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)

Ruth Seymour, General Manager for KCRW, reacts to NPR’s Blueprint for Growth (download the 12-page Blueprint pdf here).

reposted with permission

“New Realities” : Drinking the KoolAid
A Dissident Viewpoint

Wading through the 12-page Blueprint for Growth, I am struck by the lack of focus on the reason people listen to your station and mine: it’s the programs.

According to Blueprint (p. 10): “…we need to curate and provide tools that enable individuals to engage in making the world a better place.”

This is the kiss of death for a news organization whose responsibility it is to report the facts on the ground, whether they make the world a better place or not.

Culture is created by artists driven by both demonic as well as angelic forces. When the impetus to create is driven by message, it’s called propaganda.

A quote by a Hugh MacLeod, cited in Blueprint (p. 5) is even more alarming. It states in part: “The market for something to believe in is infinite…. It’s not about merit, it’s about faith…”

Is this the philosophy that informs the “New Realities”? Since when have we joined the “human potential” movement?

It is certainly true that the revolution in technology has brought a seismic shift in the options for news, music and entertainment. The need now is to base our decisions on the current realities of the media marketplace.

The dangers of making the wrong kind of decision for your station can result in the loss of your station identity– perhaps by having it subsumed by NPR.

NPR has found a successful business plan, modeled on underwriting returns from its podcast initiative. An aggregation of all public radio content under one roof may diminish the ability of your station to attract an audience to its own website. Is this in your station’s best interest?

It may be. It depends on your resources. Think it over. You can partner with others — with community groups, with service providers, with other content providers. You have alternatives to consider before making a decision. You may want to sign on to one aspect of Blueprint, but not another.

Choose the best option for your station. Not for the group. Not for some amorphous ideology whose premise is questionable to begin with.

“Public radio,” as such, will probably mean less to listeners in a digital age – but programs will matter even more. Content is king, regardless of the platform.

The line between commercial and non-commercial has already been blurred all over the Internet.

The primary distributor of public radio’s podcasts is iTunes, a website designed to sell a commercial piece of hardware – the iPod. iTunes distributes more public radio podcasts, even of NPR’s own programs, than NPR does. iTunes also introduces a new audience to our programs, an audience that is broader, more diverse, younger, more international than one that we have been able to reach.

The business of the Internet is advertising. Online simulcasting, on-demand streaming, podcasts – they all offer underwriting opportunities for making your station money. So do banners and skyscrapers. Will your development staff be inhibited by a centrally-controlled sales and distribution division?

Weigh the options. Choose a model that can yield your station the greatest return.

Competition is not necessarily bad. Competition can be the stimulus that makes a station improve its performance by paying more attention to how it operates and how it sounds. It can lead to enterprising initiatives, new program ideas and entrepreneurial ventures.

A collaborative structure may work for some projects, but not others. Moreover — premising system growth on the belief that a central communal-type public radio system will increase listeners or dollars to your station is unproven. In fact, it’s counter-intuitive.

Make your decisions on the basis of self-interest, not on the basis of some supposed “greater good.”

Follow Ronald Reagan’s dictum: “Trust but verify.”

Find out how the pie is divided. Do you get a piece or just the crumbs?

Do your homework. Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

Ruth Seymour: KCRW

The revenue sources for digital distribution such as podcasting tend to boil down to a) underwriting (aka sponsorship aka advertising); b) payments through subscription or a la carte access; and c) membership or voluntary listener support. And there’s another category of bundled syndication deals that are more tied to specific deals and business development.

Of these listener support tends to get the shortest shrift, with some dismissing it as a part public radio’s ‘broken model’ that we should move beyond.

On average only 10% of listeners contribute money to public radio stations each year. And we harrass the other 90% for not chipping in.

And it’s true that the numbers ad up faster if you can effectively sell underwriting spots on tons of downloads, or if several hundreds of thousands of people started paying $10/month.

But I wonder about the opportunities for a new take on voluntary support and the kind of messaging and relationship that would be required in the new medium.

It’s one thing to endure seasonal pledge drives, or to feel the steady drumbeat of year-round on-air reminders to contribute. It’s quite another to imagine listeners responding to the atomized audio files reaching them through various syndicated destinations, or played as a one-off in a flash player on some site.

There’s an alignment in pushing for open syndication and free access – it holds true to the spirit of a public media mission, it may help connect with new audiences for existing content, and – not coincidentally – it builds numbers that attract sponsors to pay the bills.

But even if the underwriting revenue does the trick, I think there’s something important to continue and to redefine in the invitation for voluntary support.

