JMS

digesting in Cabo

• Clear Channel to sell 448 stations in 90 markets
  what would it take to buy them all for public/community/noncomm radio?
  (tags: public radio, clear channel, prc)

I’m in San Francisco at a Ford Foundation convening for public media grantees and guests, hosted by the Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University.

It’s the fourth gathering of this group under the umbrella of Ford’s 5-year $50M “Global Perspectives in a Digital Age” public media initiative that launched about 2 years ago.

PRX is one of the 11 partners, nestled in with some usual and unusual suspects like NPR, PBS, Public Radio International, Public Interactive, Public Radio Capital, the five minority consortia (National Black Programming Consortium, Center for Asian American Media, Pacific Islanders Communication, Latino Public Broadcasting, Native American Public Telecommunications), ITVS, LinkTV, the Sundance Documentaries, and New American Media.

It’s a full agenda with some guests speakers and presentations by members of the group.

Orlando Bagwell, deputy director of Ford’s “Media, Arts, and Culture” division, set out the theme as “innovation, investment, and imagination”. I dig it.

Joaquin Alvardo is our host, and as founding director of The Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University he tantalizes the group with visions of a broadband and fiber-fabulous future that harnesses the explosion of democratized media expression. I’m sold.

The bulk of Monday’s meetings were presentations by partners in the initiative:

- ITVS talked about new strategies for multi-platform outreach and engagement around the films they fund like HIP-HOP: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, and the internal organizational challenges and changes in adapting to a new environment.

- We get a heady dose of rights wrangling from Pat Aufderheide from the Center for Social Media, Fred von Lohman of EFF, and Sue Kantrowitz of WGBH.

Pat walks us through the copyright wrongs and ways to address them for users as creators, focusing on fair use and pushing the boundaries in practice. Fred tells the group that as broadcasters we’re still playing under the old rules - including “strict liability” - while new competitors like YouTube and others have started playing by totally new rules. The new rules aren’t yet even rules, and some of the pending litigation and deal-making surrounding YouTube will have an impact. I ask Fred how safe the DMCA Safe Harbor (the part of the DMCA that protects sites from liability for infringement if they take down material when rights-holders notify them), and if it’s big enough to accommodate YouTube is it big enough for the rest of us too… He basically says “yes” (good thing, I’m the “DMCA agent” on record for PRX…). Sue decodes the dicey state of play for WGBH and other content providers and distributors in the hybridizing world of broadcast and new media. It’s a rights and clearance nightmare, particularly for shows like American Experience that can have dozens and dozens of third-party elements with different terms that need addressing for any new uses. It’s a mess.

At lunch Orlando interviews Jim Dolgonas, President and COO for the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC…pronounced “scenic” rather than “cynic”) and we learn about the remarkable capacities of the coming fiber-optic enabled Internet 2, and the potential for a public media partnership with educators in bringing it to life.

I’m up next and do my PRX bit, updating everyone on the fact that stations have now licensed over 10,000 pieces from PRX, we have over 22,000 members and have paid out over $250,000 in royalties to hundreds of independent producers and stations. I segue into my other riff of the season which is about the social media opportunity and the themes of Relevance, Participation, and Trust.

Mike Litz from OneWorld US shares lessons they’ve learned from building an online network of NGOs sharing content, community, communications, including focusing on the “single” not the LP in terms of syndicating content (in other words, figure out how to embed as much context into atomized bits of content as possible when you can’t count on someone encountering your page); and how to serve as a “values-based lens on the world”.

An interesting discussion breaks out about the fickle fate of 20th century style journalism in a 21st century social media world.

Last up are Susan Harmon and Marc Hand from Public Radio Capital (PRC). PRC was also incubated at the Station Resource Group where PRX still makes its home, and I’m always admiring their bold moves in building a national case for preserving and extending the reach of public radio with new signals. They’ve already helped move $100M in transactions and have bigger ambitions in the works. With the new owners of Clear Channel gearing up to sell 450 stations (PDF) we need to think very big indeed to take full advantage of the opportunity. I want PRX to play a role in thinking about new formats for new stations and new audiences. Public radio should have far more diversity in sound than the current duplicative crop of news and music streams represents.

Monday night I luck out and get to hang out with Davia Nelson of the Kitchen Sisters at the holiday party for Zoetrope - the Francis Ford Coppola company housed in a super cool building (where Godfather was mixed and where the Sisters have their office, among other things).

Ok, running out of steam here…

Tuesday those of us who stayed on got a real treat. Sandy Close invited us to New America Media’s headquarters - a big news room with an amazing mix of people assembling, creating, annotating, amplifying youth and ethnic media from around the country. We learned about The Beat Within - a weekly publication of writing and art from kids in juvenile halls and prisons around California. New American Media was one of PRX’s first producers, I believe they were even a beta tester before we launched, and we’re planning to lure them back as they relaunch some radio programs in the new year. Also check out the short video report from the First National Ethnic Media Awards they put on in DC a few weeks ago.

Next up was a visit to BAVC (Bay Area Video Coalition) - “the most advanced noncommercial media access and training center in the nation”. And you could tell. About 7,000 people per year get trained at BAVC, including 1,000 young people working on video/audio/music production at the main facility and in sites at schools and centers elsewhere. Fantastic. Thanks Ken Ikeda and the staff for giving us the tour.

I managed to cram in a PRX business meeting at the end of the day, dropping by the offices of the Internet Online Distribution Alliance (IODA) where we are gearing up for a partnership to distribute more PRX pieces through a variety of new digital services where public radio content is so far mostly absent.

