Friday, April 13, 2007
These organizations exist on behalf of their members and work hard -- especially in Washington -- to preserve an industry that, frankly and truthfully, is being eaten away from beneath and cannot be defended entirely through traditional, institutional means anymore. There's not just a lot at stake; everything is at stake, and our response must be measured and accepting of the realities of the business disruptions confronting us.
We are, however, quite realistic about the future, and we're adamant that the time to build for that future is now, not when we're so far down a sliding slope that we cannot recover.
We need to stop reacting and start acting. <Permalink>
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THE NAB NEEDS A NEW NAME (Terry)
Public Broadcasting:
I thought, "That's nice, but what's the internet doing on that sign?"
This is no flip question, and it strikes at the heart of the conundrum that all local media companies face as wave after wave of disruptive innovations break at the foundation of our business. The internet most certainly is not any form of broadcasting, and the illusion that we are broadcasters online will be our downfall.
Every internet play in the broadcasting world is there to extend our brands and further the mistaken belief that our only mission is one of reach and frequency. Television station portal websites, for example, are there to represent the station -- to be all things to all people, the essence of the broadcasting paradigm.
The problem is that the web is too efficient for this, and besides, a TV station's website is just another URL in the vast sea known as cyberspace. The more local media companies, newspapers included, try to shift their mass marketing models online, the bigger the smiles on the faces of the internet pureplay companies. Heck, they'll even help us by aggregating our content to give us more eyeballs.
This is a wolf in sheep's clothing, for these companies are our real enemy in the battle for local, online supremacy. Think not? Read these few lines from a Newspapers and Technology story on the alliance between Yahoo! and eight newspapers to provide local content:
"We believe the local segment is largely untapped and provides significant opportunities to expand audience engagement and grow local advertising."
Local media companies are willing to get in bed with the enemy, because we can't see past reach and frequency as a way to make money. It's reasonable, then, that anybody who can help us expose our content to other users, well that's all the better. But remember what Professor Bob Papper says, "Television didn't hurt magazines by taking away their readers; they hurt magazines by taking away their revenue."
We simply have to stop looking at the web as only a mass marketing, brand extension platform. We need to see it for what it really is -- a place -- and craft new business models that will guarantee us a seat at the local media table for the long term.
This is why I think the NAB (the RTNDA, too) needs a new name, a name that's truly representative of what we are -- or what we need to be. As long as we think of ourselves as only broadcasters, we'll never make anything else the priority it deserves. We're not "just" television and radio stations anymore; we're multimedia companies who happen to have television and radio stations at our disposal. This is a significant difference in thinking, and it begins with a name.
This is not to say that broadcasting isn't or shouldn't be our core competency, but this isn't about the core; it's about the edge, because that's where life exists in the niche-oriented web. That's what these Media 2.0 Intel reports are all about, and why we so strongly recommend our Simulpath™ strategy for clients.
Media 2.0 seems strange and foreign to us, and overcoming this is job one -- something we're less inclined to do as long as we view ourselves as only broadcasters.
And beyond the name change, the NAB needs to provide the leadership that's so badly lacking as our world gets turned upside down. Our organization should be in front of -- even way in front of -- the changes that are taking place, so as to provide "big picture" ideas and vision for tomorrow. Steve has much more on that. <Permalink>
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HOW THE NAB CAN REALLY HELP BROADCASTERS (Steve)
Here are five ways the NAB can start helping broadcasters make the change to being well-rounded local media outlets:
1. Be for change. Help guide broadcasters through the tumult in the new media world. Help them transition into what Terry calls "local media outlets." Highlight the stations that do this successfully.
2. Reward innovation. Give awards to people who bring about change. Spread the word like crazy - the NAB is in the change business: we embrace it, we encourage it, we want to see more of it. The highest honor we can bestow is on the local stations that lead the way in innovation.
3. Bring presenters to the keynote who present a fresh take on the industry. The keynote is broadcast-centric. There is an audience for that. But there is more demand than ever for new media information in this audience. Have a voice from new media-land at that keynote talk about the opportunities and victories of the past year. Have one of the general managers of a local affiliate who has had a breakout year talk about it. This is more than just a breakout session - this is worthy of a place at the kickoff.
4. Offer materials on how to change newsroom culture from being TV-centric to 24-hour news-centric. This is key to the shift from focusing on the newscast to focusing on local information. The NAB has the ears of the networks and the affiliates. It can be a focal point for this shift. It can be a clearinghouse of information and offer suggestions on best practices. Newsrooms are undergoing the pain of change, and the NAB can help ease that pain with good guidance and practical examples.
