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public media

Pivot to the Intention Economy

July 6, 2017 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

When it comes to civic media, the attention economy is not adequate to the task of serving the unmet information needs of neglected communities.

An intention economy can address this shortcoming in the following manner:

  • PROBLEM: Journalism in a mass-media ecosystem driven by attention and reactive fascinations will always trend toward distraction, spectacle and popular topics.
  • OPPORTUNITY: Mass media driven by specific interests rather than simple attention has at least the opportunity to build a habit of civic engagement around non-spectacular topics and issues.
  • MUTUALITY: In this equation the intention must be mutual, on the part of the media producer as well as on the part of the audience.
  • SUSTAINABILITY: Memberships, contributions, social-sharing and other forms of sustaining actions by audiences represent the apex of the intention economy.
  • DESIGN: Journalism’s practitioners advocates must design and implement systems that make it easy for those intentional economics to develop around public-interest news reporting in neglected communities.

On the demand side, civic-media advocate and Internet journalist Doc Searles explores the idea of the intention economy as a consumer-driven phenomenon, which opens up critical conceptual terrain for consumer or buyer’s co-ops for civic media.

What sort of intention can the production side — journalists and their advocates — bring to the table here?

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: attention economy, Engagement, entrepreneurship, intention economy, journalism, nonprofit, philanthropy, public media, trust

Molly de Aguiar: "Fundamentally, our work is about building relationships and trust"

July 27, 2015 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

A conversation about public media in the Garden State with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation’s Molly de Aguiar

WATERSHED: Your organization is a longtime, mainline public-media funder — and a household fixture in North Jersey in the ’70s and ’80s, via the public-broadcasting anchors WNET and WNYC. How has the emergence of the small news nonprofits shaken up a public-media landscape that’s traditionally been oriented around large, centralized public-media institutions?

DE AGUIAR: The Dodge Foundation has indeed made many grants to public media over the past 35 years or so, but we didn’t actually have a specific “media” or “journalism” focus until about five years ago.

We felt compelled to do more comprehensive grantmaking in support of local news here in New Jersey in light of the dramatic shifts in the media landscape and an ever more urgent sense that we need strong local journalism for our communities and for democracy to thrive.

New Jersey has a very challenging media landscape — local news has always been in short supply because much of the news we get comes from New York or Philadelphia. You referenced WNYC and WNET as staple public media stations in your north Jersey household — those are both based in New York.

In fact, the state of New Jersey eliminated its support for public media in 2011 and transferred the public radio and television licenses to WNYC and WNET in New York and WHYY in Philadelphia.

However, over the past several years, a network of locally-owned and operated community journalism sites has been emerging alongside the remaining legacy media. These sites are being helmed by diverse local stakeholders, from former newspaper journalists to concerned community members and citizen reporters.

And this ecosystem of sites — large and small, nonprofit and for-profit — presents an opportunity, we believe, to better serve communities by being more collaborative and connected to one another, and by meaningfully engaging the public around the news and information that communities identify as being most important to them.

It’s fascinating how ideas about networks, news commons and news ecosystems have taken root in New Jersey and not, for example, in the cutting-edge, entrepreneurial Bay Area. What are the conditions in the Garden State that have produced this focus on innovation in practice and organization, rather than on technology and killer apps?

Our efforts to support and strengthen the local news landscape in New Jersey have grown out of necessity — a sense of alarm for losing what few local sources of news and information we had as the digital age disrupted the business of journalism, but also a sense of excitement and opportunity for reimagining what a 21st century news ecosystem looks like and establishing New Jersey as a leader in local news innovation.

Full_Color_Dodge_Logo_for_Websites_and_OnlineWhen we launched our focus on journalism funding five years ago, I think we were lucky to have an incredible mix of smart, talented people like Debbie Galant and Jeff Jarvis, willing to lend their expertise to help guide this experiment.

And I don’t think this effort could have happened without philanthropic dollars to launch such an ambitious effort, including our partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

There are too few funders in the U.S. who see journalism as crucial to strengthening the fabric of our communities.

You mentioned technology and killer apps — those are tools, as you know, that are often helpful and sometimes not. But fundamentally, our work is about building relationships and trust among and between news organizations and communities.

We have done this by establishing the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, which provides an incredible array of support, services, learning opportunities, and a collaborative community for journalists in New Jersey.

