Zoe Michelle Shapiro

and

Maksim Samuel Shapiro

were born exactly one week ago on December 30, 2008 at 2:21 and 2:22 pm
weighing in at 7 lbs 11 oz and 8 lbs 2 oz – big twins!

Zoe and Max and Mom and Dad are doing great, amazed and happy to be together at last.

Dad, who was not a good blogger in 2008, will be an even worse one in 2009…

JMS

Congratulations to my friends Jim, Brian, Tristan and the crew at EchoNest on some new funding and the launch of their developer platform.

These guys are cooking up something unique with the Musical Brain, and it goes well beyond the LastFM and Pandora experiences most digital music fans have been gravitating towards. I can’t wait to see what developers do with the new APIs and the ones to come, we’ll certainly be playing with it over at PRX.

Financial Times, Mashable, and Ars Technica cover the launch.
Watch Jim and Tristan wow the crowd at Demo ‘08:

And then go try More Cowbell for yourself.

This trip was part of the New Media Institute (NMI), an evolving project of the National Black Programming Consortium, one of public television’s five minority production centers. NMI is becoming a real nexus of training, discussion and networking for minority multimedia producers here in the U.S. and now also in Africa (see short overview video at the end of the post). PRX has looked for ways to partner with NBPC (most recently on their Masculinity Project) and joined in several NMI sessions in Boston and Jackson, MI. So I was thrilled to be invited to join the Zanzibar voyage.

Stone Town is a maze

The workshop itself was a two-day conversation (in English, with a bit of Swahili) with 40 or so participants on public service media’s transition to a digital age in both North America and Africa. The focus was on how Africa could use new media to tell stories in a new way, to connect to each other within and between countries on the continent, and to reach beyond on a global scale. Although the majority of the African attendees were broadcasters of one kind or another, the workshop started off with a blogger panel featuring Kenyan blogger Daudi Were and Tanzanian blogger Issa Michuzi who really set the pace for the rest of the discussion. Daudi talked about the complicated role of blogs and SMS in the turbulent aftermath of the recent Kenyan elections and drove home the theme of a power shift in media authority.

Later panels such as “All Politics is Local, All Conflict is Global” and “The Online Space and the Marginalized Voice” took us further into discussion of the tension between institutions and individuals as media roles start to shift. In particular the story of SMS during the post-election violence in Kenya was striking. The viral and direct potential of misinformation or incitement via SMS when mass media is unreliable or unavailable is leading to a new law banning the use of messaging that targets people by ethnicity no matter what the cause. On my panel I talked about PRX, a bit on the long tail (complete with self-serving segue to my rock star status in South Korea), and how U.S. public media is handling the transition to digital.

Wambui Mwangi and Jake Shapiro

Feeling like we’d only scratched the surface, it was already time to head home but not without a trip around the island, catching some time at a spice farm, a spectacular beach on the eastern shore (and my first swim in the Indian Ocean), a visit with the endangered Red Colobus Monkey (I got some video of a funny encounter here on YouTube), and even a chance to jam on guitar with a Tanzanian reggae band.

I was profoundly grateful for the chance to visit Zanzibar and in such a provocative way – would that all introductions to new places mix in a film and music festival, an intensive workshop, and a taste of five different flavors from a cinnamon tree.

I’ve mainly and only haphazardly followed a variety of African developments through Global Voices and my friend and fellow Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman’s outstanding blog My Heart’s in Accra. Thinking about Ethan’s post “Homophily, serendipity, xenophilia” brought home again the simple realization that in part drove my interest in this trip to begin with: being there matters, being there changes something. It’s not one single thing, like breathing the distinctive air or the huge distance traveled, but the complete experience of being in a place has the ability to connect you with it and with people there in a way that even powerful stories – never mind news reports – can’t match. Kind of obvious, I know. Of course, this approach doesn’t scale to meet Ethan’s goal of bridging the global empathy and attention gap, but perhaps there is a strategy that makes the most of folks who serendipitously get inspired through a trip like NMI Zanzibar. I’m an aspiring xenophile.

Here’s a short video overview of NMI: Mississippi:

Check out the draft agenda.

And you can download the slick PDF of the Berkman@10 Special Report.

Since I first landed at Berkman back in 2001 the Center has really blossomed into a remarkable community and hive of activity, really pushing the edge of what’s being learned and taught and demonstrated about the Internet. I can’t wait to see and be part of what comes next.

It’s a free service and I’m sure it’s a compelling one for many universities. We may experiment with it for PRX as well. iTunes does all the hosting and helps you with the setup and, of course, puts you on a platform that now has 500 million potential users. The list of participants is getting longer and includes Stanford, MIT, Duke, Carnegie Mellon and a few dozen more. The “beyond campus” providers include American Public Media, MoMA, New York Public Library, and PBS.

