One of the core values that public broadcasting holds is its ability to serve local communities. It is what distinguishes those in public media from their more commercial brothers and sisters. However, it also a truism that, confoundedly enough, that public broadcasting believes that doesn’t know how to connect with diverse audiences.

It is a very strange circumstance that has stations knowing the community, but not making a tangible connection with important elements the audience. Which of those two statements are true? How could they possibly both be true at the same time? From a community organizing point-of-view if you cannot connect with important elements of the audience, then you truly are not serving the community at all; that public broadcasting is failing its core mission, and that fact will catch up with it sooner rather than later.

However, I do not think things are quite that dire. I think that real problem is that public broadcasting actors truly believe in a community service mission, but just are terrible in putting their role, their value add, into terms that anybody outside of public broadcasting could possibly recognize as a net positive. The spirit is there, but getting anybody to believe it needs some serious work.

At my last employer, at a nonprofit focused on utilizing technology to fight poverty, I spent a considerable amount of time building and maintaining community relationships. This experience has given me a unique perspective on how to leverage and sustain connections with the community. That experience also taught me to clearly recognize that even if I had the right combination of resources, I might not be the best person to create and manage the relationship. The first rule of working with communities is building trust with communities that have their own rules, values and goals. You have to listen to be heard, and give respect to receive it.

My goal in every interaction with local organizations was to find the right balance of “asks & gives” that resulted in a perception of a ‘positive net value proposition’. The outcome being that the community organization should be able to clearly articulate the reason that they should spend their time, attention and precious resources to work together. The second rule is that each party has their own calculus of determining whether they are receiving more than they are giving…and recognizing that the calculus utilized is largely independent of the others.

The goal of any community engagement strategy is get the partner to not only agree to work together, but announce the partnership with what they are gaining rather than what they are giving.

One note before going further: there are a multitude of local stations that are doing a wonderful job of community engagement. This essay, if successful in its endeavor, should provide additional opportunities to raise these best practices for the system to learn from and utilize.

The Environment
Before jumping into observations about how public broadcasting stations can work with community organizations it should noted that the frenetic, resource stretched, limited attention environment of public broadcasting is matched on the community and social service side. Local staffs in community-based organizations (CBOs) are fully engaged in their own mission, raising their own resources and serving too many people with too few resources. They have little time to engage in intellectual exercises and are always focused on the bottom line outcomes of tangible accomplishments.

I believe the key to working with CBOs is to utilize the same framework that stations use to evaluate whether to take the next step and spend treasure and time in a partnership. Just turn it around. Community engagement should not take as a given, rather a public broadcasting station must produce an explicit value proposition to the local community and CBOs. What are you asking for and why should someone listen (let alone agree and do something about it)?

The starting point for constructing a proposition is to conceive of the community’s needs and wants, rather than your own. It is vital that a station be very, very clear in what it is offering to a CBO, and sometimes that relationship calculus will be a net positive for public broadcasting, but also that some partnerships will be a net negative, loss leaders for the future.

Local Public Broadcasting’s Value Proposition
As stations reach out into the community they are finding that CBOs and others already have the beginnings of what is the explicit value proposition for their engagement. Whether these are the same that stations themselves perceive as their value is not the point. Again, it is the opportunity to build a convergence of values. From a community perspective there is perception of three core values that public broadcasting offers:

• The Bullhorn – as respected broadcasters with infrastructure that has the potential to reach all residents CBOs value the opportunity to reach the whole audience in an economical manner. While some advocates will want to engage in editorial processes, the majority of potential partners want to leverage the bullhorn with co-created and sponsored information.

• As Storytellers – following from the first point is the ability for station personnel that understand media to provide creative support in crafting content, messages, information and action-oriented content. While many in public broadcasting bemoan the capacity to be creative storytellers, the fact remains that most CBOs focus on good service, not good communication.

• The Alternative – related to the issues above, many see public broadcasting as a viable alternative for original programming for the community, including in the native language. While not using the same language, CBOs naturally understand “public service media” and want to leverage local stations to create information services for their constituencies.

