JMS

I wrote a little ditty for the Berkman Center’s Filter newsletter

The Future of Public Media?
– by Jake Shapiro

As citizen journalism and user-generated content burn up the blogosphere and incite waves of entrepreneurial venture-backed energy and big media interest from Fox to the BBC, your friendly neighborhood public broadcasters are paying close attention and are starting to get their digital act together.

Over the last 10 months NPR has partnered with local stations and networks to offer hundreds of podcasts, generating over 25 million downloads to date. American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio recently made a major investment in Gather.com - a new social network startup with a “My Space for grownups” feel.

Open Source with Christopher Lydon continues to blaze a trail as a hybrid Internet and radio presence. And local stations across the country are beginning to dip their toes into blogging and podcasting, if not yet loosening the reins on who is behind the microphone on air and online.

In a way, public media should be better suited to adapt to the social web than other broadcasters: the public service mission emphasizes open access, civic engagement, diversity of voices, education values that resonate with the citizen, and participatory media movement. The increasingly valuable role of trusted filter is already one of its signature traits. And the system structure of stations and networks and independent producers mirrors the “small pieces loosely joined” (thanks to Dave Weinberger) nature of the Internet itself.

But big questions loom:

* Can public media remain relevant in a digital world where there is no “left of the dial” and oceans of commercial, noncommercial and user-generated content intermingle?

* What’s the role for local stations when producers can reach audiences anywhere anytime?

* Are we stuck with repurposing existing programming for digital distribution or can we broaden the sources and voices now that “shelf space/bandwidth” is no longer the limit?

There’s been a flurry of activity this year, from the BBC’s “Creative Future” to NPR’s “New Realities.” The Ford Foundation launched a $50M initiative to support public media, and the Berkman Center hosted “Beyond Broadcast: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture.” The answers aren’t all there but the trend is clear: public media is evolving into a significant digital service (just Google “evolution” and PBS comes up first), and it can continue to play an essential role as a trusted convener of conversation around news, information, arts, and culture, and help build a backbone of noncommercial media in a networked society.