Technology360

The Reconstruction of American Journalism

This is the title of a new report by former Washington Post executive editor, Leonard Downie, Jr. and Professor Michael Schudson, The Journalism School, Columbia University.  They begin:

... Newspapers and television news are not going to vanish in the foreseeable future, despite frequent predictions of their imminent extinction. But they will play diminished roles in an emerging and still rapidly changing world of digital journalism, in which the means of news reporting are being re-invented, the character of news is being reconstructed, and reporting is being distributed across a greater number and variety of news organizations, new and old. ...

Some lengthy comments on public broadcasting begin on p. 5 of the online version (p. 12 if you make a 39-pp. pdf of the document).  Their recommendations for public broadcasting begin on p. 14 of the online version (p. 33 of a pdf) and look to reorienting public radio and television "to provide significant local news reporting in every community served by public stations and their Web sites."  I've given shortcuts to pubcasting material, but it's important to read their analysis and recommendations in context.

Link:  Columbia Journalism Review.  Thanks to Vivian Schiller for the link. 

Update: 28 October 2009:

The "atomic" version of Current newspaper has a page one overview of this report by Karen Everhart.  It's not yet on current.org.  Also on page one but not on the site is a report on the forward-looking Chicago News Cooperative.  WTTW-TV is a founding partner and the article says WBEZ-FM may also join the partnership.  I'll try to remember to add links when they appear.  --Dennis

Copps: Digital TV offerings fall short

Joel Rose writes:

... Two of the major networks are offering their own national weather channels. But Michael Copps of the Federal Communications Commission says the offerings are a far cry from what broadcasters could be doing with the new channels.  ¶  "If this spectrum is going to be used just for home shopping and Doppler radar, it's falling far short of the purpose that it could be serving," Copps says. "It has the capacity to represent local issues, local politics, local music, local religious and cultural diversity." ...

Link:  NPR All Things Considered.  --Dennis

WAMU's Bluegrass Country wins NAB HD Radio Multicast Award

Congratulations to Caryn Mathes and team at WAMU for winning this year's National Association of Broadcasters HD Radio Multicast Award (link: RadioWorld) for the station's Bluegrass Country channel.  HD Radio's receivers are still in toddlerhood with many interesting developments ahead, but in the end it will be programming that makes or breaks this technology.  WAMU's innovative use of its HD-2 channel, web streaming, and a Reston, VA translator have shown how it can be done.

Update, 12 August 2009:
Read some more about what WAMU is doing with its multicast channels in Radio World's Leslie Report.  --Dennis

Christian radio questions concept of localism

Michael Lasar writes:

The Communications Act requires broadcasters to serve "public interest, convenience, and necessity." But a campaign by a Christian media group to defeat Federal Communications Commission proposals to encourage more locally-oriented radio reveals the extent to which some Christian broadcasters see their mission in sectarian terms.  ¶  "The FCC is considering a proposal that would force every radio station to take programming advice from community advisory boards broadly representative of an area’s population," a statement distributed by Save Christian Radio (SCR) darkly warns. "That means that Christian broadcast stations could be forced to take programming advice from people whose values are at odds with the Gospel!"

Link:  Ars Technica.

In The Decline of Localist Broadcasting Policies, Ed Felton then comments on this development and also the debut of Pandora for the iPhone:

... Many people are like the Pandora or Christian radio listeners, in wanting to hear content aimed at their interests rather than just their location. Public policy ought to recognize this and give broadcasters more latitude to find their own communities rather than defining communities only by geography.  ¶  Now I’m not saying that their shouldn’t be local programming, or that people shouldn’t care what is happening in their neighborhood. Most people care a lot about local issues and want some local programming. The local community is one of their communities of interest, but it’s not the only one. Let some stations serve local communities while others serve non-local communities. As long as there is demand for local programming — as there surely will be — the market will provide it, and new technologies will help people get it. ...