So far it’s a missed opportunity in the current NPR-hosted podcast project. There are no appeals that I’m aware of embedded in the audio (some stations do put those messages into their streaming services). Even without solving the stickier trick of what a call to action would be given the variety of providers and brands, a simple variation on the common line about supporting the free service would be worth a try and could help set expectations among early podcast adoptors.

Doug Kaye has given this some thought with his donor program at the nonprofit Conversations Network . I don’t believe donors get any special access to exclusive content or even functionality.

There is some movement afoot about tying access to content to a membership premium: instead of the coffee mug you get the high-bitrate curated podcast, for example.

More questions abound: is a content-related premium just a back door into paid access; how would voluntary contributions spread across the content provider, the presenter, the distributor. Who manages the relationship with contributors?

That last is a biggie, and leads to an interesting and timely conversation for another time about user-centric identity management and “federated” identity – a topic at the Berkman Identity Mashup conference a month or so ago.

Another whirlwind week for the DDC.

In San Francisco the Digital Distribution Consortium working group settled in at KQED and met with David Sifry of Technorati, Doug Kaye of The Conversations Network, Mike Homer from Open Media Network, and Paul Mercer from Iventor.

We headed over to Lucas Film at the Presidio (where one of my favorite lines of the trip came from a receptionist “The restroom is just down the hallway, turn left at Yoda”).

We flew down to LA to meet with someone from Creative Artists Agency (great website) and Fox.

What did we learn from all of the above? That’ll have to come in a subsequent post, need to gather thoughts, notes, and decompress a bit. And right now I’m in New Orleans preparing to moderate a panel tomorrow on “online community engagement” at the PRDMC — public radio conference for developers and marketers….

From: Jake Shapiro
Subject: Re: DDC
Date: July 14, 2006 10:36:28 AM EDT
To: Mike Janssen

Mike, here are some responses. I’m going to forward this to the rest of the DDC group as well, some of whom might want to offer additional thoughts on this round:

On Jul 13, 2006, at 1:09 PM, Janssen, Mike wrote:

What has the DDC worked out in its meetings so far?

We’ve spent time sorting out the scope of the project, agreeing to the framework of a business plan to help us organize our thinking and research. We’ve focused on defining what “it” is – what are the services that solve problems and take advantage of opportunities in the digital environment for public media. We’ve also worked out that the basic character of a Consortium should be ‘enabling’ – it should support a variety of applications and projects that stations and other partners can plug into and build upon, in a kind of “innovation at the edges” approach.

For example, a group of stations could partner with local theaters to create a regional arts destination site, using syndicated content and data from the DDC.

We’ve also talked about a simple matrix of content and audience:
1) current content for current audiences (meet expectations of broadcast audiences for ‘my time’ access to existing programs);
2) current content for new audiences (e.g., iTunes users who aren’t part of our broadcast audience now encountering public radio content for the first time);
3) new content for current audiences (e.g., offering and promoting online-only lectures on a station site);
4) new content for new audiences (e.g., alt.npr, WNYC’s “TEDTalks”, Youthcast from PRX).

Each area has potential for growth, and personally I’m most excited about the last one as a chance for a new sound and service.

What are proving to be the most challenging issues to resolve?

We’re trying to do a lot at once: check our institutional hats at the door, think ambitiously about a public media digital future, create a business plan that supports a compelling vision, and help build momentum across and beyond the public radio system for action on several fronts.

I’ve seen the discussions described in part as “information gathering.”
What information are you gathering in particular?

We’re gathering everything from market data about online advertising to bandwidth and hosting costs for large scale distribution to the latest thinking on open standards and interoperability. We need to be able to back up the model with real numbers about the potential revenues and costs for operating these services. We’re also gathering insights about digital media trends, evolving user behaviors and expectations, the increasing significance of the social web, ‘user-generated content’, and the dynamics of ‘web 2.0′ architecture.

How far along are you in developing a business plan?

We’ve divvied up parts of the plan and have already started drafting it, with lots of gaps to fill in.

Can you share any details of the business plan?

There’s nothing ready to share just yet.

How might the digital distribution system work with the ContentDepot and
the Next Generation Interconnection System?

We’ve been talking to both ContentDepot and NGIS to understand how these new systems could integrate with the digital distribution services we’re envisioning. It’s really important to find ways to connect with these new major broadcast distribution machines, both of which are going to deliver digital files and metadata and huge amounts of current programming. It’s also clear, however, that neither system is designed to directly offer the aggregation, syndication, content management, licensing, and other services that this Consortium approach would require.

