Hopper Analytical - PublicMedia

Social Technology and the Future of News

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:54:57 -0400

Slides and links from my presentation at PRI's The World.

Subject: Social technology and emerging uses in news.
Date: 3/27/2008
Location: WGBH, Boston

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Big Week for Shoutouts

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:45:58 -0400

Seeing as I get "the mention" about once a year, and usually by accident, I figured I’d strut out the fact that I got two (2) unsolicited plugs this week on not totally obscure media outlets.

The first was from none other than the Cluetrain man himself, Doc Searls. During a Newsgang podcast from Steve Gillmore with Steven Hill, and the Interim CEO of NPR, Dennis Haarsager, Doc mentioned our work together on Project VRM at the Berkman Center. The future of public broadcasting discussion that ensues is an interesting insider view and a worthwhile listen.

The next one was great fun and truly a historic moment in our little sphere of nerds-who-work-in-public-broadcasting. Thursday’s Up to Date call-in show on KCUR (Kansas City) was sagely dedicated to the future of Public Broadcasting and its interesting and evolving relationship with the web and social technology.

Rob Patterson, Andy Carvin, and Todd Mundt then spent the next hour trying their damnest to not talk constantly about Twitter (and pretty much failed). In a particularly self-referential moment, Andy mentioned that I was livetwittering a bunch of twittering broadcasters as they broadcast twitter's impact on broadcasting. I’m not sure that last sentence was grammatically correct or even remotely what Andy said, but whatever. Listen to it yourself.

Making Experts: The Future of Audience Engagement

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:00:04 -0400

How might media organizations better engage their audiences online?

Over the past year, I teamed up with several public broadcasters to try and answer this question. We collected lessons while rolling out online participation software at NPR’s Car Talk, KQED, Oregon Public Broadcasting, PRI’s The World and a dozen others. We are learning that the future of media engagement goes beyond invitations for listener comments. The leading examples involve much higher expectations from the "audience"; specifically, their partnership in delivering on more collaborative projects.

Take WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show, who in late 2007 asked their listeners to share price inequities they found at local grocery stores. The results made national news, and not just for the novel use of crowdsourced journalism (turns out that the state regulates milk prices, and not everyone was playing by the rules). As the demand for richer and more compelling media experiences increase, you’ll likely see less "Come join the discussion" and more "Let’s solve a problem together".

Most important here is the word "together". What participants want is a team-oriented experience that is open, inclusive, and aims to produce valuable outcomes where they can benefit. While these co-directed endeavors can be challenging to conceive and manage, they can drive significantly more participation and yield real, lasting online value (they now have a nice map of beer prices across Manhattan). Successful initiatives give the opportunity for all to be involved, and for many to play the role of expert – whether as an authoritative voice, a creative problem-solver, a data gatherer, or even a tackler of basic tasks. The very best solutions have participants as co-creators, co-directors, and even co-owners of the produced results. In this more collaborative environment, the notion of "the audience" begins to dissolve.

These collaborative projects can involve varying levels of commitment from participants. The following list identifies a spectrum of media-driven initiatives, from those with the least individual involvement to the most.

Opinion & Preference – Extract localized knowledge and insight from your audience in the form of polls, aggregated estimates or prediction markets.

Basic Task Completion – Why not crowdsource a simple electronic task? Well, for starters, coming up with a compelling outcome and building a system to do it efficiently are two likely reasons not to. There are a few good examples of ones that seem to be working, although tying it effectively to media might be a different story.

Shared Experience – Collect narratives around unique themes. Inviting in stories effectively involves finding unexpected, yet invariably human common ground.

Unique Expertise – If you have a big enough audience, track down the needle in the haystack by seeking unique expertise. Proven ideas include troubleshooting car problems, soliciting peace corps volunteers, or getting hot tips on possible stories.

Research Data & Analysis – You don’t need rare skills to roll your sleeves and do some primary research or apply a critical eye. Audience members have proven their ability at spotting celebrities, measuring a city’s SUV density, and helping slog through the JFK files for conspiracy clues.

Creative Content – Accumulating creative submissions around a common theme is a time-tested method for getting media junkies engaged. Consider offering incentives and showcasing the best. Examples are endless: photos, top-10 lists, t-shirt ideas, show names, fan fiction, and full-on radio stations to name but a handful.

Ideas & Solutions – "Given enough eyeballs, all [problems] are shallow." Arguably the oldest crowdsourcing endeavor was the British government trying to solve the longitude problem. And since then, pumping your community for insights to address specific issues has inspired everything from the online suggestion box to trying to find a cure for Lou Gehrig’s disease.

True Collaboration – Bringing a community together, deploying varied skills over time in a dynamic and massively productive process is the holy grail for online participation. It's like applying the complexities of open source software development to the media industry. Three noble efforts in this regard include spurring organized community action, collaborative story coverage, and, of course, cataloging the World's knowledge.

Has News Innovation Stalled?