We are also working hand in hand with a number of partner sites to better understand what sustainability looks like for a local news organization, which we believe includes a diversity of (earned and contributed) revenue sources as well as robust and meaningful community engagement.

All of this work takes a massive amount of time and patience — building relationships is very labor intensive. Technology and apps can certainly facilitate and improve the work, but people power and human connection will always be needed too.

In terms of impact funding, with its need for data, how does the foundation’s theory of change quantify and define that sense of urgency? Does the foundation’s fundamental work of “building relationships and trust” make it necessary to expand our understanding of the actual information needs of communities?  

Our metrics for success are multi-layered, so there’s not a simple answer to this question. We care about the individual health of the partner sites we work with: are they creating new, solid revenue streams? Are they expanding their audiences? Are the owners of these sites able to pay themselves? Do they have to work 80 hours a week just to make ends meet?

But also, is the ecosystem itself healthy and growing? And, are we successfully facilitating better, deeper relationships between local news organizations and their communities? Is that resulting in more community investment in local news?

Philanthropy requires a lot of patience. This work is just starting, and I don’t think we’ll have clear answers to most of these questions – at least not the macro level questions – for some time.

To your second question, understanding the actual information needs of any community is fundamental to the sustainability of local journalism whether in New Jersey or elsewhere — it needs to be relevant to people’s lives.

A transformative factor for small producers is low-friction backbone services. How do ideas of networks, ecologies and the commons open up possibilities for shared services in operations, technology, marketing, development?

Sharing and collaboration are the new currency in this digital media landscape, and that includes content as well as the back shop functions you pointed out.

The Center for Cooperative Media has done a great job facilitating content sharing among news organizations across the state through its Story Exchange. My Dodge colleague Josh Stearns is currently exploring shared back-shop functions with our six local partner sites.

We launched a shared website tech-support back shop, which our partners thought they wanted, but after some experimentation, they realized that what they really wanted graphic design support more than IT support. So we’re looking into that.

We’ve also set up some legal support with a partnership with Rutgers-Camden, and the Center has an OPRA Sherpa which will help news sites craft and submit OPRA requests as well as staff who can help make legal referrals.

We are exploring a number of other shared functions including ad networks, sales support, accounting and events coordinators.

This is a huge area of opportunity for the sites as well as for entrepreneurs looking to build businesses serving the NJ news ecosystem.

Another Knight grantee along with the Dodge Foundation is Radiotopia, which amounts to a very interesting investment in pure infrastructure and program development. How has the philanthropic landscape changed for journalism-infrastructure projects? Should the other service and membership organizations out there be paying attention?

This is an interesting question. The trend in philanthropy is not to fund infrastructure — not to give general operating support and capacity building grants. It’s often more attractive to fund discrete projects with clear goals, outcomes and a set timeline.

Funding infrastructure requires patience, and philanthropy often doesn’t have enough patience.

I’m grateful that one of the Dodge Foundation’s core values is to make general operating support grants, recognizing that nonprofit have to pay rent and salaries and all the other costs of doing business.

We severely handicap nonprofits when we refuse to give operating support. Dodge also provides a variety of capacity building workshops for our grantees on how to build and develop a nonprofit board and also how to improve your organization’s communications; these wrap-around services are really critical for nonprofits.

So, it was a logical move, when we launched our Media grantmaking program, to focus on the infrastructure needs of the New Jersey news ecosystem — given the need for infrastructure support as well as Dodge’s willingness to give that kind of support.

In order to best support the whole ecosystem in New Jersey, it was clear that we needed a centralized system/hub to offer that support, which is why our first grant was to establish the Center for Cooperative Media.

Service and membership organizations are also vital to providing support — although I think there are perhaps too many separate service and membership organizations, and that they should join forces to provide more robust services for the field.

I very much appreciated INN’s focus on sustainability for news organizations under Kevin Davis’ leadership, and I hope INN doesn’t move away from that.

It makes sense that service organizations could network or join forces in some manner, but on the flip side, the member organizations in the journalism field emerged to serve distinct needs, and especially the smaller, newer ones (such as INN) lack scale to derive revenue from members to develop high-impact programs across geographic regions.
 
I don’t know that I agree that member organizations emerge to serve distinct needs. There are lots of nonprofits out there that duplicate efforts because they’re unfamiliar with or unaware of what already exists in the field. Or believe that they can provide services better than others, so they start their own organization rather than trying to improve upon what exists. (This is true of all nonprofits — I’m not limiting my comments to just the journalism field or membership organizations).

