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Collaboration
How NPR, Public Media Use #PubJobs to Recruit Talent Collaboratively
Many organizations approach hiring like they do most other functions: as an individual sport. But when it comes to recruiting top talent in today's rapidly evolving media landscape, collaboration is necessary. As the director of talent acquisition for NPR, I believe that talent management is the engine driving public media forward -- and that this engine is best fueled by...
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Public MediaShift
Localore Winners Gear Up to Transform Public Media
The following post is from Jessica Clark, who is the media strategist for the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), which produced the Localore competition. From Fargo to Austin, and Boston to the Bay Area, 10 public stations across the country are now poised to ramp up their innovation capacity. They'll be incubating projects led by winners of the Localore...
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Guides
Your Guide to Crowdfunding Public Media Projects
Need $40,000 to produce a local documentary? Just ask your audience. That's what filmmaker Sam Mayfield did, for a film she's working on about last year's protests in Madison, Wis. In a blog post on January 13, she wrote: We are currently trying to raise $40,000 of our $200,000 budget through Kickstarter, the online fundraising platform that facilitates grassroots investment....
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Public MediaShift
How Social Media, Collaboration Fueled Reports on Australia's Refugees
An innovative Australian public journalism project has partnered student reporters and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation with a refugee support agency and a social media startup. The aim of the project, #ReportingRefugees, was to tackle problematic media coverage of asylum seekers and refugees in a volatile political climate in parallel with educating students to connect with a "citizens' agenda." The result...
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Public MediaShift
Public Media: A Wish List for 2012
What's the No. 1 innovation that's needed in public media in 2012? I posed that question to the public media group on Facebook, as well as to some additional colleagues via email. The responses ranged from a focus on cultivating a culture of innovation, to calls for more innovative content approaches, to the need to grow public media's audience to...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #31: BBC World Invades U.S.; ReadWriteWeb Sold to Say Media
Welcome to the 31st episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. This week we turn across the pond to the U.K., where the BBC is pushing its BBC World cable news channel to an American audience. The BBC recently made a deal with Comcast to increase its...
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Mediatwits
Mediatwits #29: Spot.us Acquired; Buffett Buys a Newspaper; Cord Cutters Rising
Welcome to the 29th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali. This week we get back from the Thanksgiving holiday and find some interesting mergers happening. First, there's the crowdfunding site Spot.us being acquired by American Public Media (APM) and its Public Insight Network. Guests David Cohn,...
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Ethics
Juan Williams, Lisa Simeone and Public Media's Quest for Integrity
Trust "is perhaps the most important asset public broadcasting carries forward into evolving public media future," writes Byron Knight. Knight should know. He's had a long career in public broadcasting. Now, he is co-director of the Editorial Integrity for Public Media Project, a ground-breaking attempt to define public media's principles for a digital age. Leading public broadcasters, NPR, PBS, and...
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PoliticalShift
Convergence 2.0: How Public TV Can Save Democracy
This September, I wrote in MediaShift about the unfortunate effects on journalism that the deregulation of campaign financing could have. The article hinted that public media might be able to offset the damage, and maybe even save democracy. This sounds so grandiose that, to explain how and why, we need to back up a few steps -- quite a few,...
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Public MediaShift
WBUR Helps Listeners Find Better Health Care Options
Martha Bebinger, a longtime reporter for WBUR in Boston, had been reporting on efforts to control health care spending in Massachusetts for years, but over the past year and a half to two years, interest in the subject intensified among listeners, she said, and it was time to help them be part of a conversation. And so Bebinger and WBUR...
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Public MediaShift
Public Radio Stations Make Space for Innovation at PRPC
What does innovation feel like? According to newly minted MacArthur genius Jad Abumrad, it's a bit like being chased by a tiger: visceral and gut-churning. Abumrad, the co-host of WNYC's ground-breaking show Radiolab, advised the audience at last week's Public Radio Programming Conference (PRPC) to seek out this life-or-death sensation. Innovation isn't always obvious, he explained in his keynote address,...
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Public MediaShift
FCC Report on Media Offers Strong Diagnosis, Weak Prescriptions
A consensus has begun to emerge around the Federal Communications Commission report, "The Information Needs of Communities," released Thursday: The diagnosis is sound, but the remedies are lacking. The 465-page report (see full report, embedded below) is the result of 600-plus interviews, hearings and reams of research conducted over 18 months. It represents the most ambitious attempt yet to come...
