At last week’s meeting of the minds at NPR, there was much discussion about the difficult position local stations find themselves in as the value of their distribution diminishes. And it was said, as an article of faith or perhaps reflex, that going local is the answer — the same answer given for newspapers these days. But as I thought about it on the train ride back, I wondered what that really means.
Obviously, it’s not easy for a radio station to get hyperlocal; it has just one big pipe and no resources to cover a market broadly. It’s not easy for newspapers, either, but they clearly have a headstart with a larger staff of reporters and the ability to slice their products into local zones. So I asked myself what the strength of a radio station is and the answer’s apparent: promotion. A station can drive a sizable audience to something new online. But what do they get when they get there? And what content on the radio station continues to draw the audience to give it that promotional power? Not easy questions.
I’d start and the end and say that a local radio station must stop thinking of itself as radio. It has the power to develop local communities of news, information, and interest. It can use its promotional power to drive people there. It could, for example, get people in a market to record every damned school board and town council meeting and put them online, served by the station. It could create the meeting place where people share news and information, competing with or even in cooperation with local papers. It could be a home for talk about local issues and news.
So what is the on-air content? It’s not hyperlocal. But it could be a meta version of that: talk about the issues that cut across the region with reporting from the best of the local communities. It could feature the best citizen critics giving you reviews of local arts and entertainment. I don’t come up with much here. So I’d say that the station has a limited time frame in which to use its promotional power.
Here’s Zadi Diaz’ take on the same issue out of the same meeting:
So why listen to radio?
There will always be a need to connect in real-time. To know that there is another person on the flip side that can give you perspective on the present and can communicate back to us. It’s a living, breathing thing. And in a world that becomes progressively automatic, the need to connect on a deeper level will grow.
People like to be social. Twitter is proof of that. To me twitter is the text version of a well-oiled ham radio. People sending out ideas, and questions, and mundane little things that may only be of importance to a handful. But it’s that instant live connection that makes it so special. You know what someone is doing at that very moment. And in a sense, it puts you there with them.
People also love to tell their stories. To each other. Conversation. The thing about Twitter that makes it electric is that there are multiple conversations going on at once. You become a receptor, a connector, and a storyteller all at once. I feel this is the key to the future of live broadcasting:
Becoming a converstation. No misspellings there.
Creating a converstation within NPR can only benefit everyone involved. Maria Thomas, who invited us to the panel discussion spoke about how NPR was born of storytellers. It immediately conjured images in my mind of people sitting around a campfire and sharing their stories. Around that campfire there is the storyteller and the people listening. The storyteller isn’t in a vacuum, there is ambiance, they occupy space, they are also listening to the listeners. The storyteller is the independent producer who is an expert in the story they tell. NPR can build small campfires and enable those storytellers to begin and ultimately develop the grandest story of all.
Local member stations+storytellers= campfires
Campfires can especially grow in a beautiful way online. The use of a website becomes less about providing news (we have feeds for that), and more about being a social hub where people can go to connect. There is a reason why there are so many social networking sites. Why can’t organizations think of their websites like they do their buildings?
- You have your reception area where the receptionist answers your FAQs
- Office spaces which are only accessible to employees
- Conference rooms where you hold meetings
- Mess hall where people from inside can congregate and speak to each other
- Lobby where people from the outside can talk to each other and to the employees
- Etc.. play room?
If you’re not afraid to open up your building to the public, there should be no fear of opening up your web site to a little one-on-one communication.
So what you end up with is an endless number of little radio stations making their own connections. The old radio station is some collection of the best or widest of that.
I’m still not satisfied that there is a great answer for local radio. But if the Siriux, XM merger (below) goes through, I think that creates more opportunities for local NPR radio. The rest of radio — from the big companies and from satellite — will be national. NPR member stations can be the last outpost of local radio. They can’t afford to get more local on their own but they can do it in partnership with their listeners.
It’s great news that Sirius and XM have agreed to merge — and the FCC has every reason to approve the move. Without this, one of them would likely fold anyway. With it, we get the best of both their talent and technology and they can compete with terrestrial radio — which, Lord knows, needs the competition — and iPods. I’m a Stern fan and Sirius stockholder and satellite user and I’m all for this.
My CUNY colleague Sandeep Junnarkar — who makes magnificent multimedia journalism at Lives in Focus, where he last reported on AIDS in India — is embarking on his next project: the impact on families when one of your own is behind bars. He’s already getting amazing reporting. But to realize his full ambition, he needs to raise money to loan video cameras to the families so they can document their experiences. It’s easy to contribute through Have Money Will Vlog, which enables networked journalism by helping you to support these projects. I just gave. Won’t you?
I’m fond of saying that the most important invention in media was not the printing press but the remote control, for it gave us control of our media. OK, so it’s a tad hyperbolic. But still, when the remote control passed 50 percent penetration on American couches in the mid-80s — at the same time that use of the cable box and VCR also grew — we took over our control of the consumption of media and media changed forever. It got better. And that is a straight line to the internet, which let us take over control of the creation of media.
