Dennis Haarsager's rolling environmental scan for electronic media. "Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us." --Jerry Garcia
In last Thursday's (Apr. 6) Wall Street Journal, tech columnist Walt Mossberg reviewed the "alpha" release of True/Slant. He writes:
... True/Slant is run by a former news executive at America Online who
worked at a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal.
It covers a wide range of topics, such as politics, culture, sports,
business, health, science and food. ¶ It is launching with 65 journalists, or “knowledge experts,”
assigned to specific topics. Each of these contributors gets a page to
house their journalism and, it is hoped, an active social network of
followers who will regularly discuss the articles they read there. Each
page also will feature headlines of stories elsewhere on the Web
selected by the contributors. These “headline grabs” link back to the
originating outside site. ...
It's an ad-based business model, but approaches it in a new way that's worth watching.
Nicholas Carr has a thoughtful essay on the impact of Google as "middleman" between content producers and content consumers, extracting trillions of tiny tolls in the process. He takes a particular look at the impact of this on newspapers, writing:
... When a middleman controls a market, the supplier has no
real choice but to work with the middleman - even if the middleman makes it impossible for the supplier to make money.
Given the choice, most people will choose to die of a slow wasting
disease rather than to have their head blown off with a bazooka. But
that doesn't mean that dying of a slow wasting disease is pleasant. ...
He goes on to argue that the news business needs to massively reduce supply to consolidate traffic.
Allison Muller, CRM manager for Accenture, has some interesting observations on how new technologies are making it easier for retailers to individualize and personalize for consumers. She writes:
... Phenomenon like YouTube and MySpace
give young consumers a stage for voicing their opinions and showing off
their social lives and it's influencing how they shop. Some companies
are reacting by offering customers avenues for personal expression,
like personalizing a Heinz Ketchup bottle or Kleenex box with personal
slogans and pictures. ¶ More sustainable ideas include MyTwinn.com
that produces dolls that are exact replicas of real girls, allowing
them to celebrate their identity through their toys. And, for an extra
charge, you can get specific freckles or birthmarks painted on the
dolls. ...
At the end of January, Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired and formerly publisher/editor of Whole Earth Review, posted what I think was the best essay of 2008 of relevance to us in the media -- Better Than Free -- in his blog called The Technium. The post has also attracted a number of good comments in the months since. I linked to it at the time and compared it to Chris Anderson's upcoming writing on the same topic. The essay is now available as a "manifesto" in pdf form at ChangeThis.
"... Free is always a fine way to win a flow of attention. As Chris Anderson's clever parsing of the four types of free
shows, whenever a free product or service is given, the free is
exchanged for attention. Without the flow of attention back to the
producer, the free is meaningless. A producer might as well dump the
free things in the woods if attention from customers did not count...."
Our new SVP & GM Digital Media at NPR, Kinsey Wilson, sent around the following email to a few of us this morning. With permission and thanks, I'm sharing it with you. --Dennis
As you dig into
the morning papers, I'd call to your attention an
interesting article in the NY Times today that describes how small, independent,
not-for-profit local news web sites are springing up around the country --
further evidence of the growing number of players that hope to lay claim to the
local news franchise as papers come under increased financial pressure.
This line in particular caught my attention: "[F]financially, VoiceofSan
Diego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are
nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience
contributions and a little advertising."
If they succeed, they could gradually compete for the audience, allegiance and
charitable giving that traditionally has sustained public radio. The audience
for terrestrial public radio isn't likely to go away anytime soon. But as
younger audiences form their media habits and older audiences look for serious
local news sources to replace the papers they once relied upon -- something
that's happening right now -- sites like these will gain in influence and
popularity among our target audience and could eventually pose a threat to the
member station franchise.
Local public
radio stations are ideally positioned to form alliances with sites
like these. The member stations have reach; they have an audience already
pre-disposed to quality journalism; and if they want to use it to this end, the
ability to drive traffic to these (or co-branded?) endeavors. They
also have established relationships with funders, which these sites
presumably are just starting to put together. The startup-ups, meanwhile, have
the capacity to innovate in ways most stations do not.
In other
words, member stations could potentially bring audience and money to the
table to help keep these efforts alive; and in the process further
develop their reputation and capacity as a source of serious local news.
(And NPR, through its API, could provide wider visibility and lift for these
efforts).
If half a
dozen of the more progressive member stations around the country aligned with the
best of these sites on a trial basis, they might create a model that other
start-ups and stations could emulate.