Is the future of journalism-service organizations one of large centralized institutions or of networks of small, highly focused bureaus?

I doubt the future of journalism service organizations is either or — it’s both large and small, centralized and decentralized, but I would like to see more connections and collaboration between them. There are probably some mergers that would make sense too.

Public media has a long history of content commissioning, especially on the film and video side. Do you see any opportunities for commissioning to take on a more significant role for all the “new public media” coming up in the digital medium?

I’m going to punt on this question primarily because I’m not focused on content at all right now — although I get many many requests to support content for public media.

I will say this: if I transition to funding content, I would seek out work that better reflects the diversity in our communities than the requests I currently get.

The public-broadcasting divestment by the state of New Jersey in 2011 took place under Gov. Chris Christie, and the subsequent emergence of the community-media projects you describe seems like an almost organic response. What are the characteristics of the “information ecosystem” in New Jersey that is making (and will make) it possible for these community media organizations fill in the gaps?  

The divestment was perhaps a catalyst to what was already a shifting landscape, but the upheaval in the media sector — the democratization of publishing tools, newspaper industry layoffs, unemployed journalists, the major gaps in coverage — is what shaped the ecosystem we have in New Jersey.

I would recommend this blog post by Jeff Jarvis which is a very clear explanation of what we mean by the ecosystem concept and what it looks like in New Jersey and elsewhere.

Let’s close with a question of deepening concern — that of what I’m calling, for lack of a better phrase, “information inequity,” in which issues of social import and communities with acute information needs are more often than not overlooked by the systems we have built. What do we need to learn and understand in order to turn this around? What needs to change?

I’m glad you asked this question — it’s a big issue and one that I care about deeply. In fact, it’s probably what I care about the most.

The recent Pew research (“Local News in a Digital Age”) that studied Macon, Sioux City and Denver showed that while Hispanic residents in Denver and African-American residents in Macon follow local news at significantly higher rates than white residents in those cities and expressed a “greater sense of agency when it comes to improving their community,” there aren’t nearly enough news outlets and sources serving their needs.

Also, we partnered with the Democracy Fund to support research led by Rutgers looking at access to and availability of news and information in three cities in New Jersey — we’ll be releasing this research soon, but what we found about the disparities of access to news and information is both revealing and troubling.

We are currently trying to tackle this issue on several fronts in New Jersey (although there’s so much more I want to do):

On the journalism-education front, we support Dr. Todd Wolfson at Rutgers to help journalism students become better listeners and community members through community-based storytelling projects; this project also trains community members how to be media makers themselves, empowering them to tell their own stories.

Related, we fund Media Mobilizing Project on a just-launched project to work in several communities in New Jersey on citizen media/storytelling training, as well as The Citizens Campaign, which conducts comprehensive citizen journalism training.

We also support Free Press, in partnership with the Democracy Fund, to build relationships between local news organizations and their communities, which we believe will lead to greater participation and inclusion of diverse voices from our communities. The Knight Digital Media Center recently wrote a good piece summarizing that work.

We also have a new grant to New America Media to help build relationships with foreign language news outlets in New Jersey and nurture collaboration between them and the English language media.

I would also point out that ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting (both grantees) do tremendous work fighting for those who are the most overlooked and the most impacted by the systems we have built.

There’s so much work to do on this front. We need a bigger pipeline of journalists of color and more opportunities for them to take leadership roles in news organizations. We need more diverse news rooms at every level.

We also need to support and lift up community voices and have community-led (not just journalist-led) conversations.

There are many opportunities for philanthropy to support work that breaks down these entrenched systems we have built.

We welcome discussion and feedback on our work via the Local News Lab and also on Twitter:

  • Molly de Aguiar: @grdodgemedia
  • Josh Stearns: @jcstearns

Your readers might also want to sign up for Josh Stearns’ weekly newsletter The Local Fix which offers practical tips and advice, trends, and thoughtful conversation about local news.

Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: democracy, funding, journalism, philanthropy, public media

Chuck Lewis: How to Start a News Nonprofit

June 17, 2010 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

[Interview conducted May 2008]

A former 60 Minutes producer, Charles Lewis hit hard limits on what he could cover in the commercial sector. So he jumped ship, and embarked on the “tough slog” of building his own nonprofit news outlet at a time — the late ’80s — when the industry was still flush, and the Internet largely unknown. The Center for Public Integrity went on to break ground as a new type of public-interest news outlet, while Lewis has since founded the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, and played a key role in forming the Investigative News Network.

Notable Quotes

• STARTING UP: “The first time we got a six-figure grant was in ’94. For the first four years I could not get a major foundation — a well-known, large, kind of iconic foundation — to even answer my letters. So, y’know, it was a tough slog, a very brick-by-brick thing.”

• SPREADING THE WORD: “When I started the Center, the Internet was not really used by the public — the late ’80s, early ’90s. And so when we released something, we’d go to the National Press Club, and it’d be on C-SPAN, or the wire services would move stories based on what we had found, and it would be framed as findings even though it was a news story. And it worked, and people started noticing us. But the Web obviously helped, because instead of printing up a few hundred copies of a report, you could obviously put it on the Web and it would be available everywhere.”

• SIGNAL TO NOISE: “The problem is the Web and the blogosphere … doesn’t easily distinguish between quality and crap … That, and you start to be lumped in with a lot of things that you’re sheepish to even be associated with …. So the Web has its downsides, too, I would say. The viral nature of something exciting moving — we’ve seen that. And the Center saw lots of very big studies that got instant global attention when it hit … but the other side of that is, it’s getting lost in the din.”

• SELF-LIMITING JOURNALISM: “My worry is the extent to which both political sensibilities and intellectual squeamishness, about covering or not covering certain subjects, will creep into any new systems or forums. Most of these things come down to people and they come down to large bureaucracies — and whenever that happens, generally you’d better look out, because people get kind of strange, and frankly kind of closed-minded about what they’re willing to do. We’ve seen some of the results of the sort of calcification, and what I’d call a sort of nervous anxiety, about what the outcome of investigative journalism might be, who might be offended, etc.”

• THIS MAGIC MOMENT: “I think the opportunities are just breathtaking, and I actually think this is the most exciting time to be alive, or a journalist — ever. It’s sort of like what it was like in the end of the 1940s, with the advent of television — except it’s multimedia, it’s every potential form of communication imaginable, all exploding at once.”

• THE FUTURE: “Whatever happens is going to be a startup; it’s not going to be an existing entity trying to adapt. Entrepreneurialism always works better at new platforms, unencumbered by the past, or bureaucracies, or precedents, or cultural sensibilities that date back decades.”


CHARLES LEWIS, TALKING PUBLIC MEDIA
Interview by Josh Wilson, May 2008Let’s talk about your path into nonprofit and noncommercial media. I know the basic story — that you got frustrated at 60 Minutes and needed to strike out on your own — but I’m sure there’s more to it.

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, that’s an understatement. I had done investigative reporting at two networks, ABC and CBS, over an eleven-year period — and I basically came to a sense that there was a lack of seriousness and sincerity, really, about doing thorough, substantive investigative journalism, and I began to realize that I had done my time there, and it was time to move on.

This occurred in a number of specific cases of specific stories where they were not aired, or parts of them would not be aired. And I mean, I’m giving you the sort of Cliff’s Notes version …

But this happens in every sort of major news organization. There are these pressures we all hear about — and it does happen, and I experienced it firsthand, and I saw my colleagues experience it.

And I’m an old-fashioned, meat-and-potatoes guy that likes to investigate the bastards, whoever they are, and I don’t like anybody telling me that I can’t do this or that when it comes to that kind of work. The reasons would have to be really compelling, and they weren’t. [Laughs.]

So I didn’t have any idea what was out there; I just knew the world I was in was not working for me.

I was familiar with some models; I knew the Center for Investigative Reporting had been around; I knew about the Better Government Association in Chicago, which was really more of a nonprofit watchdog entity than a journalism entity — although it was a partner with many journalism outlets in Chicago.

The two of them had different models, in the way they were funded and their backgrounds and their approaches … and CIR, as you know, is the oldest nonprofit investigative journalism entity, actually I suspect in the world, from everything I’ve done and research I’ve done.

And I was close friends, still am, with Lowell Bergman — so I was familiar with the CIR model, but I had issues with the model, there were some things that I would want to do differently and ended up doing differently.

