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, 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 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?
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.
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
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.
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!!!!!!!
Here is a 4 part story of how KETC - Channel 9 - St Louis is doing its own part to discover the "New World" of Public Media.
Part 1 - The results so far and the vision that is pulling us into the future
Part 2 - The What - the tools and our approach
Part 3 - The Culture & the Values that underpin it all
Part 4 - The Future - what KETC is planning and the big idea
My thanks to Jack and to everyone at KETC - What a privilege to work with you.
On Monday Ken Burns came to St Louis where he previewed The War
300 invited guests were there including many vets.
But by live webcasting the show KETC was able to offer access to Ken throughout St Louis and the US (The Archive show is here Unfortunately we cannot show you the hour of material that Ken brought with him - but there is 40 minutes of KB talking about how the series was made, his views on war, his views on art and his views on public television - it's just a great program!) .
For KETC I think that this show is historic. It's one thing to know that we have to reach out on the web and to help community form. It is another thing to act on this idea. I talked to the gang yesterday and they were so pumped. All this happened from scratch after they decided to do this only 3 weeks ago. Until then, it was juts going to be a show with 300 invitees.
We used two cameras and linked the web into the show, just like Christies link outside bidders into global auctions, with 3 people at computers passing on questions to Ken to Patrick Murphy the host. Because we could not use the film that Ken brought with him, we then cut into the webcast other footage. Returning to Ken for the question period at the end.
I know that for some this is old hat, but for us this is our first step in learning how to combine a public meeting, with TV and the web. The barriers of a fixed schedule have been breached for us. We know now that we can use the web to expand what we can offer the public. We can begin to work now down the Long Tail. We now know that we can offer the viewers great material whenever they want it and also to bring them into what we do - many of the questions for Ken came from out of town.
Now the question is - what next? How does this apply to our daily lives as a station? Where do we go from here?
We will let you know.
On Monday, Ken Burns visits St Louis to tell us more about his new documentary, The War, that will air in the fall. He will be speaking to an audience of about 300. KETC will film his talk and field questions from St Louisans who can ask them online. We will stream the Q & A session locally. We just did not have the bandwidth yet to go national - we are learning. Later next week we will go national. In an immediate sense, we seek to help Ken Burns to meet not just those who can fit into the space but all in St Louis who wish to become involved. In a wider sense, we are taking a first small step in finding our how to make the move from broadcast to engagement and how to add the web to the air and to a face to face meeting. I will let you know how it all went
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