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Media Usage
Massive Digital Divide for Native Americans is 'A Travesty'
Perhaps nowhere in the United States does the digital divide cut as wide as in Indian Country. More than 90 percent of tribal populations lack high-speed Internet access, and usage rates are as low as 5 percent in some areas, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Sascha Meinrath, director of New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative calls it "a travesty."...
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EducationShift
5 Great Media Literacy Programs and How to Assess Their Impact
Increasingly, Public Media 2.0 projects are moving not only beyond broadcast to social and mobile platforms, but into the realms of digital and media literacy training. Producers of such projects recognize that in order to participate fully in the new media world, children and adults need to be able to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate messages in a wide variety...
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Public MediaShift
Defunding Public Media Would Stifle Digital Innovation
Political analysts are dismissing last Thursday's House vote forbidding public radio stations to spend federal dollars on content (HR 1076) as little more than red meat for the Republican base. But even if not a single dollar ends up being stripped from public broadcasting appropriations, the current battle threatens to strangle innovation in a sector that was just gaining new...
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Public MediaShift
IMA + SXSW = Major Discussion on Future of Public Media
Public media makers found a whole new crew to hang with at this year's Integrated Media Association (IMA) Conference on March 10 and 11. Fueling excitement was a new collaboration: The IMA preceded and then flowed into the interactive track of the SXSW festival on the 12th. Attendees at a Knight Foundation-supported array of SXSWi panels on news innovation and...
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Public MediaShift
World TV Revamps Site to Entice a Younger Audience
How can public media spur multi-platform engagement through a national TV channel? That's the challenge that was posed to the team developing WorldCompass.org, the companion website for the World TV channel, a news and documentary channel now available in parts of 32 states.
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Public MediaShift
Brazilian Public Media Faces Tough Digital Transition
Belém, BRAZIL -- At the mouth of the Amazon river, vendors at the Ver-o-Peso market display the region's fruits, fish and crafts on splintered tables and rusting carts. They hail prospective buyers who pass by their closely packed stalls. Just a block over, behind the security gate of the Estação das Docas, a collection of renovated waterfront warehouses, eco-tourists stroll...
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Social Media
How NewsHour Used Crowdsourcing to Refute TSA Meltdown
Social Media content on MediaShift is sponsored by the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships, a program offering innovative and entrepreneurial journalists the resources of Stanford University and Silicon Valley. Learn more here. During Thanksgiving week, the debate over stricter TSA security measures was turning into the big story. A handful of airport security anecdotes were making the rounds via...
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Public MediaShift
8 Key Lessons the CBC Learned Working with Citizen Journos
The 2010 G20 summit in Toronto marked the first time the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation collaborated with citizen journalists on a large and integrated scale. In the lead up to the event, we noticed our online community was passionate about the topic. As a public broadcaster, we saw it as a perfect opportunity to tap into that conversation and encourage...
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5Across
5Across: What's Next for Public Media?
While most people think of public media as being government-funded broadcasters such as NPR, PBS, BBC and CBC, the definition is being expanded to consider public-serving new media. So that might also include new non-profits such as ProPublica, Oakland Local or Bay Citizen, who all are looking to serve the public as a mission that is more important than making money. But how are these new entities -- as well as the old guard in public media -- going to evolve in the digital age?
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Public MediaShift
Innovative Projects at Public Media Camp 2010
The Public Media 2.0 series on MediaShift is sponsored by American University's Center for Social Media (CSM) through a grant from the Ford Foundation. Learn more about CSM's research on emerging public media trends and standards at futureofpublicmedia.net. Ira Glass. Gwen Ifill. Big Bird. These are some of the public faces of public media, but behind the scenes lies...
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Public MediaShift
The Business of Public Radio: WNYC Bulks Up, Builds Out
New York Public Radio, which includes WNYC, the most listened to public radio station in the country, has in recent years developed a lot of ways to, in the words of CEO Laura Walker, "diversify revenue streams." It has increased its member base, used new fundraising techniques, attracted new grants, conducted capital campaigns to buy radio licenses and build new offices and studios, made financial investments, developed new sponsorships, increased web revenues, rented out its event space and more.
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Public MediaShift
How Should Public Media Respond to Efforts to Defund It?
"Here is what I still don't get," wrote NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen in response to my November 18 article, "how can public media develop a strategy or simply a coherent response to the culture war in which it is entangled if it cannot admit to itself or reason publicly with the fact that only one side in the culture war wants to destroy it... and the other one doesn't? What is public media's culture war strategy? Not to have one?"
