Robert Paterson's Weblog

Content + Context + Community = TV as a social object = Success?

A lot of the discussion about the future of TV is about how it will die in the context of the online alternative. I myself watch nearly all the video that I do on the web now. I think that it is inevitable that in a few years this will be commonplace.

This raises the large question - what is the new business model? For stations and for producers?

As Dave Snowden suggests, when you have a complex problem, you can only experiment until you see the new emerge.

In this context, KETC has been conducting as series of experiments to seek out answers. I have shown you how they are using their ideas about being the convener for major community issues such as the Mortgage Crisis and Flu. KETC are getting close to answer a related question - how does a public station get the support it needs from its local community.

Today I would like to share with you a big idea that they are trying to answer the Producer question. How do you get a return on high quality content in the online social age?

Our big idea is one that Hugh McLeod has long espoused - Create a "Social Object".

Here is quick summary of what we are trying. Then I will unpack the ideas and show you the details - my hope is that you can see the DNA of our approach and hence then see how you might use this or improve it.

• We picked a community that exists - that is not merely a fan based community - but a community of rabid Participants that had an equally rabid following. A Community that spans North America with chapters in every major centre. We picked a community that everyone admires an thinks is worthwhile. We picked a community that does something very visual and where drame and story is built in. We picked an ideal starting point to create a Social Object - We picked First Robotics. If you are one of the 3 people in North America who know nothing about this - here is a link, In essence this is a community that hosts teams who kids who build robots and then compete with them in a national series.

• We then picked a series of partners that would enable us to follow many teams on their way to the finals and from all of this found our "heroes" and our narrative. That was the classic Content part that was not new.

• We then built a supporting web world that will act as the Social Amplifier for not only the film but the entire community - that is the new aspect and this has a number of features that I think will become useful for any such community and project. Imagine a "Jane Austen" community that enfolds Masterpiece Theatre? Imagine A Science Fair community that enfolds say Nova?

So here are some of the features that we have put together - as you can see this is not hard to do technically - the barriers, as always are cultural.

Just a taste of the excitement.

Lesson 1 - While we have a banner on our main page that takes you here - we have a dedicated piece of real estate for the community. With the web, we can have an infinite amount of dedicated real estate. At KETC we have an Economic area - A Flu area and now the Gear Up area - there is really no limit. This is the SPACE where the community will be hosted - not just a page.

Here you can see a small section of the national map for First. These are the nodes of a scale free network. Each community can have their own local space. So what is National is also local. In aggregate we might get something remarkable.

 

This is what all scale free networks look like. This is actually a picture of flu!. This is the test for you. The Pattern" must look like this, if you have any chance of getting life and emergence from your network.

The Gear Up First design enables this to occur.

If we follow the Jane Austen Book Club idea - every city can have a boo club. People meet face to face and then go on to meet regionally and then nationally. Such a network can afford to have say Colin Firth visit! The national producer has this huge keen and identified group to base their ideas, projects and funding on.

QW

We are using Facebook and Twitter to bind the local, regional and national groups more tightly. We have used our Trust as the host.

With more and more safe and trusted connections - there is more chance of Emergence. The deep value of Public TV is Trust. Communities need this to flourish. So part of our role here is Hosting - providing that safe place on the unsafe web.

Now the kids themselves and their families have a local, regional and national place to put up their own content. So this space is not just for chat or for KETC to show content - but for all in the group.

Having a film that is a social object means in the end that people get together. The climax for First is the nationals. This is the SXSW of First. For the next few years, St Louis, the home of KET, will be the host.

As many of us who are the children of the social web have found, meeting each other is the payoff. Star Trek? First? Jane Austen?

These kind of events in themselves create more energy - social and economic. Is not the new model for authors to use the book as a social object to convene face to face meetings that pay?

Such a process is different from the traditional mass media model where over time, interest wanes and more and more resources are required to keep the show on the road. With a good social object, the social power scales over time and the group resources take over from the seed resources.

It's like gardening. If you tend and care for your tomato plant until it is time to plant, by fall nature and the plant will give you the crop.

Our film is just the seed for a whole garden of First related stuff to come.

Of course this is early days. This is an experiment. There will be some parts that do better than others. But I think we are close to a model that will work - will offer the public and the producer a great return in the new web age.

What do you think?

Best Web Practice Pub Media for Swine Flu - A Model

If you go to most media web sites - they look like a second hand car dealer's site - masses of stuff - banners - very noisy.