Everyone adapts to whatever they’re encountering and whatever they’re approaching based on experiences, tastes, biases [and] life experience. And I had a slightly different idea in mind. And I didn’t know it would be nonprofit at first. I mean, I didn’t know what IT would be — capital I, capital T — I just knew that I needed to be in charge of it [laughs], not anyone else telling me what I could do or should do.

That’s how it all started. And I explored all kinds of possibilities. I explored for-profits, I explored nonprofit, I had offers from numerous commercial news organizations, I had offers from Hollywood folks [laughs] — I had lots of possibilities.

But the one that I was most intrigued with was a nonprofit, and that’s really what became the Center for Public Integrity.

It wasn’t a short, quick odyssey; it took, literally, a long time. From start to finish — I left in November of ’88 and began working full time to make the Center happen, having obtained some funding, about a year later, actually, October 1, 1989. But it was a tough slog to get just to that point, and of course the next two or three years were really a tough slog.

So starting nonprofits is not a simple matter. And when you’re trying to control it, you deliberately have a board that will not be involved in fundraising, because they’re journalists. [Laughs]

And you have certain rules or sensibilities about what money you’ll take, and from whom, and all that stuff — and when you start down those roads, you’re starting to shut doors off to yourself, in terms of opportunities to grow the organization.

And in your earnestness for moral and ethical purity, or at least the perception thereof — hopefully both — you know, it actually does affect the level and degree of your success, in terms of your capacity, your size, all that stuff.

The more earnest, the less capacity?

Yeah, the more earnest and the more fastidious you are about your funding sources, in other words, the more limiting you become … to what money is worthy of your enterprise. I’m being slightly humorous here — my feeble attempt at humor.

But that degree of earnestness can impede the growth and the capacity of the enterprise — because if you’re too picky, you won’t accept money from anybody, and you won’t have any money.

At some point, you have to come off the ivory tower and come down into the village. [Laughs] And anyone who has started anything has had to do that. No matter how lofty the original notion.

So probably about five or six years to get it to a state where you considered it –

The first time we got a six-figure grant was in ’94. For the first four years I could not get a major foundation — a well-known, large, kind of iconic foundation — to even answer my letters. So, y’know, it was a tough slog, a very brick-by-brick thing.

Do you feel that’s changed?

No, I still think it’s hard to start things, actually — because it’s a very complicated dynamic between resources you need, what is your mission, what exactly is your self-imposed mandate.

And I hate to say it, but then it comes down to those intangibles, like the buzz factor — are you being noticed?

And if you’re doing something that’s counter to, or even in competition with existing major media, you are almost by definition not going to be receiving news coverage.

And so, off the bat … you’re certainly not assisting yourself, helping yourself in terms of publicity and attracting attention to yourself in the community, whatever that community is.

And it’s very, very hard.

So, there’s a direct relationship between the media discovering something and the availability of philanthropic funds. [Then] the hot commodity — or one of other cliches, the flavor of the month — gets all the funding, because it’s exciting, and that entity is a player and donors are thrilled to be associated with it.

And they feel what they’ve done is important, and it’s showing that it’s important because others have seen it as well, and there’s this exciting moment when that all happens.

But if any piece of it’s not worked right, if you don’t have the people, if don’t have the right projects, and you don’t have folks noticing what you’ve done — in other words, if what you’ve done is not terribly significant or even new, or impressive, or whatever word you want to use — then the funding will be affected by that.

I don’t care how many soapboxes you get on, how many phone calls you make, how many meetings and luncheons you attend. You will not be able to go beyond your own performance, or your record as an entity.

And — that part is a very, very tricky dynamic to understand — because without money you will not be able to function. And if you don’t function well, you don’t get money. It’s a little bit like a cat chasing its tail. It’s exceedingly difficult.

And the reason, I think, that nine out of ten new enterprises, companies or nonprofits fail is because getting the balance down — between the resources needed and the ways in which they are expended and the impact from those expenses — y’know, it’s a very, very delicate equilibrium.

With a startup, you don’t have a lot of people …

The capacity issues for a startup …

Yes — capacity is just a very big deal.

What’s the potential of the Internet to change or open up this situation, or will it?

Well, I’ve seen it on both sides. When I started the Center, the Internet was not really used by the public — the late ’80s, early ’90s. In Washington, most usage of the Web didn’t start occurring most places until the mid-’90s.

