Technology360

The Future Newsroom: Lean, Open and Social Media-Savy

Thanks to Cleve Callison for a link to this interesting article by Greg Ferenstein, which begins:

On the campus of Penn State University, a rivalry between a rogue campus blog and the official newspaper has become a fascinating mirror of the strife between old and new media. In only a matter of months, the unofficial campus blog Onward State, has marshaled the power of social media to compete with the award winning 112-year-old campus paper The Daily Collegian. With one-tenth of the Collegian’s staff size, Onward State has constructed a virtual newsroom that collaborates in real-time with Google Wave, outsourced its tip-line to Twitter, and is unabashed about linking to a competitor’s story. ...

Link:  Mashable.  --Dennis

Amusing blog comment spam

More than half the comments to this blog are spam (I delete them before they're published and report them to TypePad). This one from a term paper company is amusing: "It is glad to see this blog, it is good that and detailed fun to read this, nice informative blog, Thanks for share this article." Guess they don't write the term papers they sell. --Dennis

Gegenwart: Unity between the present and presence in radio

I’ve been meaning to post for quite awhile on a lengthy (30 pp) essay by Pierre Bellanger, Founder and Chairperson of Skyrock, the French-based social network/ radio station (in itself an innovative mash-up).  I do a lot of reading in media topics, and think this is the first time I’ve seen Goethe invoked.  But what an interesting invocation!  He writes:

… As regards the essence of its content, radio is an audio presence. Presence means the co-existence alongside me of another human being with whom I share the present moment. Radio is both about humanity and immediacy. Radio is the audio link between another person and me at the same time.  ¶  Therefore, in radio there is an inseparable unity between the present and presence. To understand this better, it is necessary to read Goethe …  Goethe wrote to his friend, the musician Zelter, and shared his thoughts on the present and presence which in German are a single word: Gegenwart.  ¶  Goethe talks about an intense experience of the moment, a presence in the present and that is radio. It is only worth anything in that moment and in the human intensity which occurs at that moment.  ¶  The vector of that experience is sound. …

The essay draws a distinction between just digitizing radio (e.g., HD Radio in the U.S.) and how radio can be something much more in the internet age.

Link:  Skyrock.  Thanks to Vincent Benveniste, CEO at DAVID Systems, for the tip and link.  --Dennis

Are we becoming gadgets?

I’ve just ordered Jaron Lanier’s new book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto based on a review in Slate by Michael Agger.  He writes:

… As near as I can make it out, Lanier's view is that the Web began as a digital Eden. We built homepages by hand, played around in virtual worlds, wrote beautiful little programs for the fun of it, and generally made our humanity present online. The standards had not been set. The big money and the big companies had not yet arrived. Now Google has linked search to advertising. The Internet's long tail helps only the Amazons of the world, not the little guys and gals making songs, videos, and books. Wikipedia, a mediocre product of group writing, has become the intellectual backbone of the Web. And, most depressingly, all of us have been lumped into a "hive mind" that every entrepreneur with a dollar and a dream is trying to parse for profit. …

It seems to be a critique in many ways of how derivative content has become in the Web 2.0 age; how we’re replacing creativity with rehashing what’s come before.

Today’s episode (hour 2) of the NPR program, On Point with Tom Ashbrook is a discussion of the book with guests Lanier and long-time Web visionary (co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto), David Weinberger.  --Dennis

Does Facebook contain the seeds of its own decline?

Social media outlets have certainly grabbed a significant share of attention, both from individuals and from organizations hoping to ride what many perceive to be a wave.  I participate in three such (or four, if you count blogging), Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, in declining order of value to me.  As this is written, I have 382 "followers" on Twitter, 152 "connections" on LinkedIn, and 264 "friends" on Facebook.  This compares to about 800 subcribers that FeedBurner says I have for this weblog.  Modest levels all.

What motivates most of my Twitter "followers" is a mystery (in the last few months, some may have come from the follow link below left).  They generally come in at a pretty steady clip -- one or two a day, though once in awhile there is a burst of 10-15 in a day.  I recognize very few of the IDs.  The 86 people I follow are of two types -- a handful people close to me (mostly family) whose tweets I like to get on my phone, and then everyone else who I read mostly using TweetDeck, which helpfully pushes tweets out.  Those I follow are mostly favorites from my blogroll -- easier than scanning RSS feeds.  No, you can't say much in 140 characters, but that's a good thing.

LinkedIn "connections" are almost entirely people with whom I've had a business relationship.  I've used LinkedIn a few times to check "who is this person?" and a couple of times to look for potential hires.  It's nice to have but not essential.

Then there's Facebook.  Hope I don't come off as a misanthrope for the following -- I'm not -- but here goes...

In contrast to Twitter and LinkedIn, Facebook is increasingly annoying.  "That's OK, grandpa," I imagine some of you saying, "it wasn't built for you in the first place."  But when I read, as I did this morning in the Financial Times, that social sites are losing popularity with British 15-24's, I wonder if it's something more than what the author supposes is loss of the "cool" factor.  Perhaps it's the underlying math of Facebook.