Leveraging Community Assets
On the other side of the balance sheet, there are a number of opportunities for local stations to leverage community partnerships to complete important service objectives. The key to utilizing these locally native talents and tools is to utilize them on co-founded projects that eventually lead to more integration in the future.

• Translation – whether crowd-sourcing or working directly with CBOs that represent minority language groups, the community can provide support to translate materials of a local station. (e.g. WGBH’s Forum Network programming being translated independently) This is especially true where those materials provide clear advantage to a particular community or fits within a curriculum/program services.

• Community Profile – there are a variety of techniques, some intensive and others conversational, that allow a station to discern and ultimately reflect the local communities’ needs, wants & interests. They key is conversation continually happening, than a formalized framework. Form follows function.

• Public Insight Network – while APM has created a public insight network, this framework, whether leveraging APM’s tools (which are pretty darn good) or not, is a great opportunity for building advisors – formerly & informally – to provide deeper, more specific advice, as well as sources of content.

• Outreach & Marketing – whether a national program service, a tent pole series or a purely local program there is some interest group/lifestyle segment that will be interested in that specific content element.

• Local Services & Contracts – if local stations work well with communities and start to define themselves as open community assets, what will follow is the opportunity to tap into new income sources, whether governmental or philanthropic.

How To Make it Happen?
OK, so great. Very interesting, but how to make it happen? While people pay lots of money to consultants to help them sort out the answer, there is a core truth that every community engagement is different. There are general guidelines that have and are being discerned from community organization and engagement programs. I am going to try to summarize some of them below, but frankly the key is staying away from high-stakes conversations in favor of ongoing, multiple iterations of discussions. Some operating guidelines for stations include:

• Audience - Clearly identify specific audience segments that you want to reach and engage; reach out and meet with multiple organizations and find the one that matches your station’s engagement style, but has an honest representation of the community. (There are untold number of organizations that purport to represent the community, but underneath have limited respect and awareness of that community.)

• The Conversation – Stations should leverage multiple opportunities for input and output, including rapid, low-risk cycles (“otherwise pick up the phone”). Spend the time through lunches, coffees, tours (everyone likes a tour) and meetings where you get to know them, how they work, what are their needs. Don’t go in high and fast with “we want to engage”, but start low and slow with “who are you”, “how did you get here” and “what do you think about ________”.

• Go to Them – While everyone likes to go into a studio – it is so outside the normal course of life – bringing an audiences into the station is only a starting point. In the world of portable equipment, where a Mac with Final Cut Pro is replacing AVID studios is easy to assemble a ‘digital media in a backpack’. The resulting content might not have as high production values, but for many community organizations we need to understand that the quality of the information is the highest priority, not its production quality. The basic formula is engagement/relevancy + information = action.

• Community Planning Processes – stations should identify three to four critical community planning processes and get involved in the work. These are wonderful opportunities to define a net positive value proposition, as well as loss leaders that may result in funding in the future. Some of the most important that match a range of public service media goals include emergency management, workforce development, local district education planning and healthcare needs/program assessments.

• Hire Right – next time someone leaves the station and hire a trained and experienced community organizer (preferably one that has some tech familiarity). As a former community developer…well, we come cheap. A very good, experienced organizer can be had for $35,000 with health benefits.

• Recruitment – even if you are university licensee or other flavor, target specific board seats for community representatives to fill, specifically with people who can go toe-to-toe with other business and government leaders on the board. Beyond the board there are umpteen opportunities for broader community advisory boards, as well as project specific community conversations.

Over the next several years stations will either revitalize themselves or find a somewhat meaningless existence of being irrelevant. A key opportunity to avoid the fate of self-referential loathing is to invigorate a community conversation. Some stations are doing this through costly capital investment in new facilities that represent a new physical manifestation in the community. While these are fantastic, splashy endeavors, I think that there are just as effective methods for the station ‘on a budget’. These start with removing public broadcasting as the center of the conversation, and replacing that with new conceptions of community needs and how public broadcasting will present itself as solving local problems not just reflecting them.

