Image courtesy of PMP Partners

NEW YORK — The country’s five silos of public radio and television are spilling into each other with a joint program that will allow them – and eventually the public itself — to build apps, stations, websites and other media services combining audio, text and video content from every public radio and television outlet in the country.

NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller appeared at Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference Monday morning to announce the new Public Media Platform, a partnership between American Public Media, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Services (PBS), Public Radio International and the Public Radio Exchange distribution network.

Over the next six months, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will spend about $1 million to develop a working prototype of the platform, with NPR leading the charge

The Public Media Platform is “a series of platforms that will allow all of the content from all of those entities — whether news or cultural products — to flow freely among the partners and member stations, and ultimately, also to other publishers, other not-for-profits and software developers who will invent wonderful new products that we can’t even imagine,” said Schiller.

The Public Media Platform will cross-pollinate news across those five networks, and will provide data analysis to help reporters inside and outside those organizations present complex information more effectively. Both will be subject to various licensing rules, but the idea is to allow member stations and eventually third parties to distribute this information however they see fit.

“We’re going to spend the next six months figuring out exactly [the] rights [and metadata] issues, but the ultimate goal of this is to make this content available,” said Schiller. “Say there’s a blogger who is particularly focused on the BP crisis in the Gulf — they will be able to pull out still photographs, national and international reporting, reporting from local stations, video from PBS, data, and mash that all up together.

This is THE project I think. Many of us who participated in New Realities saw this move. We looked back to the common satellite platform and wondered if a common web platform would be the new common platform. Well here it comes.

Maybe I am naive about how time works. That was back in 2005/6. The level of trust was not high enough and the certainty that the web would be utterly dominant was not all there yet either.

I also applaud the inclusion of TV into this. After all it's all digital.

But the harder work is ahead - changing the culture from Broadcast to Participation. This is brutal work. Even when you know you have to go there.

It is like giving up smoking or carbs or even drink. It means leaving what you know for something that you don't.

This kind of work cannot be done alone either.

Just as the work to build the platform goes ahead, I urge stations to experiment as a group so that they can support each other with what a participatory POV would be like.

At KETC during the Facing the Mortgage Crisis project we found out the hard way what some good rules for this might be. I will repost these soon.