And so when we released something, we’d go to the National Press Club, and it’d be on C-SPAN, or the wire services would move stories based on what we had found, and it would be framed as findings even though it was a news story. And it worked, and people started noticing us.

But the Web obviously helped, because instead of printing up a few hundred copies of a report, you could obviously put it on the Web and it would be available everywhere. From the mid-’90s to today, we’ve seen a exponential explosion in terms of how many people that is. And of course you have the global component, which you didn’t have with news conferences at the Press Club.

So, yes, the impact of the Web is astonishing in that sense, in terms of what you can do journalistically, but also, most importantly of course, your economies of scale, your costs of this and that, in many ways go down. And your reach and your dissemination of course is the most exciting part, because it’s global.

And that’s all great. The bad news is that now there are tens of millions of people who have websites or blogs …

The info glut.

Yeah, there is a glut. And the problem is the Web and the blogosphere … doesn’t easily distinguish between quality and crap … That, and you start to be lumped in with a lot of things that you’re sheepish to even be associated with …. So the Web has its downsides, too, I would say.

The viral nature of something exciting moving — we’ve seen that. And the Center saw lots of very big studies that got instant global attention when it hit — I mean, the excitement of the Web is quite real and quite palpable and thrilling to behold — but the other side of that is, it’s getting lost in the din.

Do you think that there’s an opportunity for what I’m going to broadly call “public media” to provide standards or credibility amidst this undifferentiated glut? And if so, do you have any thoughts about what that would look like?

I have ideas about what everything should look like [laughs] … but I don’t know public media and what public media will become, both from the standpoint of technology, and the so-called spectrum, and the new digital channels …

I have friends who are authors of books about it, and I can get answers when I need ‘em, but there’s good news and there’s bad news about the PBS/NPR model: The good news is that nonprofit institutions were created in our lifetime, at least mine — 40 years ago — and it’s thrilling and inspiring to know that new things that have high impact can be created. We sometimes forget that, frankly, certainly in the public context.

So just the vision and possibility that it could happen at all is inspiring.

Yeah … when I see that a news organization today has 30 million listeners throughout the nation, and it started out of thin air forty years ago, that’s terribly exciting. And when I see it’s doubled its audience in the last decade, that’s thrilling.

When I see that they have over thirty bureaus around the world when CBS is down to five or whatever it is — that is remarkable.

So we have to stand back and acknowledge what we do see, before we go forward, and so — some of the things that have been created are magnificent.

On the other hand, you’re talking to an investigative reporter kind of junkie. I mean, I’ve been doing it for thirty years, and that’s all I really mostly care about.

And, with the exception of some of Bill Moyers’ programs and specials and Frontline, some of the Frontline shows, there’s not much of that on PBS — and NPR generally speaking does not do investigative reporting.

And so, in all the things that are contemplated, do I know what new structures and new systems will be created to enable investigative journalism, or to ensure that quality in-depth journalism occurs?

I’m not persuaded we’ve ever achieved that, number one, and number two, I don’t know what that is. And I don’t think anyone does, honestly. Is there a lot of discussion about it? Of course there is. I mean there’s an event in Washington, I know the American University Center for Social Media has been involved in mapping —

The Beyond Broadcast project …

Beyond Broadcast and folks, and — and I’m on faculty with Pat Aufderhide, who is in the AU School of Communication, and I myself am starting a new research center at American called the Investigative Reporting Workshop, which will be I think the first entity that I know of, at least in the U.S., looking at new models to do investigative reporting, both creation and dissemination or delivery of investigative reporting, as the sole mission of the enterprise …

I think what you’re asking is the question of the hour in many ways, certainly regarding the public realm, and public journalism, and what’s possible and all that.

But my worry is the extent to which both political sensibilities and intellectual squeamishness, about covering or not covering certain subjects, will creep into any new systems or forums.

Most of these things come down to people and they come down to large bureaucracies — and whenever that happens, generally you’d better look out, because people get kind of strange, and frankly kind of closed-minded about what they’re willing to do.

We’ve seen some of the results of the sort of calcification, and what I’d call a sort of nervous anxiety, about what the outcome of investigative journalism might be, who might be offended, etc.

I’ve been hearing people saying or discussing this and thinking about it for years and years and years, and I’m into the — I’m into investigating. Period.

