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Pubcasters and Social Networking

Last September, mega-station WGBH in Boston held a conference for public broadcasters about how to cope with the astonishing new world opening up in the land of Web 2.0. Now, reports and podcasts from that conference are available at http://opencontent.wgbh.org/index.html. Conferees listened to network pioneer Mitch Kapor talk about the peril of being an "incumbent" as a new media model arises--"you need to be 'fast followers,;" he advised. Yale law professor Yochai Benkler said, "What we’re seeing today is decentralized social production emerging as an additional modality of information, knowledge, and cultural production alongside these others. And whenever you have a new model to a production, creating, it affects everything... The question I think that is important for PBS to think about is how non-profits do the same thing; how you adjust how you are, and what you do to plug into these materials." Public broadcasters meanwhile wondered what happens to their traditional intermediary role if their new job is to promote self-generating open sites. The conference was a bold staging of the struggle of the old with the new, and WGBH's reports are worth visiting for people who want to know how pubcasters are grappling with new media challenges.