Josh Wilson

Persephone Miel: What Should PBS Do?

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[Interview conducted April 14, 2009. Miel died in 2010, and asked to be remembered through a reporting fellowship managed by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Your donations will support the fellowship’s growth.]

Internews Network’s PERSEPHONE MIEL, a recent fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, brings some Internet-era vision for the idea of public media. Rather than look to new nonprofits and new structures, she says the real opportunity is to activate existing public media — PBS, NPR, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — to more effectively serve people and communities. But this may require a reinvention of what an NPR or PBS “station” is, as well as a reimagining of the role of taxpayer funding in this picture.

Read Miel’s lively blog for more media criticism and commentary, and check out her Berkman fellowship project, Media Re:public.

Notable Quotes

• MISSED POTENTIAL: “There’s a really strong sense … that public broadcasting has a huge potential role to play, as the media landscape shifts and as we shift into more and more online delivery and platform-agnostic content. But there’s a really good chance that they’re not going to seize that opportunity, and that [public broadcasters] could end up being completely irrelevant to the next wave of journalism — which would be sad.”

• INTERNET’S ROLE: “A lot of what people hope to see happen in the new media space, when people are feeling optimistic, is the kinds of things that public media broadcasting was supposed to do — I mean, is supposed to do: serve the community in its entirety, be accessible, really reflect the community, and so on.”

• WHY NO PARTNERSHIPS? “Public media is supposed to be going where the people are, regardless of whether there’s money there or not. So the fact that they don’t seem to be looking for partnerships with local nonprofit-place bloggers or other things, trying to bring in that new stuff, now that they can — it’s kind of depressing.”

• NOT PAYING ATTENTION: “[P]arts of public media have not taken advantage of the ability to listen to their audience in the way that the Internet era affords, and that people are more and more coming to expect. This has nothing to do with the Internet era, really … we have a lot of discussions about the media ignoring people in the lower-income percentile, not representing them, not being interested in them — and I certainly think that public media should be working to a higher standard on that front, and I don’t really think they do.”

• “Many of the same exact things that are happening within newspapers are happening in public radio.”

• “Maybe what we really need to do is expand the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s charter, so that they can fund online-only resources.”

• “Public broadcasters need to get over themselves, [they’re] as bad or even worse than many of the print journalists about the high-priesthood thing.”

PERSEPHONE MIEL, TALKING PUBLIC MEDIA
Conducted by Josh Wilson, May 2008

Give me your sense of the strengths and weaknesses of public media in the Internet era.

Ha. That’s a small question. Well, first of all, there’s a growing consensus among people within public media — when I say ‘public media’ at this point, I’m meaning just standard public broadcasting, NPR and public radio and television — to talk about public media and public-service media as something bigger than that, and as something we need more of, and that it could be lots of different things.

There’s a really strong sense both within the system, and certainly from a lot of critics, or not even so much critics, but people who want public media to succeed, and value it — that public broadcasting has a huge potential role to play, as the media landscape shifts and as we shift into more and more online delivery and platform-Agnostic content.

But there’s a really good chance that they’re not going to seize that opportunity, and that [public broadcasters] could end up being completely irrelevant to the next wave of journalism — which would be sad.

While the potential is exciting, the failure to seize the opportunity should at least be instructive.

A lot of what people hope to see happen in the new media space, when people are feeling optimistic, is the kinds of things that public media broadcasting was supposed to do — I mean, is supposed to do: serve the community in its entirety, be accessible, really reflect the community, and so on.

You end up seeing people within public broadcasting who have gotten very locked in, to the extent that even the TV people and radio people don’t really work together very well, a lot of the time … but even more so, that they’re not doing a great job of taking their own content online.

And they’re also not taking on a role of being a welcoming place for other people who might be wanting to do that.

There’s all these foundations out there funding little tiny experiments of citizen journalism and so on, and hyperlocal — and many of them are nonprofit. And it just strikes me, why are we creating more nonprofit media when we already have a whole lot of nonprofit media organizations around the country who could be, in theory, boosting these new efforts, or making them happen?

We all know that there’s organizational-culture problems that are certainly not only within public media …

But public media is supposed to be going where the people are, regardless of whether there’s money there or not. So the fact that they don’t seem to be looking for partnerships with local nonprofit-place bloggers or other things, trying to bring in that new stuff, now that they can — it’s kind of depressing.

And there’s a real split — the problem is there are people within NPR and within local stations, as well as within PBS and within local stations, that really do want to move this stuff forward — and there are some really interesting experiments.

What are some of those experiments?

