Integrated Media Association 2007

Great news and challenging news… Doug Kaye’s brainchild — the Conversations Network — has been granted official nonprofit status. Good for him and his team!

What’s challenging about this news? Well, to the public broadcasting old guard, this new entrant into the public media space could be seen as a threat — after all, they’re creating media for public distribution, media of high intellectual quality.

Personally, I find it encouraging to find new teams/groups/companies jumping into the public media game. We need examples of fresh thinking to give us (the old guard) permission to try new things, including (gulp!) new business models.

And, as someone working at a dual-licensee station that’s unsure of where to go on the evolving mediascape, I think it’s high time we re-envision our public service mission. What does it mean to “serve the public” today, anyway? Doug Kaye has one answer, and it works for me (though it’s only one piece of the puzzle for now).

One question Doug… When does the pledge drive start?

Hi folks! This is John, and I’ll be your video and audio streaming cruise director this year. For those of you that can’t make it to Boston, we’re going to bring a bit of this year’s conference to your computer.

We’ll be streaming the sessions that are in the main conference room, including keynotes, lunches, and selected breakout sessions — anything that happens in the main hall. You can check out the schedule at the IMA wiki.

Here’s where to point your media viewers…

Live AUDIO stream (MP3 format)

Live VIDEO stream (Windows Media format)

If you’re a Mac user, you’ll need to download and install an appropriate Windows Media playback package. You can find appropriate players for Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X.

I’ll be working with the fabulous team from StreamGuys to make it all go and ensure we’ve got usable audio. Video? Well, we won’t be able to shoot video straight-on to the presenters — we’ll be off to the side in the presentation hall. Sorry — that’s where the gear had to go for technical reasons.

Enjoy!

I’m in the session on Pledge applications, thankful that as a show we’re spared the yeoman’s work of getting people to give you money. But it does give me a chance to say something I forgot to mention during the panel on user-generated content: public radio listeners are used to being asked for money. They’re grateful, however, to be asked for their opinions.

Engaging listener communities online looks like a necessary evil. Listeners want to talk online; we are all public service organizations; therefore we owe listeners an online space. Someone from a station just asked me how we handle the volume of comments and emails at Open Source, which made me realized that all of this activity — blogs, wikis, forums — looks like a cost center. Extra work, extra time, extra staff.

But it’s not a cost center. It’s a profit center.

Public radio traditionally has only one point of real contact with the listener: the phone call to offer money. And listeners — enough of them, at least — are happy to call in and pledge. But we’ve found at Open Source that listeners are tremendously excited to be asked for their opinions and stories, too. As Andy Carvin pointed out during our panel this morning, the ten percent of listeners that actually spends time commenting is likely to be the same ten percent that pledges. How much nicer, then, as a potential pledger, to discover that public radio cares not only about your $50 checks, but about what you think about Iraq, as well.

We’ve discovered at Open Source that the more willing we are to open up about what we do — and it takes time and valuable production hours to do this — the more connected our listeners feel to the show.  This isn’t just a warm fuzzy, it’s quantifiable; when we ran into a funding crisis last October, dedicated community members begged us to tell them where they could send money to help us out.

So yes, transparency is work.  Responding to listeners and integrating their comments in your show is work.  But transparency and real community integration can make people really excited to give you money, too.