What will happen when your local TV Station & Newspaper are Gone?

March 26, 2009 at 8:30 am · Filed under CBC, CPB, FASTforward'09, NPR, News, PBS, Platforms, Public Media, Public Radio, Public TV, TV

We are surely entering a new reality? The discussion of the “Deathwalk” of papers and TV Stations has until now been academic but now hardly a week passes when a city or town loses one or the other.

What will happen in your town when there is no more “Official News”?

Of course I don’t know but it may be fun to speculate. A good way to speculate I think is to think of nature. What does nature do when an over mature system crashes? When say a big tree falls or there is a forest fire?

Nature has a iron-clad set of rules for the death of an over mature system. The rule seems to be – the small and the fast growing fills in the space. In phase 2, the trees that can get height fast and shade out the rest come next. In phase 3 the slow growing larger trees push by aggregate and then dominate. And then the cycle continues.

So if this pattern is reliable then this is what will happen when your community loses its Big News.

• The Fast Growing New Growth  the “Poplars” – The best of the local bloggers will rise in prominence. Some of the personal brands in the old will also join the local blogging scene. These bloggers will not only write about what interests them but some will pull in and filter news from around the world. They will act as much as taste makers and editors as contributors. But many will also wish to focus on what interests them – “Beats” in effect. Food, politics, books, whatever. The new system is largely here but it has low structure and hence low value.

• Aggregation – Very quickly some of these will form an affiliation. We have seen an early variant of this in St Louis with the establishment of the Beacon. The Beacon is an online “News” service made up of many of the best journalists that used to work for the main Paper the Post Dispatch. The Beacon has moved into the offices of KETC, the PBS local TV station. (Postscipt – Here is a major article by The Current – the Trade Magazine of Pub Media on this work) There are plans for KWMU, the local NPR radio station and the local University to move in too. A great addition will be to find a way to pull in the best of the bloggers. This has not yet been done but is surely possible and desirable. Also on the cards will be the power of this local system to pull in great national and international coverage. CPB, NPR and PBS are working on how best to create and offer a combined feed of the best of their News in one easy to use complete forum. As this aggregation phase builds so does the overall value to all parties in it. The Network Effect benefits all. Costs fall, ROI rises. It becomes central to the economic, social and political health of the community. Being so widespread it excludes competitors. You either have to join or die. It is also hugely valuable to the global producers and to the global aggregators. At some point, NPR and PBS and maybe the BBC also have to form their own aggregated system that lives on top of the local system?

• Climax – I think that the climax or mature and stable phase will emerge from the Aggregation process. This is surely what Sloan did for GM? GM in its heyday was built on the aggregation of a number of brands.  But this time, there is a different economic model. This was not the result of a traditional use of financial capital. Now we have a global system that is truly PUBLIC. It has strong economic roots and is sustainable but it is no longer controlled by a few men with access to credit. It would be very hard to attack by any political force as well.

If I am right and that nature does offer us a model, then the Aggregation phase is where the future lies. The people that can lead the aggregation will “win”. If we can do this in the Public sector then the Public will win.

So where will this happen in your community?

In the US I think that St Louis offers us a strong hint. Journalists, Public TV and Radio can get together to offer a home for the rest of the local blogging ecosystem. They can also pull in national and global content and offer up stories from their own place. I think that the current talks between CPB, NPR and PBS are also very encouraging.

But what about Canada? Would the local music station be the aggregator? How easy/hard would it be for a few bloggers to do this – hard I think. We don’t have the emergent local system that the US has. This tells me that the urgency in the US to “see” their total public system for what it is – the future – is extreme.

It’s all there to win or lose.

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Making Your Knowledge Work PersonAll

March 9, 2009 at 12:46 am · Filed under Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IT Department, Interaction, Personal Branding, Platforms, Social Computing, User Revolution

(Cross-posted to the AppGap blog)

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NPR opens the Kimono – Inside NPR

July 8, 2008 at 6:54 am · Filed under Andy Carvin, Bryant Park Project, Culture, Innovation, NPR, Personal Branding, Platforms, Public Media, Social Media, Social Objects, Trusted Space

One of the aspects that I love about NPR’s new morning Show Bryant Park is that the show shows you what is going on behind the scenes with their Twitter feed and a daily video showing what will be on the show the next day.

BPP was tested in beta by allowing a lot of interaction – real time research.

Now NPR are going further – they are starting a blog whose purpose is to get behind the scenes, under the hood, open the kimono. What people like Andy and Dennis understand is that the more human NPR is, the greater the attachment.