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 13:55:09 -0400

Has news innovation stalled? The last decade has seen significant shifts in how news is created and delivered: grassroots publishing and online news aggregators for example have resulted in shifting advertising dollars and widespread panic in traditional mass media outlets. However, fresh approaches both in traditional media and in new media exploration has felt scarce as of late. Most of the recent thinking around news delivery involves slapping the latest social technology idea or delivery device onto a news outlet and calling it innovation. Or worse, a retreat into potential profitability through a focus on niche or hyperlocal audiences. Of course, some exceptions exist, but there is too much opportunity tied up in new technology and the shifting demands of the public to slow down the exploration of new ideas.

I think this lack of exploration is due to limitations in our assumptions about where to innovate. For example, participatory media means more than just tapping first-hand knowledge and citizen footage. Why can’t low-cost production tools be utilized by professional journalists as well as regular citizens? And what about the content itself - why do we assume short-form written articles or anchor-delivered video segments are the only relevant news vehicles? As the lines between producers and consumers of news blurs, can we forge partnerships based less on clearly defined roles and more on where creativity and power surround a specific story? Perhaps this requires organizational innovation and cooperative production that is merely enabled by emerging communications technology. Please stop with the same old approach repackaged on twitter from mobile phones via facebook. It's time to get original again folks.

When the Customer Sets the Price

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 15:55:17 -0400

As you have no doubt heard, Radiohead skipped the middleman with their latest release, offering the album online for download. This resulted in an estimated $10 Million in profits from 1.5 million downloads over the past week, more than the first week sales of their last three albums combined. Not too shabby, particularly when users could set their own price for the download, including being able to set the price of nothing. Radiohead's VRM-like experiment did trigger a flood of promotion, but at the end of the day, fans still volunteered to cough-up an average of $8 per album. Gets one thinking, don't it?

We will undoubtedly see more stunts like this to promote online sales, along with an increasing willingness to go cheaper and wider by offering digital downloads for free. But I want to know, will we see more customer-driven price setting? It feels a little like a public radio pledge drive, essentially asking the customer at transaction time - what is this worth to you? Applying this sort of purchasing model to product transactions is one approach that the VRM project is exploring - where the customer takes a more proactive stance in setting the relationship terms with vendors. Doc Searls introduces this idea in the context of public broadcasting at the tail-end of a Berkman.tv video on the future of public media. Don't miss the first part of the video either, as Jake Shaprio takes on predicting the future.

Managing the Public Media Relationship

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:46:47 -0400

How can a public radio listener take greater control of their relationship with public media?

This was (more or less) the question posed to a public media-savvy group last week at Harvard’s Berkman Center. Led by Doc Searls, our ad hoc team explored how to equip the public media audience with a VRM tool to better drive their relationship with existing broadcasters, distributors, and shows.

Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is the reciprocal to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). VRM explores the idea that individuals could create more value if they had better control over their vendor relationships rather than the other way around (my definition). The rise of participatory culture and its subsequent impact on vendors suggests an environment where this is not only possible, but highly desirable for everyone. Perhaps the long-term outcome of VRM will be to facilitate the dissolution of traditional consumer and vendor roles. Identity will be managed by the individual, but value production will happen across a spectrum of participants in a variety of capacities. In this environment, it will be difficult to define the meaningful boundaries of an organization, and what exactly constitutes an employee, vendor, consumer or producer.

A whole new generation of creative consumer has the potential to rediscover public broadcasting and co-opt it for its potential

But why public media?
Well, it feels like a good testing ground for something like VRM. If you are exploring the boundaries between organizations and the public, what better environment than one that is mission-driven to engage and serve the public?

There also seems to be a compelling overlap between what’s going on in participatory culture and what already exists surrounding public broadcasting. A whole new generation of creative consumer has the potential to rediscover public broadcasting and co-opt it for its potential as a non-commercial, open network designed explicitly to serve the public. I would ask, how can we encourage this?

...triggering more questions on engaging with public media in a participatory environment:

If we were to reinvent public radio in an end-to-end environment like the internet, what would it look like? How would it compare to what exists, and what important differences might emerge? What can we do to fill those gaps?
What does the long tail of public media look like? What are the democratized production tools, potential aggregators, and filters that drive demand down the tail?
As a creative consumer, what is it that I want to do with public media? What are my Lego building blocks, and what would motivate me to play?

In trying to answer these questions, one particularly promising idea that emerged was a model for a new type of public radio station - one that is not centered on broadcast. Such a station could have many of the traits of a participatory, web-based environment while leveraging the existing broadcast audience and media. In this way, we would have a transitional strategy of sorts – understood and embraced by traditional participants (both the audience and infrastructure), but able to transcend boundaries by reinventing itself from scratch, online, and with the public itself to steer its direction. These unique characteristics would drive important differences on how to fund, program, create, and manage its media. Without too much wild-eyed thinking, you could imagine an encouraging and experimental mix of user and collaboratively-programmed media, integrated online conversation, multiple device support, and a breadth of media types, alternative funding methods, etc.

Rethinking public media from a new, more participatory direction reveals an opportunity to redefine people-oriented broadcasting. And what’s more people-oriented than public media?