More Interactive

C. More Interactive

1. Incorporate digital media into every aspect of public media at all levels. Support the creation of a platform to share all public media content. Include mobile platforms in planning.

Public media is embracing digital technology and using it to advance its mission of service to communities. The national organizations are developing strategies that will not only strengthen their digital presence but will also help stations develop their capabilities.

In her paper “Public Service Media 2.0,” Ellen Goodman writes, “Public broadcasting entities have gone a long way in recent years to diversify their offerings. PBS and local stations now have significant presences on the web and other digital distribution platforms….”36

NPR president Schiller said recently, “NPR is radio at the core, and using digital media as a tool to advance the mission.” She said NPR looks at each platform in its own terms and rather than saying they are platform agnostic, they say they are “platform embracing.”37

The most expansive effort in digital technology to date, announced in June, is a collaboration of PBS, NPR, American Public Media, Public Radio International and Public Radio Exchange to develop the Public Media Platform with $1 million in support from CPB.38 The Public Media Platform will use an open application programming interface (API) to allow public media producers to share content on a single platform and “make it available for uses from news websites to educational curricula,” the announcement said. The platform will be made available to non-public media producers as well. Among the potential uses are to feed the websites of not only stations, networks and producers but also other non-profit media. The platform will support partnerships with a rights-management system that would enable a local station to distribute content to a regional newspaper or non-profit news website. The platform will allow local stations to use national material, national programs to use local material and local stations to use material from other local stations.

The Public Media Platform is a logical next step in efforts already under way at NPR and PBS. NPR introduced its API in 2008, which allows stations to present NPR material on their own websites and now supports traffic for large member stations. This year PBS rolled out COVE, its video player, which can be incorporated into local station websites, Mike Kelley, PBS vice president, strategy and operations, said in an interview. PBS is also developing a supervertical to aggregate all PBS news content and allow for content verticals. This will bring together, for example, coverage of the war in Afghanistan from the NewsHour, Frontline and Need to Know, coverage that previously existed only on the individual websites of each program. Another PBS project is Project Merlin, a re-architecture of PBS.org that will bring local content to the surface and drive users to local websites.

PBS’s flagship news program, NewsHour, incorporated interactivity in its rollout of a new program format late in 2009. The website was redesigned to be more inviting and includes interactive features such as “The Rundown,” where NewsHour correspondents can engage with the public. The NewsHour hired Hari Sreenivasan to give the site a “face.” He appears twice in the program, once with headlines and a second time to highlight online content. In a regular feature, “NewsHour Connects,” he interviews local public media reporters about stories in their communities. The reporters are able to send video to the program via the web, an action that previously would have required expensive satellite transmission.

NewsHour staff members say their most successful venture has been the “oil widget,” an embeddable player that showed BP footage of the Gulf oil leak with a variety of counters that the user could select from to calculate how much oil was flowing. The oil widget went viral, with 12 million page views by the end of June, and was embedded on 6,000 web pages. Thanks to the interest in that, NewsHour website traffic in summer 2010 ran 40 percent above the previous year. The widget has been embedded in local public station websites, helping to bring traffic to those sites as well.

NPR and partners such as PRX have had great success in the past year with mobile platforms. The NPR News app for iPhone was launched in August 2009 and downloaded more than 1 million times in the first five weeks. It has consistently ranked in the top three news apps and in early July 2010 was number one. The NPR iPad app is second among free news apps, and recently topped 400,000 downloads. NPR also has an app for Android phones. NPR’s mobile website was relaunched last summer and now achieves 1 million monthly visitors.39 NPR says its overall web traffic is 11 million visitors a month.

Podcasts have been another area of success for public radio, with NPR reporting 14.7 million downloads in December 2009. The most recent iTunes ranking has local public station-produced podcasts at number one overall (“This American Life” from WBEZ) and number nine overall (“Radio Lab” from WNYC). Two other programs, NPR’s “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” and WHYY’s “Fresh Air” (distributed nationally by NPR) are number three and number seven, respectively.

Among local stations, the use of digital platforms varies widely. The Grow the Audience report says, “It is clear that public radio has an enormous distance to travel.”40 In this report, only one public radio station website (Minnesota Public Radio) achieved as many as 400,000 monthly visitors in 2008, with the other measured stations lagging farther behind. Seventy percent of station website visitors come once a month, while the typical listener tunes in a half-dozen times.41

But progress is being made. Laura Walker of New York Public Radio says since the Grow the Audience report was issued, NYPR’s web audience has nearly doubled, reaching 400,000. And the promise is there. Tim Eby, general manager of KWMU-FM in St. Louis, discussed his hopes for partnering with the Beacon and said, “The web is the perfect point to come together and get over the ambitions of each organization.” The shared platform being developed for all of public media would go a long way toward helping existing institutions make the transition.

