MVM Consulting

MediaShift . Lessons on Collaboration from EconomyStory, Election Projects | PBS

Lesson #3: Autopilot? I Don't Think So.

People were enthusiastic when they left the kick-off meeting, but then they returned to busy offices, overflowing inboxes, and lengthy to-do lists. In other words, it was going to take more than goodwill to drive the project forward. Specifically, success was going to require:

> Formal Communication Channels: For the election project, partners relied on the phone and email to stay in touch with each other, and with me. This time around, I introduced Basecamp, a project management tool from 37 Signals. I made it clear at the outset (and in partner contracts) that participation on Basecamp was a requirement. Sound harsh? Yes, but I knew I was dealing with busy people who needed extra prodding to remember to share information outside of their own shops.

It's been a huge success because it's far more effective for partners to share information with each other, than for information to flow only from them to me. Why rely on a switchboard operator in the digital age? 


via www.pbs.org

MediaShift . Lessons on Collaboration from EconomyStory, Election Projects | PBS

Lesson #2: You Need the Muckety-Mucks

The web department still operates as something of a ghetto at many media organizations. Despite pockets of leadership and innovation, public media organizations are, for the most part, no exception.

Sure, everyone knows the future's in digital, but, more often than not, the people with power and influence work in the organization's legacy media area, such as print or broadcast. I witnessed this directly during the election collaboration, which primarily involved web managers and producers at partner organizations. This hampered the project's impact, either by limiting promotion or preventing more meaningful editorial collaboration. (Much of our "collaboration" during election 2008, aside from the NPR/NewsHour map, took the form of cross-promotion -- a type of collaboration, to be sure, but not the deepest type.)

Having learned our lesson, the kickoff meeting for EconomyStory included multi-disciplinary teams from each partner organization. We then broke off into strands for in-depth brainstorming sessions. At one point, producers of several blue-chip public media programs locked eyes and admitted they didn't trust each other. Then they laughed about it. Then they started talking.

via www.pbs.org

MediaShift . Lessons on Collaboration from EconomyStory, Election Projects | PBS

Lesson #1: Collaboration Isn't Efficient, But Still Worth It



At the outset of the election project, I expected collaboration to create efficiencies. After all, instead of eight organizations having eight conversations about how to cover the same story, we were having one conversation. Certainly, the thinking went, this would reduce, if not eliminate, redundancies. But reducing redundancies, it turns out, doesn't necessarily mean reducing effort; coordinating with people at other organizations that have different ways of doing things takes time -- lots of it.

via www.pbs.org

MediaWatch Monday: Journalists Won't Report News Unless It Can Drive Page Views - SVW

Page view journalism will make our society poorer because less popular but important topics will be crowded out.

This also means companies with decent stories to tell will be lost in the media tsunami. All the more reason why companies must also generate their own media, to make up for the shrinkage of the independent media industry. (When Every Company Is A Media Company...)

via www.siliconvalleywatcher.com

I'll have to follow Tom Foremski more closely. Not just because I'm headed to Silicon Valley. The business pressures on media will surely shape the products we receive.

Mobile Done Right? How National Public Radio Embraces the Mobile Web and Apps | MobileActive.org

However, targeting a mobile audience could have big returns. Says Spier, “Our mobile audience is much more loyal, they engage much more deeply with us, than our NPR.org audience.” He reports that both the iPhone and the Android apps are generating approximately six times more page views per visitor than visitors logging on to NPR.org from a computer. Furthermore, he reports that mobile users engage more continually and for longer than users on NPR.org. Explains Spier, “We also know that it’s a much more 24/7 audience. We see our traffic hold up 18 hours a day [from users on apps or the mobile web], whereas on NPR.org it’s always been a workday, workweek phenomenon. […] We’re seeing an average session time among people using the iPhone news app currently at about nine to ten minutes a session right now, which is substantially longer than NPR.org.”

via mobileactive.org

Data backs the hunch and my own experience that NPR needs to maximize its portability -- because that's its brand: portable news. Radio was the ultimate but now they have to deliver it on the device in our pockets.