Link:  Freedom to Tinker (about a dozen comments follow his post).

Adam Thierer provides some comments on this in The Progress & Freedom Foundation blog and expands on this theme in Our Continued Wishful Thinking about "Media Localism" where he points to a debate on this in Editor & Publisher:

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at Editor & Publisher in which E&P columnist Steve Outing and Mark Potts of the now-defunct Backfence.com are debating media localism and recent efforts to give dying newspapers a new lease on life by focusing on the “hyper-local” coverage and community services. Potts obviously didn’t take too kindly to Outling saying of Backfence that: “We know from its experience that relying too heavily on non-paid citizen contributors isn’t a winning strategy.” And that the: “content is often of low quality and boring, and dull just doesn’t fly in the hyper-competitive Web environment. In response, Potts suggests that other factors were responsible for the site’s demise and that hyper-localism and user-generated local content is the future of the industry...

Link:  Technology Liberation Front.

Nota bene to fellow broadcasters from the Boy Scouts: Be Prepared.  Unless we're serving both geographical and affinity communities, we'll likely be marginalized.  --Dennis

Audio makes video come to life

NPR has been combining audio and video on its web site for some time now.  NPR's SVP/GM, Digital Media, Maria Thomas, forwarded to me this afternoon a note from Joe Matazzoni making the point that "outstanding audio makes our video come to life."  Indeed it does.  Check out this video of singer Lizz Wright.  Link: NPR.  Congrats to Ivan Burketh and Neal Tevault for audio and Dave Gilkey for photography and editing.  --Dennis

Better Than Free + Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Maybe some regular reader can set me straight, but I swear that recently I linked to Kevin Kelly's terrific piece with this in his blog, The Technium (Kelly was one of the founders of Wired)  However, can't find it, so I either dreamed it or accidentally deleted it.  Seriously, it is the best thing I've read this year as part of this blogging effort and was a core part of a brief presentation that I made to last month's Public Media 2008 conference in L.A.  Now comes Chris Anderson with a lengthy article in Wired that's previewing a new book, FREE, that will be out next year.

Kelly begins by noting:

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free. ...

He goes on:

... From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free. ...

These eight "generatives," as he calls them ("A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced.") are as follows:

• Immediacy
• Personalization
• Interpretation
• Authenticity
• Accessibility
• Embodiment
• Patronage
• Findability

Link:  The Technium.

Anderson looks at "free" a different way (though if you think advertising, for example, is truly free, think about how much of the cost of the products you buy goes into making you aware of and desire them).  Here's his taxonomy:

• "Freemium" (basic version free, premium version costs you)
• Advertising
• Cross-subsidies (free product entices you to buy something else)
• Zero marginal cost (e.g., online music)
• Gift economy (e.g., open source software)

Link:  Wired.

We can learn from both these guys, but for those of us making the transition from legacy media to emerging forms, I think Kelly's offers especially valuable insights.  --Dennis

Requiem for Old-Time Radio

Jon Fine writes:

... Realities of the music world—the explosion in both expression and availability, first on independent labels and now everywhere, thanks to the Internet—began overtaking commercial radio stations well over 20 years ago. (I feel profoundly sorry for anyone whose musical universe is limited to the shrunken playlists of commercial radio, given the bounty available elsewhere.) There was a complicated blood bond that budding music geeks of the 1970s and '80s formed with radio, which today seems quaint. You loved radio for first opening up a world; you hated it for falling behind what was actually going on. ...

Link:  BusinessWeek.

NY Times: Is PBS Still Necessary?

Charles McGrath writes:

For the eighth straight year the Bush administration has ritually proposed taking a hefty whack out of the federal subsidy for public broadcasting. ...  ¶  Every year, though, it gets a little harder to muster the necessary outrage, and now and then a heretical thought presents itself: What if the glory days of public television — the days of “Monty Python,” “Upstairs Downstairs,” “The French Chef” — are past recapturing? Lately the audience for public TV has been shrinking even faster than the audience for the commercial networks. The average PBS show on prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating, or roughly what the wrestling show “Friday Night Smackdown” gets. ...