2. Use digital means to engage communities.

The Center for Social Media advises public media to direct funds and attention away from making top-down content and toward “directly mobilizing users around issues and news in collaborative spaces. Such a change would reflect the shift from producing public broadcasting content for delivery to doing public media with networks of publics. Such activities would include acting as guides to and curators of the mass of high-quality news and information that’s now available online; working with users on participatory platforms to shape and generate high-quality, pro-am coverage; and engaging publics around shared civic problems.”42

A number of ongoing projects could serve as models to accomplish the goal of greater community engagement. One of the most interesting efforts is Public Insight Network, developed by American Public Media and Minnesota Public Radio with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The project has created a database of 89,000 experts in various subjects. Journalists serve as analysts trained to search the database to tap into the insights and expertise of the public radio audience in order to efficiently deepen their reporting and make it more relevant. The system, which represents a significant open source platform that can undergird a number of applications for engagement and network collaboration, is now in use at more than 20 public radio stations and one newspaper (The Miami Herald). Examples of reporting utilizing the resources of PIN include a series on California prisons produced by Southern California Public Radio after the Chico riot and a Peabody-Award-winning series called “Hard Times,” produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting, on the impact of the economic crisis on Oregonians. In the first hours after the Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007, Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) used the database to contact structural engineers and others with expertise in bridges. While other media were speculating about a terrorist attack, MPR was reporting on the structural deficiencies later identified as the cause of the disaster.

Other examples of community engagement include the St. Louis mortgage crisis project that later spread to other communities, the San Diego Envision project that invites citizens to contribute their ideas about the community’s future and Cleveland’s ideastream. Kit Jensen, the ideastream COO, said, “We measure our success by the success of the region.”

Such an approach requires negotiation with journalists’ notions of themselves as observers, not activists. The use of a database of experts fits with traditional journalistic practice. Using public media to mobilize support for a particular plan of action could cause problems. Stations need to carefully delineate the boundaries between engagement and the credibility of their news operations.

3. Invest in professional development to help staff stay current and acquire new skills. Promote use of social media by news and information staff. Purchase digital gear to add video to websites and on-air productions.

Investing in professional development for staff is essential to make digital adoption work. With a Knight Foundation grant, NPR trained more than 300 employees in digital technology. NPR president Schiller and the Grow the Audience report noted the inconsistency among staff at member stations in digital knowledge and skills. Among the skills staff need is knowledge of social media to extend reach, engage new audiences and acquire new sources for journalism.

With less expensive, more portable digital equipment, acquiring video will become a less difficult proposition. Radio stations can add video to their websites and television can consider news programming that does not require a studio and expensive gear. Of course, staff must be trained to use the gear. In many cases, younger staff may be able to train veterans. Ideally, new employees should possess such skills already.

4. Develop metrics to assess success and areas for improvement in digital media.

Progress cannot be made in digital media without developing metrics to measure success. At the moment, the national organizations track trends in engagement on various platforms, but few local stations do the same. Also important is an analysis to identify areas for growth. The Grow the Audience study analyzed differences between on-air and online users and suggested strategies to turn web users into public radio listeners.

5. Ensure that the national broadband plan promotes a strong public media.

None of these dreams of public media that flourish in the digital realm can be realized without including public media in the nation’s plans for universal broadband. The FCC’s National Broadband plan devotes a section to the importance of broadband in promoting civic engagement and the role public media should play.

“As the Internet increasingly becomes the standard platform for receiving information, those who do not have high-speed access to the Internet will be left completely out of the civic dialogue,” the FCC’s report said. “Public media will play a critical role in the development of a healthy and thriving media ecosystem,” the plan continues, “public media must continue expanding beyond its original broadcast-based mission to form the core of a broader new public media network that better serves the new multi-platform information needs of America.

“To achieve these important expansions, public media will require additional funding,” the report concludes.43

The FCC report proposes funding online public media content from a trust fund to be endowed by revenues from a voluntary auction of spectrum licensed to public television. It also recommends copyright law revisions to give online public media exemptions similar to those previously won for broadcast content and to give public media the necessary clearances from intellectual property rights holders to build an accessible archive such as the one contemplated in the Public Media Platform.

Ellen Goodman and Anne H. Chen, who call public media “the original broadband infrastructure,” forecast the consequences of not including public media in planning broadband policy. “Without better broadband infrastructure,” they write in “Modeling Policy for New Public Media Networks,” “public media cannot deliver mission-driven services to everyone.” They cite the lack of universal access to broadband and the high cost of streaming as barriers to reaching diverse, underserved and young audiences.44

Some have suggested a broadband reservation for public media, akin to the spectrum reserved for public radio and television broadcasts. This recognition of public media’s unique role could afford guaranteed accessibility and reduced streaming costs from Internet service providers and special consideration and reduced rates from copyright holders.

Public media stations should also be included among the “anchor institutions” eligible for infrastructure grants under federal stimulus spending to achieve universal broadband. These proposals complement the plan laid out by Blair Levin in his white paper for this series, “Universal Broadband: Targeting Investments to Deliver Broadband Services to All Americans.”45

To secure a place for public media in the shaping of broadband policy, public media leaders should become more involved and more active as advocates for their organizations. During the FCC’s deliberations on broadband policy, public media leaders privately supported some of the recommendations but never united and took a stand publicly. The creation of universal broadband is too great an opportunity to be squandered.

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