Think about your connections to other people.  You have family and dear friends, casual friends, acquaintances, etc.  As the circle of "friends" expands, you become less interested, frankly, in the stream of pictures and comments that come from them nor in the growing number of requests to join and support and hug and poke and to offer up your "friends" to causes and the like -- Facebook is full of goofy apps.  It's set up like a big chain letter -- or rather a series of them -- only without the threat of harm if you break the chain.  It's been ages since I actually did anything on Facebook other than respond to requests.

As your group of "friends" expands beyond your initial core group, you get more and more requests to "friend" new people.  The longer you're on Facebook, the more common are requests to "friend" people who you barely know, or maybe met at a conference a long time ago, or in some cases don't recall ever hearing of.  Yet they all come with some "friends" in common, so you want to be nice and include them in your circle.  Maybe you had a great dinner or served on a committee with them five years ago and just forgot.

So, eventually, it seems that the math of Facebook becomes essentially a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game where almost everyone can be connected.  Management of "friends" and their various requests becomes your primary reason to visit the site, but the value of the site as a true social glue diminishes in proportion to the number of more distant relationships you "friend."

So here's my theory -- feel free to knock it down:  The reported declining use among teens and early 20s is because they've been through the "chain letter" earlier than the rest of us and have thus widened their circle of friends already, and that's led to declining value for them.

Oh, hold it...  Kevin added you as a a friend on Facebook.  We need to confirm that you know Kevin in order for you to be friends on Facebook.

--Dennis

Mobcasting the news

At NPR, we have occasional brown bag lunch (is there any other kind of lunch at NPR?) presentations.  Today's was extremely informative and given by our social media expert, Andy Carvin (twitter @acarvin).  His topic was Mobcasting the News: Crowdsourcing, Volunteers and Journalism (slides) and audio.  Recommended.  --Dennis

The Infinite Dial 2009: Radio's Digital Platforms (video info, too)

I'm beginning to think of my iPhone with its free Public Radio Tuner app as my "infinite dial," having just had the experience yesterday morning of an early drive from Baltimore to Washington listening to WSIU in Carbondale, IL by simply plugging my iPhone into my car's sound system.  [Hint to pubcasters:  WSIU's signal that morning was very reliable and sounded great, but the higher bitrates some stations are using contribute no fidelity that you can detect in a car and have many, many more dropouts.]

However, in this case, it refers to a study of this name from Edison Research and Arbitron:

We update the status of radio's new digital platforms (online radio, satellite radio, HD Radio, and podcasting among others), social networks, online video, iPhones, and implications for broadcasters, advertisers, and media planners.

They say, for example, that an estimated 69 million Americans listened to online radio in the last month and that weekly online listening (42 million) is up by one-third year over year.  The same number of people who listen to internet radio in a month watch internet video in a week (69MM).  For satellite and HD Radio, there are awareness data only.  Finally, in spite of the rapid growth in internet radio listening, 80% of people say yes to, "In the future, you will continue to listen to AM/FM radio as much as you do now, despite increasing advancements in technology?"

A rich study.  Link:  Edison Research.  --Dennis

NPR's digital distribution strategy

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 open Application 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 Initiative to 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   model and 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. 

 

Dennis Haarsager, Interim CEO, NPR

Who are you, Master, and why do you want to control me?

My sister and brother-in-law have been staying with me in Washington this week, so I've played hookey a few hours during the week to do touristy things with them.  One of them was a visit to the Newseum yesterday, a beautiful tribute to the values of big craft journalism -- which, of course, I try to nourish every day.  However, that particular visit followed a briefing that our management team at NPR got from Andy Carvin concerning social media plans.  I'm trying to nourish this kind of thinking every day also.  So this juxtaposition of media values, which some observers might think are contrasting, were at work when I ran across the foot tall MASTER CONTROL letters on the 3rd floor of the Newseum.  What room in a media company could be more at odds with social media?  --Dennis

Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus

I've been doing some weekend bike riding and visits to the gym in my building for the last five or six weeks -- not that you would know it by looking at me.  But when I want to visit an intellectual gym, I pick up the New York Review of Books or boot up Edge.org -- always satisfying.

The latter recently posted a video by Clay Shirky of this title -- and its transcript (you'll need to scroll down the page to find it).  Shirky is one of the most innovative thinkers out there, especially on the social web, and recently published Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (have read most of it, but got sidetracked by a rare read of a novel*).  He says:

... And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.  ¶ We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.  ¶ And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement. ...

Be sure also to read the intro by John Brockman and the commentary by Tim O'Reilly on that same page, and Nicholas Carr's commentary, Gilligan's Web, here.

Shirky's writing usually resonates with me -- and I like his "cognitive surplus" coinage.  But here, on first reading, I feel more comfortable with Carr's critique.  I'll read it again in a week or so and see if I change my mind.

Update 4 September 2008:
*Mark Laskowski asks, "what was the rare novel?"  It was the excellent Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson.   --Dennis