Perpetual conferencing: Public Media, We Media and beyond

It's taken me a few weeks to regroup after my February conference blitz: first Making Your Media Matter, then a marathon 5 days at Public Media '09, and then rounding out the month at We Media. This triumvirate gave me a rapidfire glimpse into the zeitgeist of three related but distinct public media sectors: documentary film, public broadcasting, and commercial journalism.

The prognosis is quite mixed: while individual media makers and outlets are still very excited about the possibilities of social media, crowdsourcing and mobile platforms, no clear business models are emerging to allow legacy organizations to transition gracefully to the networked media environment. At Making Your Media Matter, attendees were intrigued by the concept of the "people formerly known as the audience." At Public Media '09, members of the CEO session enthusiastically debated the possibilities offered by collaborations, as I laid out possible pubmedia 2.0 partnerships described in our recent white paper. Later sessions revealed that stations around the country are already experimenting with community-based networks, news aggregation, and cross-platform partnerships—echoing our recommendations. In the coming months we'll be exploring these and other promising public media experiments in our new Public Media 2.0 Showcase, with an eye toward measuring the projects' impact.

While the public broadcasters are worried about survival, many commercial journalists are hitting the end of the line. We Media organizers noted that while the first conference five years ago had been attended largely by leaders and staffers from traditional news outlets, they accounted for fewer than ten percent of this year's conferencegoers. Instead the event attracted "we media" makers from a variety of sectors, from government to healthcare to citizen journalism. The news during the conference that the Rocky Mountain News would be folding (don't miss their gut-wrenching final edition) underscored the massive shifts in the media and economic landscape that We Media organizers are exploring. Through their Game Changers Awards and Pitch It sessions, they offered glimpses of our connected present: mobile volunteering, social networks for preventative medicine, the "end of apathy" and the rise of networked politics.

Despite the gloomy newspaper news (and the even gloomier seesawing economy), I came out of these conferences optimistic. As Clay Shirky notes in a recent post titled "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable":

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead. When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work. ... For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Ditto for the public media we need. Thanks to Twitter, this round of conference-going greatly expanded my network of peers who are also trying to figure out what works. I feel plugged into seemingly perpetual social media conferences around the country. Whether I'm following Andy Carvin of NPR at South by Southwest, Doc Searls at the Emerging Communications Conference, or Lisa Williams at Marketplaces 2009, I'm immersed in a constant flow of real-time examples and reflections. This is a not only tremendous research resource, but a powerful ad hoc network that crosses regions and sectors seamlessly. Lisa's Twitter bio says "Good experiments kill flawed theories, we remain alive to guess again." Amen.