Hitler arrives at Nuremberg for rally 1933 – another very popular orator

Normally I don’t write about politics here.

But not today.

I recently posted a note to Hoda Kotb from the Today Show. She had an item on her Facebook page asking what she should cover in her show.

Most of the answers posted related to shoes or clothing or divorces.  I told her she should speak out about the growing trend to publicly accepted racism in our culture, with Muslims paying the role of the Jews this time.

So far, she is sticking to shoes. Kotb, by the way, is Arabic for book.

The Failings of Public Education

When I went to school in the 1960s, almost all of my teachers were women.

They were women because in those days, the only jobs women could get were teacher, nurse or secretary. And so the smartest went into teaching.

And they were good. Very good.

When new opportunities opened for women in the 70s, (and I am old enough to remember when a woman going to Harvard Business School was still a big story), the smartest flocked to careers as lawyers or MDs or CEOs.  They followed the money.

In the days when women had no choice, schools could get away with paying teachers $23,000 a year, or less for women, and no one said a word – and they were able to attract the best talent in the country.

When other opportunities became available, the schools should have responded by making teaching as competitive as law, and paying as much.  But they didn’t. Instead, we debased the public educational system in America.  Oh, there are still those who teach out of pure dedication, but that’s like asking people to go to medical school and then head off to work for Medcin sans Frontiers. There are those who do, but not many.

I taught for many years at both Columbia University and NYU, and over the course of time, I watched as the level of basic education that my students came in with dropped and dropped and dropped. They were not stupid. Far from it, they were just uneducated – increasingly so. And interestingly, they didn’t care.  Most did not know the difference between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, and if they had to find out, they could always go to the web and Google it.

What we eroded was a basic foundation of fundamental knowledge, which by now, I think, is pretty much gone.

And the price we pay is that we have created a society without the ability to process information through any kind of historical wisdom.

So when Glenn Beck goes to the Lincoln Memorial and proclaims that he is the true heir to the Civil Rights Movement; when he and his Tea Party follower proclaim that the President is the racist here; when he fundamentally rewrites the history of this country to suit his own ends, one would think that an educated nation would laugh him off the stage.

But they don’t.

They don’t because we no longer have an educated nation that can process what he says through a lens of intelligence.

We have a nation of people who get their information superficially, and lacking in any kind of grounding of basic education, can be easily swayed by demagoguery of the worst kind.

For two generations we have ignored the infrastructure of this country.

Our bridges rust out and collapse.

That makes news.

Well our schools are rusted out and collapsing. And when the education of our nation rots and collapses, its is a whole lot more serious than when a bridge collapses, or deciding which shoes to buy.

What is happening today at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Dr. King’s I Have A Dream Speech is nothing short of pornography. Public pornography based on a collection of lies.

But we have a public that has lost the ability to discern the truth for itself.

This is how it starts.

And if you know anything about history, you already know how it finishes.

But alas, most people don’t even know that.

But they will. Sadly.

 

I quote Michael Rosenblum in full today. For he touches on the peril that confronts America today.

Can America get its Mojo back?

In Jane Jacobs great book Dark Age Ahead - she makes the point that the signifier for a great states's decline is growing xenophobia. Leading to a retreat into a fortress culture. This is what happened to China and what happened to the Muslim world. Both were many steps ahead of Europe but bothy retreated into themselves.

In the "fortress" thinking is not allowed or welcome. As Michael notes - many do not care that they know nothing. There is a pride in ignorance.

Such a society will look to the simple and to demagogues. Such a society will set up the the preconditions of "Collapse" - a structural inability to respond to challenges.

Don't we see signs of this inability today? As I see it we do.

This is why I am passionate in my support for public TV and radio's efforts to expand their role from providing good content to providing a safe place where the community can have a discourse about issues that are important to them.

At KETC in St Louis this effort began with creating such a safe place to help each other cope with the mortgage crisis. Now we are trying to find a way of facilitating the kind of discourse that will enable America to have a better approach to Immigration - an issue that will surely determine America's future as much as any other.

WGTE in Toledo will be doing the same soon on local agriculture.

 

My hope is that such an approach - of having a local in depth discourse on challenging topics such as who is an American? How we get our food? Jobs and the economy? Health? Education? Is our only chance of breaking out of the polarization of our politices and the over influence of the corporate will.

I don't see any other opportunity? Do you?

This is a small video made by Selena Wilkinson at the KETC Nine Academy.