Minnesota Public Radio has a whole bunch of things that they’re doing, there’s Public Insight Journalism Network, you probably know about … And New Hampshire Public Radio, which is tiny, but which has done some little citizen journalism things — they did this thing called Primary Place — and Chicago Public Radio is in the middle of a really huge experiment of having launched an entirely separate radio station, that uses none of the NPR content — it’s called Vocalo. Check it out. They openly admit that they don’t know if it’s going to succeed, but —

At least they’re trying.

Yes. At least they’re trying.

So you see some leadership, at the local level, or at the state level?

Not that I have a lot of inside knowledge of it, but — one of the reasons that Ken Stern left NPR was that there was a lot of tension between the national organizations and the big stations versus the little stations who felt that they weren’t getting enough support — that they were being left behind, and not helped to do new digital things.

And then at the national level I think there’s a certain amount of feeling of like, “Well, they just don’t get it” — I mean just the sort of typical city-cousin, country-cousin kind of thing … nothing unusual about that.

My perspective is that it’s wide open, right now — but my own work trying to take public media online has been very challenging at the institutional level. Members of the public get it. But the institutions seem out of step with that. Why has it been so difficult? Why aren’t people paying attention?

Many of the same exact things that are happening within newspapers are happening in public radio. And, y’know, I think [the Corporation for Public Broadcasting] sometimes finds their hands tied, because of their original covenant, which is actually determined by the law — they’re only allowed to fund public broadcasting stations — officially, they’re only allowed to fund projects that will be broadcast.

They obviously want everything to have more and more of a Web component. For me the question is what the local stations really want to do and become. Not soon, but at some point, the whole model of how they deliver their stuff is going to get ripped apart.

People really just aren’t going to care anymore whether they get their signal on a local broadcast frequency — they’ll be either using satellite radio, or they’ll be using podcasts, or they’ll be listening to it over the Internet, including on their mobile phone. It really won’t matter whether that organization is in Milwaukee or Washington, D.C. anymore.

Some go to one of the national services, there’s American Public Media and Public Radio International and so on, but what are they going to do as that broadcast function becomes irrelevant?

I bet you have an answer for that.

Well — no, I don’t have a full answer. I mean, I think they basically have to decide whether they want — either they can go to a completely bare-bones retransmission operation for the people who still have radios, because obviously people will still use radios for a long time, it’s not going to go away in a year or probably ten years, it’s just that there’ll be so many other options.

Or they can decide they really do want to be a local media operation, and find a way to do that that’s competitive, which would probably mean finding a way to hook up with local or regional citizen-journalist initiatives, blogs, maybe local governments providing information systems — and really re-imagining themselves not as radio or TV stations but as community news hubs.

But it’s not in any way clear that that would necessarily work; it may depend a lot on the community.

What can public media be doing to support actual journalism? What about ProPublica?

[Laughs] That’s a-whole-nother question. I think nobody knows that. We just don’t know yet.

Yeah, let’s not worry about them quite yet.

Right, so … NPR is a huge news organization, right? And it does very good work, and they could aspire to do more work and better work if they wanted. And they have a really huge reach in the market.

And then PBS doesn’t really have a big news organization — they have one half-hour news program that might as well be on radio, pretty much — and yet it’s still very influential … and Frontline. I’m not worried about Frontline. Frontline is going to exist no matter what. They will find a home no matter what happens to WGBH.

Tell me more about the roles public media could play in the Internet era — you spoke about how there’s an opportunity to become more of a community resource.

The question is whether some amount of important journalism is going away as newspapers fail, or get bought out, or get smaller, or become nothing but a shell for AP content and advertising, right? Let’s just assume that might be true. So you have that happening on the one side — and you have people talking about the need for nonprofit journalism on the other side — and so, who should be filling that local news gap? If it’s going to be nonprofit, why shouldn’t it be somehow part of public media?

And specifically the NPR or PBS legacy networks?

[Laughs] “Legacy networks … ”

I meant that simply as “already existing.”

Maybe what we really need to do is expand the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s charter, so that they can fund online-only resources.

Must it come from CPB?

Not necessarily, but I mean, why — why create a new CPB, right? CPB has got a budget.

You just have to wonder about how politicized it is. Should we be planning around that? Such as what Charles Lewis said about the Marshall Plan for journalism. It sounds to me like there are ideas for something other than CPB to do that, that could be nonprofit, or public/private — but not linked to a government charter.

Right — um, well yeah, unless you think that the, whatever, $70 million the CPB gives away is our money. [Laughs]

That’s a great point. There is just such an expectation of, “why bother working with CPB, it’s so politicized — you can’t fight City Hall,” but it is our money.