Everything else kind of follows…

Yeah, everything else follows. If you’ve got the information, and you’ve got the quality journalism that you’ve been able to either do yourself or work with others to achieve, you’ll find a way to get it out these days — and that is one advantage of the Web.

But back to your question, it’s a great question, I don’t think we have what you just asked, and I don’t think anyone has any idea where it’s headed. And anyone who would say, “trust me, it’s gonna be great,” I would also hold onto my wallet and lock my doors.

There’s a mixed record here of setting up federal and national systems and guaranteeing they won’t be politicized in recent years, but they do become politicized — so let’s just get over that idea [laughs].

So you’re hearing a suspicious, independent cuss here, on the other end of the phone.

That’s fine. You know, independence is one of the bullet points in the SPJ Code of Ethics, to “act independently.” This is a bit of an aside, but I did leave SFGate.com after Hearst took over because of a lack of opportunity, because of people telling me what I couldn’t do. I started Newsdesk.org because the Internet appealed to me as a place where it was possible to be more independent.

I wonder if there is the opportunity to create a model or system or method — maybe not an institution, but a method — by which journalists can act independently within the classic decentralized Internet structure, where there is no center, everybody’s independent — but if they’re all signed on to a set of standards, for example, suddenly you have the professionalism and the support network that lack the hierarchy. That’s the theory behind Newsdesk.org. And that might be pipe dreaming.

No no no. I may be misinterpreting what you’re asking, but I think that could be very useful and there’s a need for it.

In fact, I’m on the advisory committee of a new thing called the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence — it’s going to be an annual prize and it’s going to be administered by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation — and there have been discussions with I. F. Stone’s son, Jeremy Stone, about what constitutes an independent journalist and independent journalism, and what are the criteria, and we’ve been in deep discussions really in recent weeks.

And you know, I have been asked by them to write about this very subject, and to discuss that is and how to define it. And most journalists, no matter where they work, assume they’re already independent. Also the phrase “investigative” — “Oh, I’m investigative.” What do you mean? “Y’know, I ask questions …”

So these definitions and these terms are still not well understood, even inside the profession of journalism itself.

One of the things that we made a point of at the Center for Public Integrity when I ran it for the first fifteen years was that, to have a code of conduct and standards for — and this really more along the lines of ethics and integrity, about news-gathering techniques — but I was very very strict, as or more strict than the news organizations and networks, places like that, that I have worked.

Given the name of the organization, the Center for Public Integrity, I had very clear ideas about what was reasonable in news-gathering and what was a violation of privacy, or other sensibilities.

And so there’s a way to do investigative reporting and not violate any laws or do things that are just simply unreasonable, I would say.

And even something that basic [as having a standard] is actually borderline revolutionary, because you have lawyers telling you for libel reasons “don’t do it,” because then you’re charged with libel later in some civil situations; they’ll hold it against you that you had a standard — anyway, you can basically lose your mind splitting hairs on any one of these questions, and that’s just the ethics dimension, but the independent one is almost as vexing. It’s not a simple question of what constitutes an independent journalist.

I’ve just interviewed nearly two dozen great journalists of the last half-century about their truth-to-power journalism at the national level, as part of a book I’m writing, and I would dare say in 45 hours of interviews, I would never have asked them to define what we’re discussing — do you know what I mean?

Because not a single one of them — which is probably collectively several hundred years of experience in journalism — would have said the same thing, I suspect.

About what?

About what is an independent journalist. Or — they would all insist that they were independent — and they were — but they all worked for news organizations that at one time or another were not so independent.

And so, I don’t mean to make everything overly complex… but the fact is that these are not simple questions. I mean, they’re great questions, but they’re not simply answered.

So I think it’s something we need to come to grips with as a profession. I think going forward in the Information Age or Internet Age, we need to know better what the answers are to these questions.

But the fact is, there’s no — because we have something like 45 or 50 journalism nonprofit organizations alone in the United States, not to mention a few hundred colleges and universities that teach journalism — there is no single arbiter of anything about journalism, as you know.

There are no professional standards; this is a profession that prides itself on not having any standards [laughs].

I always go back to the SPJ Code –

Well, it is, it’s true — although that code, no offense to SPJ, I mean I’ve been a member for, gosh, a long time — but the SPJ code is actually not the most demanding code.

It’s a perfectly nice and reasonable code. It says some good things, and that’s why we put it on the website, but it doesn’t get down and dirty in the precise techniques and things that are useful for investigative reporting to be discussed, I guess you’d say.