In addition
to the sites mentioned in Richard Pérez-Peña 's piece, also check out the newly
launched Spot.US, which solicits
story pitches from individual journalists in the Bay area and asks readers to
donate money to support story ideas they think are worthy of further effort. It
launched Monday.
N.B.Many readers know that I'm the Interim CEO at National Public Radio, but this personal blog (now closing out its fifth year) has only a couple of times been used to talk about related things going on at NPR or at my previous workplace. However, since what we're trying to build is so closely related to what I've learned over those five years and earlier, all of which I've shared here, I thought it made sense to share this "private" email to NPR station managers here.
If you're at a public television station or in a non-profit, education or government organization, please read on because this initiative could very well be for you also. So now, I'll quote from this morning's email with only very minor changes. --Dennis
_______________________________
Dear station colleagues,
Happy Monday! With apologies for the length of this,
I’m hoping to stitch together several developments at NPR in the context of
what they mean for the future of your station. It will pay special
attention to connecting a number of developments into a coherent digital
strategy. I am excited about these because I think they can be important
building blocks in lifting all of public radio.
The 90 stations that founded NPR did so because they wanted
to serve the public in a way that could only be achieved through
collaboration. This collaboration has encouraged impartial distribution
of both branded programming (NPR, PRI, APM) and independent productions - in
the intervening 38 years through PRSS and, more recently, PRX.
Distributed hours have grown tremendously over the past four decades. As
we seek to strengthen our relationships in content creation and fundraising, we
must make a strong commitment to reinventing distribution for a new age, or we
will fail to reach the audiences we seek to serve.
Radio will remain strong long after I’m a full-time grandpa,
but the rapid adoption of new digital platforms means we must effectively
utilize these platforms or ultimately witness the erosion of our audience
and economic model. More importantly, the new digital platforms give
greatly expanded opportunities to deliver broader public service, to be
more significant in our communities and nation.
Toward this end, there are now several initiatives on our
plate at NPR. I'll write primarily about a cluster of digital distribution projects from which we will draw to create something we're calling the "Community-Building Initiative," but I also want to mention a news-related one that will benefit from the same initiative.
A “News Network of the Future” (NNoF) is envisioned to provide structure and scale for collaboration in the support
and production of news for all platforms, building on ideas which have already brought promising results to a few stations (e.g., N3, the Northwest News Network);
Three related projects in the category of what I’ll call “distributed distribution” —expanding our ability to reach our listeners better, and expanding and engaging our audience:
The openApplication Provider Interface (API),
The acquisition of Public Interactive (PI), and
The Community-Building Initiative (CBI), which I’ll discuss below.
There have been several digital distribution efforts in
public media in recent years. Leaving out many, I’d like to tip a hat to
a few that have made extraordinary contributions. Independent producer
Stephen Hill showed us that the web can be an important means to serve the
audience, and that they will financially support such efforts.
Entrepreneur/philanthropist Mike Homer developed Open
Media Network, a functioning content delivery network for public media,
with the help of Stephen, KQED’s Tim Olson, myself and several others, and
gifted it to public broadcasting. PI (above) under the direction of Debra
May Hughes has been public media’s innovative application service provider for
years. Jake Shapiro’s team built Public
Radio Exchange (PRX) under the sponsorship of the Station Resource Group,
creating a way to cultivate, discover and distribute new talent, voices and
ideas and to innovate with models that connect listeners to a broader
world. Mark Fuerst’s Integrated
Media Association has led beyond-the-transmitter thinking for years.
NPR’s Dana Davis Rehm has championed both the News Network of the Future and
the Digital Distribution Consortium (DDC) of 2006 in which Jake, Tim and others
played critical roles. Lastly, the WGBH
Forum Network and Twin Cities Public Television’s Minnesota Channel are important
inspirations to the CBI.
Bottom line – there has been a ton of work by dozens of
people over nearly a decade during which, independently, Web strategies and
content distribution over the Internet have matured. We have learned a
lot in this time, we have successful exemplars, and it’s past
time to put those to work in ways that strengthen public radio.
This and what follows provides some context for the
announcements you’ve heard about the open API and the PI acquisition and why
it’s important for the future of your station.
