Today I posted our 3 reports to the members of America's Public Radio on Sandbox - our private intranet - that is open to all those that have participated in the discovery process that we called "New Realities". At the end of this month, after the NPR board and time for the community to talk about this amongst themselves, we will make the reports public for all to see.
As a lead I wanted to tell you a bit about what we did to find our way in this confusing time for everyone in media. For everyone in media is struggling to find their place in a new reality.
I would like to share with you how we in Public Radio set out to find our place. In so doing - you too may find a way to your own.
I am going to begin by providing you with some context as to the dynamics of Public Radio in the US. Then I will share with you some of the questions that we asked ourselves and then I will talk about the approach that we used to find the answers.
What is Public Radio in the US?
Public Radio in America is not a state run monolith like the BBC, CBC or ABC. It is a genuine community structure. More than 300 organizations operate local radio stations. Most of these organizations are owned by Universities or School Boards. The rest are owned by local community boards. Most of these stations have less than 20 employees. Some however are larger and have over 100. Many are one offs and operate as stand alones. Some like Minnesota Public Radio are local regional networks. Many operate a public TV station as well.
Holding all of this together is a national satellite distribution system that is owned by all the stations and is operated on their behalf by a subsidiary of NPR. Anchoring the local programming are a number of organizations that specialize in creating national programs. Some of you know Prairie Home Companion offered by Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) Largest of these is NPR with over 800 employees. NPR is based in Washington. NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered are two news magazines that bookend the day on many stations. NPR was the child of the stations but is now much larger than any station. NPR does not broadcast directly. While huge in Public Radio terms, NPR is tiny when compared to the Commercial Media that it competes with.
Until recently, the economics of public radio were simple, if awkward. Your local station would periodically have "Pledge Week". The same experience that most of know who watch PBS in Canada. The week is given over to begging for our dollars to support the programming that we like. About 10% of the audience nationally respond and give enough money to enable the stations to pay for their programming and cover their operating costs. Listeners pledge to their local stations who put on national programming that they pay for with the pledge money.
The audience for public radio has grown substantially in the last 10 years from about 15 to 30 million. It is comprised of well educated people on the whole but its main characteristic is that its audience are curious. They have become fed up with the pablum, inanity and spin of commercial radio. Public Radio has become the most trusted source of news in the US and has been attracting some of the best journalists to its ranks such as Ted Koppel - who themselves are fed up with spin and trivia.
In the last year however, listener growth has halted. Some say that public radio has become too middle aged and too bland. With more choice, maybe people are going elsewhere? Many stations and NPR are trying new avenues such as Podcasting and Vcasting. Some are trying Blogging. Some like MPR have enlisted 17,000 volunteer Public Insight Journalists to help augment their newsroom.
So what is the problem?
Imagine you are a small station. What would happen if your listeners went direct to NPR or to a Podcast and bypassed you? Did NPR have a secret plan? Could you trust anything they said?
What would happen if you were NPR? Would you want to try being a direct broadcaster? Could you afford not to experiment? What would happen to trust in the system if NPR experimented? Should NPR make its future with the stations or not - how would you know was the right call anyway? If you moved too slow, would you lose it all. If you moved too fast would you lose support? There were relationship minefields everywhere.
What does the audience really want? Is this all about technology? Is there in fact a web 2.0 of media that we are overlooking?
Can we expect to rely on government for a lot of support? How can we in the midst of all this turbulence rely on the support of our members? Is just good programing enough? What is good programming today anyway? How does the Long tail affect us? What would an endless dial and clock mean?
What were we anyway? We call ourselves a "system" but are we really a system or are we merely a collection of individuals that do the same thing? We talk about our members but are they really members or givers of money?
Our biggest problem was that even if one clever executive or consultant could answer these questions correctly - who would ever believe her?
How could we find answers to these questions that all could trust? Did we even have the right questions? What about you? Does what you do look as if it is about to be disrupted? How would you know what to do in such a way that you could trust the result?
The Wisdom of Crowds
So instead of doing a Moses, we decided to ask the opinion of nearly 1,000 people. We bet that if we used a process that was deeply engaging and that did not force people to defend their turf, we might have a chance of having the right questions and the right answers emerge.
After 10 months of engagement - I think that we have seen both the right questions and the right answers emerge.
Tomorrow I will describe how we did this.
Technorati Tags: Community, NPR, Organization, Podcasting, Public Radio, Wisdom of Crowds, Radio, Web 2.0