One of the things we learnt at KETC was that if you were going to have any impact on the web on a topic - that it was best to create a unique piece of Web Real Estate to do that.

So we and all the stations covering the Mortgage Crisis have a unique site for that attached to our main site.

So this is what the KETC Flu site looks like:

Everything on this site is about the Flu or the path to resources.

Note also that KETC itself does not pretend to be the expert. On the right you will see the key partners. Central is the United Way's 211 call service. People can make one call 24/7 and get directed to expert help.

If you look at the video link - here - you will see that nearly all the speakers are experts in the public health arena that now have got a big voice thanks to the station. Their information is not lost as the new cycle rolls - but remains and gets added to over time. If our experience with the Mortgage Crisis is any predictor, this page may become one of the most helpful in the nation.

Note also how the videos have been titled. They answer implied questions. We know that people usually start with their own question and search. So we have learned to cut stories and to title them predictively to answer these searches.

We have learned that Mapping is very useful - the link to Vaccination Info - is all about maps and information linked to place. To act people need to know where to go. They don't need to know what is happening across town - they need to know what is happening close to home.

KETC is not a "News" station - This does not mean we can't bring people the "News" - the link to Flu News is to an aggregation of the best news that our editors can find. KETC is not restricted to its own resources here - or anywhere - our role as "Connector" is very leveraging.

Our work is to find and connect the best - in resources, in information - and help you find them.We also will be connecting you to everyone one else. For the real story here will over time be about what you did.

The only hard thing about all of this is of course that it is all counter culture to many stations and media organizations. There is no financial barrier - only culture.

And the pay off? We think that if we play a vital role in the life of our community, that our community will respond.

The Flu - No Panic - Just Help - KETC extends its community model to flu

Living With the Flu - Our Goals

By KETC on October 15, 2009, 9:04 am

H1N1. A combination of two letters and two numbers very few people knew seven or eight months ago, but now have taken on an ominous meaning for many. As we enter the 2009-2010 flu season, most in the St. Louis region—and across the country—are wondering what will happen and how they and their family can best prepare for “Living With the Flu.”

To help our community during this time, KETC is using our capabilities on-air, online and in the community as the region’s trusted public media organization to connect residents to H1N1 prevention and immunization resources through a network of trusted community agencies. Watch our broadcast for tips on how you can prevent the flu and what to do it you or someone in your family is infected. We’ll be posting information and links to resources here, and we want to hear from you if you know of resources we don’t have here.

We are all going to be living with the flu this year, but by staying informed and being prepared, we call all try and prevent the spread.

via livingwiththeflu.org

Once again the news is filled with panic headlines. It's 1918 all over again - a National Emergency - Huge line ups for vaccine - Not enough vaccine - Kids dying and so on. Just like good old Channel 7 New in Buffalo with a fire every night! Come back Irv Weinstein.

This approach to news just confuses and frightens - after all when we hear this kind of thing, we are left helpless. There is nothing that we can do.

At KETC, we decided to behave differently when the mortgage crisis struck. We are not even a "News" station. We decided to see what we could do to HELP. One of the challenges was that we didn't know what to do either.

So we did something quite novel, we went out into the community and found out about the people who did know what to do - we helped bring them together and we gave them a voice and we connected them to a lot more people than they could have been connected to on their own. It worked. worked so well that now over 70 stations are doing this in the 32 worst hit cities in America.

So this clip above is the next step. The Flu is like the economy. A TV station can shout "fire" in a crowded room or it can find help. This time we have a bit more experience - we already have relationships with a lot of community resources - we have learned how to give the community a voice and to connect people who don't even watch our channel to the help that they need.

Public TV in particular has been criticized for not really serving their local public with news. Here is a snip from a new report:

The study, posted on the Columbia Journalism Review website, can be found online through this link: 

After surveying the field for news chops and innovative thinking, Downie and Schudson conclude that too much of the money spent on pubcasting is directed to maintaining local television and radio stations and not enough to independent news reporting. “Overall . . ., local news coverage remains underfunded, understaffed and a low priority at most public radio and television stations, whose leaders have been unable to make or uninterested in making the case for investment in local news to donors and Congress,” they write.

But I think that the term "News" is too narrowly defined. Surely what people need locally is not more Irv Weinstein headlines but more context and connection?

KETC is doing this without blowing up the station. What has happened is that the work of the station is evolving into this connector role.

