This chain of newspapers is boldly striking out into digital territory that no other legacy media has ventured in (switching to free online tools and more), but I’m eager to consider how our station can adopt this idea:

Telling the Stories

A cornerstone of the Ben Franklin Project is the inclusion of everyone in the process. While project observers helped fill the toolshed, our audiences helped fill the websites and printed pages.

The Ben Franklin Project opens the process and allows everyone to participate at whatever level they are comfortable. Adhering to Journal Register’s digital first mission, the Ben Franklin Project will empower the audience – through use of free web-based tools (the list of which is still being finalized) – to determine on what stories our reporting and editing staff should be focusing their efforts. The audience – the news consumer – will no longer simply be the end user. By transforming the process the traditional “end user” will be put at the beginning of the process when she helps shape the newsgathering and participates in the newsgathering.

And the audience wasted no time in participating. The Perkasie News-Herald invited readers to a town hall meeting — a mix of old-school outreach and the new-school crowdsourcing approach. The Q-and-A session of the meeting served as a news meeting where residents requested stories on the local electric rates and the community’s pay-as-you-throw trash collection system. Reporters and editors still did the work but they knew from the time story assignments were conceived that these stories matter to the audience.

The News-Herald in Lake County asked readers to help extend the newsroom’s reach by covering more turf than the reporting team could do alone. Editors, using Facebook, asked followers to help the staff build a list of the most dangerous intersections in the coverage area. By asking the audience to collaborate the staff was able to collect dozens of suggestions within the first few hours of the Facebook post. Reporters cross-referenced the submissions with data obtained from police. The same worked for a series of stories on blighted properties in the area. Readers were asked to report blighted properties and the reporters then investigated.

The crowdsourcing not only ensures the stories are relevant to the readership but also provides greater depth and breadth to the report as the community — collaborating with reporters and editors — can help extend the reach of the newsroom.

Hyperlocal ‘news cafes’ are taking the Czech news scene by storm

Tribeca looks to expand notion of film festival

By JAKE COYLE (AP) – 6 days ago

NEW YORK — When British director Mat Whitecross was growing up in Oxford, only so many movies screened in his local cinema — and not the intriguing movies he read about playing at film festivals or elsewhere.

Whitecross estimates that 90 percent of the films that were influential to him — such as “Taxi Driver” and “La Dolce Vita” — he watched “on very dodgy, knocked-off VHS tapes” or on TV early in the morning with commercial breaks.

“Better to have seen them that way than not at all,” he says.

Whitecross’ experience guides the ninth annual Tribeca Film Festival, which kicks off Wednesday amid concern that the volcanic ash disrupting air travel in Europe might ground some of the many European filmmakers who were planning to attend.

. In an effort to help films find audiences, movies won’t just be screening in downtown Manhattan.

A new distribution company, Tribeca Film, founded by the festival’s parent company, Tribeca Enterprises, will make a dozen movies — including Whitecross’ directorial debut “sex & drugs & rock & roll” — available on TV by way of video-on-demand in some 40 million homes. A “virtual festival” will also stream eight movies and 18 shorts online for viewers willing to shell out $45.

…ctd

A win-win for indy filmmakers and indy-loving audiences who can’t get to Manhattan (or can’t get a ticket.) Get the films on VOD and watch in your home theater. Now I’ve got to convince my little cableco to sign up!

I’m a little late posting this one, but a fascinating study that shows we like to surf and watch! (and I thought it was only me…) The two media can and will stand side-by-side for quite a while.

Written by Ryan Lawler

Posted Monday, March 22, 2010 at 8:30 AM PT

Nielsen: Media Multitasking Catches On

People are watching more TV than ever and using the Internet more than ever before. So how do they find the time? Mainly by doing both at the same time, according to new research from Nielsen. In its latest Three Screen Report, Nielsen found that 59 percent of consumers watched TV while simultaneously surfing the Internet, up from 57.9 percent in December 2008. The amount of time they spend doing also increased dramatically; on average, Americans spent three and a half hours on the Internet while also watching TV in December 2009, up from two hours and 36 minutes just a year before.

In December, the average American watched an average of 35 hours of live TV per week, with an additional two hours of timeshifted TV, Nielsen reports. The amount of television people watch is up about two percent from the year before, but DVR usage is up about 28 percent. In addition, Americans spent about four hours of their week on the Internet, including watching 22 minutes of online video and four minutes of mobile video.

The amount of online video consumers are viewing has grown 16 percent year-over-year, and it appears that much of that viewing is happening while people are at work. Approximately 44 percent of all online video viewing is happening in the workplace, according to Nielsen, a stat that probably won’t be too surprising for those who follow events like March Madness on Demand, which has been made available live online by CBS Sports. CBS saw a huge spike in traffic during the first day of the tournament in the hour after 2 PM EST, during which it delivered 533,000 streaming hours of video for the full hour.

While the amount of time Americans spent viewing mobile video remained flat, the number of users that watched mobile video increased dramatically. With an increase in the number of smartphones on the market and in user’s hands, the number of consumers watching mobile video increased 57 percent year-over-year, from 11.2 million to 17.6 million.

1 comments:

Colin Powers said…

Like John, I’m interested to see how the dialogue develops on some of your provocative ideas. Anyone involved in the PBS system who doesn’t feel the pain of investing heavily in distribution technology with ever-shrinking lifespans is in denial or in the dark. And no one wants to do away with pledge drives more than those of us who have to go on air and conduct them.

A content driven model is hugely desirable, but I need to understand just how the funding flow would change.

I’ll describe the situation I know best and maybe you can help us find ways to repair or replace it… we need the ideas!

Our station has more filmmakers, journalists, editors, videographers and educators creating local content and providing hands-on educational outreach to the community than it does administrators, technicians or management. I’m not sure how much leaner we could be as a pure local content provider with a lighter technical burden. We’d still need a studio, edit bays, field equipment, engineers to maintain them and some sort of master control room to insert the local programs into the stream you imagine we’d feed to the commercial tower. Plus, we’d have to sacrifice our multicast channels that our audience has decided they really like. We would save on transmitter and other transmission costs.

Unfortunately the content creation side of media is expensive… just what the newspapers have discovered – and they don’t record in high-def!

I suppose we could transition to some system whereby national content fed via a national television feed and local content was strictly available via web, but I see two issues with this: First local content would hit that digital divide – back to the “people who need PBS the most” point. Second, local stations tailor their programming to suit the needs of their community – this would go. It would be Nova, American Experience, History Detectives nationwide at the same time every week. Convenient for branding and promotion, but not very reflective of regional tastes. Our station runs local content in prime time 3 or more nights week – much more on weekends and daytime.

Also, even a web-based local public media outlet requires the same facilities, equipment and personnel that I outlined above – especially to deliver professional content that will draw eyeballs in a cluttered media environment.

Finally, this discussion (and others on the web) have focused heavily on programming content and journalism, but few have addressed the value of station-based education departments that provide tens of thousands of hours of early childhood literacy, media literacy and teacher professional development training to school children and school districts throughout the country. Your pledge dollars support these activities, too. Where do those resources go in the FPBS?

April 14, 2010 11:50 PM

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Here is my response to the provocative site PBS revolution and the thoughtful post by John Proffitt posted yesterday.