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Public MediaShift
NPR, PBS Try to Tame Controversy, Embrace Tech at PubCamp
The second annual National Public Media Camp, which wrapped up Sunday night at American University in Washington, D.C., provided an opportunity for representatives from all three organizations to share their experiences and -- more importantly -- the lessons learned. Not surprisingly, the session entitled "How to handle an online revolt" was one of the many highlights of a packed weekend of diverse discussions.
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Public MediaShift
A Viral Video Takedown of Public Radio (in 5 Acts)
Why is NPR such an easy target for comedy bits and video parodies? It doesn't take a regular listener of Science Friday to figure it out. They're a bunch of mega-nerds. With every subtle use of alliteration, every time Robert Siegel says "draconian," and each transitional upright bass interlude, they slap a big fat "kick me" sign in the...
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Public MediaShift
How Public Access TV Evolved into Community Media Centers
The Public Media 2.0 series on MediaShift is sponsored by American University's Center for Social Media (CSM) through a grant from the Ford Foundation. Learn more about CSM's research on emerging public media trends and standards at futureofpublicmedia.net. Around the country, community media centers are launching exciting new collaborations with local organizations, neighborhood activists, schools, and media outlets to...
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Public MediaShift
Public Media Experiments Show Promise, Need to Involve Public
The Public Media 2.0 series on MediaShift is sponsored by American University's Center for Social Media (CSM) through a grant from the Ford Foundation. Learn more about CSM's research on emerging public media trends and standards at futureofpublicmedia.net. This article was co-authored by Jessica Clark, with research support from Christopher Ali and Erin Roberts. After a slew of reports,...
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Public MediaShift
Special Series: Public Media 2.0
The Public Media 2.0 series on MediaShift is sponsored by American University's Center for Social Media (CSM) through a grant from the Ford Foundation. Learn more about CSM's research on emerging public media trends and standards at futureofpublicmedia.net. About this Series How are public media makers and outlets evolving in the digital, participatory age? Stories in this week's special...
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Public MediaShift
5 Emerging Trends That Give Hope for Public Media 2.0
Public media is facing the same pressures as commercial media when it comes to digital: How can they transition to a new age of social media, collaboration and audience interaction? From today until Thanksgiving, MediaShift will have a special in-depth report on Public Media 2.0, with analysis, case studies, a 5Across video roundtable and coverage of this weekend's national PubCamp in Washington, DC.
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Public MediaShift
Inside the NewsHour's Multi-Platform Election Night Bedlam
Elections test how much information a news organization can process and then quickly and accurately share it with an audience. They're also a good time for news organizations to take stock of how far they've come since the last one, and to try the latest journalistic tools (or gimmicks). Four years ago, YouTube was nascent and Facebook had finally opened...
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4MR
4 Minute Roundup: A $100 Million Expansion for Public Media?
In this week's 4MR podcast I look at the ambitious plan by American Public Media honcho Bill Kling to add more than 300 new reporters and editors to four local public radio newsrooms, at a funding cost of $100 million. These new reporters would be digital-first and focus on text and multimedia before radio. I spoke to Ken Doctor, who wrote a detailed article about Kling's plan recently.
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Public MediaShift
KETC Works with Community on 'Homeland' Immigration Project
Fresh from their ambitious multi-city Facing the Mortgage Crisis project, KETC/Channel 9 in St. Louis has launched a new community-based news project on another hot topic: immigration. Homeland aims to "apply public media sensibilities, expertise and capacity to address a complicated and polarizing issue," said Amy Shaw, KETC's vice president of education and community engagement. The project includes a website...
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Public MediaShift
A Guide to Rising Public Media Networks in the U.S.
While it's taken public broadcasters awhile to catch up to the possibilities and dynamics of social and mobile media platforms, over the past year on MediaShift we have been documenting a flurry of innovation that reveals new possibilities for how the sector might share content, do business, and engage publics. Here's a guide to several types of rising public media...
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Collaboration
Public Media Corps Takes on Broadband Divide for Minorities
If there was a reality show about the Public Media Corps (PMC), the intro might sound something like this: "Here's the true story of how 15 fellows, five public media institutions, three high schools, three community organizations, a library and a museum collaborate to bridge the broadband divide." Secretly, I wish there was a reality show about the project because...
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Social Media
Social Media Helps Drive Traffic, Engagement at NewsHour
When the PBS NewsHour relaunched both on-air and online in December, a new homepage was unveiled, a news blog was born and a new correspondent joined the team. But another big change unfolded behind the scenes as well: The addition of a social media desk assistant (myself) dedicated to fostering an online community and better distributing PBS NewsHour content digitally....