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I recently had the privilege of attending a small dinner with Jack Dorsey, Chairman and Founder of Twitter. Hearing him speak about how Twitter is being used beyond the likes of Ashton Kutcher and P.Diddy as a tool in “solving the big problems” was thought provoking. He told us about a growing number of unlooked for and unheralded uses, from emergency managers in LA and San Francisco integrating Twitter into their emergency planning, to poets and writers in New York using it as a new distribution network and robots speaking to each other (and the rest of us) in Boston.

The genius is that this extremely simple tool has spawned extremely complex opportunities for consumers, which are further complicated by new sets of relationships, applications and linguistics. (@RT @grrlboy I totally agree! #topeka). Twitter is a good window into our dramatic new digital landscape by the simple fact that it is so compatible with other forms of media. Thus we see the beauty of chaos theory, from simplicity comes complexity.

The world, as it always was, it a much more complex place than that poor relationship.

When we think about digital audiences, the so-called digital natives, we have to engage more dimensions, such that shift our thinking from old-school demographics to more complex lifestyle-centric groupings. As referenced above, the complexity of the digital audience is and was equally true in the broadcast world, but conveniently hidden behind the blunt instruments of media metrics. Today we know the digital natives more often express loyalty to interests, fancies and attraction then they do with the schedules printed in TV Guide or demographer/marketers labels.

Digital natives are breaking new ground on constructing, what my former boss, Rey Ramsey, has called a ‘21st Century Ecosystem’; where digital and traditional media blend with each other, but also have deep connections with offline manifestation of actual human interactions and transactions. A new digital ecosystem is centered on the consumers who now have easy access to the tools that allow them to construct their own universe of information and services, resulting in a complex deep ecology of people, application and the bits of data that trail behind them.

Ironically, the rush to push broadcast content online now only has reinforced the formation of this new ecosystem as consumers mash, remix, share, comment, tweet and post. For many broadcasters they feed video into the digital world thinking that it is a nice sedate house with a television inside. Actually, they feed their content into a saw mill that chops it into hundreds of jagged little blocks that are the fuel for millions of camp fires where diverse tribes of online consumer huddle.

Today people time-shift, place-shift and device-shift all of their media streams to meet not only the requirements of their complex lives, but also their own fancies. This is the essential lesson of the digital ecosystem – that it is a highly personal, highly referential and individual to the person in charge. Some think of this as fragmentation, but in reality it is the creation of a new order that requires new sets of analytics to perceive useful patterns, niches and groupings; a new digital ecology.

Rather than “punching through the din” of media, the future is following the consumer where they lead us. Rather than unifying the audience we need to provide varieties of multiplatform and multi-application content that escapes through multiple rivulets out into the world. And rather than to try to continually experiment to discover the secret formula, the audience desires the high-quality information that PBS, NPR, PRI, APM and stations are already producing, but perhaps not in the containers that are so familiar to the system.

So, what are the elements of a digital ecosystem? While no expert – because really is no expert frankly – the average digital native lives in a continuum of media inputs and outputs. The continuum travels from simple/quick and immediate (Twitter) through appointment (and one-way) media (broadcast). The rise and fall of usage of any particular media stream moves with the rhythm of the individual’s day. A few minutes in the morning yields a Facebook update, watching an episode of The Office on a iPod on the train to work, a shared video out through multiple networks after getting an email at the office, twittering during a business presentation, watching NewHour in the evening on an HD TV while keeping up with your friends via Twittering online, Facebook and email at the same time. (And then supplement that with Hulu, more iPod and Nintendo DS when someone travels.)

And even this picture becomes more complex when we think about the all of hooks that are being created between Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, et.al. Content is fungible and as producers we need to respect and understand that it is an opportunity to provide additional user value.

The multiple dimensions of the digital ecosystem may be confusing to some, but one of the core lessons that public broadcasting stations must wrestle with an ecology defined by the combination of bandwidth, device, time/availability, digital skill level and lifestyle-identification.