Do you envision a new entity of some sort being created to administer
the system?

At this point we’re using the notion of an ‘entity’ as a convenient way to envision a complete set of needs and solutions. We’re very aware that a number of relevant entities already exist or are emerging, including PRX, Public Interactive, Content Depot, NPR’s podcasting system, OMN, several stations with large-scale digital asset management systems, and numerous alternatives outside of public broadcasting. There are a variety of options for how to get from here to there and we want to get a complete picture before making any recommendations.

Who else is the DDC talking to about this? Why?

The DDC working group is also checking in with the Digital Distribution Task Force, a broader group of people from around the system with interest in these issues. We’re each talking to colleagues at our own respective organizations and also reaching out to people with particular expertise or opinions on both the process and substance of the project.

We all put a high value on communicating openly about the project, which is the only way it will succeed as a collaborative effort. It helps solicit input, maintain awareness and interest in the ideas, allay suspicions about ’secret plans’, and generally stay consistent with the collaborative spirit of the entire endeavor. We’ve started a public wiki (http://digitaldistribution.wikispaces.com), several of us are blogging about the project, and there are more memos and updates coming. We’ll also have a chance to give an update at the upcoming PRDMC, we’ve briefed the NPR board, and I’ll report on the project at the SRG retreat in August. I also encourage anyone to drop us a line or join the wiki if you have questions or thoughts to add.

How are people in public radio reacting to what you’re doing?

So far quite positively, especially when we get a chance to delve into what we’re learning and thinking.

How well do you think people in public radio understand what you’re
doing?

Probably not so well yet, apart from a relatively small set of folks who have been focused on these things for quite a while. It’s early yet, but we also need to do a better job of making the case for what problems and opportunities the DDC project addresses for different constituencies.

How much revenue has the podcast project generated?

I’ll check on that (don’t have it handy) and see if it’s a number the podcasting partnership can share.

What is CPB’s view of your activities?

Best to ask someone from CPB. We’ve had numerous CPB staff on conference calls and meetings with both the Task Force and the Working Group, so there’s definitely a level of interest and support for the process.

Todd said that CPB staffers who met with you said a one-time
appropriation for this would be “problematic.” Why?

I believe that was in reference to the once-a-decade or so major interconnection appropriations in tens and tens of millions of dollars, especially on the heels of ContentDepot and NGIS, which is still awaiting some more funding.

How much time and energy are the DDC members giving to this?

Lots. We’ve basically signed on for a six-week intensive stint and our organizations are volunteering our time to participate. We’ve spent time together in DC and Boston and will be heading to San Francisco and LA and perhaps a few other locations, in addition to conference calls throughout.

We caught up with Rich Dean from Austin’s fabulous KUT today on day 6 of the Digital Distribution Consortium working group sessions and got his take on the pros and cons of the aggregated approach and the priority needs for stations like KUT, much of which Rich outlined in this prescient email below back in May.

From: Rich Dean
Subject: Re: Taking the Next Step:
Date: May 4, 2006 3:06:51 PM EDT
To: Tim Olson, Mike Bettison, Jake Shapiro

Hey Guys,

Hope you all had fun in DC. Alas, my travel budget for the year is spent, so
I couldn’t go, but Stewart was there.

Tim, I think you’re right. Far too many folks are looking for a “thing” or
system to solve the challenges we face, rather than a solution that might be
squishier, but more effective (standards, cooperation, unified marketing,
content sharing).

I do have some thoughts about next steps, some of which will be repetitive
with what I just emailed, but rather than retype it, I offer the
comments/next steps below (Jake, you’ve seen this mostly):

—–

My comments are predicated on these goals:

1. Bring a greater degree of cohesion between station and network web sites
2. Find new sources of revenue to support our activities
3. Reduce redundancy whenever possible (not at the risk of local innovation)
4. Strengthen local stations (and continue to support the network sites)

In a “new reality,” the biggest threat is at the local level. With “bypass”
likely and increased ways for local listeners to find national shows, we
need to find ways to strengthen our stations.

To that end I propose that we focus on these areas:

1. The podcast project — or more accurately, time shifting.

Downloading quality audio files is an inherently flawed approach. It is
costly and places the burden squarely on the broadcaster. Compare this to
time-shifting television, which is increasingly done through DVRs (Tivos).
RadioTime.com (and others?) enable users to record local station signals. It
is podcasting without the bandwidth. And it is a locally-focused approach.

Of course Tivo-like solutions only cover broadcast content, but NPR and
others should be working closely with these time shifting companies to bring
these tools to our listeners.