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Public MediaShift
While Others Shrink, KQED Expands Cross-Platform News
Last month, KQED News in San Francisco dramatically expanded the scope of its news coverage with a new website, an increase from six to 16 local radio newscasts and the addition of eight news staffers, including six producers/reporters, a developer and a social media specialist. Its expansion will continue over the next several months (look for a new news blog...
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Collaboration
KCET's 'Departures' Exemplifies Community Collaboration
I've written for MediaShift several times about journalistic collaboration between news organizations, such as the Climate Desk project, for example, or Public Media's EconomyStory. But there's another kind of collaboration that's critical to the future of journalism: Collaboration between a news organization and the community it serves. This kind of collaboration is critical for a few reasons. First, as anyone...
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Public MediaShift
Pop and Politics Blog Becomes Converged Radio Project
These days it's not so unusual for a public radio program to boast a companion blog. But few shows begin online and move to broadcast.Pop and Politics is the exception. Farai Chideya -- a high-profile public affairs reporter, novelist, and the former host of NPR's late and lamented African-American current events program "News & Notes" -- began the Pop and...
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Public MediaShift
6 Key Lessons From NewsHour's Coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has lasted more than two months now. It is the worst spill in U.S. history, and it is likely to continue until at least August. And in covering it, PBS NewsHour has broken every traffic record it ever had thanks to great reporting, our live video feed of the spill and the...
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Embedded Report
PBS NewsHour Collaborations Require Buy-In from the Top
Collaboration is one of the public broadcasting buzzwords of the moment. The new PBS NewsHour is a national news organization that is trying to figure out how collaboration works. Collaboration was one of the bullet points when we announced the changes to the program. As with the staff reorganization, which I wrote about in my previous post on MediaShift, our...
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Public MediaShift
5 Needs and 5 Tools for Measuring Media Impact
This spring, National Public Radio launched Go Figure, a new blog authored by members of its Audience Insight and Research Group. In an April 1 post, blogger Vince Lampone wrote, "Nearly all listeners have been moved to take action by NPR at some point in their lives. For instance, two in three have done further research into a topic, most have visited a website, and nearly 25% have become involved with a local or national political issue as a result of listening."
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Public MediaShift
CCTV Shows How Public Access TV Can Transition to Digital
In 2008, Mike Rosen-Molina wrote on MediaShift about public access TV's "fight for relevance" in the digital age: In an age when it's increasingly easy for amateur filmmakers, citizen journalists, and the general public to distribute videos online, is there any point in having a public-access cable channel? Some argue that public-access television has outlived its usefulness for this reason:...
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Public MediaShift
Live-Blogging the FCC Workshop: New Platforms, Strategies for Public Media
This live-blog post is a continuation of the first post covering the FCC's Future of Media Workshop on public media. Panel Discussion III: New Platforms, Approaches and Structures Maxie Jackson III, President and CEO, National Federation of Community Broadcasters Says when he thinks of the future, he wants to stress "independence and impact," in the transition from public broadcasting to...
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Public MediaShift
Live-Blogging FCC Workshop: Public Media in the Digital Era
How should public and noncommercial media evolve in the digital age? Hopefully we'll find out shortly, as I report live from today's FCC's Future of Media Workshop. A who's who of execs, funders and researchers are lined up to speak, and given that this isn't the FCC's usual beat, everyone's curious to see how the day will turn out. You...
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Public MediaShift
Better Coordination Needed to Map Local Media Ecologies
Back in 2008, I co-organized a conference called Beyond Broadcast. That year's theme was "mapping public media," and was designed to both call out the rising importance of maps as a platform for sharing digital media, and to "map" the fragmented universe of public service media projects. The maps I found at the time underscored the siloed nature of news...
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Public MediaShift
Witness Creates Sophisticated Evaluation Tools for Video Impact
Last month, Jessica Clark and I explored how various Public Media 2.0 projects are measuring their level of success in informing and engaging publics. We found that many public media organizations are struggling to measure impact -- and some are relying only on traditional indicators of reach, as opposed to other elements of impact such as relevance, inclusion, engagement or...
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Public MediaShift
Public Media Twitter Chat Aims to Foster Collaboration
Public media workers and aficionados have a new routine: Every Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, they log on to Twitter for Public Media Chat, which is using the #pubmedia hashtag. The chat, which started about a month ago, is the result of a discussion between a group of public media professionals at PublicMediaCamp in Washington, DC. "Public Media Chat...
