The Case for Open Data in Public Broadcasting

Tom Glaisyer

[Originally published as "The Black Box of Broadcasting: The Case for Open Data in Public Broadcasting" on Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, the blog of the Media Policy Initiative of New America Foundation.]

by Tom Glaisyer and James Losey, New America Foundation

At her penultimate Impact Summit, Knight Media Policy Fellow Jessica Clark posed the question “How do you measure impact of the media you produce?” She brought together a round table of public broadcasters, media funders, and media policy analysts to discuss the question.

Clark split impact into five parts: Reach, Relevance, Inclusion, Engagement, and Influence and her blog post on MediaShift outlines those categories and the challenges many media producers have to overcome as they move beyond an environment where metrics where they existed were scarce, expensive to acquire, and focused on Nielsen ratings points or share for television and for radio the average quarter hour or time spent listening. All are metrics valuable to advertisers.

If you accept Jessica Clark’s premise, that media makers need to understand impact at a more granular level, the question you are left with is how to go beyond traditional measurement efforts and develop new tools for measuring such facets of impact. Notwithstanding that it requires media producers to have a more fine grained understanding of what they want to achieve – no longer is it enough to say I want the largest number of people to watch the show – but it will require new “technologies.” Tools that permit producers to understand, across many platforms, how the media is being consumed and provide a proxy with regard to how it is having an impact.

Measuring impact in this manner won’t be easy, and the question it begs is how will such data be generated? History suggests that independent private sector providers of information such as Nielsen and Arbitron will develop over time to give a finer grained understanding of such measures of impact. That said, the measures of impact required are more measures of the “public good” that such media is generating rather than advertising value which is often the priority of private measurement companies focused on private sector advertiser driven media.  In a world where the audience is sliced ever smaller across a larger and larger set of channels measures of impact such private companies will work to generate will be validity in measures of demographic slices rather than measures of of community reach and engagement.

All of this means that perhaps it is useful to look to measures of public broadcasting effectiveness or impact that aren’t meant to be directly comparable to the private sector but are designed explicitly to ascertain public media-like measures of impact and sharing them openly among all actors to speedily increase the rigor in collection and generate legitimacy from audience endorsement. This idea is not free of challenges. Media veterans contend that similar proposals have been attempted in the past with little success, though these attempts have been rooted in broadcast frameworks.

As the media landscape continues to evolve from broadcast to two-way communication through the Internet, the opportunity to create channels to collect and share data has never been greater. We think it warrants more exploration.