The goal of programming is not to hand-off promotion to promotion to promotion, rather producing content that comfortably can be distributed within the ecosystem. While editorial may, largely, remain the same across topics, the quality and temperature of the content may undergo significant shifts as it moves from ecological niche to niche.

This is not a widely understood strategic opportunity within public broadcasting, but one to watch is Tom Karlo at KPBS (San Diego) as he merges his television, radio and online content producers into one unit. Rather than forcing the same story out onto different mediums he is weighing lifestyle, access and opportunity to repackage and re-report content out on various platforms and syndication channels. Tom’s experiment in San Diego should be watched by all of us for lessons and good ideas.

The adoption of robust digital ecosystem development is not an easy leap. While many cite a fundamental generational barrier (perhaps also an ego barrier?) to understanding and operating in this ecosystem, there are other obstacles that public broadcasting must address.

A key problem is that there is no effective single package of metrics that allow public broadcasting to pull back to a high enough level to identify clear digital ecology trends and niches. It is not that there is a lack of techniques for this type of analysis. Our friends in political campaigns, business intelligence departments and financial market trackers do a pretty good job of understanding and exploiting trends data. The core problem is that our media metrics have spent too long in front of the TV; they are fat, slow and tired. This is an area of opportunity for public broadcasting to again lead the way.

The new digital ecosystem requires that public broadcasting turn its strategies on it head from a set of “appointment media” programming to variety of engagements – including appointment media - with audience that allow them to break the old rules and formulas of content consumption, distribution and participation. Some implications for public broadcasting include:

• Develop and publish editorial and content policies that recognize the digital ecology of its consumers; provide a range of editorial content delivered on multiple platforms aimed at interconnecting interest areas, but also ‘niche-only’ content;

• Understand the appropriate use of content creation and distribution tools to tell a story, such as layering high cost/static techniques (e.g. documentaries) with moderate/dynamic tools (blogs, social networking) with cheap/immediate opportunities (Twitter).

• Use the opportunity to create ‘digital only’ or ‘digital first’ content as a gateway and starting point for more robust story-telling that may involve multiple future platforms;

• Embrace digital metrics not as a ‘winner or loser’ measure, rather as a guide to refining digital ecology strategies. But also break the traditional model by using a variety of metrics and analytics, such as BBC’s trust measures, transactional data, online and offline focus groups and consumer engagement tools to really understand the patterns and niches;

• Leverage the investment of others to distribute and syndicate your content, whether it is PBS, NPR, Google, Microsoft or other technologies. The goal is branded content playing everywhere, and not ownership of the pathways; (For a more radical view read http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/12/pbsCouldBecomeACauseForThe.html)

• Accept that your input of content into the world might not be the last say; you are not writing a canon, rather creating high-quality information that will only last if it offers an interesting, important (and dare I say it…entertaining) perspective;

• Leverage the public broadcasting brand by attracting, associating and curating (I still hate that word, let us minimize our brand association with museums) the BEST content on the web. Users want a trusted editor that can help explain the context of the world and provide some sense of navigation and action, a perfect role for public service media!

The new Digital Ecosystem in massive, confusing and shifts constantly and rapidly, which can cause terrible indigestion in anyone who attempts to “own the space”. One of the key lessons that we must embed throughout the public broadcasting system is that we must place more trust and expend more energy in understanding the individual/user/consumer. We must sweep away the days of brilliant minds declaiming from the mountain top out to the wilderness. Time to put on our safari hat and jump in.

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It has been awhile since I posted to this blog...partially because of work, but also because of my transition from One Economy as head of media. I am moving onto a new position starting April 20th, and once I land and understand the relationship of my external blog and the new position I will start to write more regularly.

Not to be coy, I can write about it later in April, but the new job will rock. I will have a front-row seat on how public broadcasting is evolving towards a new definition of itself. The term public service media has been bandied about quite a bit to describe how public broadcasting looks as it swings into this century.