Right. [And] to some extent, I think in certain ways, foundation money is our money too. The tax breaks that we give whoever donated the money …

You would like to see some courage on the part of the campaigners, perhaps — to try and set their sights on CPB and try to open it up and loosen it up somehow?

What do you mean when you say ‘campaigners’?

I guess when I said that I envisioned the National Conference on Media Reform, who are all about building campaigns. So maybe there is a leadership opportunity here.

Maybe.

What are the lessons of the Internet era that public media should take to heart?

One of the things that got said at News Tools 2008, and I can’t remember who, but someone said, “aggregation is creation.”

It’s one of the classic complaints against all traditional media — that it’s taken them forever to figure out that it’s actually to their advantage to point people to other people’s stuff. But public media is, from most of the Web sites that I’ve looked at, pretty bad at that.

And lots of parts of public media have not taken advantage of the ability to listen to their audience in the way that the Internet era affords, and that people are more and more coming to expect.

This has nothing to do with the Internet era, really … we have a lot of discussions about the media ignoring people in the lower-income percentile, not representing them, not being interested in them — and I certainly think that public media should be working to a higher standard on that front, and I don’t really think they do.

What should public media look and act like in the twenty-first century? What are the opportunities that public media-makers, academics, nonprofit leaders and grantmakers should be thinking about?

Partnerships, partnerships, partnerships. Public broadcasters need to get over themselves, [they’re] as bad or even worse than many of the print journalists about the high-priesthood thing.

They need to look at more partnerships and kind of reach outside of themselves, whether it is to local bloggers or schools, and really see themselves as a community service and less as a high-priesthood.

And we have to get rid of pledge drives.

And they have to — oh — get rid of pledge drives?

[Laughs] Yes; that’s essential.

Really — how are they going to pay for themselves?

Well, we have people working on that.

Tell me about it.

[I]t’s called Project VRM — Vendor Relationship Management. Doc Searls and a whole group of folks around the world are working on it.

Ted Glasser: Imagining a National Endowment for Journalism

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Go big or go home! Stanford communication professor Ted Glasser brings a fifty-state strategy with his modest proposal for the creation of a National Endowment for Journalism.Glasser also weighs in on the FCC and its adequacy to the changing media moment, and the importance of developing journalism support structures that can serve basic civic needs, particularly in communities outside of the commercial news-publishing model’s target audience.

Notable Quotes  

BIG VISIONS: “We’re at the very early stages of talking about what a National Endowment for Journalism might look like … we haven’t figured out most of the details, but there are any number of opportunities to secure substantial funding for something like this. One good place to begin would be by tapping into the billions of dollars the FCC brings in when it auctions off our airwaves, those natural resources, and those auctions are likely to continue, and they bring in billions of dollars, and there’s no reason why that couldn’t be used to begin to create and endowment for journalism.”  

JOURNALISM ALTERNATIVES: “Alternative journalism is journalism aimed at people who aren’t well-served by existing newsrooms — they’re not hard to identify. They’re all over the United States. Almost every inner city lacks a serious neighborhood newspaper. You go up and down the [San Francisco ] Peninsula, and it’s not difficult to find the poorer communities without weekly newspapers.”  

REFORM: “[I]t needs to be radical reform, in the sense that it needs to get at the root of the problem, and that is the absence of the infrastructure to support the kind of journalism we would all agree we want. I’m not proposing any radical or strange form of journalism. I’m trying to find a way to support what almost everyone would agree is the kind of journalism we need.”  

THE INTERNET: “[T]he early talk about the Internet democratizing the world is far off base. We’ve made the same claims about almost every new communication technology. That’s not to deny that computerization of communication has fundamentally altered the landscape — it has. And it’s created all sorts of interesting and new opportunities.  But the opportunities depend on … a core of quality journalists. And that’s the very core that’s shrinking now. I mean, we keep firing some of the most talented, or encouraging them to take buyouts, and it gets reported in the most euphemistic ways. We don’t even use the word fired — it’s ‘laid off,’ ‘bought out’ — these people are being fired! At a time when we need more journalism, not less journalism.”  

NATIONAL DIALOGUE: “We need a national commission, and this coincides with — supports — a notion of a National Endowment for Journalism, that ask these larger questions: What system of journalism does a democracy of the kind we have in the United States need? To what extent can the marketplace sustain it, to what extent can it not? And to the extent that we agree that the marketplace cannot sustain the kind of journalism we all agree we need, then we need to ask ourselves what can we do to bring that about. Rather than accepting whatever the marketplace yields.”

