JMS

A short report from PaidContent.org on a BBC blogging project fits with my growing conviction that public radio stations have a unique opportunity to extend their local media role by helping curate, amplify, annotate, and reconnect the blog conversations already taking place in their community.

Connect to emerging conversations already taking place in your community, be a trusted filter by engaging and annotating the salient threads, jump in early and often and build relevance by generously linking. ( Terry Heaton has nurtured this idea for some time now with local commercial broadcasters, and it’s all the more powerful for public media). And find a way to talk about it on your air that educates the audience a bit, invites them in, and captures what’s cool about it.

Stations, many of whom are searching for a new web rationale beyond the companion sites they now operate, can add value and meaning and connectedness to these emerging local conversations and networks. Of course you need someone in house who gets it. Not a small requirement. And the ‘metrics’ of success in these activities are a bit up in the air (have some thoughts on that).

This is also something newspapers (just noticed the Boston Globe’s attempt) and start-up new media ventures are starting to focus on so the time is ripe to play a leading role.

This particular BBC experiment (one of many) is a good one to watch because it’s within the capacity of some US public radio stations to try on their own.

Here’s the original post on PaidContent.

And here are a couple excerpts that give a feel for the project:

Robin Hamman, senior community producer for BBC English Regions New Media, explained the initiative in an interview with paidContent.org: “We aren’t sure if it’s aggregator, a citizen journalism project or a media literacy campaign – it probably cuts across all three.”

This is a three-month trial launched last week by BBC New Media Central and BBC Manchester:
- Between 10 and 20 volunteers are being recruited across the city.
- Through workshops, participants will be guided through the BBC’s editorial guidelines and production values and then referred to commercial blogging platforms to start their own sites.
- The BBC will monitor RSS feeds from these blogs and highlight the best content.
- Pre-existing local bloggers/Flickr contributors are also invited to submit work or tag content “bbcmanchesterblog” so it can be picked up.

…As for the workload, Hamman optimistically envisages this as a one or two hour job each day for BBC staff — skimming the RSS feeds and wrapping editorial around the best. The rest of the task is to promote the blog to BBC journalists as an efficient source of content about Manchester.

Couple stations already poking around this:

WXPN podcast picks
North Country Public Radio (proving you don’t have to be a big market station to try this out)