Between iTunes U and the iTunes podcasting directory, which offers something like 120,000 podcasts, there is a ton of free content available. It’s clear that Apple likes the idea of recruiting more high-quality free non-music content to offer to users (who presumably will want to fill new iPods, iPhones and laptops with it all), and no doubt it’s a boon to lifelong learners and media seekers worldwide.

It’s interesting to see some crossover items in both categories, such as a radio documentary I found for sale in the Audiobooks section ($7.95 for 52 minutes) and for free in iTunes U. You’d have to be a discriminating searcher to figure that out, however, and it’s entirely likely that these sections are serving distinct if overlapping subsets of the iTunes audience.

But now that iTunes is the world’s biggest music retailer and generates billions of dollars of revenue for Apple and the content providers to the music store, what about enabling a la carte, subscription or volunteer payments for the long tail in podcasts and the educational content in iTunes U?

I’m intrigued by the voluntary model and certainly it’s one that public media needs to redefine as it moves to digital platforms (keep an eye on Project VRM as it continues to spell out the solutions and implications of more user-centric approaches). Right now I have $9.06 in my iTunes account left over from a gift card, and after enjoying a 90-minute video lecture from MIT I might be quite willing to ding it over to them, especially if they reminded me with a short and sweet appeal before/during or after the talk and on the site. I think a decent percentage of the 500 million iTunes users out there might respond similarly.

One can imagine lots of reasons why Apple hasn’t and probably won’t enable this in iTunes, but it’s worth pondering and pointing out, particularly as most of the energy and attention goes to ad-supported models for content syndication.

The MacArthur Foundation has selected PRX as one of its 2008 recipients of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.

“Public Radio Exchange (PRX)/Station Resource Group – Cambridge, Massachusetts: By gathering and distributing new programming and using technological innovation to expand content choices, PRX is leading public radio to become more interactive, diverse, and participatory.

PRX is taking public radio in new and stimulating directions, giving a larger dimension to one of America’s most important intellectual resources.

PRX will use their $500,000 grant to establish a cash reserve fund, a content venture fund, and to develop new technologies.”

Read the full press release here.

MacArthur Announces 2008 Winners of Award for Creative and Effective Institutions

Chicago, IL (April 10, 2008) – Continuing its tradition of encouraging creativity and building effective institutions to help address some of the world’s most challenging problems, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced today that eight organizations in six countries will receive the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.

These nonprofit organizations have diverse missions – from helping public radio thrive in the digital age to defending human rights in Nigeria to seeking a more fair juvenile justice system in the United States. Still, they have much in common. All are highly creative and effective organizations that have made an extraordinary impact in their fields, while driving significant change on a modest budget. Each organization will receive up to $500,000, a large sum considering their annual budgets are under $2.5 million. The organizations will use their new funding for a range of purposes, including purchasing new office space, developing training and research facilities, upgrading technology, and undertaking new research.

“From its founding, the MacArthur Foundation has sought out people and organizations that have the creativity, energy and breadth of vision to change the world for the better,” said MacArthur President Jonathan Fanton. “These imaginative and influential small organizations have an impact altogether disproportionate to their size. They are addressing problems and injustices, finding fresh solutions, and proving themselves as leaders and innovators.

Make sure to read about the other remarkable recipients of this award here.

How is PRX planning to use the award?

UPDATE: The Boston Globe ran a piece about PRX and the MacArthur Award

Nearly two years ago CPB issued an intriguing challenge called “The Public Radio Talent Quest”: find three new on-air hosts and develop pilot shows that showcase their talent.

PRX proposed an online contest, inviting anyone to submit a two minute audio audition and giving the audience a voice in choosing the winners. Basically it would be This American Idol.

We had two main goals: (a) find truly exciting new hosts for public radio and (b) create an open, participatory way for public radio to identify and nurture talent—with help from listeners.

Last spring we launched PublicRadioQuest.com, an online audio contest application combined with a social network (built by PRX developers on the open-source Drupal platform). The online community has grown to more than 20,000 members, with a talent pool of hundreds of aspiring hosts from all across the country.

We took a calculated risk that the way to find outstanding individuals is to throw the doors wide open, attract the broadest and most diverse group possible, and encourage public participation throughout.

Ultimately it was a risk that paid off—as you can hear in the strikingly original pilots from our winners Al Letson, Rebecca Watson and Glynn Washington (all now available on PRX.org)—but for the organizers as well as the contestants it was an adventure every step of the way.

So what makes a great host? Of course, all the usual qualities have to be there: A host has to be engaging, empathic, interesting, knowledgeable, compelling. But anyone who hires people knows that there is a difference between highly competent performers and those with a special something else. You know it when you hear their spark, that secret sauce, the thing that makes you lean in closer to the radio.

It is also a judgment call, and no matter how many criteria or scorecards you create, everyone has a highly personal take on the elusive quality that we called “hostiness.”