As for podcasts, it would be interesting to continue the project, but rather
than focus on building a large backend system with a new staff we should be
focused on how local stations can insert content (news, stories,
underwriting) into national podcasts. This more pressing issue is cheaper to
solve and results in more dollars to the local station.

2. Federated Search

No single project would do more to bring cohesion to the system’s web sites
than federated search. While technically this project is not trivial, it is
also well within Google’s (or other search engines) capabilities. PBS has
been working on this project as well with their stations — an alliance with
PBS.org would be a tremendous advance for public broadcasting users.

Sponsored results and/or banner ads on result pages are among the easy
opportunities for increased revenue.

3. Local Content on Network Sites and in National Podcasts

At NPR.org we can identify local users (at least those who have chosen to
localize or been ‘forced’ through links from local stations). We should be
able to serve local newsfeeds as well as banner ads to station visitors to
NPR.org. Station sites already include network content on the local site,
NPR (and APM) should offer the same opportunity.

Again this advances the cause of integration, while strengthening the local
station. And from a technical standpoint this too is relatively simple.

It is already possible to “stitch” audio files together to create a single
podcast. Localized versions of national podcasts could include local
newscasts as well as local underwriting. This revenue opportunity also
strengthens the local brand and mitigates “bypass” concerns.

4. Banner Ads

This is a relatively simple exercise technically, but has enormous revenue
potential. There are several aspects: aggregated inventory, local banners on
NPR.org (see above), and shared standards.

KQED, PRP, and NPB have already started projects around aggregated
inventory, but some national standards and leadership from the networks
would help make this accessible to everyone.

As for local banners on NPR.org, we already know how many localized page
views there are for each station. Allowing a local rep to sell that
inventory shouldn’t be rocket science.

5. Shared/Common Metrics

This is an old project iTAP, that needs to get back on track. I don’t think
I need to say any more about this.

Thoughts on Common Backend Systems

Building a shared backend system for content delivery is, to put it mildly,
a massive undertaking. Look at Content Depot, which took years to build (and is not up yet, really) and millions of dollars in investments.

The goals of a shared backend system are poorly defined at this point, as
are the benefits to the local station. While there are benefits to group
purchasing of bandwidth or other services, this does not then argue for
shared hardware or software. Every station has different needs and being
hamstrung by lowest-common-denominator approaches ultimately hurts the
system. In short, a shared backend limits our ability to innovate at the
local level.

If a shared backend must be built, it must be managed outside of NPR. NPR
cannot be the central location for all network and station content.

In the end, spending the next couple years and millions on a shared backend
serves us less well than aggressively addressing the 5 issues above. And if
we address the 5 issues over the next year or 2 we will have a track record
of working together as a system — and better understand what our needs may
be for centralized capabilities.

Simply put, there is no pressing need for a centralized system yet.

If the goals we set out are…

1. Bring a greater degree of cohesion between station and network web sites
2. Find new sources of revenue to support our activities
3. Reduce redundancy whenever possible
4. Strengthen local stations (and continue to support the network sites)

…then our best solution is to work together on the issues laid out above.

How should we best work together to make this happen? Your comments welcome!

Tim Olson pulled me into an interesting exchange with the cellar rat and standards wizard Alan Baker, apropos of the digital distribution conversations:

From: Alan Baker
Subject: Re: pubcasting 2.0 infrastructure
Date: July 4, 2006 8:31:34 PM EDT
To: Jake Shapiro jake@prx.org

Yes it does seem that the time is right to get all the pieces spread out on the workbench to see which might plug together.

Several of these things I’m trying to do under the umbrella of existing projects. It might be stretching the boundaries of the original charter for those projects but ultimately they are funded to be successful, and the world is changing faster than you can get agreement to adjust scope.

Specifically as part of of the PBCore project, I’m charged with generating a working prototype of what was called a markup tool for PBCore records. My angle on this is that with the appropriate side effort we can roll RSS generation into the tool base, and thus provide a PBCore-compliant publishing mechanism for anyone who wants to use the free markup tool. (done right it might solve the batch ingest problem for PRSS, and thus can become a tool to help stations deliver content to the Depot, or, of course, PRX. It will assist these publishers most if they are publishing to multiple channels/partners.)

Good luck, I’ll try to keep up with the DDC work via the wiki. And I’m glad to weigh in as time allows. I think my flurry of holiday emailing will come back to bite me yet this week. And I should probably get started on the Friday podcast…

Alan

From: Jake Shapiro
Date: July 4, 2006 7:39:46 PM EDT
To: Alan Baker
CC: Tim Olson
Subject: Re: pubcasting 2.0 infrastructure

Thanks Alan, this is hugely helpful and comes at the right time.