... Considering how much it costs to create new topnotch programming, the best solution to public television’s woes is the one that will probably never happen: more money, not less. ...

Link: New York Times. 

In comparison to public TV, McGrath makes favorable comments about public radio (I'm affiliated with both).  In fact, public television invests less of its economy in national programming than does public radio, though it's relatively small in both cases.  Viewer-sensitive revenue (memberships and the noncommercial advertising we call underwriting) makes up less of public TV's economy (about 40%) than does listener-sensitive revenue in public radio (about 60%).  So one could make an interesting argument -- not one I'll develop here beyond stating the hypothesis -- that public radio stations are closer to their listeners than public television stations are to their viewers. 

Update 19 February 2008:
Also see the comments appended to this NYT article.  --Dennis

Toward an Embarrassment of Niches

This clever title from Skip Pizzi, who writes:

... One recent study, conducted and reported by a respected music industry publication, The Lefsetz Letter, compared the overall music sales — both physical and digital — of the calendar year 2000 (the peak sales year to date for the industry) with sales in 2007, and found that the 2007 figures were down about a third (–36%) from the 2000 sales.  ¶  Then Lefsetz compared the individual sales of each of the top 10 selling records for those two years with one other (i.e., sales of the #1 record of 2000 compared to the #1 record of 2007, #2 with #2, and so on), which you would expect to approximately reflect the same one-third drop — but they did not.  ¶  Instead, the records that occupied each of the top 10 slots for 2007 were off from over 50 percent to nearly 70 percent compared to the sales for the records in those same positions for 2000.  ¶  This substantially disproportionate drop for the bestsellers of 2007 indicates that music sales are clearly trending toward greater diversity and choice. ...

... Consumption patterns are shifting, and these may significantly affect radio formatics, particularly for music.  ¶  Here are the high-level bullet points that influence any course corrections that terrestrial radio might consider:

• As blockbuster sales decline and niches grow in importance, music promotion will move away from traditional radio formats and seek more specialized outlets.
  
• As big names sell fewer records but continue to receive most terrestrial radio airplay, music labels will seek increased compensation to make up for sales losses through new royalty payments from broadcasters.
  
• Metadata matters, particularly for less well-known artists.
  
• One-to-many is giving way to many-to-many, and unilateral purveyors of taste (e.g., radio programming gurus) are giving way to “communities.” These virtual communities are defined along multiple axes, one of which is geographical. Terrestrial radio’s limited coverage can be turned to a strength for such localized communities.
  
• A potentially controversial point, but worth considering (at least academically): In terms of maximizing competitive agility, terrestrial radio ownership limits may be inverted. ...

Link: Radio World.  Thanks to Kerry Swanson for the tip.  --Dennis

TV Stations Seek Shows to Put Online

Brian Stelter visited the National Ass'n of Television Program Executives (pronounced "GNAT-pee") conference in Las Vegas and writes:

... As broadcast growth flattens, local stations are increasingly looking to their Web sites for new sources of revenue. Some stations are creating original programming for the Web, but it is far easier for them to purchase the online rights to syndicated shows. This week, for instance, 200 television station Web sites introduced “Big Shot Live,” a national online talent competition promoted through “Entertainment Tonight.” Some stations, under an agreement with Warner Brothers, are now showing the syndicated sitcom “Two and a Half Men” on their Web sites.  ¶  If ventures like these are successful, local affiliates may wind up playing the same role online that they do on television, in which they buy up what is essentially used programming from producers. As Oprah Winfrey and Alex Trebek can attest, syndication is a backbone of local broadcasting: affiliates purchase the local rights to specific shows and sell ads alongside the content. ...

Link:  New York Times.  --Dennis