I think that The Audience is a mass media construct. So asking the Question How we grow the audience is asking an old and irrelevant question.
The deeper issue is how do we become vital to people?
For if we are vital we must be doing something very important and we can also be sure of their attachment and hence their support.
Attachment means participation - we can see this is the Haiti situation - Facebook and Twitter enable us to become part of the News. Even the US Navy is using Facebook on the USS Carl Vinson with nearly 4,000 people following to date.
Andy Carvin and Laura Conaway now at Rachel Maddow prior at Planet Money are showing us all how to use participation in news to get more attachment. Andy has maybe the most trusted news gathering system on the planet right now - and what did this all cost? Very little! What does it mean? It means that he has the deep reach into the issues on the ground and surrounding the story.
Haiti is reminding us what we learned during the Tsunami, then the China earthquake, that social media using the power of community is the future of news. I think that we will see in Haiti that it will also be the future of how NGO's and Government s and the Military get coordinated.
No more central control - but looking at real time emergence.
This will work I think with entertainment as well. Lets look at A Science series such as the new one on PBS - The Human Spark - this is in fact part of a range of programs dealing with how we became to be human - each program on its own is nice but what if all the related content was aggregated and a local series of face to face and online discussion groups were hosted? What if some of the key people could then tour and talk directly with the people who are not the Audience but the true members of a group?
Now you have both a global and a local passionate community focused on an issue. This issue could be anything. A composer - Mozart! An Author - Jane Austen.Genres - Detectives.
But the process is the same - its not about A program. It is about a passionate community. They will have as much to say or to contribute as any programmer.
But what about the people who like nothing about what we do in the programming arena? How do we serve all?
The answer I think is a fractal version of the idea above. Public Service Media.
We have seen the beginnings of what John Proffitt is calling Public Service Media in the Facing the Mortgage Crisis. Here by helping everyone we get attachment from people who will never listen or watch our programs. Here we get diversity legitimately. For years we have been beating ourselves up for not having a larger Hispanic or African American audience. That is all about content. But if you help an entire community cope with jobs, with housing, with feed and power. Then we affect everyone.
Everyone does not have to want to watch the News Hour or listen to Car Talk. But we all have a stake in where we live and our lives.
Stations that offer meaning in both news and culture and in terms of the polis will; get the support that they need. Stations that offer transactions will get the crumbs.
So for me the bottom line is this: We don't want a bigger audience - defined as passive transactional consumers of transactional content delivered on our terms.
We want to have a deep attachment with our community - defined as their active participation in news and culture in safe places created by us for them - 24/7 on their terms