5. Make a major push to get the FCC on our side. The NAB is, after all, a lobbying group. Right now, the FCC is the enemy of the affiliates. The affiliates are under the chilling effect of the FCC, living in fear of a potential station-ending fine for an obscenity uttered on a live broadcast out of its control. There needs to be a better system of checks and balances, and some system where more than one viewer complaint can spell doom for a lifetime of hard work by a local.
The NAB convention is the gathering place for networks, affiliates, vendors and others seeking their way in the media marketplace. What's missing right now amid the often chaotic pace of the convention is a good tour guide. The NAB can be that tour guide - helping stations build a roadmap and then guiding them around any potential barriers to reach their destination. <Permalink>
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NEW MEDIA EXPERTS OFFER THEIR ADVICE AND WISDOM TO BROADCASTERS
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JEFF JARVIS, author of the popular blog Buzzmachine, media consultant, NYU associate professor, and international columnist.
The dangers are clear and if broadcasters try to ignore them, as newspapers in America have, they will suddenly face the same kind of dire restructuring that overtook Knight Ridder and Tribune. There is not a :01 to waste. The value of distribution -- especially as the key definer in local broadcast brands -- will plummet precipitously. The competition for attention and local ad dollars will only explode. But we all know all that; we just have to make sure we've faced it honestly.
And then let's move on to the opportunities. Local broadcasters need to figure out how to get more local -- fast. They need to learn how to work with the people formerly known as their audience to create more content and connections than they ever could have before. They need to see that once they get more local, they can expand their reach and also serve a new and very large, untapped population of smaller advertisers. They need to see that they have a limited time to use their tremendous promotional power to drive people and money to the future. They have to see life after the broadcast tower. <Permalink>
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J.D LASICA, author of Darknet, Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, co-Founder of OurMedia.org and Socialmedia.biz, and originator of the term "personal media revolution."
Stage one of the personal media revolution was all about "me" -- personal podcasts, one-off silly video clips uploaded to YouTube and tens of millions of mostly inward-looking blog posts.
We've entered stage two of the revolution, and while "me" is still front and center, "we" is fast gaining ground. Social networks help turn personal media into social media, or conversational media. The interaction around the media has become as important as the video or broadcast itself.
The popular videoblogging site Blip.tv is not about clips, it's about shows. Web 2.0 tools are springing up that help people organize the torrent of media coming into their lives. More and more people are picking up tools like the free Spinxpress.com file-sharing program to collaborate with others to create higher-quality works.
Two years ago, when we launched Ourmedia.org, we were the first site to make it easy to publish videos and podcasts to the Web. Now, with 360+ other sites offering to do that, we're focusing on the "we." We'll be exploring how to spotlight the good stuff - the most relevant, useful or interesting (and not just the most popular).
Shhh! Don't tell anyone, but this weekend we'll be relaunching Ourmedia with a new focus on channels. Anyone will be able to create a sort of social broadcast network -- an individual, a circle of friends, a club or organization. Program in the videos you want to highlight, no matter where they reside on the Web. Then, talk about it. Rinse. Repeat.
It's an exciting time to be a we. <Permalink>
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DOC SEARLS, blogger, columnist, consultant, senior editor for Linux Journal, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, originator of the term "markets are conversations."
1) The Live Web. The Static Web of "sites" is still there, but the action is on the Live Web of posts, real time search, and live feeds of searches on topics and stories that are unfolding *now*.
Key point: Less than a minute passes between the moment when a blog (or any syndicated item) is posted on the Web and when it's indexed and searchable on Technorati or Google Blogsearch. Think of these (especially Technorati, which does the best job*) as engines for searching "what's too new for Google." You can subscribe to live feeds of searches for subjects or tags or web addresses. Your search terms may be city or town names, political figures, weather systems, news story keywords -- anything, in various combinations. These will be the new AP wire feeds of the future. They should be the feeds of today. There isn't a "system" here yet, but you also don't need one. You can "mash up" a system yourself in your own newsroom.
2) Supply from the Demand side. Thanks to the Net and inexpensive video recording and production systems (Apple's leading the way here), countless former consumers are now producers as well. Nothing the Net does is more important than the ability it gives *everybody* to be a producer as well as a consumer.
Don't think of these new producers as competitors. Think of them as potential allies, partners and collaborators in building out the new systems that will replace TV as we know it. By the way, this trend isn't about "user generated content" -- a term that calls to mind packing material. It's about participation by parties who will sometimes be much closer to news sources than your reporters, and more educated about countless subjects as well.
3) The Giant Zero. That's how to understand the Net -- as a giant zero between everybody and everything on it. In the long run, the cost will trend toward zero too. The Net will become a utility like roads and water systems and waste treatment. There won't be much money in deploying it, and its maintenance costs, once installed, will be small.