The open Application
Programming Interface (API) is an awful name for a very powerful
functionality that permits accessing NPR and, soon, station and other content
and placing it with modest but important restrictions on non-NPR web
sites. These might be your station’s web site, or it might be a
non-profit organization with which your station has a relationship, or it might
be a blog that your sister maintains. If you look down the left column of [this] blog, you
can see an example that took me ten minutes to install. Why do
this? Because open, distributed access to public radio content will
result in much greater usage than if we require everyone to come to our
portals. It’s expanding the reach of public radio beyond the radio or our
own websites. This is being fairly recognized as one the most
progressive and powerful web initiatives in American media. Open APIs
are common on the web but are very rare among major media companies.
Public
Interactive (PI) has been around for a long time and has a great
reputation for providing Web
services to the public broadcasting community. We’re pleased to have
reached an accord with Public Radio International to bring it into the NPR
family. Its mission is entirely consistent with our goal of increasing
NPR’s commitment to station services, as was our acquisition of National Public Media(NPM) last
fall. PI has a great suite of products and its core competencies are
consistent with our open API and other “distributed distribution” efforts to
grow the quality and relevance of station websites.
Combining these, we are developing the Community-Building
Initiativeto expose public media content
to broader audiences, strengthen public stations as a key community anchor,
help national and local community service organizations be more effective, and,
through all that, enhance and diversify the public media economy.
Like NNoF, the CBI is a “child” of NPR’s New Realities effort. An example
follows and this weekend I doodled a simplified drawing [see link] for
those among you who are visually oriented.
To seed this effort, we are working to establish several model
national partnerships with non-profit organizations which have affiliates
in your communities. There is a complex array of ways new partnerships of
this kind could work, so to help in understanding one of them, here’s a
fictional example:
Let’s say that you’re a public
radio manager who wants to gain exposure for what your station does and
build community public service alliances, adding local value. You
have recently been approached by a local conservation organization that has a
best-practices initiative relating to salmon recovery for which it would like
build awareness. It is also interested in building a community dialog
using modern social media tools. Traditionally, you might have put them
in touch with your news director, who has done stories on salmon recovery in
the past and perhaps might be interested in another one. She handles the
story in the journalistically critical arm’s length way and it is heard by
10-15% of your weekly cume on the air and then it (maybe) goes into a podcast
or is archived on your web site.
But the CBI expands
possibilities. Let’s say that the organization also has some video
content that it commissioned, perhaps from your local PTV station. With
proper guidelines, branding and labeling, it can be part of a larger collection
that you can distribute. So this video piece, the ten radio stories you’ve
already produced archived on this subject, some NPR stories on the subject
(Google gives 574 hits for “salmon” on npr.org), a couple of related stories
from PRX, and links to related blogs in your community are curated by your web
producer into a widget (a
piece of portable code that can fetch content from other web sites) carrying
your branding, the template for which has been provided to you by Public
Interactive. That template also includes social media features to
build communities of interest, plus opt-in sponsorship messages arranged by
NPM. The widget then goes on the partner’s web site, on those of many of
your other partners, on your own pages, on relevant blogs, etc. Others
will use the API tools to extract some of these pieces and republish them still
more places. Web searches build still more users, not just for the
distributed content but for your main web site. In the context of how
search works (see PageRank),
these multiple linking relationships make it more likely for your content to
emerge higher in search results. This strategy builds a much larger
audience by bringing content to people rather than requiring them to come
to your website.
Perhaps the station undertakes
similar partnerships with 25 or 50 or 100 other community organizations.
Some of these are local affiliates of national service organizations with which
NPR will have initiated relationships that stations can opt into. Others
are those you develop yourself. You can see that the placement
opportunities for content grow tremendously. So do new partnerships that
increase your station’s impact in the community, not to mention new funding
opportunities from new sources.
Public broadcasters have learned over nearly 40 years that
distribution success depends on brand impartiality. Recent digital
distribution work has taught that we’re better off starting with a
service modeland related economics, instead of with
technology, and that we need a to place our content many places on the web,
not just on our own web sites. To be sure, there are important
issues, especially with the need to maintain a wall between partner-generated
content and station journalism efforts, but there are numerous successful
examples to follow. The CBI plan is to incorporate all of these
assumptions in a way that just might transform the value equation for public
broadcasting stations in their communities.
These are exciting and challenging times for all of us in
public radio. I continue to be encouraged by what I see and hear from
stations around the country, and what is happening here at NPR. These
latest developments should give us some important new tools to address our
common future in a way that can transform both the impact and economics of
public media. Please share your thoughts about these issues with
me by posting a comment below.
Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota makes a withering analysis of the arguments of network service providers concerning why (real-time streaming capabilities) they oppose net neutrality. Odlyzko's analyses frequently challenge flabby assumptions with hard data and this one is particularly valuable.