The Nine Academy is a new idea for Public TV - it is a Video school at the station for the Public - where people can learn how to be film makers. They do this for themselves and also for the station.

So what's new? Until now, Public TV was very much like regular TV in that while it looked to the public for funding, it made programs just like all the rest of TV - with professionals. The Public did not get on the air nor did the public make TV.

This is what is new at KETC. We are creating the space on our web for the public to have their own content and we are using our physical space to train them to become good at this.

This film on soccer is part of an entire series on Soccer in St Louis. St Louis is the home of native soccer in the US. We have made a professional/traditional documentary and we are surrounding this with content produced by our community.

We are trying to find the sweet spot between what we have done traditionally - make and offer great pro content - and help the public have their own say about this topic - whatever that topic may be.

Next week - we go further - we take one of the most challenging issues of our time - Immigration - and bring the wide voice of the community to the public. Please watch this space for more

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.

“a source very close to Apple” suggest that Apple has been working on the next version of the Apple TV. The goods according to them: it will be a very small box (smaller than the current one) with perhaps only outputs for power and TV-out cables. It will run on Apple’s new A4 chip (the one found in the iPad and soon the new iPhone).. It will still do 1080p video, but may have as little as 16GB of flash memory. That’s because the thing will be based around streaming over the cloud (or from other computers in your home) rather than local storage. Most significantly, it will run the iPhone OS.

Basically, it’s an “iPhone without a screen,” is how Engadget hears it. Oh — and it will cost only $99, supposedly.

Looks likely that next week Apple will announce a new Apple TV - basically iPhone to drive our TV. War between Google and Apple will drive huge innovation.

So what then if your business is Conventional Appointment TV?

My bet is that within 2 years, Appointment TV will be over.

So what to do? Maybe first of all to understand this. For Public TV it means a Moon Shot Planning Process to get ready. Single stations cannot cope alone with this. Maybe it does not need all at the table but enough to build a new approach.

Content alone will not be enough either. Solving what truly is Public Service Media now becomes a compelling issue. How to be vital to your local community has to be more than being an online content supplier.

The crunch is in sight.

For me as a user this is great - but what does this mean for the producers of content? I am a bit boggled right now - but this feels like a question that producers have to find an answer for asap

Fear Is the Mind Killer – Mind Set and Adoption

by Rob Paterson

May 19, 2010 at 7:45 am · Filed under Adoption, Public Media, Public Radio, Public TV 

We have intuitively known for ages that the gateway to a 2.0 world – a world of participation and real partnership – is not merely the adoption of a new set of tools – but the mindset of the influencers in the organization. Now we know that this is an empirical fact.

In 2009 I was advising KETC, a public TV station in St Louis, as they tried a something truly novel. The Station had in its own market just completed a project funded by CPB, to see if it could use its Trust to convene the community to help each other get through the Mortgage Crisis. The challenge being that St Louis was locked down with fear and shame and it was all but impossible to find safe sources of help. The project was to find out who could be trusted and to help them set up a network of support and to connect this to the people. It forced the station to itself work across the silos and to connect TV with the web and with its outreach. The success of this experiment caused CPB to fund a much bigger test. 32 of the hardest hit markets in America were chosen. In each market CPB asked the TV and the Radio stations to partner and the entire group partnered as a group. Again the task was to reach into the community, to find those who could help, help them partner and to connect them to the people.

Here is a link to the full details of the project. We were in effect using the Mortgage Crisis as a Social Object.

View Facing the Mortgage Crisis, Participating Stations and Markets in a larger map
Here is a map of the scale of the work. If you expand it you will see the names of the stations.

So what happened? What happened is that some stations did brilliantly. Some did ok and others went through the motions. What was the difference? We found that the difference had nothing to do with any tools – we all used the same ones and we ll helped each other use them. No the Difference was mindset. The Mindset of the leadership of our a group of leaders at each station.

We were able to categorize the stations as you see in this chart. Here is more detail of what these categories mean. I offer it up because you can assess your own organization by using this screen.

Tier 1

• The station knows that they must shift their work patterns and focus on the external—they have a positive and open mindset

• They seek to shift their norms—despite what resources are available to make this shift

• Core beliefs inside the station have shifted and there is an emotional attachment between the station and the people they serve

• Communication is strong internally and externally

• Internal collaboration has become the norm, silos are minimized

• They are able to utilize all of their assets, leveraging the broadcast component and maximizing social and online media, community involvement and partnerships

• They listen first to their partners and their community, and they understand the value of these relationships in helping define a course of action for their work

• They are able to take direction from their community advisors and have a willingness to cede control of certain aspects to other organizations.

