Headlamp Pictures Blog

I really didn’t mean for these to appear in alphabetical order, but here’s a teaser for fellow student Mark Barroso’s film A Puppet Intervention. When I read about it I thought I knew what I’d see (seen lots of activist puppet stuff living in Philly, Eugene, Berkeley). These have to be seen to be appreciated. Obviously a nice light touch with the filmmaking and some cool verite moments.

“A Puppet Intervention” movie trailer from Mark Barroso on Vimeo.

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.

In 4th quarter 2009, the time spent per week with online videos, social networks, blogs, and mobile videos combined was barely 3% as much time as was spent watching television on a home TV set. 

Why Online Video Fails To Meet Its Lofty Expectations

With television advertising being a $70 billion market and total online advertising weighing in at $22.7 billion for 2009, you can’t help but wonder why online video advertising only represents a $1 billion market. 

In fact, according to the IAB, video advertising grew from $734 million to $1.017 billion from 2008 to 2009 — or 38%.  That’s not bad, but when you consider that total video consumption per month has soared from 10 billion videos in July 2008 to over 33 billion in December 2009 (or 230%), you wonder why the revenue growth hasn’t mimicked the viewership.

For sure, economics tend to trail consumer patterns.  Moreover, the recession and advertising slump didn’t help either.  And yes, the so-called experts might not be all-knowing either, after all.

I personally think there’s more to it than that. 

The Genie is Out of the Bottle

In 2000, I worked at a search engine company.  We gave away our search engines for free and sought to generate revenue via advertising.  The Nasdaq crashed and took down the ad market, after which point we sought to collect licensing revenues for our technology.  With the cat out of the bag, it was impossible to get people to pay for the product afterwards.  Lesson learned: If you give something away for free, you can’t charge for it subsequently.CTD…

An argument that professional content will continue to dominate the audience’s attention and that the likely way it will be paid for is through ads. But will the ad revenue be enough to fund the programming we’re fond of? Maybe a reality show, but probably not Lost, or CSI.

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.