We sensed a tension at the heart of the project: Were we looking for fresh talent that breaks new ground for public radio, or for great hosts who fit right into the mix alongside Terry and Robert and Ira and Krista and other established voices? What would be more likely to succeed on the air today and tomorrow? What expansions of sound would help public radio grow and reach new audiences?

Fortunately we had a remarkable team and group of judges to help debate and deliberate, and thousands of people weighed in online with their own thoughts about the future of public radio.

You know that anxious feeling when you throw a party and no one comes? We truly had no idea what to expect when we started accepting submissions for the contest’s first round. Would we get 50 entries? 250? Would they all be lousy? After all, we were asking a lot from participants: Tell us who you are in two minutes or less, create an account and upload a digital audio file to a website, even if you have never worked a mic before.

With promotional help from stations, good press coverage, a viral word-of-mouth campaign in the blogosphere and the incentives of pilot funding and public radio “stardom,” we ended up with more than 1,400 first-round entries.

We clearly had tapped into something extraordinary. In the contestants’ passion and the online community’s enthusiastic online comments,– we could hear people were thrilled that public radio was inviting them in—this time, not for their financial support but for their ideas, creativity and talent.

Entries came from all 50 states, from teenagers and senior citizens, professionals and amateurs, indie producers and station staff, podcasters, public radio fans, contest junkies and a legion of Ira Glass acolytes.

As you might expect, their quality followed a bell curve. We got a few truly wacky and off-the-wall entries (search the site for “Garrison Keillor is Going to Die”), a lot of mostly mediocre attempts in the middle, and a few hundred truly entertaining and compelling entries that made you want to listen again.

We decided early on that audience participation would truly count: Online public votes would determine one of the contestants advancing to each round, including one of the final three winners. In the end, more than 120,000 votes were cast (more than in the Fox contest to which state would be the site of The Simpsons’ town of Springfield!).

For ideas about how to vet the hosts, we consulted with producers of national shows and program directors. The initial 2-minute audio entries were extremely revealing, but how would we test hosting skills in a virtual and very public setting?

The skill tests eventually included a live script read (try pronouncing Inca emperor “Atahualpa” with no time to prepare), a free-association exercise, composing a 60-second billboard and conducting a classic host-guest interview. These kinds of tests normally are conducted in a windowless room somewhere, but the Talent Quest posted all entries on the site for tens of thousands of people to hear, comment and rate. Feeling a little sweaty?

At the same time, we struggled with the nature of the online experience. Should we allow or encourage contestants to post their photos? Should we allow them to blog about the competition, or would it unfairly sway votes or judges’ opinions? Does it matter if they responded to comments about their entries? After all, this is radio. Shouldn’t we tolerate or even prefer people who remain disembodied voices in the dark?

The answers came naturally. The site itself became an online community where contestants and voters established their own rules of engagement and styles of communication. Contestants commented on each other’s entries (partly to promote their own); people with their own blogs wrote about the process and linked to pages on the site; entire discussions launched on topics such as “your worst job ever.” For the most part,we simply stayed out of the way, reading everything the partipants wrote, only occasionally stepping in to nudge things back on track.

In today’s media, even public radio hosts have to be more than voices in the ether. The surge in online video, the sharing of photos, the searchability of text, the instant feedback of forums—there are many great opportunities for engagement we couldn’t pass up.

Once we had narrowed the field to the final ten contestants, we asked them to blog about their contest experience, chronicling the process and rounding out their own personal stories. Al, Rebecca, Glynn, April, Chuck, Anne, Chris, Bee, Carrie, and Komal became more than usernames and audio files. These were fascinating folks on the verge of a potential career break.

We were biting our nails along with everyone else as the votes came in and the stakes got higher. The judges’ conference calls in the early rounds were relaxed and congenial, but they became more tense and impassioned as we debated varying visions for the public radio sound each contestant represented.

Each deadline had genuine drama and hardship. (Tip: don’t set contest deadlines at midnight unless you are ready to answer technical questions by e-mail in the wee hours.) And there was real joy when we called the three final winners to say had each won $10,000, a chance to produce a pilot show, and a plane ticket to the PRPD, where they’d appear onstage in a gala event.

A few weeks ago we submitted the three final pilots to CPB, which will decide soon whether to give them further funding. The PublicRadioQuest.com site, the talent database, and the community of voters and participants remain an active resource that we are integrating into the broader PRX services.
We invite stations and others to get in touch if you are interested in using the technology or the talent pool for your own needs.
Public radio has a unique opportunity to tap into the talents of its audience, and we’re seeing more ambitious experiments in that vein, such as PRX, Radio Open Source, Public Insight Journalism and Vocalo.org.
The Public Radio Talent Quest gave us a glimpse of what a much more open system might look like, and it sounds profoundly encouraging. Please come judge for yourself: The pilots are on PRX and all the original entries are still available on PublicRadioQuest.com.

