Risk & The Relentless Pursuit of the New

There is a lot of talk about innovation in public service media these days. It is hard to even have a conversation about the use of technology or digital media without tying it back to the development or adoption of a new innovative technology or practice.

Before I go on further I should make sure that I am defining my terms. When I reference 'innovation' there is a whole continuum of what could be construed innovative or more properly put, perceived as innovative. (What is innovative to one person is old hat to...yeah, you know.) The innovation stretches from adoption of new practices to new insights within established systems to the adoption of new technologies.

Today, it seems that most of the time we use "innovation" as a blunt instrument within public purpose media. I think we generally define innovation with the following formula:

Leading Edge Technology + Repurposed Information = Innovation

I feel we have put a premium on the use of technology applications that re-serve information - data points, content, transactions...in new and newer ways. (Is this innovation? Yes, through a particular lens.) In fact, I think we are in the "pile-on" phase of this type of innovation, where we are getting 64 flavors of community tweets, events, opinions, news mash-ups, etc.

And this premium of this particular type of innovation is often times amply rewarded.

For example, just the other day the James L. and John S. Knight Foundation just recently announced over $2.7 million in grants to the Knight News Challenge winners in 2010. This is the [Correction: fourth] year of the funding that will eventually invest $25 million over five years into innovative journalism tools, platforms and technologies. While Knight is the core funder of journalism-technology innovation, they are joined by the Ford Foundation, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, the William Penn Foundation, the McCormick Foundation, among others.

Now this starting to sound that I am cynical to innovation. That I am complaining about Innovation for Innovation's Sake. I am not!

I saw the evolution of technology and digital media tools in my own work. I remember early on quite diligently researching and manually entering the addresses, hours of operation and description of resources in The Beehive. Then we built an API and a robust database service called the Resource Locator. And now Mark Murphy and the Technology Team the team at One Economy recently launched the Resource Locator as a virtual reality service on Layer. This is good stuff and I really applaud how they have taken the basic foundations we laid and made it into something experimental, interesting and unique.

And when I look at the Knight NewsChallenge winners I am excited to see what they are going to roll-out in the next several months. It is a very, very exciting time to be a part of digital media and in particular public service media.

The Challenge of Risk

However, I am also a bit concerned about the LACK of conversation about risk, and in particular the management and sustainability of continuing this relentless innovative focus.

While innovation has clearly created mission value, there is also a question of how it will create lasting (asset or income) value. There is little discussion or analysis paid to the life cycle of the technology innovation, the maintenance/operating costs of the programs or the total cost of ownership.

This is not an argument against taking innovation or slowing it down, but an argument that inherent in the act of innovation is the need for intentional risk assessment and management. I have increasingly been seeing stories about the "future skills of journalists" such as this story here and this one here. And while I think these articles make great points (love that MediaShift), I worry that I am not reading more about urging the adoption of the "business skills" within journalism or digital media.

I am not suggesting every digital media practitioner learn "managerial accounting" and "financial analysis." But we sometimes seem to treat digital media as either a playground - an earnest and serious one - or as a something that has to be done because everyone else is or that it is expected of us. (Sigh...there is always an implied sigh at the end when someone expresses this thought.)

This is a disservice to what is an essential element of digital media, which is that it is a business.

A nonprofit is still a business, and frankly one that requires staff to be more entrepreneurial than most companies. I should know since I have been working at nonprofits for the past - oh God, don't say it - 14 years.

Public service media does not have an innovation problem...or at least one anymore. What we have is a risk management problem. As a group, an industry, a system...we are not properly arming ourselves with the necessary enterprise skills, tools and perspective to make our efforts sustainable.

One of the fundamental facts of working in public service media is that the mission attracts,

drives and sustains you. Another fundamental fact is that if you don't manage your cash flow, watch your balance sheet, look for operational efficiencies and diversify your revenue you are going to fail.

When we fund or lead innovation we are often looking at the wrong thing. Or perhaps more aptly put, we are not looking at the full picture. Innovation is a shiny object. What we should be paying attention to is a portfolio of assets, liabilities and the transactions that connect the two.

While overly simplistic, below are some broad

areas that hold the keys to proper analysis of return on innovation. Within these areas we should be building both metrics and analysis that tie traditional business financials with the increasingly sophisticated digital media analytics. We need an Innovators Dashboard that enables both funders and managers to understand the risk and rewards of building and implementing innovative digital media practices.