Skip Pizzi: Radio Convergence is at Hand

Think about how a handheld device that simultaneously offers both broadcast radio reception and wireless Internet access could be used. The addition of synchronized visual “enhancements” from a station’s website to its regular audio broadcast content will increase the appeal of a station’s programming to listeners and to advertisers. In such an application, audio still arrives at a handheld’s headphone jack via the very efficient and robust FM broadcast channel, while a relatively small amount of additional enhancement data (such as album cover art, advertiser logos and location info, playlists and program guides, sports scores and weather graphics, etc.) flows via WiFi or 3G links to the device’s display screen.

via www.paragonmediastrategies.com

Skip Pizzi is God's gift to radio. His point here is about marrying portable FM receivers with Internet data. This is the first article pursuing this line of thinking that I’ve come across — even though I’ve been looking for more on this topic for some time. As usual, Skip is ahead of the curve here (as are those broadcasters in UK). I think this link between the mobile platform and our traditional audio signal is huge. I approach it as a public radio news director (and public radio news consumer): How do we keep public radio front and center as our primary niche service — while augmenting service via the visual opportunities of the mobile web? NPR’s rush to do what I'll call “newspapers on web” doesn’t satisfy the audio imperatives, but a lesser visual accompaniment certainly does. Take Skip's idea one step further and now we're seeing pictures of newsmakers or news events or the reporters themselves on the screen as an accompaniment to our audio.

Go Figure : NPR

One of the more compelling success stories for NPR is the growth of its broadcast audience from its member stations.  Given the backdrop over the past decade of an increasingly fractured news media environment, the audience growth shown across the top markets is no small thing.  Take a quick review of Pew's excellent State of the News Media report and you'll see many storylines highlighting the decline of news audiences for TV, Newspaper, and Magazines.The chart below shows the growth of the total weekly audience for NPR Newsmagazine stations (thereby excluding music-only stations).  To view the chart in more detail, click on Menu in the left hand corner, then select view fullscreen.

via www.npr.org

Read the good news: NPR stations keep on building audience. All this means is CONTENT IS KING. Radio still needs to get its local house in order. Thank god NPR member stations have a solid foundation.

The Infinite Dial — Act As If

If your local radio station is going to survive, and even thrive, in the universe of the Infinite Dial, it is more important than ever to stand for something unique. Soon--very soon--it will no longer be enough to be the best AC in your market, or to be your local Hannity affiliate. When that day comes, you can be sure of two things: "me too" stations will go dark, and you will not get to choose that moment in time. No business gets to pick "that moment." Your local newspaper sure didn't get to choose it.

via www.infinitedial.com

I like the urgency in this post. I like the threat of annihilation that animates it. It isn't as prescriptive as most managers would like, because it doesn't know the answer, but it is helpful to stoke the fire of change. Follow the link for a particularly damning comment about current management minds in broadcasting.

A Plan for Action | New Public Media

Under this proposal, public media would essentially be “off the dole” by 2030. Imagine what we could do with that kind of money. We could transform from a public broadcasting system that re-airs Antiques Roadshow (wonderful as it is) on all four of its digital channels to something much greater. With that kind of money invested in local reporting, investigative journalism projects and media access centers, America would have a world-class public media system that truly informs and engages the public.

via www.newpublicmedia.org

No doubt these are scary times for all media. But even public media can feel nervous about this call for a new trust fund. Not that we don't welcome proper levels to support our mission -- we always have -- but it opens up the old system to potential new rules, new players and unknown consequences. While anxious about losing what's established, meager though it is, you can't blame us for clinging to the status quo for the sake of security. Yet, we really must suck it up. Change is coming one way or another and this is the most momentous opportunity since our founding for revitalizing the public media system. Let's take that risk.

Public Purpose Media: The Sublime Freedom of Failure

In a strange rush of the the last twenty-four hours I have heard about or read about three sublime, elegant, beautiful failures. The honest admission of coming-up-short. And the great thing is that people are owning it and determined that you or anybody else doesn't repeat the same mistake(s).

via publicpurposemedia.blogspot.com

This reminded me of an example recently where I suggested an industry conference include a session picking out the lessons from Vocalo, the radio project in Chicago.

Parent company, WBEZ, recently conceded that many of their expectations have not been realized with the project (specifically it isn't garnering audience or revenues). See the Current Article from January 2010.

A failure of this sort -- when it involves reaching out to new communities and ceding media control to youth and volunteers and non-traditional messengers -- would seem ripe for review, with an eye toward lessons learned.

Maybe some arguments against its inclusion in the conference were legit, but I got the distinct sense that such failures are not the kind of thing we want to bring up in public.
-- MVM