Public radio has a unique opportunity to tap into the talents of its audience, and we’re seeing more ambitious experiments in that vein, such as PRX, Radio Open Source, Public Insight Journalism and Vocalo.org.

The Public Radio Talent Quest gave us a glimpse of what a much more open system might look like, and it sounds profoundly encouraging. Please come judge for yourself: The pilots are on PRX and all the original entries are still available on PublicRadioQuest.com.

You can stream or download the MP3 here.

Read more about Bob and his work with ManagingRights here.

Here’s the full press release.

Most importantly for us right now, we’re hiring two contract positions to help lead the curating projects starting immediately, so please spread the word and send us some outstanding individuals. We’ve started to talking to some candidates already but want to make sure we cast a wide net.

Campaign Audio Curator.
Full description and link to online application

The Campaign Audio Curator will work with PRX to find, select, annotate, and promote public radio and other audio material on Campaign ‘08 and related issues. Selected works can include produced pieces, interviews, raw audio from campaign appearances, issue-based and local or regional stories that can be edited or excerpted for re-use by stations and other project partners. The initial collection is underway and located here: http://www.prx.org/articles/905

 
Social Media Curator.
Full description and link to online application

The Social Media Curator will work with PRX to find, select, annotate, and promote citizen media and “user-generated content” from blogs, YouTube, podcasts and other sources. Selected content will be showcased on local and national public media websites.

What’s the point?

Public media has a unique opportunity to cover Campaign 2008 and elevate public engagement around critical issues at stake nationally and locally.

The democratization of the tools for creating and distributing media has resulted in an explosion of conversation, connection and content. This in turn creates a critical need for ways to sift, filter and find value amidst irrelevant or even harmful expression.

One important role is to use public media’s presence and journalistic values to showcase and highlight examples of the diverse range of content and conversation already taking place online.

While the CNN/YouTube debates are the highest profile attempt so far to incorporate participatory media into coverage of Campaign 2008, there are few focused efforts to help audiences navigate the growing ocean of “user-generated content” to find relevant, important and revealing voices and perspectives.

This social media curating project is an experiment to explore approaches to this task, in the context of a critical national moment of a presidential election.

For the election audio project, we will help bubble up stories that otherwise might get lost in the shuffle, create an collection for timely use during the campaign season as well as a helpful archive for further evergreen and “long tail” opportunities in the future.

With the proliferation of audio on-air and online there’s a critical role to play in sifting, sorting, curating and promoting the best of what’s available. The PRX campaign collection will be a vital resource for public broadcasting stations, partners and the public.

Just making it this far “is quite an achievement,” says Jake Shapiro, the executive director of the Cambridge-based Public Radio Exchange, which ran the contest. “We had over 1,400 entries.”

Watson, Shapiro explains, was a long shot, particularly in the contest’s early rounds, which combined open voting with judging by public-radio professionals. “She was the one that made it all the way through most improbably,” Shapiro says. “She was a popular pick. She wasn’t one of the judges’ picks. What I think is part of [Watson's] success is that she earned the judges’ respect.”

I was one of the judges whose respect Rebecca definitely earned, particularly after getting to meet her in person at not one but two rocking PRX parties. She’s a star in the making, no doubt.

You can hear all three pilots from Rebecca, Al and Glynn on the Public Radio Talent Question website, and they are also available on PRX for anyone to listen, rate and review and for public radio stations to license for broadcast.

PRX is a grantee in the Ford Foundation’s 5-year “Global Perspectives in a Digital Age: Strengthening Public Media” initiative, which has been a remarkable experience that has put us right in the thick of some important developments in the field.

The foundation just put out a report on “The Public Square in a Digital Age” that includes a section on public radio and PRX.

You listen to National Public Radio. You tune in to Public Broadcasting Service stations. But does Public Radio Exchange ring a bell? PRX, a clearinghouse for archived quality programming, is part of a new wave of public service media that has arisen in response to rapid technological change and segmenting audiences.

Last week I was at the New Media Institute in Jackson Mississippi, put on by the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC) and hosted at Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

NBPC is one of the 5 minority consortia in public broadcasting (the others are Native American, Latino, Pacific Islander, and Asian American), and Executive Director Jacquie Jones pioneered the idea a year ago of putting together a week-long training and convening event for minority media producers focused on technology and new tools and platforms.

I missed the inaugural meeting last year in Boston (in my own backyard at WGBH too), so I was really glad to be able to join for at least a day and a half this year.

PRX was well represented. John Barth came down to co-present a session on reversioning documentary film for radio/podcasting. The Talent Quest got props in a CPB speech, and I helped facilitate a meeting with NPR, PBS and the minority consortia about diversity and collaboration for future public media.

