I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to visit Louisville, but it might be a bit. I need to dig in at work for a while, and then we have a memorial service for Stephanie’s mother in April (she passed away earlier this month). Plus I’ve got a meeting in DC in April as well. So May is more likely a visiting timeframe.

But if you’ve got time to spare and want to go to the top of the Gateway Arch, we can get together on MY side of the Mississippi.

Elizabeth LOVES Ruff Ruffman and WordGirl, so looks like you are going to a good station!

I have no idea whether media publishers will be able to make a go of new devices like the iPad. In some ways I think their structures are much more limiting than their distribution systems. I mean, if the NY Times stops printing paper and goes online and onto media devices, it won’t change their work methods much, which is where a lot of the cost — and a lot of the tone-deafness to public needs — is bound up.

Personally, I find this new era exciting. Someday I suspect the technology and how we create and gather media will calm down into some regular, maybe even boring, patterns. But for now, who knows what happens next?

I’m hoping this Mobile DTV business is all an engineering geek thing that dies before it reaches the executive offices, but that may not be the case. In public TV in particular (more than in radio) I get the sense that the engineers run the show much of the time. If PBS leaders are smart, they’ll kill anything beyond small R&D investments (<$100,000 annually) in Mobile DTV immediately.

Sadly, both NPR and PBS are controlled by member stations, which completely stunts their evolutionary growth as networks (it also stunts station evolution). NPR has, thankfully, broken free of much of the political drag when it comes to developing online/mobile services for national consumers. There may be a backlash coming to NPR soon, but so far most stations have thrown their hands up and said, explicitly or implicitly, "Go ahead — we don't have the resources to do online stuff anyway." And really, PBS has done more online than most stations, too.

But the long-term viability of the system is definitely in doubt if there isn't a major shake-up in the financial and political structures governing this 40-year-old beast.

Thanks for the comment. I only wish you'd had a better experience inside the system. And thanks for your work on Sprout!

I suspect the reason PTV groups are making grandiose plans here is that it’s a LOCAL digital channel which in theory does not disrupt the broken structure of public television. Unfortunately PBS, CPB, NETA and APTS are not able to view the complete marketplace because the vast majority of viable distribution paths to the consumer disinter-mediate the local station. As a result, they invest heavily and narrowly in channels that are politically safe but economically unstable and technologically immature. It is really unfortunate.

I was at PBS from 1999-2006 and left as VP of Digital Ventures. My undoing was the joint venture I spearheaded between Comcast, Sesame Workshop, HIT Entertainment and PBS that resulted in the launch of Sprout on cable. Today Sprout is one of the most successful digital preschool services in the market and I suspect will secure a home for educational children’s programming for decades to come (with or without PBS), thereby preserving the goal of public television but perhaps eliminating the inefficiencies.

I can tell you first hand that putting that deal together in public television’s antiquated system and political environment took every ounce of energy that we could muster to “save” PBS Kids from the downward slide.

I truly wish PBS the best because I passionately believe in the mission and the quality of programming; however, when I read an article like this I am so grateful to be removed from that environment. There are other amazing independent media brands (several of whom I represent through my digital consulting practice) who understand the market deeply and can act quickly. To that end, new distribution models will at least ensure that Americans can continue to receive the best in educational, cultural and independent media, irrespective of whether PBS is able to be a part of the landscape.

Thanks for article. It (painfully) took me back a few years and reinforced why I felt the need to do execute Sprout with the extraordinary support of a smart, market-savvy team… many of whom also left in 2006 to pursue their careers in more progressive, in-touch media companies.

Deron Triff
(Former Vice President of Digital Ventures for PBS)

I have my doubts that media publishers will make a ton of money off of these devices. I mean, how well is the NYT doing on the Kindle? Free is a difficult price to beat.

The idea is that you give employees as much freedom as you can while still maintaining enough central services to keep the employees in close communication and coordination with one another.

