Life in the Third Zone - Boston IMA Conference 2007

PANEL: Station Social Media Experiments

Blogs, podcasts and wikis are just some of the tools that are taking radio beyond commercial and noncommercial broadcast into what Jake Shapiro calls an emerging "third zone": social media.

Shapiro -- ExecDir of PRX, and digital distribution visionary – moderated a panel that highlighted three public radio innovators in the booming (and challenging) participatory, multiplatform media landscape: WFMU (http://www.wfmu.org); , Chicago Public Radio (http://www.wbez.org); and Minnesota Public Radio (http://minnesota.publicradio.org)

What happens when public radio -- cherished for trusted quality content and civility – opens the doors to audiences that access, experience and use media in new ways?

How can public broadcasters translate core values into this new environment? What services can they provide? And what are the economics?

Panelists agreed that risk is built into the process, and that failures are not only to be expected – they are essential to creating working models.

For Chicago Public Radio, blogs and websites are opportunities to involve community and go deep into civic issues. But building sites doesn’t necessarily mean that audiences will come. Faced with "underwhelming response" to early efforts, the station was forced to reexamine its audience, services, and identity – as well as internal resources necessary for moving into uncharted territory.

The folks at Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media see a continuum between interactivity and community, and engages new audiences with projects that serve both MPR internally and its public. For example, Public Insight Journalism (http://americanpublicmedia.publicradio.org/publicinsightjournalism) both
generates content for news coverage and brings people together through wikis, polls, salons, and talk radio. Gather.com is a place where interest groups – from the local Duluth Life to Miinewiki, a collaborative music reference project – coalesce on Gather.com. Some rules: create simple tools, start small, create solid terms of use.

WFMU is also broadcast live over the internet in a wide variety of streaming formats (including Ogg), and all programming is archived on the WFMU website in 128k MP3 format for two weeks, then permanently thereafter in RealAudio format.

In 2005, WFMU expanded its online broadcasting efforts by offering 15 hours a week of Internet-only live programming ("free of the FCC's incomprehensible language restrictions", explains WFMU Station Manager Ken Freedman), as well as an independent 24 hour-a-day webcast of Nachum Segal's Jewish Moments In The Morning program.

In January 2006, WFMU announced that it is making the station's live stream and archives available to cellular phones and other Mobile devices running the PocketPC or Palm operating system.
Podcasts of 15 WFMU shows are also available.

The official WFMU blog, WFMU's Beware of the Blog, was launched in 2004, and has become very popular even among non-WFMU listeners. Original content from the WFMU blog is regularly featured on the front pages of high-traffic sites such as Boing Boing and MetaFilter.

Social sites need good rules

Blogs don’t necessary attract radio audience

Values: trusted How can public media leverage that trust and convene public conversation on civic and cultural issues?

Strengths: trusted producers; quality content, safe spaces for public dialog; quality content local connections possible

Opportunities: to be trusted conveners; create safe spaces; navigators through noisy media landscape; go deep into issues; involve people as active citizens, not consumers

Challenges: economic, managerial; relationship between broadcast and blogs?

Not clear that blogs, websites strengthen the broadcast side

Broadcast, digital – different cultures

Not just new delivery systems. Fundamentally changes the way radio is produced, experienced and used.

[American Public Media is part of the American Public Media Group organization which comprises Minnesota Public Radio, Southern California Public Radio, and Greenspring Company. William H. Kling (Bill Kling) serves as President and CEO of American Public Media Group (APMG).]