There was a mix of panels and presentations, but the main activity of the Institute was the work of 9 different teams of young producers working with mentors and spending a mostly sleepless week creating digital media projects from scratch for debut and discussion on the last day. Jackson and surrounding areas provided the raw material, and the teams came up with a dazzling variety of projects, from video podcasts, online games, Google earth media mashups, and web-based narratives. The final dinner on Friday featured a raucous final presentation and celebration of the projects (Leslie Rule has posted some of them here on the PBS MedaShift blog).

John and his co-presenter Grant Clark (a producer at BET) talked about the possibilities for repurposing documentary film into audio for podcasting and/or radio. They were given a tough one to start with, Linda Goode Bryant’s “Flag Wars” – a narrationless and impressionistic film about gentrification in Ohio. There are certainly easier examples of films with more two-way interviews, introductions and voice overs that would lend themselves well to an audio-only version, but it was interesting nonetheless to hear a draft version that still captured the intent of the film.

Of course there are excellent examples of audio narrative with no narration – work by Joe Richman (here’s Joe on “The Invisible Narrator”), Jay Allison, Dave Isay among others – but it takes ingenuity and planning and is much harder to achieve with material gathered for another purpose.

Grant and John’s basic point is that there are opportunities for reaching new audiences, cross-promoting film and television releases, experimenting with form, and making use of the extra footage and material that every project accumulates. There are also potential collaborations with radio producers who bring a complementary set of skills.

No doubt documentary film and radio are two very different beasts, but it would be an interesting creative challenge and a potentially a source of valuable new audio work to start reversioning a few.

Some more highlights:

The Bay Area Video Coalition’s Producer’s Institute. BAVC was on the scene and helped out with the mentoring too (read Wendy Levy’s post about it here) Their Institute sounds great and the applications for next year’s session just went live, due on Feb 1 2008.

The Producers Institute for New Media Technologies is a ten-day residency for eight creative teams (independent producers or public broadcasters) with a shared goal of developing and prototyping a multi-platform project inspired by, or based on a significant documentary project. The intention of the Institute is to develop socially relevant media projects for emerging digital platforms.

The AFI Digital Content Lab also talked about their process and presented some beta projects coming out of the lab – amazing stuff. You could see everyone in the room start thinking about how to pitch an idea or volunteer as a mentor. Here’s the application.

The AFI Digital Content Lab (AFI DCL) incubates new forms of entertainment programming on digital platforms from idea to audience. Placing the highest value on creative excellence, the AFI DCL pairs design and technology experts with professionals from TV, film, games and an array of programming initiators in an R&D environment to adapt new and existing concepts to digital creation and distribution. In short, we create content for new and emerging digital media.

The 930 Club. Friday night we headed out to a genuine juke joint with a bunch of folks – great band, cheap beer.

Seven Studioz. Goog 411 couldn’t find this place, but after some searching we landed there later that same night to find a warehouse with 3 different DJs in different rooms, including one of the Institute Mentors – Anthony Marshall, founder of Lyricists Lounge and now at Current.tv. I caught my first ever serious crumpin session…

Give One Get One starts today!
From all of us at One Laptop per Child, thank you for your interest in our mission. Today marks the first day of our limited-time “Give One Get One” program. Starting today, when you donate an XO laptop to a child in the developing world, you’ll receive one for the child in your life. The price for the two laptops will be $399, $200 of which is tax-deductible.

So a quick paypal link later and I’m the expectant owner of one of these super cool machines, and glad to know I’m sending one off to someone in the developing world. It would be cool if somehow that created a pen pal relationship of sorts at the same time, I’d love to be able to track the journey of the other laptop and the kid(s) who end up using it.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with the one we get, but if I had the means I’d buy one (two) for everyone in my family.

Out of over 90 minutes of tape I grabbed about 10 minutes of reactions from some public radio industry types, prompted in stellar fashion by the one and only Maxie Jackson. Maxie is Senior Director Program Development at WNYC, he was a Talent Quest judge, helped us plan the project, and generally has been a big PRX friend from early days.

I left out some racy stuff from the post-party, Glenn doing karaoke, Al in the elevator shooting the breeze with Pat Harrison (President and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting), and some Rebeca antics. If I find myself home sick again some day I’ll compile that into another highlight reel.

It was a real thrill to see our three winners up on stage introducing themselves to an influential industry audience of stations, networks and funders. They knocked it out of the park. Make sure to catch Glynn’s finger-pointing moment with CPB president Pat Harrison.

I’m just back from a week in Moscow Russia where I was invited as a consultant to the Ford Foundation’s Media/Arts/Culture (MAC they call it) workshop where program officers from all of Ford’s MAC offices around the world (Indonesia, China, India, Vietnam, Egypt, Brazil, Nigeria, Russia, US) convene and reconnect. This is evidently an annual gathering and the first time it’s been in Moscow. I was there doing triple duty as a MAC US grantee, a former Moscow resident (1993-1995), and a guest speaker on PRX, Internet and social/public media issues. A big thanks to Orlando Bagwell and all the Ford folks for including me in this remarkable gathering.