This type of rigorous analysis is just emerging and there has not been to date a concerted effort at building the type of best practices needed. When I speak to senior managers at public purpose media companies I often ask the question "what metrics do you look at on a regular basis?" The unfortunate answer is that they hardly look at any metrics; more often than not they are guiding themselves and their small companies forward by feel, grit and determination. It is a worrying trend that I, as both a funder and digital media person, should start to address. My hope is that there others out there who want to help out.

The starting point is well away from the funder's decision-making process. It needs to start at the most basic level, and that is the innovator him/herself. We can and should continue to innovate, but every innovator should also take the time to learn the skills they need to make that innovation sustainable. Any entrepreneur has multiple personalities: artist, hustler, visionary, salesperson... Now is the time to add one more: business person.

A Response to David Sasaki's Very Interesting Post

On November 18th, David Sasaki posted a very compelling post titled "Toward a National Journalism Foundation" on PBS's MediaShift Lab. As I said, I thought it interesting, but I believe it was too narrow for what public broadcasting is (could) become. My response posted on the MediaShift Lab is below:

The premise of David Sasaki's argument is only true if it is viewed through two, limiting filters: that journalism or in a broader sense 'information' is the ultimate goal of public broadcasting and that public media management means institutionalization.

I would urge a broader view of Public Broadcasting in the form of "public purpose media", meaning that public + media could suggest a wider range of roles of different players, especially in realm of digital media. Public media of all stripes is one of the most focused (rigid?)forms of intentional media with a legislated purpose to inform and educate. However, like all things Internet-related, the old formulations are being subverted as technology allows viewers to become users that work together in new ways to take personal and collective action.

A founding principle of public broadcasting that I believe is widely shared is that quality of life largely depends on the quality of information that we can access. Everybody has the opportunity to make decisions and the fundamental question for policymakers and 'public purpose media' providers is how to help individuals become informed decision makers, achieving better outcomes.

Rather than just to be informed, the point of public media has to be how it can materially improve our lives. This takes us well beyond the traditional province of Public Broadcasting. Beyond a goal of an informed citizenry it requires public media to wrestle with the challenge of producing tangible, positive outcomes.

The new public purpose media should look to supporting outcomes that have been referenced in the current media environment, but never truly addressed, such as improving access to financial services (and financial management skills), access to health care, educational attainment, ability to secure a safe and affordable home...namely just addressing the 'should haves' and directly into the 'must haves' of a life.

Beyond broadcast in the digital medium means two things to me; one, we can erase the divide between inspiration and action (you watch, you click to finding a job), and two, the valued providers of 'public purpose media' are wide and varied, and might include folks without a broadcasting license.

Moving beyond broadcast means that content can come in smaller packets of information and action that are consumed across a wider digital universe. The News Hour is truly journalism at its best, but David rightly points out EveryBlock as a valid news source, another example of packetization of media.

However, I think his proposal and viewpoint are two narrow for the true meaning of public media. Where is the place of the financial skills management site in the public broadcasting universe? What is the responsibility for public media to move beyond the 'companion web site' to the the power and authority of public broadcasting to organize a digital diabetes program and into an ongoing resource for helping low-income Americans manage their chronic disease regime?

There are organizations - public organizations, individuals, nonprofits - that are doing this work everyday and using the ubiquity of the web to reach new audiences with new transactions and services, as well as information and education. What is their role in the future of public broadcasting, or for that matter in the proposed National Journalism Foundation?

The Smallest Unit of Information

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?

Been A Long Time

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.

Make Me Happy, Love Me and I am Yours

I came across a wonderful presentation on Karl Long's blog ExperienceCurve. This is a great poke in the ribs to make sure we are building information and content that is engaging, relevant, but also makes people happy (i.e. improve their lives).

Happiness as Your Business Model

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: magnolia worpress)

Public Media: The Virus

Is it better to control the distribution channel or is it better to infect mass media?

I am increasingly believing that the best bet for the future of public media is to forsake the old fortress mentality of purity and sanctity and throw the lot in with the barbarians of commercialism and supposed nihilism. When the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created in 1967 we believed that our democracy needed to "enhance the knowledge, and citizenship, and inspire the imagination of all Americans." However...things have a way of changing don't they?

When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you — and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
-- Newton N. Minow on May 9, 1961

The Internet as English Ivy
Victor Kamber quipped that with the growth of the Internet that "the wasteland has only grown vaster", but at the same time, like a virulent case of English Ivy, it has grown into the cracks to bring information to new audiences and new ways. While one could argue that this, this and this are Minnow's worst nightmare on steroids as a distribution channel the Internet has tended to prove itself out as not so bad.