Ironically, as an IT professional, I’ve discussed this idea with a few companies where I’ve worked and all have rejected the idea as impossible. And I must admit in several instances it wouldn’t have worked — mostly because the users simply weren’t proficient enough with computers to be able to support themselves. Centralized control and standardization will, in theory, turn the people into replaceable parts in the machine of the business.

In an industrial model, this makes tons of sense. But as business generally becomes more chaotic in shape and function, the industrial assembly line model makes much less sense. Companies should train up the trainable and then hire the best self-sufficient, yet collaborative, people they can. Protect core assets, of course, but then let these smart, creative employees loose with their own computers and very little top-down control.

With firewalls as they are, IT depts, Clunky Win Machines etc inside and this open cloud world of iPads etc outside

What a contrast

So this notion of “mimetic beliefs” you bring up rings true. What we say about social media is perhaps more important than reality, more important than facts. Web 2.0 is whatever you want it to be — a waste of time and a savior of humanity all in one!

It reminds me of what I told someone recently about Sarah Palin. She’s what you want her to be; she’s what you want to see in her — she’s been successful because she’s a blank slate or a vessel into which people pour all their hopes, dreams and fears. She doesn’t really stand for much in reality because her grip on reality is limited and fantastical, not fact- or knowledge-based. But she’s a stand-in for whatever some people think is wrong with the world, fighting the “good fight” for “good people.” Really, it’s all nonsense. But not if you believe.

I would hope when we profile projects in social media we’re not so swept up in this kind of self-serving analysis too much. Some self-serving is necessary to keep things moving and developing. But at some point we’ll need to step back and ask whether we’re following a digital Sarah Palin and we’re not really going anywhere.

and most of them are entirely untrue –
regurgitated non-factoids from older videos, also full of errors.

so what if the data proves it somewhere btwn misleading and wrong:
http://hearingvoices.com/news/webworks/didya-know/

it matches our social-web2.0 memetic beliefs.
so it must be the data that’s wrong… right?

Perhaps public broadcasting is not so different from newspapers. Newspapers are no longer the purveyors of news since it is available faster from other sources. What newspapers can add is context. Why, how, in what ways is this news item significant because it relates to other things around us? This would be valuable.

Perhaps the content for public broadcasting is context. Public television is a content generating social medium in the same family as Facebook, You Tube, and Flkr. They may not consider themselves as such, but with the diversity of content venues available. perhaps it’s time for public broadcasting to reconsider.

By the way, I had my first “social media” experience at Macworld in Boston back in the early 1990s. I exchanged “business cards” with another guy on our Newtons. Geek alert!

Excellent presentation John. Let’s get you to Cambridge for a PRX visit soon.

Ellen

I know it takes people a long time to change, and the process is painful because those that built their careers — indeed their identities — on the old model feel as though their work is being tossed out in the trash. But a changed world demands a changed media to serve its needs.

I’m wondering whether the only way forward is for some bold movers to make some bold moves outside the traditional system. That said, the CPB’s talks and actions in the last couple of years have been encouraging. They seem to understand something is up.

Hope all is well down there in Arizona!

Pandora has gotten me to spend real money on new music in ways that radio never has. That means something, I think.

Still, if a station can find the right music mix and build the right audience, it may very well work out.

I listen to radio, public or on-air, internet or not, to hear music that I don’t already have or know. I subscribe to Paste Magazine for the same reason. One of the main advantages Pandora and services like it has, for me, is that music discovery benefit. I don’t want to spend my life playing the same songs I already own over and over.

As for the rest of your post? I agree. I also hate over-specializing my listening, as with super niche systems like XM Radio.

Great post. Thanks for the thoughts!

If I take out the extra $71,250,000 from TV station grants, then the numbers fall in line. At that point, TV represents 66.9% of total CPB appropriation.

I’ll post a correction in the blog post, but changing the slides at this point will take some time.