Most of the folks I’ve been speaking to have been thinking about public media in a very broad sense, not in terms of state-sponsored media, but more generally in terms of developing new nonprofit models. And every now and then somebody says “oh, but then there’s Corporation for Public Broadcasting, using our money, maybe we should make them more responsive to our needs.” It’s odd that it’s so easy to forget that public media traditionally has had that presence in our lives. Or had it — and if it doesn’t anymore, why is that?

Ted Glasser: Well, it’s never been a major force in American society. We have an aversion to the state playing that kind of role. Now we have, as you point out, we do have the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but it’s been systematically underfunded to the point where, compared to European countries and elsewhere in the world, we just don’t take it seriously.

So in general, you don’t think that um programs like McNeil-Lehrer and All Things Considered are important but don’t own as much of the public market share as they should?

I think they’re vitally important, although I’m not a big fan of McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, but I think public broadcasting is vitally important. I think funding for it ought to be strengthened, but more importantly the idea of publicly supported media, not publicly owned and controlled, but publicly supported media deserves more of our attention.

Okay …

But not just radio and television — there’s a particular bias in the United States in favor of talking about public support for broadcasting even though it’s marginal, but there’s virtually no conversation about creating a system of subvention for other media —

Subvention?

Subsidy.

For other forms? For example, online media?

It could be anything, we don’t need to talk about what it is, what we need to talk about is the importance of a system of strong, sustainable newsrooms. Whether those newsrooms produce material for websites or newspapers or radio or television is less important, and partly because most newsrooms are multimedia now anyway, so specifying the technology is really increasingly beside the point.

You do have a prescription for the situation you just described, and I’m wondering if you could describe that a little.

Well we’re at the very early stages of talking about what a National Endowment for Journalism might look like … we haven’t figured out most of the details, but there are any number of opportunities to secure substantial funding for something like this.

One good place to begin would be by tapping into the billions of dollars the FCC brings in when it auctions off our airwaves, those natural resources, and those auctions are likely to continue, and they bring in billions of dollars, and there’s no reason why that couldn’t be used to begin to create and endowment for journalism.

And then the task would be to define what we mean by journalism, what kind of journalism do we want to support. The goal would be to create the conditions for supporting journalism that the marketplace no longer supports or never supported.

So it would be alternative forms of journalism, journalism aimed at minority communities, journalism where communities are deemed to be demographically unattractive. You know, the places that have historically been disenfranchised and are increasingly disenfranchised given the failure of the business model of journalism.

What about the seeming lack of interest by the American public in serving the underserved via public media, i.e., viewing it as “alternative” journalism, which I suppose has all sorts of political implications.

Alternative journalism is journalism aimed at people who aren’t well-served by existing newsrooms — they’re not hard to identify. They’re all over the United States. Almost every inner city lacks a serious neighborhood newspaper. You go up and down the [San Francisco] Peninsula, and it’s not difficult to find the poorer communities without weekly newspapers. The stronger communities like Palo Alto are amply served with local media.

So by alternative news you mean —

I mean alternative to the marketplace.

Can you speak about the strengths and weaknesses of public media in the Internet era?

By public media you mean — ?

Everybody has been defining it in their own way, so I’m reluctant to impose my own definition. I’d like to use an inclusive one — to say that both existing traditional public media, publicly owned media, as well as emerging publicly supported models.

Do you include privately owned?

You know, Geneva Overholser suggested, when I was talking to her, that subscriptions and newsstand sales do constitute a form of public support for commercial and privately owned papers … but I think we do need to speak about the tax-exempt sector.

I think there’s a very weak and underdeveloped infrastructure for public media. That’s not to say that there aren’t great examples of people doing wonderful work, but it’s hit-and-miss, there’s no systematic support for it, and that’s why I think there needs to be public support for public media, not simply philanthropic support, not simply entrepreneurial support, but something that we can count on that will create not simply outlets, but outlets that coalesce into a larger system.

I think what the United States desperately needs is not simply alternative media or minority media that serves the needs of the particular community, but [to] find ways to create linkages to successively larger media, which is to say that there needs to be a relationship between mainstream and minority media, so that local communities get to participate in successively larger discussions, so that we create opportunities for participation in society through a system of media —

You are describing something a lot more aggressive than the piecemeal approach of, “Let’s support this small project here.” That’s the philanthropic approach right now — very cautious, focused on the entrepreneurial side and lacking vision for what you describe as a system.

I think you’re absolutely right. And it needs to be radical reform, in the sense that it needs to get at the root of the problem, and that is the absence of the infrastructure to support the kind of journalism we would all agree we want. I’m not proposing any radical or strange form of journalism. I’m trying to find a way to support what almost everyone would agree is the kind of journalism we need.