Moscow is a boomtown these days, and certainly earns its standing as the world’s most expensive city. What used to feel like a sliver of wealth and ostentation in the 90s is now a thick coat of shiny new real estate, shops, restaurants, fancy foreign cars and ubiquitous advertising for luxury goods and vacations for a growing and ambitious middle class. There’s still enough Soviet dilapidation and neglect at every turn to remind you of the pace of transformation under way.

The theme for the meeting was “freedom of expression in a networked communications environment,” in a framework developed by Andrew Puddephatt for a broader project that is worth learning more about here.

With a nod to others pioneering this approach, Andrew divides up the global media environment into four stackable layers: physical (like fiber optics, broadcast towers, telephone lines); Connectivity and Code (packet switching, operating systems, http), Applications (software, sites, services access/creating/finding); and then Content (documentary films, radio pieces, music, text, etc). These four layers are then influenced by three drivers of change: Technology; Politics, Regulation and Governance; and Economics and Markets.

This ended up being a helpful starting point for my PRX presentation, because a lot of Ford’s MAC effort is funding content of various kinds, but PRX is an example of how to have an impact at the applications layer and there’s lots more work to be done there. Ford and other foundations could support more open source software projects that intersect with media access and distribution, encourage more civil society organizations to adapt web 2.0 approaches to their online presence, and help develop new networks of their own grantees that cross disciplines and geographies.

There was an excellent discussion of copyright, remix culture and intellectual property, including a screening of Good Copy/Bad Copy which I highly recommend watching and sharing. Ford has to strike a careful balance in supporting creators and their careers while generally advocating for open access to knowledge, creativity and culture.

Other presentations and discussions included the challenges of supporting contemporary art in transitioning countries where ambiguous and ‘edgy’ ideas can be seen as threatening to emerging national identities; the idea of sustainable artist spaces; a screening of the excellent documentary Miss Gulag about Russian womens’ prisons; a view into the Arab media revolution where where 200 channels of satellite TV across the ideological spectrum are shaping new realities; a moving performance by Palestinian singer Kamilya Jubran; and site visits to Ford’s very impressive local grantees, including a peek at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and some exceptional dance and musical performances at converted factory/art space “Fabrika”.

Of course there’s a particular resonance in discussing freedom of expression while in Moscow, which in the last several years under Putin has seen a consolidation of media and political control and a disturbing trend of violence against journalists.

The journalist and Carnegie researcher Masha Lipman was a guest speaker and gave a very compelling and discouraging update on the state of Russian media, basically boiling down to total control of national television (the three network heads meet with Kremlin staff each week to set the agenda) and a sophisticated stance towards other semi-independent media outlets that are ultimately rendered politically irrelevant. The internet is open, but she says there’s a small Kremlin army that publishes stories, blog posts and generally invisibly seeds lots of pro-government information all over the place. And Putin has something like 80% popularity and in general the population is apolitical and resigned to the current configuration as long as the economic benefits continue. Here’s a really good piece by Masha on the attitudes of the Russian middle class, and for more gloom and doom read Remnick’s great piece on Kasparov in last week’s New Yorker.

I also went to visit the Fund for Independent Radio (FNR), an energetic group of radio folks who are doing some very PRX-y things with college and community radio stations around the country. They recently launched “Podstation” as a site to showcase new storytelling and documentary work. We’re discussing ways to work together with some help from Charles Maynes, and American indie radio producer deeply embedded over there.

Friday night a convergence of radio worlds took place, when we managed to gather the visiting Kevin Klose (NPR president whose son works in Moscow with a college friend of mine) with Greg Feifer (NPR’s Moscow correspondent and yet another college classmate of mine), Charles Maynes (aforementioned indie producer and FNR link). Kevin was in town in part to attend the opening of the Russian rendition of Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia. Our friend the hardest working documentary filmmaker ever Robin Hessman (who ran Russian Sesame Street in the 90s and is currently making a film about Russia’s “Pepsi Generation”) interviewed Stoppard and managed to get us tickets (thanks Robin!) to the opening performance on Saturday. So, quite a bit hung over, I spent my last day in Moscow attending most of the the 8 hours or so of this epic play, and though I confess that some of the rapid Russian dialog about the competing philosophies of 19th century intelligentsia totally passed me by, it was an inspiring and fitting final experience nonetheless.

(left to right: yours truly, Charles Maynes, Kevin Klose, Greg Feifer)

[on the blog post title, "Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears" was a very popular Soviet film of the early 80s and also a film that all Russian language students are always made to watch.]

• Media Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is undertaking a project to comprehensively study the new/citizen/social media landscape, including reflection on its reach, implications, impact, and ecosystem, and charting an agenda for research and action moving forward.