The really hard work was in "seeing" this role. Once we got it - the rest has happened naturally.

Disclosure - I am an adviser to KETC

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Follow us at KETC tonight on the mortgage crisis on Twitter

Tonight KETC will run an hour show on how communities are reacting to the ripple effect of the mortgage crisis. You can follow the show on Twitter @ketc

We will have the video on YouTube on Wednesday

KETC - The Engagement Begins

KETC, a client of mine, the Public TV Channel in St Louis, has been chosen by CPB to test how well a public TV station can be in Convening the wide community of its city to come together and help each other cope with a giant crisis. Here is a link to the background.

I am writing today to offer up an early report. This week we held the first on air/web town hall meeting.

For the first time St Louisans could see that they were not alone. The room was full of all sorts of people. St Louisans could see the enormous amount of help that was there for them. They could hear stories of all the things that could happen for bad or good. They could feel hope.

The show (links part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4) was masterful. First of all it set the context - it gave the whole story. Then the full range of risks and remedies were explored.

As I watched this show, I felt as I had after Robin's cancer diagnosis when we met the wonderful team of people who saved her life. I felt that while the situation was dire, that I might lose not my home but my wife, that we had the benefit of a great team and of the best that medicine could offer - we knew what we were up against. We knew that we had a chance. We had hope whereas before we had only fear.

I thought that I knew it all before the show. But I didn't. In an hour, Ruth had covered the full story.

The last segment was for me the most gripping. Here the show is opened up to the audience, to callers and those on the web. The dignity of the people and the panel was something to behold. The barriers between the helpers and the helped were eliminated.

The full impact was also revealed.

This is much more than a person losing their home. This is about the ripple effect that kills blocks, kills communities and in the end can doom the city. The ripple effect affects us all.

Next week we have a second show. This time we will focus on the the ripple effect - how can St Louisans work together to protect their communities? How can the people save their city?

Of course what you see on TV is merely the surface. If you look at the video, you will see The Swan - You will see the show but behind the scenes the feet are paddling hard under the surface.

The guys at KETC are paddling like fury all over the city and the state connecting people to help and more important connecting the help to the help. Have a look at the credits at the end of part 4.

This is the hard graft - many organizations, I call them Nodes of Trust, are meeting each other for the first time and seeing how much they can do to help each other do a better job.

Many are also seeing that the mortgage crisis itself is only part of a much more dangerous threat, the Ripple, that has the power to take the entire city down.

Many are starting to see that many who got caught were not foolish but unfortunate or worse exploited.

St Louisan are starting to feel that they might have a chance of beating this - a chance not because of false hope or exhortation but hope drawn from meeting other good men and women and seeing that together they can make an impact. Seeing that they are not helpless.

I think that KETC is on its way to prove out the hopes of CPB - that Public Media can be seen as a powerful force for good in their community. For who else can do this work? Who else can act as the convenor in these tough times?

Why are we working at KETC on the Mortgage Crisis?

Why is the KETC Mortgage Project so important?

The CSM posts this devastating article today - this is what really confronts us:

Some 44.5 million homes in the US now stand next to an empty house, resulting in a drop of at least $5,000 in property value per house. By that calculation, a total loss of home value of $220 billion across the US can be attributed to the vacancy problem.

"This is a man-made disaster that's had more dramatic impacts on real estate markets than natural disasters [have]," says Bruce Katz, a housing analyst at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington. "In a way, we have a lot of mini-Katrinas across the country.

John Robb says - From Atlanta's urban core to leafy neighborhoods filled with chirping crickets in Charlotte, N.C., some 2.2 million homes are expected to go through foreclosure – and stand empty – by the time the mortgage meltdown ends, according to Global Insight, an economic research firm. As the housing dominoes fall far from Wall Street, growing urban "ghost towns" of vacant houses are resulting in a costly crush of weeds, trash, and dereliction on a scale unseen in American cities since the Great Depression, economists say.

Is this not what we are working to prevent? Is this not the greatest threat to our way of life that we have experienced in our lifetime?

St Louis - The Mortgage Crisis - The Beacon KETC's "Newspaper" Partner

KETC's Partner in seeking to activate the help of community in the Mortgage Crisis in St Louis is a new online "Newspaper" - The Beacon.

St Louis' main Newspaper, the Dispatch, has been going down the road of many once great local Newspapers in America. Many of the more talented journalists have left and many of these, committed to serving the City they love and committed to remaining journalists, have formed a new online "newspaper" The Beacon.