So you can have internal policies that are different, or even go further than the SPJ Code of Ethics, which we did try to do at the Center in some cases.

It’s particularly delicate when you’re dealing with international journalism, where the language is different, the mores are different, the practices even about something that’s verboten in the United States — paying sources — is actually done quite a bit around the world.

One source versus two sources, a lot of the standards and techniques and practices of journalism vary according to geography, and in terms of the duration of their democratic experience, I guess you’d say.

And so — and existing laws in place — do they have criminal libel? Turns out 158 of 168 countries have criminal libel in the world, which is an astonishing thing to say, but it’s true. Article 19 has recently apparently found this in an international survey.

So if you not only risk getting civilly sued, but also thrown in jail in almost all the countries in the world, you can see how delicate this is in setting a standard.

So … now the public space is a global space. It was always kind of global, but it was in the context of the U.S.

Now it’s not — and that may sound like a small point, but it’s actually a rather significant point, because basically there are no global standards for this kind of stuff … I don’t mean to make everything so complicated, but these things are complicated.

It sounds like we have starting points for lots of important issues and ideas.

It’s also not rocket science. These things can be formulated and can gain currency over time, in terms of both the profession and the business of journalism, including the public sector part of journalism.

There are ways this can occur, but especially today there’s a lot of work to be done.

Which would you like to talk about: past or future? Legacy of public media, or opportunities for public media in the future?

I don’t know much about the future. I’m trying to forge it as much as anybody, and I have entrepreneurial leanings in various ways which will play out in the months and years ahead. So I have ideas about the future. But I don’t know about the systems that are going to be established in the future.

Then think in terms of opportunities, as an entrepreneur.

Well, I think the opportunities are just breathtaking, and I actually think this is the most exciting time to be alive, or a journalist — ever. It’s sort of like what it was like in the end of the 1940s, with the advent of television — except it’s multimedia, it’s every potential form of communication imaginable, all exploding at once.

So what’s possible in terms of what you could do journalistically to tell a story, to explain a story — but also even to get a story … some of the various new techniques, from computer-assisted reporting to satellite imagery — all the different techniques now are just breathtaking.

It takes journalism so far, centuries beyond Lincoln Steffens or S.S. McClure or whatever. So I mean, when we see what the technology enables, it is thrilling.

And from an entrepreneurial standpoint, we are obviously seeing a rather significant historic economic transformation — a euphemism everyone uses — but it’s true, the transformation.

And for an entrepreneur, the question is, who is going to pay for this information, this particularly difficult-to-get information, that is the most expensive, time-consuming and slightly riskier information to prepare?

What we have been seeing is [that] most of the for-profit models rely on folks without journalistic sensibilities or concern for community … those folks are into their shareholder earnings and their quarterly profits, and keeping them rather high — uncharacteristically high, vis-a-vis the rest of the industry sectors, even.

And so … the question is — what will emerge in the months and years ahead, and is there a way to redefine this landscape, or even this information that’s so crucial and so important? Is there a way that this information will become suddenly more attractive to the mega-players out there that dominate the global landscape economically?

And I actually think the answer to that is yes. Will it happen? The answer’s yes. Do we know exactly in what form? We don’t quite yet.

But whatever happens is going to be a startup; it’s not going to be an existing entity trying to adapt. Entrepreneurialism always works better at new platforms, unencumbered by the past, or bureaucracies, or precedents, or cultural sensibilities that date back decades.

And so, we’re going to see new startup for-profits, nonprofits and hybrids of the two emerge. We’re seeing it already — but we’re going to see it, I think, on a larger scale, in an economic way that finally takes, so to speak.

So far, the for-profit model has not had any success lately — not really, not substantially for this kind of work — and it is what is terrifying most journalists and most journalism production shops, so the owners in other words — and somehow that’s got to shift.

And I predict it will shift, and I think it will shift even in the next three to five years — but what do I know? I mean, no one really knows. But there are enough signs of ferment and enough signs of where things are going to suggest that it’s possible.

And I do find that utterly thrilling.

Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: entrepreneurship, journalism, nonprofit, public media, talking public media

Persephone Miel: What Should PBS Do?

April 13, 2009 by Josh Wilson Leave a Comment

[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.

Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: interview, journalism, PBS, public media, talking public media

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