Just yesterday I was quizzing Matt and Steve at PRX for their take on pushing the pbcore/psd/’public media forge’ work forward, given the limitations of efforts to date and the opportunity at hand with the Digital Distribution Consortium.

Our method so far with DDC is to take on the business level requirements, map out some fairly ambitious services that an ‘entity’ could provide, and then evaluate existing infrastructure and organizational capacity in the system to see where the gaps and opportunities lie. We’ll then make recommendations for next steps, operations, investments, etc.

So there’s clearly an opportunity for the path you propose here to sync up, in a way approaching the same problem from two sides.

In fact this could address one of the common pitfalls, where standards are created in a vacuum and don’t get applied, at the same time others develop applications without waiting around for standards, i.e. pbcore and podcasting.

Cheers,

Jake

From: Alan Baker
Date: July 4, 2006 3:42:17 PM EDT
To: “Tim Olson”, “Jake Shapiro”
Subject: RE: pubcasting 2.0 infrastructure

This is all rough draft, and wide open for edit/add.

I think a functional spec is a bigger project unless we tackle this right out of the gate as an initiative that will be charged with actually building something. But maybe you’re talking a higher level investigation than I’m thinking a functional spec might indicate. We could lay out our ideal production chain with a pretty good level of detail.

I was expecting this to be more of a survey of what tools are available, with gap analysis on how they fit into the content production delivery chain. We’d also define what we feel we need to provide the functionality we wish to provide for producers, and ultimately just what/how we deliver to the audience.

Project parts:

- Pull together a team which had the chops to evaluate existing tools with a definite bias towards open-source technology. This group would evaluate production tools, sharing mechanisms, content and asset management systems, various publishing methods/tools, and the standards that are behind them.

- Match that technical/functional analysis against desired current/future functionality

- Develop scenarios, including specific development to be done to tie best available tool sets together to solve the most pressing problems for producers, distribution partners and broadcasters.

Out of this project I would hope to fund some actual development with a consortium approach that would have some clout with vendors to encourage the production tool integration of our standards, and then build/modify some of these tools to be used by pubcasters.

Part of the problem with the standards development funded recently is that there is a definite end-date to the development, and each “standard” is then frozen with no real entity to shepherd it forward. I was thinking that we might even make a case that this is an appropriate structure to act as a steward for the various emerging standards that we hope to lean on to take us into the future.

Of course to do this right, we’d be trying to build something that give us pubcasters a definite advantage over the commercial outlets but the open source development, and drive to get the standards supported by vendors, might mean that we have to be drastically open, which some orgs might not agree to easily.

ab

The first week of meetings with the Digital Distribution Consortium (DDC) working group has come to a close and we’re off to a good start despite the torrential rain in DC [my flight from Boston was due to arrive at 8 pm and eventually touched ground at 2 am, where I was greeted by a 90 minute wait for a taxi. The next morning parts of the metro were shut down and I joined thousands of commuters in waiting and then giving up on various shuttle busses and I ultimately ended up hoofing it to NPR headquarters.]

Most of this first week we spent huddled around conference tables and white boards at NPR. We will spend three more days at NPR next week and then take the show on the road to Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, arranging meetings with industry experts along the way.

The basic plan is to devote a chunk of time over a six-week period to think through digital distribution services that would benefit from a greater degree of coordination across the system.

We’ve decided to organize our efforts by writing a business plan for an ‘entity’ that would perform these services, describing the markets it would target, its products and services, revenue model, competitive position, strategic partners, risks, technology and operational needs, expenses and investment requirements — a full picture.

We’ve agreed that the character of the service is ‘enabling’: it should help a wide variety of stations, networks, producers, and other partners offer digital content to existing and new audiences across multiple platforms in innovative ways. It should leverage the collective assets of a more broadly defined public media field to create a significant presence online, increased relevance and engagement with audiences, and new sources of revenue.

After we get a comprehensive plan together the next phase is to make recommendations for how best to make it happen in our current configuration: what would need building or buying versus coordinating between existing resources and infrastructure, what roles might our and other organizations play, what would be the governance and investment structure, is this indeed an ‘entity’ or something else?

Of course it’s been very tempting for us to jump to phase 2, especially given our own direct interests in the outcome and the likelihood that it will be tricky to navigate. I think we all swing between excitement about the project’s potential and recognition of the complexities of orchestrating it in reality.

We’ve launched a project wiki here: http://digitaldistribution.wikispaces.com