And what about the Public Broadcasting side? Umm, not so good. As one example, in a recent NY Times article stated "The average PBS show on prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating, or a little over half of what the wrestling show “Friday Night Smackdown” gets." (To be fair, they pointed out that NPR listeners are up to over 30 million from just 2 million in 1980.)

Laughing Babies Drive Me Crazy
While there are literally thousands of opportunities to distribute content that are open to mass audiences, the ability to actually reach those masses is not such a sure thing. You can post a great, solid piece of work on You Tube, but that damn laughing baby is going to kick your butt.

If a public purpose media entity wants to move to scale they are going to have to look to infecting their content into existing media channels.

As media distribution companies proliferate online they are increasingly searching for authentic, quality content in areas we might consider for a "public purpose". For example Think.MTV (broadcast), Good Magazine (publication) and Current (cable) are all examples of what would have been traditional outlets that are aggressively online creating and aggregating content for mass audiences, but with a clear monetization strategy in mind.

Top Reasons to Infect Commercial Channels
We need to become public media viruses, infecting the host body with high quality, in-demand, authentic content. We use the infected system's infrastructure to distribute our content amidst commercial content that is engaging, entertaining; something that much of public media - still - needs to learn.

Multi-Modal Marketing - love the triple play of publishing, .tv and mobile.

Standing Next to Angelina Jolie - if there is someone gorgeous next to you it makes you prettier

Be More Interesting - a little competition with a bit of celebrity here, a little ironic humor there...it's not going to hurt you for pete's sakes.

Ad Revenue (Share the Wealth) - a little money to help fund the mission isn't going to hurt...

Co-Production - ah, the ultimate potential, working with Viacom on a four-part series on diabetes in America, the other triple play: cash flow, distribution & leveraing talent.


New Skills Required
The traditional skills of the film documentation need to be adopted by online public media producers to increasingly court these hybrid channels for opportunities to co-produce and distribute their content. Current's Make a Pod content is a great example of the new medium of scalable public media distribution. And now just compare that with PBS's producers site.

Laws & Money
The mad, mad, mad new world content producers are going to have to start to get comfortable with a new world of digital copyrights, creative common licenses, promotional rights, etc. We are also going to have to increasingly understand and present content with clear eyes towards monetization strategies that provide targeted web-based products and increasing potential for advertising dollars. That means starting with the niche audiences and keying on the trends that drive traffic and dollars. Lastly it will mean at least a passing understanding on the underlying technology of online monetization, including Google's AdSense and Microsoft's adCenter.


I don't believe that the future of public media will be rosy unless we start breaking the molds. Let's not recreate the traditional broadcast world online by a go-it-alone approach. For public media producers at scale we need to reset both the legal, monetary and creative landscape. Start to pick up the phone and start dialing those 27 year old New Media, Business Development folks...they are waiting for your call.

PBS Starting To Make Big Moves in Video

There have been two recent news items about PBS making strong moves in video distribution of great interest.

The most recent was an announcement that they would be distributing content, such as episodes of NOVA, Wired Science, and other programming through Hulu, a company created to stream video, mainly TV and movie, content. Read more at NY Times technology blog.

The other piece of news was that PBS has recently signed up with thePlatform, a media management company that is a subsidiary of Comcast. By adopting a central video management and distribution platform PBS will manage the broadband video back end for both the main PBS portal and distribute video to station sites, help stations publish local content on their own sites and let stations share videos with other stations’ sites. Read more at Current.org.

Two major moves in the matter of a few weeks? This is an interesting set of aggressive moves that somewhat seem at cross purposes. On one hand they are making a major investment into a media platform for aggregating content across their national and affiliate sites, and then a new push to syndicate content onto a separate channel. And Comcast and the News Corporation to boot.

I am looking forward to watching these developments.

A New Media Marketplace

I broadly break up the media world into three major actors: Original Content Producers, Content Aggregators and Content Channel Distributors. As often the case with horizontal and vertical integration many, if not most actors have a stake in all three areas. One of the best examples is Current, which has Current TV and online (Distributor), gathering user submissions (Aggregator) and does its own news reports (Producer).