Does the Internet provide that opportunity? Is it the ideal mass medium for what you’re talking about, or does it need to be more inclusive of traditional media?

It depends on what you’re trying to do. There’s still a digital divide in the United States. And it’s in part a divide grounded in funding and funds. It still costs money to buy a computer. And there’s a literacy question. You need to be able to operate the software. I don’t know of a recent study that suggests how big this divide is, but we need to find ways of getting computers into the hands of more people and getting more people to be comfortable with computers if the Internet is going to serve the role of an alternative newspaper.

But it sounds like you don’t think the Internet is itself a magic bullet that’s going to make it all better.

Oh no, the early talk about the Internet democratizing the world is far off base. We’ve made the same claims about almost every new communication technology. That’s not to deny that computerization of communication has fundamentally altered the landscape — it has. And it’s created all sorts of interesting and new opportunities.

But the opportunities depend on … a core of quality journalists. And that’s the very core that’s shrinking now. I mean, we keep firing some of the most talented, or encouraging them to take buyouts, and it gets reported in the most euphemistic ways.

We don’t even use the word fired — it’s “laid off,” “bought out” — these people are being fired! At a time when we need more journalism, not less journalism.

One of the things that comes to mind when I think of a large system of support is — control versus independence. One of the key points of the SPJ Code of Ethics is to act independently, which is something that isn’t as possible in the hierarchical commercial newsrooms of the day.

With regard to control and independence, I think it’s a non-issue, in fact it’s easier to maintain independence and control in a publicly-supported media environment than a privately-supported one because 1) there’s more transparency and 2) there’s more accountability.

We can demand from the state transparency and accountability that we can never demand of Google or Yahoo or anything. Now that isn’t to say that the conditions for independence and autonomy seem to me to be stronger in the public sector than the private sector. And you know NPR has exhibited, if not more, certainly as much independence as any other news outlet in the United States.

I’m more fearful of the subtle but insidious control that advertising imposes on the press, and the insidious and not-so-subtle control that people like Murdoch impose on the press. and we as the public — there’s nothing we can say about that. There’s no one we can call, there’s no one we can convene, we just accept it.

And you hear the phrase constantly in journalism “these are the realities we have to accept.” And I think that’s the phrase we need to abandon. These are not the realities we have to accept. We should identify for ourselves the ideal set of conditions and then ask ourselves how do we get there. Rather than accepting the conditions that are imposed on us by a model that equates free enterprise with free press.

It seems like the media-reform community — who often focus on exclusively top-level policy and aren’t really involved with producing journalism — sometimes suggests that all we need is a friendly FCC and everything will be nice and pleasant and the corporations will behave. That’s a simplification of their message — but do you think that that is a step towards having transparency, being able to make demands on the private sector?

The FCC only deals with broadcasting. The whole media landscape calls into the question the role of the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC was modeled on the Interstate Commerce Commission. It views communication as an aspect of commerce, not an aspect of culture.

It can’t figure out quite its regulatory framework given its supervision over computers and cable, all the things that don’t demand the scarce frequencies that were the original justification for the FCC back in the 20s and 30s. We need to re-think the role of the state in creating a system of diverse media and opportunities for diversity of journalism.

What would that look like?

We need a national commission, and this coincides with — supports — a notion of a national endowment for journalism, that ask these larger questions: What system of journalism does a democracy of the kind we have in the United States need? To what extent can the marketplace sustain it, to what extent can it not? And to the extent that we agree that the marketplace cannot sustain the kind of journalism we all agree we need, then we need to ask ourselves what can we do to bring that about. Rather than accepting whatever the marketplace yields.

Would this commission be public, or private, or a combination?

Conspicuously public and democratic.

State chartered, or — ?

To be honest, that level of detail I just don’t know. A few of us are working on that, but it will probably take us a long time to figure out some of the details, and even if we get to that level of detail, it’s going to mean nothing unless people understand and agree with the larger democratic premise that communication is a democratic enterprise. It needs to be operated democratically, it needs to be justified, defended, and supported democratically. It’s a democratic institution, journalism is a democratic institution, it shouldn’t be subject only to the whims of the private sector.

It is a little bit of a literacy and awareness, civics and media literacy and education issue.

I think that’s the biggest challenge, particularly among journalists. Journalists are historically, in the United States, libertarian in their view of press freedom. They have a right-wing bias among journalists, they might not like to think of themselves as right-wing, but their understanding of the First Amendment is very right-wing, it is very focused on individual liberty, not on the needs of the community.

And they celebrate the relationship between free press and free enterprise. And I think the education challenge begins with journalists and then spreads into the larger community. But I think you’ll find these ideas much more receptive in the larger community than in the journalism community.