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Embedded Report
Merging Online, Broadcast at NewsHour Still a Work in Progress
About two months have passed since we officially became the PBS NewsHour. I wrote my previous update for MediaShift" just after the two staffs -- broadcast and online -- merged into one building and were getting used to having each other around. But, really, how merged have these two teams become? The initial good news is that, after our re-launch...
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Public MediaShift
Is There a Master Metric for Evaluating Public Media?
Over the past few months, we've been presenting MediaShift readers with a picture of a more dynamic, engaged, public media future. But how are Public Media 2.0 projects measuring their success in informing and engaging publics? Is it even possible to create a master metric? What are the differences and similarities in evaluating different kinds of projects?
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Public MediaShift
Why Youth Media Projects Should Link Up with Public Media
"The issues that we tackle in our films are very powerful," said youth filmmaker Lenah Perez in a newsletter from the New York-based youth media organization, Global Action Project. "I should say the way we tackle the issues is powerful, the issues are important -- to look at the world as the big picture and to fight for this world."...
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Public MediaShift
Public Broadcasters Hustle to Fill Infrastructure Gap
In a recent presentation at WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, John Proffitt, who blogs about public media, painted a gloomy picture. In slide after slide, the stats mounted. New gadgets, new social media habits, new channels for distribution and consumption all added up to one conclusion: public TV stations are rapidly losing both value and relevance. In addition to that, urgent...
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Public MediaShift
How to Avoid Ethical Snags in Non-Profit Journalism
The nature of non-profit journalism invites ethical dilemmas. Over the past few years, dozens of centers of investigative journalism and non-profit websites have been started using money from foundations, individual donors and membership fees. The latest trend is non-profit networks that share resources. Collaboration is a good thing, but it can lead to tensions among collaborators. How can such centers...
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Public MediaShift
Lessons on Collaboration from EconomyStory, Election Projects
"Online: Content is king. I don't disagree. But collaboration is queen. In chess the king is the most important, but the queen is the most powerful." - David Cohn We in public media produce a lot of content, but historically we haven't had a lot of collaboration. That's been changing recently, and I'm fortunate enough to have a front row...
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Public MediaShift
KETC's Mortgage Crisis Project Brings Public into Public Media
Facing the Mortgage Crisis, a multi-platform community outreach project spearheaded by KETC/Channel 9 in St. Louis, has become a model for public broadcasting stations nationwide. Launched July 1, 2008, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the project connects financially struggling residents with appropriate resources. St. Louis was hit hard by the mortgage crisis, and this, along with KETC's...
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Public MediaShift
FTC Should Consider Policy Reform to Support Public Media 2.0
It's been a busy season for prognosticators who examine the intersection of public policy and media. Today will be particularly hectic for them, as journalists, bloggers, public broadcasters and policy wonks pack into a session at the Federal Trade Commission to ponder, yet again, "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" (Submit your own thoughts via Twitter here). Two weeks...
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TVShift
Merging Online and Broadcast Cultures to Reinvent 'NewsHour'
The "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" is re-incarnating itself as the "PBS NewsHour" on December 7. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes details involved in creating the new program, and chief among them is a complete reorganization of our editorial teams to create a merged newsroom for online and broadcast.
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Social Media
Profiles in Courage: Social Media Editors at Big Media Outlets
During a recent trip to see an editor I work with at The Globe and Mail, a national newspaper in Canada, I passed by the newspaper's cafeteria. My editor looked in and pointed at a man who was sitting with his back to us. "There's Mathew Ingram, doing his office hours," he told me. Ingram is the Globe and Mail's...
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PoliticalShift
10 Projects that Help Citizens Become Government Watchdogs
With the 2010 U.S. elections coming into view, many people are looking for more information about the people running for office -- and the individuals and organizations funding these candidates. Fortunately, there are dozens of initiatives that mine and share the data that influence policy and policy-makers. Many are funded by The Sunlight Foundation, which aims to use "the revolutionary...
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Public MediaShift
PubCamp Examines New Models, Philosophy for Public Media
"Public Broadcasting has a future and its all about YOU," tweeted Jonathan Coffman at the close of this weekend's bustling Public Media Camp. Coffman, the product manager for PBS Engage, was a key organizer of the event, along with Andy Carvin, a senior strategist at NPR's Social Media Desk, and Joe and Peter Corbett, two brothers who run iStrategy...
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Public MediaShift
Eight Public Media 2.0 Projects That Are Doing it Right
It's official: "Public Media 2.0" has graduated from theory into practice. "We believe that a successful broadband policy and implementation requires Public Media 2.0," said Ernest Wilson, the new chair of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, at Friday's unveiling of the Knight Commission's new report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age. Echoing the report's...
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