It might seem strange to some to think about the evolution of public broadcasting over the next 100 years. There are always dire predictions floating about the fate of public broadcasting and that at any moment it might disappear.

I think that being alarmed about the disposition of the politics around the $400 million or so that comes from the federal government is useful, as it keeps your elbows sharp and eyes focused. However, public broadcasting is a $2.5 billion dollar industry and whatever the political winds a public media system, albeit in a very different configuration, will remain.

Ones view is that Armageddon occurs with substantial cuts to public funding, but is that as things change whether the fundamentals of public media remain strong, powered by digital platforms that allow a new vitality of participation coupled with low-cost entry barriers.

My own position is that the United States and Americans in general are far better off with a robust, engaged public broadcasting system and that comes from having Americans support the system. It is just plain good economics and politics to have an alternative to commercial media that is supported by government.

However, the biggest transformation that public broadcasting needs to undertake is not embracing digital - these are merely tools - but rather truly entering into service to the public. Public broadcasting must go from a "nice to have" to a "must have" for Americans over the age of 10.

What is not being violently discussed with any detail is what does "public service" actually mean?

I am going to write more about my definition for public service, but I think one really, really good sign is the leadership at CPB, most notable Pat Harrison who put the money down for the Economic Response grant program, which is on top of the work already funded at KETC on foreclosures. That type of immediate response and relevance directly touches upon the definition of public service.

I also applaud the work that NPR, PBS, Frontline, WNET and others are undertaking around restructuring news coverage and interfaces with local journalism. Also the work over at PBS Interactive in building the common video platform/community, COVE, and all of the tools spilling out of Station Remote Control.

These are the mixture of tools, platforms and strategies that begin to build the structure of "public service media." However, let's not forget the overall plan for all of the progress being made in assembling bits of the structure. What is missing for me is the heart of the change. That we turn over our actions to be in service to the public; their needs, helping to expose new opportunities and navigate around barriers for the fundamental purpose of improving lives. Right in the heart of our founding documents is the notion of "the pursuit of happiness", and this is the test that public service media must constantly put itself.

It is a bright future and public broadcasting, from the smallest station to the largest national player, has so many assets, talent and passion that the next few years are going to be extremely fun.

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I have become a semi-avid Twitter user over the past several weeks as a way to take notes during talks that I found interesting, get the word out on our work and occasionally relate what is strange and wonderful. While I don't use it too frequently, I have found it convenient and a good way to distribute information.

Using Twitter has made me wonder what is the smallest unit of information that is useful to help people make a decision or be "informed"?

Twitter is 'micro-blogging' within 140 characters, about three short sentences. While not clear to me the character limit on a Facebook status it seems they are only effective in one sentence. Most video news clips are not much longer than one to two minutes.

We are increasingly parsing our existence into smaller or smaller units and then distributing those small packets out to our social networks in new ways, back through Facebook, onto Youtube, personal Podcasts and so on.

Public media has always excelled with the long form; the hour and half documentary; the 58 minute program; and even the smallest unit, the 28 minute talk show. This form is effective in implementing instructional design, communicating important contextual information and helping to viewers to connect to the material.

This, of course, all goes to hell when you cut the material down into a two minute clip. But does it lose its value as a piece of information? Does it lose it's public purpose? I think that it probably does because the content was never meant to be digested in the digital age. The fact that it was recorded digitally and posted on the Internet means little other than it is more "distributable".

The problem lies in the fact that while the Internet has begun to make the short-form documentary (<5 minutes) more than just a demo reel for filmmakers, we still have an emerging opportunity to Think Smaller about public purpose content. How small can we go to help fulfill our goals of education and action?

The right answer is probably "it depends"; depends on what is the purpose of the content - education? information? skill-building? advocacy? It depends on the audience and how well you know them. It depends on the level of action/outcome you expect.

One role of ultra-short content is as a teaser to lead people into a fuller form of content. The Facebook status is a great example that leads people to more information. Another role is the short clip to teach a discrete step or a single piece of information, stripped bare. It could have the purpose of linking people together, long chains of individuals each connected by a small content element, like electrons orbiting a nucleus. (Or better yet, chains of quarks.)

