DISQUS

Congratulations on the move. I actually moved my own stuff to A2 recently as well, and I'm contemplating moving all our corporate sites to it, too. Seems like a good service. And I took the 43folders recommendation, too!

Good luck, and here's hoping for more posts!

Well, I'm certainly not satisfied. There's so much more to do. But I find myself surrounded by long-time public media folks that are quite satisfied indeed.

How do we infuse a sense of adventure, optimism and excitement into the public media world? How do we get to a point of constant innovation and risk-taking and evolution? It seems to me we should be proud of those achievements that deserve praise, but never be satisfied with the status quo.

Great summary post, Todd, and thank you for sharing. I've actually e-mailed this to our entire management team. It's especially relevant to us as we're engaging in strategic planning shortly.

These kinds of short, to-the-point strategy summaries are great for framing discussions that can be very complex and can easily ramble off course.

Todd... Thanks for the comments about the web not being the same as broadcast. You're right -- it seems so obvious, yet we take it for granted. As a technologist, but not a broadcaster, I've been going on the assumption that broadcast people intrinsically can see the difference. But they don't. The focus on social media at IMA this year helped illustrate just how different the web is.

Old-line broadcasters need to dig in and figure this web medium out, first as users, then as experimenters and designers and implementers. We need to change our missions -- right down to mission statements and maybe even our nonprofit bylaws. Then the serious on-the-ground changes must begin.

Separately, I just wanted to add that for all the good things at IMA this year (and there were a lot of them), it seems that a piece of this puzzle has been missed. My own concerns now center on what must happen at the small-market and mid-market stations out there (like mine). From where I sit, it appears our smaller public radio and TV players are entering a period of sustained decline in terms of relevancy and service impact for the communities they serve. In turn, the revenue is declining as well. I suspect a wave of collapses and consolidations and partnerships is coming.

Todd... Just so you know, if the IMA audio is released to Doug Kaye's team, it will actually go to the Conversations Network, into a soon-to-be-released channel called Media Conversations.

Barth made the comment "why shouldn’t NPR, PRI, APM and PRX all merge?" but I'd take that one giant leap forward. Why can't PBS and APTS and others in the TV realm join in that merger?

In fact, I'd be more specific. We need to create a new metaphor and model -- public media -- and we need to absorb all the old players into this new system. It would be the replacement for NPR and PBS and all the other national players, and it would be the replacement for all the "stations" out there from one edge of the country to the other.

All the "stations" (radio and TV) would be collapsed into local and regional public media aggregators and distributors that focus on providing the best mix of public media -- sourced from all over the system -- to their particular audiences.

The localized branches of this public media ecosystem would produce their own media and collect it from producers in their area, whether paid professionals or amateurs. It all gets tagged and dropped into a distributed content management system that has a common backend but a distributed design that does not store all the media centrally but leaves it in a distributed net.

Anyway, the design would roll on from there, but my central point is, why should we merge all the radio units and leave TV behind? Let's finally take on the banner of "public media" in the broadest sense and learn how to both serve and engage the public nationwide with text, audio, video, still pictures and other data, and serve it up via broadcast, download, stream, search, physical distribution, etc.?

Geez, Todd... If you're ever looking to hire IT/content people, give me a call! ;-) I work in one of the many public broadcasting companies that fear even a commenting system, much less user-generated content. We seem to believe the audience is to be talked AT and not interacted WITH, at least if you judge us by our actions.

There's such an exciting frontier ahead of us, both for the public media professionals and the audience, but getting to it seems as though it will take the retirement of a generation to get there. Hopefully that will come to pass before the financial systems for public media collapse (another area that needs radical rethinking, I suspect).

Anyway, thanks for your comments. I've printed this article out as a guide for how to proceed in the online space. I've always felt a commenting system alone would be a less-than-exciting addition to the site. This is the context in which to present it, it seems to me.