If this was not itself "Interesting" - The Beacon and Channel 9, KETC and also working together to discover how an online newspaper and a Public TV Station can offer jointly something not yet seen - a digital partnership that will help each fill in the gaps that both have. KETC has no news room, the Beacon has only a limited video capabilty. Of course text, photos, video and sound are all digital.

With no presses to run and no distribution costs, the Beacon is a pure news play with none of the core embedded costs that are eroding the content aspects of most traditional papers. With a video partner with great outreach and with a grwoing social web experience, the hill to climb to find community and the full range of digital answers is less steep.

To make our partnership more real - both the Beacon and KETC also share the same offices - so as well as anything we might plan - serendipity will play a role.

We will discover together how such a partnership will work out. I doubt that this will be the only such experiment.

KETC - Mortgage Crisis Project - Getting Ready

We are beavering away getting ready for a launch at the beginning of July.

One of the tools that we are using to enable us all to work with each other across many departments, different places and different organizations is Ning. Ning is not a traditional project management tool but we are finding it very helpful.

Soon we will have not only the project team using it but also folks from several stations, CPB and PBS and a few friends who know a lot more than old Rob about reaching the hard to reach.

I think that this is a new way of running a project - where the client and the next to go can look under the hood while we are still making the car.

In essence the work looks like this:

The Big Idea: - Our research tells us that many can save their homes but are prevented because they do not know where to go for help that they can trust. Many who can be helped are shamed and don't want to put their hand up or are frozen. They have no one who has empathy who can help them find help.

Many cannot keep their homes. But they too are frozen with fear. This fear may well turn to resentment. Many are not directly affected but will be when many houses in their neighborhood are - at the moment they are stuck as individuals - how can they protect their own street? They need help.

The current problem - Most of the help is hard to find, finds you or is on the web. Most of it is "help" from "Vultures" or the people who "helped" get people into this mess.

What is Public TV's great Value? - We are the most trusted organization in town.

So what then is the work? - We can't give people money. We can't know all the answers. But we can find the help that people can trust and we can fortify the existing networks of trust to give people the best shot of finding help that they can trust.

So I think that our work is to find the 30 - 60 "Nodes of Trust" in St Louis - those people and those organizations that have the trust of each segment and form a trusted bond with them. If we can do this, then we can do "The Work" which is I think to help people find the help.

If we can do this, we will also have found a new relationship with our city. A relationship much more meaningful than bringing quality content. A relationship where we can reveal and strengthen the fabric of community and so equip it to cope with the harsh realities of our time.

Here then is a sequence of what we may see happen - all this work is done by the brilliant Valdis Krebs.

This is where we are now - this may be how your city is - there are institutions but they are not connected and these are only the big ones. In reality there are maybe hundreds of churches, beauty salons, youth centres whatever that are Nodes Of Trust.

Here is what I think we have to do this summer - reveal and connect the key nodes. At first it will be us going out to the and then revealing them to each other and to the public.

We plan to use Google Maps to do this. We will have a layer for each community. The Bosnians will have their map. The African Americans will have their map and so on. Each push pin will have as much data as possible and we will ask the public for more Nodes.

We will connect this network to the best and most trusted help that we can find. We are now digging into what is on offer and who can help in every area. We will use our ability to tell stories in print - see a new post of the Beacon - on Video - on the web and in person.

If we are fortunate - some of these Nodes will start to connect independently of us to each other.

I think this might be all that we can do this summer.

But here is my hope. That as this network becomes more self aware and as we help it find each other - then some kind of life will emerge. Like a nuclear reaction and that we will have been present at the birth of a star:

What could St Louis be capable of - if it now looked like this?

What would be the place of a public TV station - if we could have ben the midwife attending such a birth?

What could America be like if the 300 stations in the country could have this effect in the 300 major cities of the nation?

There is a lot to play for at a time when there is a lot at stake.

Over the next 7 days I will offer up more detail as it becomes available

KETC - The Housing Crisis project - Moving from Public TV to "Public" Media

Next week we will soft launch the web side of what we plan to do.

Here is a slideshow that outlines some of the principles that we are using as we set off - it looks at that I think our real work of the future is - helping enrich the trusted connections in St Louis.

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KETC and First Robotics

When Jack told me about the documentary that KETC is doing about Robotics, I was interested. But until today I had no idea how interested others are!!!!!!!

Check out the passion here.