This is a big opportunity for someone. Berkman is bursting at the seams with big ideas, important projects and interesting people, and this is a new Fellow position at the nexus of the citizen/social/public media scene. You’ll be rubbing elbows with fellow Fellows like Dave Weinberg, Doc Searls, Dan Gillmor, and Ethan Zuckerman among many others, and an all-star faculty and staff. Plus PRX is down the street and ready to scheme on all sorts of things.

• Bay Area Business Development Director for Miro

  The job isn’t posted on their site yet but the Participatory Culture Foundation is looking for a bizdev director. PCF is an up-and-coming nonprofit tech group behind Miro, the free open source video player that used to be called the Democracy Player. It’s a great tool and the team is sharp and trying to do something ambitious.

  We are a non-profit (like mozilla) and are looking for someone who is tech-savvy, passionate about our mission, and good at building relationships. There’s an opportunity to join and help build a very exciting organization that could change the face of mass media.

• American Archive 1.0 Initiative Manager
  

  The American Archive is another big idea that is just taking shape, overlaps in interesting ways with the Digital Distribution Consortium, and is gaining momentum as a possible system-wide investment.

  American Archive 1.0 will serve the American public by preserving, exhibiting, and sharing the enduring programming produced and distributed by the public broadcasting system. The Archive will make use of emerging technologies to allow access to this content by educational and cultural institutions, public broadcasting stations, and the general public.

  CPB seeks an Initiative Manager to consult with key stakeholders within the public broadcasting system to determine and build consensus for the overall purpose of American Archive 1.0. Tactically, the Initiative Manager will consult with experts within and without the public broadcasting system to develop a blueprint for the implementation of American Archive 1.0.

• Program Officer, General Program, MacArthur Foundation

  MacFound is into all sorts of important and exciting things, which I would say even if we weren’t already a grantee. Plus this job would get you working alongside the one and only John Bracken.

  This position is currently focused on implementing grantmaking initiatives in three areas – the New Ideas Initiative, Arts and Culture in Chicago, and grants to effective and creative smaller institutions. The Foundation is looking for someone with diverse professional experience, and the ability and willingness to adapt to shifting priorities and responsibilities.

  The New Ideas Initiative was launched in 2005, by the Trustees and President of the Foundation, to actively identify emerging issues important to society where the Foundation may make a catalytic investment in the early stages.

The Round 3 entries in the Public Radio Talent Quest are now live.

You can get to them by clicking on a contestant’s name over in the right hand column of every page, or from the home page of the site.

On this round we asked each contestant to interview someone of their choosing and also to be interviewed by a local public radio station host.

Our seven semi-finalists did a fantastic job with their interviews, as you’ll hear for yourself.

As with previous rounds we’re inviting the public to vote and comment, and the top popular pick will essentially get “immunity” from being kicked off the island for the next round when we whittle it down to 5 finalists. Those 5 will have one more challenge before we pick our three winners, each of whom gets $10,000 and is paired with a producer/mentor to create a pilot show for public radio.

Please help spread the word about Round 3 so the hard work of April, Chris, Anne, Al, Rebecca, Glynn and Chuck gets the attention it deserves.

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.

And Julie Shapiro (no relation, other than as a sister in the public radio Shapiro Mafia, although I do have a cousin Julie Shapiro too) writes about her trip to Moscow to the “Vmeste Radio” festival, organized by the Foundation for Independent Radio, which must have been fascinating. I’m intensely interested and would love to have gone too, having lived in Moscow for over 3 years in the early 90s and just generally following the place. Some day soon I hope to cross the wires of PRX and my Russian connections…

In the meantime Julie — who is behind the remarkable Third Coast International Audio Festival and knows whereof she speaks — is starting to unpack her impressions of the trip here:

about 200 producers from all across russia (including eastern siberia, northern-most points and a secret city or two) gathered for the happening, and spent three days talking about, listening to, debating, praising and challenging all aspects of radio documentary/feature making. even though i couldn’t understand a word of the conversations, it was clear that the producers were passionate and serious about the radio medium – and the power it has to reveal, describe, ponder, define the world

Also this past week On the Media did an excellent hour on the state of Russian media, including a fascinating blunt interview with a mainstream media manager who is totally upfront and as persuasive as he could be about his reasons for siding with the state. Here’s that segment from the show (kudos to WNYC for making these MP3 excerpts available to embed; but note to self & fellow public radio podcasters – 40 seconds is feeling too long for front-loaded promos/brands/credits, especially if it’s just a show segment):

From the interview:

Nowadays as editor-in-chief of Izvestia, I want to see it as a definitely conservative, definitely pro-government newspaper, and there is no desire on my part to conceal that.

It seems to me that it is within the boundaries of the freedom of speech to follow this line. And I think those people who inform you that there is something wrong with Izvestia are, in fact, exactly the people who want to monopolize the very notion of freedom of speech and who do not want to tolerate any opinion different from their own.