I say all this as a tribute to Robert Alder, the coinventor of the TV remote control, who just passed away.
David Cohn at New Assignment finds the 878th parody of the Apple commercial, this one with Tribune v. Sun-Times. It’s sad that one of the last remaining newspaper rivalries in America is about who’s less F’ed. Sadder still that it’s so funny to watch.
McCain’s videos may be ready for prime time, but not for YouTube. He doesn’t speak directly to those of us who are clicking; he speaks off-camera, as if this were an interview, or he speaks through music and polished production, as if this the video were intended for the giant screens at a nominating convention. He doesn’t yet understand that this is a conversation, one-on-one. He appears on an antiseptic, white background, nothing like the homey atmospherics of other candidates’ videos; it’s as if he’s trying out for Star Wars, not the White House.
But McCain has one good idea: He solicits questions for his virtual town hall via YouTube. This means that — unlike in Hillary Clinton’s tete-a-tetes — we will get to see which questions he has the guts to answer and which not. I wonder whether they realized that.
: Since one of you asked in the comments, the embed code for the video is here (under “share”).
And, damn, I wish I’d thought of Tim Shey’s line from the comments:
At one point, it looked like he was about to say, “and I’m a PC.â€
: LATER: * To embed this video on your blog (please) cut-and-paste this code:
Here’s my latest Guardian column (nonregistration page here). It’s about Viacom pulling its clips off YouTube but what it’s really about is the end of control as a media business strategy:
The days of doing business by telling customers what they cannot do are nearing an end. If your customers want to watch your shows, listen to your songs, read your news, or play your games, can you still get away with telling them they cannot unless they come to you and use your devices, pay your fees, and follow your rules? That could work in a scarcity economy in which you owned all the stuff and the means to get it. But no more. Business isn’t about control any more.
The wise company today will go with the flow of the public’s desires and try to figure out how to make money by helping them do what they want to do. That may sound obvious, but it’s not how media work. In the age of consumption, control was what media were about. In the age of creation, they should be about enabling.
Take Viacom. The American media giant – owner of MTV, Comedy Central, iFilm, Paramount, and much more – followed the old rules this month when it demanded that YouTube take down 100,000 clips that viewers had put up there. Mind you, Viacom was quite within its rights, for it controls the copyright to that content. And as a content creator myself, I’m no foe of copyright. It’s also clear that this is a negotiating move on Viacom’s part.
Still, it wasn’t a smart move. And here’s why: the evening before Viacom’s announcement, my teenage son and webmaster brought his laptop to the dinner table – yes, that is what life is like in the home of bloggers – and showed me a YouTube clip of his hero, Bill Gates, being interviewed by my hero, comic Jon Stewart, on Comedy Central’s faux news, The Daily Show. My son had never watched Stewart. Nor does he ever channel-surf the TV. The only – only – way he is going to discover a new show is via the internet, and the best way for him to do that is via YouTube. Yet the next day, that clip disappeared from YouTube and thus Viacom cut itself off from its future audience.
Comedy Central has put clips on its own site and even allows them to be embedded, like YouTube players, on blogs. Fine. But the first problem with that is that the network is speaking to the audience it already has. To attract a new audience – to make up for the free YouTube promotion it has now cut off – Viacom will have to invest marketing money. Control can be expensive. The second problem is that the network, not the audience, is picking the good stuff now. If your audience wants to praise and recommend and pass around your best stuff, why wouldn’t you let them, encourage them, enable them?
At the recent McGraw Hill Media Summit in New York, online mogul and conference keynote star Barry Diller said that “the issue is availability”. The music industry, he said, “stuck its head in the dumb sand for way too long”, but that won’t happen to the video industry because “everybody’s going to make everything available”. The question is where and how. Diller said that producers won’t want to find themselves at the mercy of a single powerful distributor, as they were in the early days of cable TV in the US. Fair enough, but they don’t have to. Their videos can be on their sites and on YouTube; they should be everywhere. Diller argued that Viacom will make money from its clips with advertising, subscription fees and micropayments (the last long-promised and prayed-for but still not materialising). I say he left out the other business model: free promotion of their core business, their network shows.
Rather than cutting off new distributors and promoters, I say that producers should be finding the ways to take full advantage of the opportunities they present. How can you build new audience for free and grow larger than you ever could when you were limited by your own distribution and marketing? How can you enable that growing audience to recommend and share your best stuff? How can you find yourself in a larger conversation – not just in comments on your site, but in the response videos people make on YouTube and elsewhere? How can you use this new medium to find new talent and new ways to make content for less? And, yes, how can you make advertising revenue on the clips that are on YouTube and then on the countless blogs that embed its videos? If, in its negotiation with YouTube, Viacom manages to crack that nut – getting revenue plus promotion plus branding plus content while helping the audience do what it wants to do – then that would be wise, indeed. We’ll see. My advice is simple: find the flow. Then go with it.