Here's the key thing about fiber optic cabling: it is capable of carrying enormous amounts of data traffic both to and from homes at almost low cost. This is where we are headed. This is the dirty awful fact that the cable and phone companies don't want to face -- and don't want *you* to face. Because they want to make money by selling access to your station to customers who will eventually be able to bypass them. They have a system of artificial scarcities that they need to maintain for as long as possible. This is not to say they don't have roles to play; just that in the long run their traditional businesses -- telephony and cable TV -- will depend on the same Net infrastructure as all other forms of data traffic.
Bottom line: the Internet is the base-level infrastructure. Not cable. Not telephone systems with DSL. Right now cable and phone companies provide wiring that gives us access to the Net but in the long run the Net will become the base utility. More to the point for TV stations, anybody will be able to serve video to anybody else.
Eventually, that's all TV will be. The concept of "stations" is already a relic of an age when TV was waves in the air that only covered a limited geography. Today cable system must-carry rules are designed to mimic the limitations of physical coverage. But those rules are another increasingly absurd example of artificially-imposed scarcities.
4) Relationships. Those are the only advantages stations will have when anybody can serve anything to anybody. Look at the Net and its giant-zero nature as the best relationship-supporting system that the world has ever known. Then look at the opportunities your station has to build relationships today that will survive the transition to a giant-zero environment.
For hints about the scope of those possibilities, think about the relationships revealed by SlingBox usage. Here viewers far removed from their home station's coverage areas can tune in and watch your local games, your local sunrise shows and evening news programs.
Think of the relationships made possible by news systems that embrace what anybody, anywhere in a station's service area can chip in and help produce.
This part won't be easy. Relationships with The Many are new to TV. For the better part of a century TV (like its father, radio) was a one-way, top-down, producer-to-consumer, few-to-many system. Now it needs to adapt to a world where anybody can produce, and anybody can consume anything from anybody, whenever they want, anywhere. The way to stay the Big Dog producer in your service area is to lead the way. And you can only do that by embracing, and relating, to others who can help out.
* Disclosure: I'm on the Technorati advisory board. <Permalink>
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CHRIS ANDERSON, editor Wired Magazine and author of "The Long Tail."
I don't really know much about what you do, but I hear it's pretty popular.
Meanwhile there's the other thing I know a lot about online, and it's getting pretty popular, too. That might affect you--after all, there are only so many hours in a day. No idea what you should do about that. I'm sure you'll figure it out. <Permalink>
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POYNTER'S E-MEDIA TIDBITS, A group weblog by the sharpest minds in online media/journalism/publishing
TISH GRIER: "Be interactive, but don't 'harvest' user-generated content (and then hold on to it in perpetuity). That was what Clear Channel's Steven Spendlove of Clear Channel suggested for a Santa Rosa TV station in February. That's not fair to contributors, communities, or to broadcast news. TV stations could become aggregators of local content in ways that respect local content and the folks who produce. Link to good local content.
"Small local broadcasters also might want to do more outreach to community access stations. Help them shape better community-created programming. Those resources are often woefully underutilized."
ALAN ABBEY: "Full-text and 'raw' video/audio content on stations' sites would be great to see -- press conferences, events, etc. They probably leave 90 percent of what they have on the cutting room floor. I'd also like to see C-Span-style coverage of local events for their sites.
"Also, it is a conversation nowadays: How about video letters to the editor?"
And my own short list of tips for news broadcasters:
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REMINDER: FIND US AT RTNDA@NAB
Terry Heaton:
Steve Safran:
If you can't make it to the panels but want to say hi to Steve and Terry, shoot them an email:
Terry: theaton@ar-d.com
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The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) meet again beginning this weekend in Las Vegas. This year's conference comes at an especially critical time in our industry's history, so we've produced this special newsletter. It contains the work of many media observers, and it's our hope it will serve as mind food prior to the conference.
We appreciate that associations must, in large measure, be cheerleaders of the status quo, but there comes a time when the half-full glass can lead to delusion, and that's why this year's conference is so important. We're not doomsayers, because we recognize that broadcasting is still -- and will likely always be -- a very profitable business.
I hope that broadcasters recognize both the seriousness and immediacy of the change demanded of them but also the many opportunities they face. I hope we'll talk more about the possibilities than the dangers.
Terry Heaton has been brandishing the term "personal media revolution" so frequently of late that I wonder if I should have trademarked the term. But that would have been contrary to its main thesis. As the ground shifts beneath us, efforts to gain firm footing by exercising control is a losing proposition. Better to nimbly follow the rock slide down the hill -- go with the stone flow.
The TV news system isn't broken. It's just one system struggling to thrive in the midst of many new systems that will only get more and more useful -- both to TV news operations and to viewers. Those systems include blogging, videoblogging, podcasting, tagging, videoblogging, rivers of news, and many other emerging practices. It's too easy, however, to get snowed by all the technical possibilities here. Better to look a four larger factors that will put them in context.