One of the things that I most liked about the Internet when it started was the hyper-link, which for me was taking small pieces of information and linking to a related piece of information and linking to another piece of information and so on and so on and so on...until you built a wholly different appreciation of the subject. From the Blue Whale to textile manufacturing in ten easy steps.

In the rush for complexity and structure I think we may have lost the the appreciation of small units of information. Perhaps it is time again to reformulate the greatness of smallness?

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There was a recent blog post from Steve Bowbrick at BBC Common Platform about the obstacles to "sharing content, technology and resources with the outside world" that is particularly practical here in the States. Steve's graphic of the obstacles he has cataloged:


Besides the very nice handwriting, he makes the point:

The number one obstacle, if the many conversations I’ve had here at the BBC over the last few weeks are anything to go by, is rights. Rights rights rights. Rights rights rights rights rights. The Gordian knot of multiple, overlapping rights regimes and multiple historic rights owners for every asset in the BBC’s catalogue.

Here is the start of my response:

The rights issue is a big obstacle and one that folks just hate to address because if involves the economic interests of folks we love to love, namely artists, documentary filmmakers, etc. and folks that we love to hate, such as Hollywood, commercial media, reality shows, etc.
It also involves lawyers, which can drive media folks batty…so there are lots of obstacles to just getting up enough energy to address the point.

However, there is also another issue that tends to get swept under the rug a bit: “To what purpose?” Sharing is great for self-expression as Lessig suggests, but the leap from “re-expressing” to original content is not too wide or insurmountable. If folks want to create, they can create without having to go to far afield in finding cleared or free content.

Here is what I would ask us to work on: let’s carefully define the purpose of sharing and follow that through the thicket of rights, especially with the BBC or US public broadcasting. If sharing leads to a substantial benefit for a definable public purpose (i.e. fighting poverty) then that should be the guiding point for both pursuing the collaboration, as well as modeling organizational behavior.

For full discussion on Steve's blog here and on, oddly enough, Flickr here.

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My blogging has slowed down in the past several weeks as work has picked up and there has been disasters all about -- Hurricane Ike and then the markets. And then the big one, the election. This has been an interesting time for One Economy of late, as well as public media in general.

I am not sure that I feel that our response to the times has been quite adequate. Public media has spent a lot of time preparing for the election and the results have been impressive. Everything from the overnight defacto role of You Tube, to the impressive "election centers" of both the commercial stations, as well as the PBS Vote 2008 and NPR's Election 2008. In an upcoming blog post I will pull together my notes comparing how public media's digital coverage of the election compares to their higher profile counterparts.

What has rocked through our collective world has been the series of hurricanes, with the most serious being Ike slamming into the Texas and Louisiana, and then the one-two punch of the economic crisis.

On one hand, I was so very proud of our team, especially the lead, Colin Lovett in pulling together our Ike response to the people displaced or cut off in their homes in Texas. We put up the Hurricane Ike Help Center and continually improved the site over the few days out of the launch. What we did that was great was deploy a team of young interns to explore and identify open resources for people in the community, such as pharmacies, grocery stores, health clinics, etc.

Paired with our work is the work of Andy Carvin and his huge array of volunteers at the Hurricane Information Center. As much as One Economy created a hurricane center based on a controlled workforce, Andy successfully leveraged a huge network of supporters, volunteers and a true "open source" community effort to create something special.

However, One Economy has been slower on the economic crisis. Keep your eyes open for our response. At the same time public media has not done an impressive job either. We have all been describing how big the economic disaster wave is ("My, my, my...that is certainly a big wave."), but not focused on the impact that wave is going to have on the families we ultimately serve.

One exception is what the Washington Post is doing with their Hard Times series. I have been very impressed by the quality of reporting and the presentation online. It is effective, compelling and, most importantly, authentic. It rings true with what we are feeling in the country today.

These are the challenges that we face. These are the challenges that are the most important for us to address everyday.

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