JMS

The Center for Social Media, with help from PRX, has released Public Radio’s Social Media Experiments: Risk, Opportunity, Challenge (download PDF), a report and survey that looks at a variety of projects underway at stations.

From my forward to the study:

I believe public radio can play a transformative role in participatory media. The Internet enables interactions and connections that can greatly extend the educational and cultural goals of public service media. Public radio brings considerable strengths to bear – a large and loyal audience, strong brands and programs, and a local presence in communities across the country.

While new platforms are enabling content creators and new intermediaries to connect with audiences – and audiences with each other – far beyond the physical boundaries of local broadcast spectrum, local public radio stations remain the primary point of contact for most of the nearly 30 million people who tune in to public radio every week.

In the first decade of the web even the most ambitious stations had an online presence that was barely a fraction of the reach and relevance of their broadcast service. Station websites have often acted as informational supplements to broadcast offerings, with occasional examples of unique content and some interactive features such as message boards.

While there are many disruptive aspects of new media and technology, including a new mingling of geographically defined communities and self-selected interests, stations now face new opportunities and incentives to engage the public online.

There are obstacles – limited resources, the biases of the broadcast business, unfamiliar rules of engagement. But the same low barriers to entry that enable remarkable digital innovation also make it possible for stations to make relatively low-cost experimentation part of their strategy going forward.

I do believe public radio can have a transformative role on the web, but it’s far from clear that it will seize the opportunity without some fundamental changes that go far beyond the current level of innovation. Earlier this week I was at a meeting partly about the FCC’s upcoming full power non-commercial FM radio station licensing window, but also exploring ambitious new models for operating stations with a web presence as the driver of strategy. More on that soon.