot be us vs. them.  Most likely, the reason that your audience might be intererested in joining and contributing to a community that you organiz is the same reason that you, as a staff person at one of those stations, work so hard to make it successful.  Its about the content, its about the experience, its about your contribution to our society.  If you see yourself as separate from that community instead of as a part of it, you are missing the boat.

I got a lot of nods, and a pat on the back from one of my fellow panelists for making the point.  I probably sounded a little righteous, but maybe that helped get the point across more effectively.  I enjoyed being on the panel and would love to help the public media conversation move forward to where it desperately needs to be, but I am not sure I was able to broaden the perspectives of anyone in attendance with respect to the framing of a conversation about social networking.

Thank you to Teri Lamitie of WGBH in Boston for the invitation.  I very much enjoyed the conversation and I hope that I was able to contribute some interesting thoughts to the discussion.  Please invite me back to do it again.

Citizen Media’s Breakthrough Moment(s)

When we look back and try to identify the breakthrough moment(s) when citizen generated media found its way into the American consciousness, the credentialing of bloggers to cover the perjury trial of Scooter Libby, and the subsequent recognition by traditional media of their efforts, should be right near the top of the list. 

The New York Times profiled the bloggers at firedoglake, the liberal collective that has been providing online coverage of the trial since it began in today’s paper.  There is actually nothing new about bloggers covering trials – there was terrific newspaper blogging of the Enron trials by the Houston Chronicle for example – but the independence of these bloggers has made it very different.  The firedoglake bloggers, and their conservative counterparts, are introducing a whole new perspective and new energy to otherwise traditional coverage. From the article:

Even as they exploit the newest technologies, the Libby trial bloggers are a throwback to a journalistic style of decades ago, when many reporters made no pretense of political neutrality. Compared with the sober, neutral drudges of the establishment press, the bloggers are class clowns and crusaders, satirists and scolds.

“They’re putting in a lot more opinion and a lot more color than the traditional reporters,” said Mr. Cox, adding that the bloggers were challenging “the theory of objective journalism.”

While I think that including independent bloggers in the coverage of federal trials is a tremendous step forward — and a necessary one — for both the legal and news industries, I worry that critics will seize on the fact that the bloggers are partisan (or worse, in the case of firedoglake, liberal) to diminish their contribution.   I also worry that all citizen media will be framed by this one, high-profile situation and that the non-traditional conventions of the contributors to firedoglake (such as nicknaming Vice President Cheney “Shooter”) will give other organization pause when considering granting bloggers full access to cover events in the future.  Everyone, most importantly the traditional media folks (newspapers, TV, radio, and established online journalism sites) should fight these stereotypes with all their energy.

There is such tremendous opportunity for citizen media practitioners (read: people) to provide perspective and color to the coverage of all sorts of events that furthers the cause of journalism and helps to inform society.  The work that firedoglake and others are doing at the Libby trial is just one example of how this can work, but its a great model and a huge step forward for the cause of citizen media.

The Future of Newspapers

I have been thinking a lot about the future of newspapers lately. 

The topic is not a new one - the various threats to print newspapers have been debated publicly in media and technology circles for several years now (and probably for quite some time out of the public’s view).  Despite numerous articles, conventions, discussions and predictions, I don’t think that much has been decided or even made more clear in that time.  I certainly have more questions than answers.  I don’t think anybody really knows what is going to happen.

A full discussion of the future of newspapers would take up more than one post, and would need to include people with far greater knowledge and perspective on the subject than I have to offer.  That never stops me from offering my opinion though.  And while I will try to organize my thoughts more clearly in the future, and invite friends and colleagues who work in the newspaper business to weigh in, for now I just I wanted to share a couple of recent articles about this debate that I thought were really interesting.

First, The Week magazine, writes about The Decline of the American Newspaper.  The article is a well organized summary of the current state of newspapers - with a little bit of editorial perspective to round things out.  For someone who is new to this debate, or just needs a refresher, the article is organized around seven key questions about the newspaper industry.  The questions include:

1. Why are newspapers in deep trouble? 
2. Where did the readers go? 
3. What’s the problem? 
4. What is the newspaper doing about all this? 
5. Is that strategy succeeding? 
6. So are newspapers going broke? 
7. Can anything be done?