A “Debate Proposition” was posed to two teams of three people each who had to argue for and against it:

“Given that New Media has redefined the meaning of Public, the wall between public and commercial media no longer exists.”

I was put on the “against” team (pro wall, perhaps?) along with Katy Chevigny (Executive Director of Arts Engine and sister of radio regular Blue) and Randy Rieland (Vice President, Interactive for The Discovery Channel). The “for” team was Angela Wilson Gyetvan (Vice President, Marketing and Content for Revver), Kathleen Powell (Vice President of Worldwide Programming, Jaman), and Michael Burns (Director of Programming, The Documentary Channel).

We each did a short presentation (the organizers had first scared us by sending along the Official Oxford Debate Rules, which it turns out we didn’t have to follow) and then mixed it up with audience input. We were encouraged to ratchet up our argumentative side even though there’s inevitably lots more nuance and complexity.

As usual in these circumstances everyone starts questioning the definitions of things, like “what is public media anyway?”. As it turns out the Center for Social Media, which is a DocAgora partner, has put out a Public Media FAQ (pdf) that makes a good attempt of tackling that question:

The term “public media” doesn’t refer to the means by which media are distributed, or the number of audience members who can access a piece of media. Instead, public media are any media used for public knowledge and action. Some media are primarily designed to serve this purpose (news programs; public broadcasting), while others may serve that function intermittently (commercial mass media, personal or institutional blogs). Public media are projects and behaviors that address and mobilize publics, within any media.”

I was up first for the Against Team and ended up saying something basically like this:

If the premise of this statement is that there is no longer a need for media that is created, curated, distributed, and supported with the primary purpose of serving the public interest, then I completely disagree. The wall between commercial and public media has actually been more like a screen door, that in the wrong light you sometimes smack into thinking it’s open. But there are important distinctions that are even more vital today.

“New Media” has redefined the meaning of public. In fact it has made it possible for the public to create its own meaning with media. The rise of social and participatory media offers a huge opportunity. It’s democratizing media creation and distribution and also discussion in ways that shift the balance of power away from traditional mass media, including public broadcasting – which no longer has a unique claim on being public media, if it ever did.

There are now over 70 million blogs in the blogosphere, and the most popular are more important, more relevant in web terms than many leading mainstream news sites. Wikipedia is a great example of new public media – participatory, noncommercial, independent, and currently one of the top 10 websites worldwide.

But in case you think this dynamic new participatory culture can be safely accommodated by commercial media, let me show you a story from last week’s New York Times:

Promoting a Thirst for Sprite in Teenage Cellphone Users
The Coca-Cola Company is hoping its new mobile site for social networking, Sprite Yard, will become the MySpace of the cellphone world.
“Being with them on their mobile phones is absolutely essential,” said Mr. Greatrex at a news conference yesterday. Sprite, he said, is “trying to establish an omnipresent, on-the-go, everywhere relationship with teens.”

Or how about the exciting new social network of last year, launched by WalMart called “The Hub”.

Even as some of these attempts fail, as WalMart’s did, the intent and the threat is clear. Commercial media is clever, it is powerful, and it has its sights set on this newly emerging public and participatory media. Rupert Murdoch was no fool when he bought MySpace before the rest of the world understood what it meant. At best I think commercial media “products”, only occasionally coincide with the public interest, but the primary constituencies are the advertiser, the shareholder, the bottom line.

I worry that we are in the honeymoon phase of social media. It may seem that Google, and Yahoo, iTunes, Amazon, even NewsCorp are interested in helping nurture a kind of public media culture. But what if it’s a temporary and conditional alignment?

When thinking about what I think public media’s role in the new landscape is, I find it helpful to refer to public radio’s core values. These were distilled from talking to listeners about what they value in public radio’s service. In fact public radio stations even printed up little laminated cards with the values to bring with them into meetings.

love of lifelong learning
substance
curiosity
credibility, accuracy, honesty
respect for listener
purpose
idealism
humor
inspired about public life and culture
civility
generosity

Mission-driven noncommercial public service media play a critical role, even more so in the emerging world of social and participatory media, which otherwise runs the risk of being co opted, bought out, or shut down by commercial interests, or dissipated into “an embarrassment of niches”.

I’m comfortable on either side of the screen door, if these kinds of core values are at the heart of the media that is serving the public interest.

Given the time limit and the audience I didn’t go into the fact that I think core values desperately need updating and expanding, perhaps to include “fringe values” that help relate to new audiences that aren’t finding themselves reflected in public radio now.

Update Oct 2007
Katy Chevigny – fellow debater on my team at the DocAgora and Executive Director of MediaRights/ArtsEngine – has posted her take on the experience and whither public media online.

But the two I did catch were terrific:

Garbage Warrior

and Pete Seeger: the Power of Song