Through my work at One Economy we also play in all three roles; we create original content, we aggregate it in channels such as our media site 247townhall and distribute it over platforms like the forthcoming Public Internet Channel. But the interesting issues are not the pieces, but how we are evolving those pieces into a portfolio of media offerings that in turn, play a role in helping to reorganize our notions of public purpose media.

The Marketplace of Media

Imagine a bazaar in some dusty, far off city. It stretches from horizon to horizon and filled with colorful tents to cool, dim souks to high minarets where the people are called to prayer. And in this marketplace are thousands and thousands of buyers and sellers all frenetically calling out prices and wares, sorting through huge piles of products and negotiating for services. It is just a big, messy, crazy place, but it has a certain charm.

Now transpose that to the digital world. We have sellers and buyers all looking for each other. The buyers are looking for online content or services or products and trying the best way to discover the perfect thing at the best price. The sellers are putting up larger and louder websites jostling for real estate to catch the digital eye.

We love the marketplace and people get rich off of building a better map of the marketplace (Google), aggregating products and services into big box digital retailers (Amazon), creating unique products and distributing them (Current.com) or even organizing their own section of the bazaar into a mini-marketplace (eBay).

The Clean Room

Inside of this hectic, crazy, kinetic bazaar is one area that is orderly, quiet, clean, friendly if perhaps a bit bland and all of the content is "above average". The only problem is that the content produced is not terribly useful (i.e. almost everything in a high-end furniture store), and the other big problem is that there are really, really high walls with guards that surround the this oasis of a marketplace that only let in highest, but expensive digital goods.

This is the current state of the public purpose media marketplace.

If we dare to to venture out into the bazaar and poke around a bit we can find wonderful content. The revolution has put the tools of quality into the hands of everyone and people are using them to build information and services that are completely new and innovative. Then there is content created by the sellers themselves, rough, but exhibit characteristics what is most in demand, that it is "authentic" or true. There is a lot going on that is fantastic in the crazy bazaar, but it is hard to find amongst everything else and largely it is created for its own sake and not connected to anything else.

The Most Beautiful Vase Ever

Also these small artisans have no natural home, so they set up their own little tent, create the content and try to distribute it out into the world. Sometimes it goes viral thanks to You Tube or Digg (to mix analogies, the Roman forum of content), but generally it is more like Garden Girl TV.

Garden Girl is produced by Patti Moreno and her husband in Boston. The show is focused on "urban sustainable living" and it is a close rival to broadcast quality, but at a fraction of the cost. It is flexible, fun, inspiring and educational. And it was done without huge production houses, distribution deals and complex financing. It has value, it is useful and it is worthy.

However, in the bazaar there is the most ironic thing happening. The big sellers have trouble in finding the handcrafted authentic product to turn into money. The handcrafted product can't leverage the resources of the big boys to turn their authentic information into their goals of public purpose action. And the only place that has the current potential to organize the marketplace, the public broadcasting system, has built around itself an unassailable wall to ward off - rightly or wrongly - the taint of commercialism.

One Economy & Public Purpose Media: A New Marketplace

One Economy and its work represents the founding of a new association of sellers and buyers within the huge bazaar and we are going to do it in a whole new way. While we are going to have some walls (standards), they are going to be a lot lower than public broadcasting. We are going to revel in the craziness in our quest to find great content from the Original Content Producers and we are going to partner with our fellow Content Aggregators, but offer them something new by helping a) organize the OCP folks and b) add some value with our own "Take Action" content. And finally we are going to partner with the big box sellers in the bazaar, the Content Distributors to give them something that public broadcasting cannot, mainly organized, regular, actionable, discoverable content that can be monetized.

We are remaking the rules all the time, and while I cannot say what the future holds it is great fun and with great purpose that we hope we will acquit ourselves with great distinction. So stay tuned for the Public Internet Channel and the future.

A Series of Niches

I was recently reading Nick Reynold's blog, an editor at the BBC Internet blog and all-around astute guy on Internet trends, and came across the following statement:

[t]he internet is becoming more dominant and sometimes the internet feels like a series of niches, not a broad mass medium. TV too is becoming a series of niches.

This is not a totally new thought, but it struck me at the right time to consider how important we think about the practical impacts that media can have on our daily lives. Most importantly we need to be clear about the special relationship that public purpose media has on evaluating and measuring those impacts in terms of benefit for users, rather than general moral stands on "the value' of public service media.