For me, the future of newspapers has to include some localization of content and expertise.  I am an avid newspaper reader and nothing bothers me more than the AP-ification of the world’s information, when all the articles pull from the same sources and not a single bit of additional perspective is added.  Don’t get me wrong, the AP provides a valuable service and I use it regularly to keep track of events happening around the globe.  But I don’t consider that to be the true value that newspapers can provide.  According to The Week, I’m not alone in thinking this:

Publishers are experimenting with generating several versions of the paper to target various market segments, such as young people. Some may start giving away their papers free, relying entirely on advertising revenue. One school of thought is that newspapers should become “hyper-local,” focusing intensely on community news not available on the Web or TV. But most industry experts believe that the era of print newspapers is nearing its end. Newspapers, says media analyst Ken Marlin, “have to either adapt to the new economics, or die.”

Next up is “A modest proposal for reinventing newspapers for the digital age” by Michael Hirschorn in The Atlantic Monthly.  The article begins with an overview of, EPIC 2014 (now apparently updated to EPIC 2015) an online movie that predicts the future of the media that results from technological innovation (or assimilation as the case may be) and continues through a discussion of the various models that newspapers might try to integrate to become profitable.  Hirschorn settles on this recommendation/thought:

The current Web-publishing model that newspapers are using isn’t likely to become financially viable anytime soon. With few exceptions, the media businesses thriving on the Web either are low-cost blog-like efforts or follow a many-to-many model, in which communities create, share, and consume content. Publishing an article on the Web gets you one click; getting your users to write the article for you gets you a thousand clicks, and costs less to boot. In other words, turning your users into contributors increases their engagement with your site—each click is, after all, also an “ad impression”—while simultaneously generating more content that you in turn can sell to advertisers.

Now we’re talking!

Last on the article list for this post is Michael Wolff’s Billionaires and Broasheets in this month’s Vanity Fair, a look at the recent push by various moguls to buy into the print newspaper business.  Wolff alludes to most of the reasons I can imagine a billionaire would want to buy a newspaper - boredom (as might be the case with Jack Welch who is rumored to be interested in buying the Globe), frustration with the perspectives of the editorial board on an issue that is close to them personally (as is the case with Hank Greenberg, who is rumored to be interested in buying the New York Times), or maybe even ego (as is the case with Ron Burkle and Eli Broad, who are rumored to be interested in the LA Times and who probably think their investment and management savvy might be able to reshape the media biz).  For what its worth, Wolff’s contribution to the debate is summarized at the end of his article as follows:

Of course, the Internet is a bitch. On the other hand, the Internet is an inefficient way for a big man to throw his weight around. A newspaper really is the much more effective bully pulpit.

What’s more, given a host of new papers—The Daily Geffen, The Welch Globe, The Greenberg Times, The Broad Journal, The Burkle Shopper—freed from the deadening template of the people who theoretically know how to run newspapers, maybe the people who know nothing at all about newspapers will stumble onto something that makes them shout and sing (Eli Broad recently offered that it might be a good idea if the L.A. Times had more pictures of donors at charity events … well … maybe).

Anyway, now is not the time to worry about the unknown. The unknown is the only hope. Make the deal.

I don’t know yet what the future of media looks like - I’m working on figuring that out right now.  I don’t believe that the demise of newspapers will come any time soon, and I don’t see that takeover of journalism by faceless and emotionless technology (as is suggested by EPIC) will be realized any sooner.  I know that profitability is the chief concern of any business, and as long as journalism is considered a business (instead of say an art, or a public service) then groups like the New York Times and the Tribune Company will look for ways to monetize their coverage of world events.  My hope is that someone in the middle of this debate will realize that one of, if not the primary value, that newspapers have always offered to the public is editorial perspective and journalistic excellence — a way to help all of us who consume news on a mass scale to understand what is relevant, important, and why.  That seems to have gotten lost in this debate, and in our news industry today as a whole, and needs to return to both.

SRI In the Rockies: The Big Picture

I spent the weekend in Colorado Springs, CO attending SRI in the Rockies, the annual gathering of the socially responsible investment industry in the United States.  I was there to participate in a panel about online marketing and host a topic table at lunch on the same topic.  I also had an opportunity to attend some of the speeches and sessions — and learned some new things about climate change its impact on disease, micro-finance and, perhaps most interestingly, the future of the internet.

Bob Veres, an author, speaker, and one of the most influential people in the financial services industry (socially responsible or otherwise) gave a talk entitled ‘’The Next Society.’  The focus of his talk was how the world of sustainable investments has changed, and continues to evolve, and how the world is now following the lead of SRI - for the better.  He noted that a decade ago, social screens were seen as a depressant on fund performance while today, social screens are the very best way to evaluate corporate character and avoid surprises in your portfolio. 

Then he launched into a commentary on the changing nature of communications and how it relates to the tough work of changing the world.  Here are my (rough) notes:

- The media industry is in crisis.  Stories are covered and then disappear.  Stories are covered by people who don’t know much about the subject and who have a very short attention span.  The future of news will be an environment where you can access a lot more information, a lot better information, from people who know a lot more than reporters.  And it will make everything more focused, more meaningful, and more actionable.