Two of Om Malik's blogs today provide an overview of this important paper. In Streams Won't Pay for Themselves, Chris Albrecht writes:
... Video can be delivered more efficiently and less expensively using downloads over streaming, says Oldzyko, and these downloads can be more accommodating to the viewing habits of online audiences and just as secure as streams. ¶ Oldzyko thinks the belief that we need real-time streaming is a holdover from
broadcast and phone networks. ...
Then, in Hulu Bad For the Net, Video Still Not Clogging It, Stacey Higginbotham writes:
... the largest part of the paper is devoted to data that supports his
conclusions that content, such as Internet radio and video, is worth less than
connectivity such as voice or Twitter. People don’t pay for content, they pay
for connectivity, says Odlyzko. ...
Here's the abstract of and link to Odlyzko's paper:
Abstract. Service providers argue that if net neutrality is not enforced, they will have sufficient incentives to build special high-quality channels that will take the Internet to the next level of its evolution. But what if they do get their wish, net neutrality is consigned to the dustbin, and they do build their new services, but nobody uses them? If the networks that are built are the ones that are publicly discussed, that is a likely prospect.
What service providers publicly promise to do, if they are given complete control of their networks, is to build special facilities for streaming movies. But there are two fatal defects to that promise. One is that movies are unlikely to o er all that much revenue. The other is that delivering movies in real-time streaming mode is the wrong solution, expensive and unnecessary.
If service providers are to derive significant revenues and profits by exploiting freedom from net neutrality limitations, they will need to engage in much more intrusive control of traffic than just provision of special channels for streaming movies.
In a world of rapid change, shift piles upon shift. One can get
thoroughly confused and draw the wrong conclusions by focusing on one
change while losing sight of the shifts that are coming up. ....
In the advertising world, multiple shifts are piling on top of each
other and it is often hard to keep track of them, much less understand
their implications. Let’s look at just some that are re-shaping the
advertising world:
Shifts from advertising placed in digital content to ads placed in social networks and applications
Shifts from digital advertisements delivered through conventional
PC’s to a growing array of mobile devices, with an increasing ability
to target messages based on the physical location of the person
Shifts in the behavior of digital users in their responsiveness to advertisements online
Shifts in the way that companies connect with and build
relationships with stakeholders (e.g., blurring boundaries between
customers, partners and suppliers)
Shifts in the revenue models for businesses, as online businesses
in particular become more and more dependent on advertising as a key
revenue source (e.g., is there any Web 2.0 start-up that doesn’t
blithely answer “advertising” when asked about their revenue model?).
If that isn’t complicated enough, we also have broader macro-economic shifts like potential near-term recessionary pressures ...
I'm way, way behind in reading my blogroll, so here are two posts from ace media observer Diane Mermigas that I missed.
In the first, she writes about monetizing consumer engagement, proactive content by attracting investor support, social-marketing connections, local connections, signature quality content, "free" versus so-called "payment", and independent third-party content distribution. Link: MediaPost.
In the second, she writes:
Public broadcasting may be better situated for the digital transition than
its commercial broadcasting counterparts, having forged its fortunes on content
bound by special interests, political issues and civic action. But it could be
obscuring its own passage to financial sustainability through interactive ties
with its close-knit constituents. ¶ The potential hurdles are long-held perceptions in the nonprofit public media
space, and in public broadcasting in particular, about what constitutes
commercial endeavors. These were cut-and-dried notions in an analog world. Video
streamed online and downloaded to mobile digital devices and user-generated
content exist without marketing support. Advertising is transcending to more
sophisticated interactive connections with targeted consumers; transactions,
marketing research and ongoing rapport can be honed over time. ...
The death of broadcasting is a popular theme in web posts. For example, Doc Searls asks, What happens after TV's mainframe era ends next February? in Linux Journal (you should read it, but that's not my purpose here). Jeff Jarvis says in BuzzMachine they should Tear down the broadcast towers because Pandora is available on the iPhone. Those are the A-list bloggers, but it's popular with us Z to ZZZ-list bloggers as well. So I decided to do phrase searches to see how the media stacked up in the death department. Surprisingly, it wasn't old media:
Dead "death of television", 13,000 results "death of TV", 28,200 results Deader "death of radio", 227,000 results "death of newspapers", 331,000 results Deadest "death of blogs", "death of the blogs", "death of the blog", 81,400 results "death of the web", 215,000 results "death of the net", 746,000 results "death of the internet", 1,910,000 results