I Lived in South Philly
I think that Nick is right on about the Internet being a series of niches, just like my former home Philadelphia is a series of neighborhoods. People often don't have much to do with what is happening six or seven blocks away, but we all still make up a great city. To keep up the analogy the we often think of public purpose media as being the wonderful, bright and shining downtown of high-end news, cultural programming and civic engagement shows. That is not the whole city and for the people who live in South Philly, going downtown does not seem like a great option. They like their own neighborhoods, perhaps a bit gritty and run down, but we know everyone and the content that is created in this community is not pretty, but better than that it's useful.


Wake Me Up When You Go, Go
In the UK the Office of Communications (see Wikipedia's entry for more), the lord high executioner of television there, something like a super FCC, uses the following definition for the purposes of public service broadcasting:

1. Inform the World
2. Reflect & Strengthen Cultural Identity
3. Stimulate interest in "art, science, history and other topics"
4. Promote awareness of different cultures and vie....huh! wha! Sorry, I fell asleep.

They go one to define public service content as having the following characteristics: High Quality, Original, Innovative, Challenging, Engaging and Accessible/Discoverable.

OK, these are very laudable, and I agree whole heartedly on the last point, but these sound more like the characteristics of a partner in a what will be a very tiresome relationship.


Towards a New Definition of Public Purpose Media
I like the quote of my friend Dan Fellini, the Executive Producer for the Public Internet Channel who says "Public service content does not need to be high quality, original, innovative or challenging to work. It does, I believe, have to be engaging, discoverable and accessible. It’s best when it is high quality, original, innovative and challenging, but those things can get in the way of getting a message out, I hate to say."

Where is the action and impact in the type of neutered content definition used by the UK? Where is the local expert, the guy that sits down at the end of Tommy's Bar & Grill and gives you that one piece of advice that is perfect?

Dan goes on to say "The fact that information exists and it is relevant, accessible and leads to action, is what makes content ‘public service.’ That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for high quality content. We should. It adds to our authority and avoids our message being muddled by poor, distracting production. But at the end of the day, the actual content — the message, the thing that leads someone from idle to action -- is king, and its delivery quality, its originality, how innovative it is... It is secondary."

To let Dan carry it home, here is what I think is a very good starting definition of the characteristics of public purpose media:

1. Inform people about their world
2. Reflect and strengthen community
3. Stimulate action to improve life through content
4. Demystify complex topics and promote awareness of change opportunities, and provide access to tools to affect those changes
5. Provide more than just the bare necessities. Art, culture and critical thought are important to everyone.

Media It's Your Time to Save the World

The media world is rapidly changing and while I love it sometimes if feels like I am spinning just a bit out of control. Rich, multi, social thoroughly 247 media is great for the particular level of Crackberry, Facebook, IM, Twitter Hell that I inhabit daily.

It is also a good time for media to give a little something back. And you know what, it just might be able to save the world.

My Apprenticeship
I have spent the last seven years in an amazing apprenticeship, and the last year and half as head of media, with the global nonprofit One Economy. In my position I have had the privilege in helping to connect over 14 million low-income folks around the world to information and tools that have made a difference. My apprenticeship will most likely never end, and this blog is an acknowledgment that I need to keep listening to both supporters and doubters, but most importantly to the people that great media can serve.

My work requires me to think about how I can help build a different kind of media company; one that leverages the quality of broadcast media with the innovation of interactive media, but most importantly all for a public purpose. My goal in this blog is to explore how public purpose media is both is set apart from the the larger media world by its particular mission, but also using those exciting, powerful tools of rich, interactive and social media to help people accomplish important life tasks.

What is Public Purpose Media?
This question will be something that is constantly discussed on this blog, but for me public purpose media can roughly be defined as content that helps people move forward from inspiration to action. The unique opportunity of interactive technology is that we can help people immediately; you can be inspired by a piece of video, audio or even written content and then help is right there, one click away.

A single mother watches a piece of video about the experiences of how someone just like her found their career and the ability to find career counseling near her is one click away. A mother listens and then participates in a discussion on the best ways to find affordable child care, and the online search tool is one click away. That to me is granular form of media with a public purpose.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it
Alan Kay

The Next Media...The Next Steps
The promise of public purpose media is creating great information, interactive, useful tools and engaging content that helps inspire a user or even a community to take the next step in their life journey. In this blog you will hear more about what is happening around the world, what this form of media hopes to become and how dedicated people all over the world are doing it. I invite you to participate by telling all of us what we can do to make the world a better place. And I hope that you have as much fun as we have had on the journey so far.