- The web has created a hostile world for advertising.  As we move towards the web as a content delivery vehicle, corporate america will not be able to artificially create demand for their products and services.  It is harder and harder for advertisers to gain interest and traction.  That is why TV advertising is suffering and that is why the future of communications will be information/content-centric, and not marketer driven.

- We are experiencing the death of the consumer economic system.  Why?  It doesn’t relate to the issues that people actually care about most.  That has also given rise to the concept of “Life Planning.”  People are finding they don’t want more stuff.  They want more fulfillment from their lives.  How do they know? 

Ask yourself, if you had one day left to live, what would be your biggest regret?  Write down 30 goals you want to achieve this year (the first ten will be easy, the second ten more difficult, the third ten will make you did deep).  If you had all the money in the world, what would you want to do?   

- How can we change the world?  He offered two directives:

1) Operate in your zone of personal genius.  Imagine a circle, with a circle inside that, and a circle in side that.  At the center of that innermost circle is a  blue dot that represents your greatest energy, focus, and passion.  That is where we must all operate - get rid of the distractions and just work within our blue dot.

2) Hire a coach to help you get there.  They will help you put aside all of the work you do for others and help you focus on just what you need.  The coach will nag you because they will present your own goals back to you in such a compelling way that you will do for them what you can’t seem to find a way to do for yourself.

- The way we work is changing.  You are going to see most of the world’s work being done by ad hoc teams who are experts in their field and who are operating within their blue dot.  You will see corporations (who right now have office buildings filled with generalists and inefficient information flow based in hierarchy not expertise) “melt like sugar cubes in the rain.” The people who own the assets will control them - you won’t need marketers, etc.

- The internet will become the superconductor of human and financial capital.
The speech made me think.  Not sure quite yet what it all means, but rarely does a conference speech make me think like this one did, so that must mean something.

At the Citizen Media Unconference

I am at the Citizen Media UnConference in Cambridge, MA today.

What does the unconference mean?
We are the panel.  The thought is that the collective intelligence in the room far exceeds what anyone could put onto a panel.  The opportunity is to learn what the audience knows and give us an opportunity to interact with each other.

That said, the agenda (full of moderators) is as follows:

• Lisa Williams, who runs H20Town, a local blog covering Watertown, MA, will organize a conversation about local sites and how they work best.
• Andrew Lih, a major Wikipedian and former Columbia and Honk Kong University new media professor, will organize a conversation about what would be the ideal toolset for citizen journalism and what is missing.
• Steve Garfield, a top videoblogger, on using multimedia tools for better citizen journalism. Here’s his summary of what he plans to cover.
• Tom Stites, whose recent speech on media and democracy has raised such interest, on how (and if) citizen journalists can fill the enormous gaps being left by traditional media organizations.
• Phil Malone, co-director of the Clinical Program in Cyberlaw at Harvard Law School, will lead a conversation about citizen journalists and the law, including seeking to better understand areas in which the activities of citizen journalists are being chilled by legal concerns and ways in which they could benefit most from help in avoiding legal trouble.  

And rounding things out…

• Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices Online, which helps “amplify, curate and aggregate the global conversation online.” Ethan will lead a discussion on how citizen media people can make themselves heard amid all the online noise. AbovetheNoise session description…

In betweeen we’ll have some brainstorming sessions, a ‘role model’ lightning round, etc.

I will post my notes as often as possible.  Doc Searls is live-blogging the event if you want to follow along.
 

I’d Like to thank the Academy…

The LA Times reports this morning:

When the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences created a new Emmy award this year for news and documentary programs produced for websites, mobile phones and iPods, the group aimed to recognize the best of new media. But when the award is presented in September, the winner will likely be old media.

That’s because five of the seven nominees for the so-called emerging media Emmy announced Monday were actually reports done by websites of the New York Times or the Washington Post. The traditional television news divisions were shut out of the category.

First, this should be a wake up call for the television news industry.  With the ability for average citizens to create, post, and view video growing by the day, pictures alone aren’t going to cut it.  Anyone can be a reporter if they choose.  Moreover, there are already thousands of quality reporters out there working for existing news organizations - the web has simply given them a new, and powerful outlet for their work.  In the end, the substance of the news, and more importantly the quality of the reporting, is once again going to drive viewer interest.  Get with the program.