Here is the fist key post:

On behalf of the NPR Digital Media team, we’d like to welcome you to Inside NPR.org, a new blog that will serve as our official headquarters for new features and services we’re developing for the NPR Web site. It’s a chance for you to explore some of the many projects we’re working on, and help us make them more useful as we roll them out.

The idea behind this blog has its roots in our two newest shows – Tell Me More and The Bryant Park Project. Both of them were rolled out as blogs many months before they were ready to go on air, in the hopes of getting as much public feedback as possible. Historically, it’s common to develop a show behind the scenes, only giving listeners a chance to hear it when it was ready for prime time. By creating online communities for each show while they were still “rough cuts,” we were able to build better programs because of it.

Now, we’d like to apply the same rough cuts idea to our online services in general. Whether it’s rolling out social networking, building new mobile products or improving our online strategy in general, we’re hoping we can develop better tools if you’re a part of the conversation.

In the coming weeks and months, you’ll hear from a variety of people from behind the scenes at NPR.org – software developers, product managers, online producers and others who are working on new Web site features. We hope that talking about these activities more openly will help create a virtuous cycle of product development and feedback.

Thanks for joining us; we look forward to brainstorming with you!

— Andy Carvin and Daniel Jacobson

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Bottom Up at NPR – Get My Vote – Platforms vs Programs

March 12, 2008 at 11:21 am · Filed under Andy Carvin, Get My Vote, NPR, Platforms

[photopress:getmyvotenpr2.jpg,full,centered]

NPR are on a roll. Recently NPR Music, now politics. Here is a new “world”that is not simply site. It is a new platform called “Get My Vote“. Here you can add your views on what would get youir vote and you can check out and talk about other’s all under the brand of NPR.

If you look at the Cloud, you can also get a feel for how a national agenda might emerge. Imagine a politician partcipating here – could be municipal, state or national. This is what I mean by a platform. This has the potential to become a force for democracy. If not in its present form with a few tweaks it will.

This door way into the “World of Politics” is a bit like WOW. You enter as an unknown with few powers. But if you work hard here – you could become a somebody.

I think that this represents a breakthrough in thinking away from the NewsRoom knows best and the NewsRoom defines what is important and what is quality.

This is a platform and not merely content. As such it has the potential to grow and to become ever more complex and hence interesting.

Platforms will be the future of the social web.

Well done Andy and the gang:

As the name suggests, the project is based around a basic premise: what will it take for political candidates to get my vote? Every person has their own reasons for selecting a particular candidate, their own litmus tests, and we’re asking the public to articulate this in the form of open letters to the candidates. Using Get My Vote, you can upload your own commentary – audio, video or text – and talk about what issues or concerns will drive you to the ballot box. NPR is then planning to incorporate these commentaries into our shows throughout the rest of the election cycle.

We’ve also designed the project in such a way that local stations – both NPR and PBS stations – can create their own Get My Vote initiatives on their websites by embedding Get My Vote widgets. That way, a station can localize the project. A station in Arizona, for example, might create a local version of Get My Vote focusing on immigration perspectives, while a station in Massachusetts might challenge users talk about what it would take for local mayoral candidates to get their vote. So while most users might end up talking about the presidential candidates, I’m hoping it’s used for state and local races as well.

On the Get My Vote homepage, you’ll see that we’re using a tag cloud prominently. These tags are submitted by users when they upload their commentaries. For example, a commentary from an Iraq war vet about healthcare for vets might include tags like “Iraq,” “healthcare” and “Walter Reed.” The more often a particular tag is used by commentators, the larger it appears in the tag cloud. That way, you can get a sense of what topics and ideas are being referenced most often by commentators. Clicking any tag also will show you all commentaries associated with that word or phrase.

We’ve also ensured that the commentaries are embeddable on other websites and social networks – a first for an NPR project. There’s an embed code available for commentaries that you can grab and place in your website. You can also click an option to post on another blog or network, giving you a list of more than 20 sites where you can upload your own Get My Vote commentary, or someone else’s.

The site is now in public beta. This means that anyone can now access the site, upload their own commentaries and explore the site in general, but we’re still working out a few bugs and other minor fixes. We’re hoping that if you have any problems with the site you’ll alert us through the contact form. Over the next few weeks we’ll continue to tweak the site, and soon after that, we expect some of our shows to begin using it on air.

So when you get a chance, please visit npr.org/getmyvote, upload your own commentary and please let us know what you think. Our team is really eager to hear what you have to say. -andy

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