All in all this was a fitting whirlwind end to a whirlwind year - drinking from a fire-hose of inspiration, opportunity, connection, convening, communication. I leave in a few hours for Mexico through the holidays, where I’m hoping days upon days of being unplugged in the sun will work wonders on the firing neurons, helping tease out an important pattern that’s emerging…

• Platforms Are The New Portals
  The challenge for any company that wants to scale in the distributed age is to create a platform that acts as a distributed portal — still a de facto gateway, but one that exists across the web.
  (tags: publicmedia portals platforms)

A good piece with some case studies and interviews from the NonProfit Times about ways that nonprofits are starting to integrate social media into their work and outreach.

Read the whole article here: NP Times / Role Reversal

November 15, 2006
Social Networking

By Tom Pope

Check out the American Cancer Society (ACS) on the Web portal YouTube.com and you’d think the nonprofit is active in showing videos. If you search for the organization on YouTube, you’ll see the cartoon The Flintstones appearing to change directions after smoking. You’ll also see that $100,000 was raised during one event at Michigan State University. News regarding colorectal cancer is in one video, and the Relay for Life details are shown in another video.

But Marty Coelho, national managing director for marketing and communication at ACS, isn’t using YouTube for Relay for Life. Volunteers took to the net and uploaded more than 120 videos.

Volunteers and donors are flocking to MySpace for personal pages, Flickr.com for photo sharing, and YouTube.com for viewing and uploading videos and social networking in general.

And another excerpt:

GetActive Software’s Haji echoed the strategy. He encourages clients to make official Web sites more participatory as a way to tie into the new medium. The strategy retains control, yet allows nonprofits to create a version of the social networking community.

“The whole movement of the participatory Web can have a huge impact on the nonprofit sector,” he said. While YouTube and MySpace are not direct competitors to nonprofits, they are competitors for attention, he said.

“We’re encouraging nonprofits to avoid a static, boring Web site,” Haji said. “Include participatory devices like personal pages.”

And

Nonprofits should be involved with portals like YouTube. “That’s where the young people are looking for information,” Sreenivasan said. “If you’re not there, much worse than losing control could happen to nonprofits.”

This PaidContent post hits on one of my talking points in promoting the opportunities that public broadcasters have in social media. The notion basically being that we traditionally have highlighted the contrast between noncommercial and commercial media, supporting the purpose and mission of public broadcasting by pointing out the failings of commercial media in serving the public interest.

Now social media is emerging as a “third zone” - a new space that doesn’t conform to the commercial/noncommercial dichotomy.

In theory public media should have significant advantages in integrating with and supporting social media. Social media in many ways is the essence of a “public” media, and as a democratic expressive and cultural movement it aligns with the mission of public broadcasting.

But the reality is that commercial media is beating us (I keep using we/us but I feel like more of a hybrid between the public and social spaces)to the punch and — as this PaidContent post says — is well on the way to “co-opting New Media”. It shouldn’t come as a surprise - commercial mass media have the motive and the means to start harnessing social media. It’s not all a bad thing, but there are real dangers in how it might evolve.

I would argue that the nascent social media phenomenon and a threatened public media field would mutually benefit from an early embrace. Social media needs some of the articulation of the values and aspirations that have guided the best of what public broadcasting has achieved, and public media needs to break out of its broadcast borders to fulfill its public service media mission regardless of the particular technology delivery platform.

Old Media’s Options: Co-opt New Media, Take Its Lead—Or Both

Posted by Jimmy Guterman
Mon 04 Dec 2006 09:02 AM PST

Depending on your point of view, there’s nothing as amusing—or terrifying—as an industry that is clueless about what it should do next. At a time when Old Media is hitting a new low of originality—expect new Rambo and Beverly Hills Cop installments over the coming months—they’re now so desperate for new ideas that they are looking for amateurs to deliver them. Yahoo and Reuters are just the latest pair of companies trying to leverage citizen journalists with camera phones and, as Scott Kirsner notes in an op-ed in Sunday’s Mercury News, that’s only the beginning. In ‘As online viewi”

(Read the rest here: paidContent.org: The Economics of Content.)

• Blog » For Artists - Amie St
  “Amie Street gives fans the incentive to discover and purchase your music through our unique pricing model. All songs on Amie Street start free and rise in price up to 98 cents based on the number of times they are bought. The first several downloads of y
  (tags: music distribution social amie)

I’m just back from a 48 hour dash to Fresno California, lucking out on the layovers considering the weather delays everywhere else.

It was a privilege and a treat to be invited to talk to the Radio Bilingüe staff and board. Radio Bilingüe is a storied enterprise, lead by Hugo Morales - the venerated founder and a really nice guy.

Radio Bilingüe offers Spanish-language radio programming (music and news/public affairs) through 5 stations in and around the San Joaquin Valley, and then via satellite to dozens of stations around the US and in Mexico.

I was there to offer some consultation on Internet opportunities as Radio Bilingüe tries to broaden their reach, appeal to younger audiences, and make the most of their considerable programming assets and broadcast reach.

Some ideas among many: start digitizing shows for on-demand distribution, a podcast, a MySpace account and a blog to start getting feet wet with social media. Gear up for multiple streams (music, news) for HD, broadcast, Internet.

Shoutouts to Ethel for welcoming me to Fresno, and also Chief Engineer Bill who took me for a pre-departure drive through beautiful countryside to Millerton Lake.