Second, this should be the ‘aha moment’ for the newspaper industry.  Av Westin, the co-chairman of the television academy’s news and documentary awards committee and the chief of ABC News during the 1970s, is quoted in the article saying “Newspapers, I think have always wished they could be in television, but they didn’t have a television network. Now they essentially have one: it’s called the Web.”  But that simply isn’t true.  Newspapers don’t want to be television reporters, they want to be newspapers.  Newspapers want to break news, uncover facts, discuss the merits of issues — you can’t do that when you are the filler between soaps and prime time on the idiot box like television news (or, apparently, when you have 24-hours to cover the news, in many cases it seems).  With all new mediums for distribution (web, mobile, etc.) the newspaper industry has the opportunity to re-invent itself, and better yet, re-invigorate our public debate around serious issues like never before. 

I’d like to thank the Academy for supporting the revolution.

We Media Global Forum

I am in London this week for the We Media Global Forum, a two-day conference (May 3 - May 4) exploring the impact of technology and the internet on media and society.  The event is co-sponsored by the BBC and Reuters and hosted by The Media Center.

I will be moderating the online conversation at the Forum – helping to make sure the opinions and insights of the media, organizations, bloggers, and others who are watching and participating from near and far are heard as a part of the conference.  I will also be helping to lead a wiki-storm, the outcome of which will be a call-to-action for conference participants, and others who are interested, to support bottom-up media.  More on that later.

More information about the conference - and a link to the online chat - are available online at http://www.mediacenterblog.org/events/06/wemedialondon/home/.

Whose Reading the Newspaper?

The Center for Media Research reports new data about the readership of newspapers and online news (taken from a study released by the Newspaper Association of America).  The topilines:

• 116 million adults are reading the newspaper over the course of a week and 55 million Internet users visit a newspaper Web site over the course of a month.
• Unique visitors to newspaper Web sites jumped 21 percent in 2005 and page views increased by 43 percent over that same period. 
• Newspaper web sites attracted 14 percent more 25- to 34-year-olds and 9 percent more 18- to 24-year-olds.
• 78 percent of the 149 million adults who live in the top 50 markets read a newspaper over the course of five weekdays and one Sunday. 
• 69 percent of 18- to 24-year olds in the these markets are reading a newspaper during the course of a week.
• 65.7 percent of consumers with household incomes of $150,000 or more read the newspaper on an average weekday, and more than 71.7 percent on an average Sunday.

And in the least surprising, yet likely to attract the most attention category:

• Newspapers own 11 of the top 25 national news and information Web sites, and locally, newspapers provide the dominant information site in most of the top 75 markets.

The newspaper industry still has a lot of work to do before it completely transforms itself from a print-only news medium to the propriters of highly interactive information centers.  I’m still not entirely sure they will succeed in their transformation – it is entirely possible that when we look at similar data in five or ten years that the newspaper industry will barely be represented in these studies and that the new information providers will be individual citizens, full-time information aggregators, or some new category we haven’t thought of yet.  I hope newspaper companies do find success online because the history and knowledge of how good journalism must be conducted is wrapped up in them and it would be a loss for us all if that wasn’t carried over to new and developing mediums.

Spending on User Generated Media Going Up

The Center for Media Research reported this week that spending on user-generated media has is growing — and fast!

The first installment in PQ Media’s Alternative Media Research Series, the Blog, Podcast and RSS Advertising Outlook, reports that advertising spending on user-generated online media - blogs, podcasts and RSS - did not begin until 2002, but this combined spending has grown to $20.4 million by the end or 2005, a 198.4% increase over the 2004 level. Spending on blog, podcast and RSS advertising is projected to climb another 144.9% in 2006 to $49.8 million.

Jeff Jarvis has some thoughts on this over at BuzzMachine.

BluePlateSpecial.net

This is a couple of weeks old now, but I think still very interesting and important.

Jay Rosen, the uber-professor for, and analyst of, all things Journalism (he writes at PressThink) worked with  15 of his undergraduate students to rate which newspapers have the best blogs.  They have posted their results at www.BluePlateSpecial.net.

Over 100 newspaper were revied for a) ease-of-use and clear navigation, b) currency, c) quality of writing, thinking and linking, d) voice, e) comments and reader participation, f) range and originality, g) an explanation of what blogging is on the blog page from the papers, and h) commitment.   The top six:

1. Houston Chronicle
2. Washington Post
3. USA Today
4. St. Petersburg Times
5. Atlanta Constitution
6. San Antonio Express

If/when you read through the analysis of why these six papers had better blogs than anyone else, I think you will gain a better understanding of blogging for journalistic purposes as well as blogging in general. Comments like “The writing is fun and clear,” which Senior Alexis Krase noted about the Houston Chronicle is a comment that any blogger - me included - would like to hear.  And the recommendations that the students have pulled together should be heeded by all.