• Station leadership is strong and backs the work directly or makes certain that key staff are supported

• Relationship between TV and Radio is secure (where applicable).  Both organizations experience the benefits of working together to help their community

Tier 2

• Internal collaboration is emerging and is valued, silos are beginning to minimize

• They’ve made relative progress from where they started and very much want to make the leap, but don’t have the capacity, skill set, people or road map to shift their focus beyond the traditional work.

• They’re beginning to make the leap from station at the center to ceding control to partners

• They are exploring what social media and online can mean to their work

• Station leadership wants to make the leap to this new kind of work, but the shift is nascent

• Relationship between TV and Radio (where applicable) is improving

Tier 3

• They think they’ve done this before, but do not understand the nuances of why this work is different

• Staff work in silos, but collaborate ad hoc

• Still working through old processes/norms

• Station leadership is supportive, but invested in traditional work and won’t alter investments to new work

• Little or no collaboration between TV and Radio

Tier 4

• Regard this as just another project with funds attached—a beginning and an end—rather than a capacity builder

• Traditional approach with station at the center

• Unable to form meaningful and equal partnerships with community organizations—station is still very much in control

• Use social media very little and do not leverage multi-platform—broadcast is still only priority

• Station leadership regards this as business as usual

• Staff work in silos

These characteristics are meaningful—they are not simply an assessment of how the stations performed in this initiative.  The characteristics of the top performing stations help us understand how to make the shift to public media.  These characteristics are the key to making the case for the relevance and significance of public media in our communities and in our country.  This is the case for the sustainability of our industry.

MINDSET = IMPACT = SUSTAINABILITY

The evidence is clear—Tier 1 stations generated more external grant resources, dedicated more staff, forged more partnerships, hosted more discussions — on-air and online—produced more reports, and spurred more talk in their communities.  This in turn had big implications for community outcomes in terms of citizen resource utilization and other media attention—meaning more calls were generated to 211 in these communities and there was more media coverage beyond the station.

Later I will post more about our findings but I wanted to get the mindset issue on the table.

 

My dear pals who work with me here on Fast Forward Blog will chip in. Where is the leverage – who has to get it and how do they get it. How do you move up? What are the barriers?

 

More soon

 

 

 

Things are moving so fast! In a month the iPad will be here. The shift from traditional computers to Mobile will take off.

But Pub Media are still coming to terms with the web itself. There are still holdouts for Digital Radio. Many hope that Digital Stations for TV are the future. After all huge sums have been spent on them. Many still deny the web. We can see this in the resources applied to it – in most stations less than 20%.

But it is clear now. The Web is it. The web is where we will consume media.

The decisive shift will be 2011 after the iPad has taken hold.

And the part of the web that will be THE place will be Mobile and I include iPad in Mobile.

So is all lost? No!

The Public Radio Player is surely the place to use as a beach head? It has been very popular with 2.5 million downloads in the Apple Apps store (includes upgrades). It has great functionality. It ties nicely back to the stations.

Let’s get a project to build of this and to include TV!

The iPad is ideal for watching video – please please please – make it easy for me to watch the great content of the public system and to integrate it into radio too.

Here is my vision:

• Radio and TV content is integrated – I can search for say Jane Austen and find video and audio and text – I can find other Jane Austen fans in my city – we can get together – we can create a community around out topic
• I can do this for news and opinion – I can follow a topic and draw on all sources – AND from my local community
• I can do this for music, documentary, whatever

The key is to offer the place where the full resources of all the system comes together in one device and in one place and where the community is added too.

PBS stunned at volume of preschoolers' video streaming: 87.5 million streams in month

PBS was expecting online streaming of PBS Kids shows for the 2-5 set to be popular when it started late last year; the usage of shows for older kids, 6-plus, which went online earlier, had fluctuated around 2 million video streams a month.

They were not prepared for the tots’ appetite: 87.5 million streams in December. PBS kept mum about the number until the press tour and the NETA Conference this week. Station folk broke into applause Wednesday as PBS education chief Rob Lippincott announced the figure. Streaming of the little kids’ programs rises in the evening as the grownups’ NewsHour grabs the TV sets, he said.

This news item surely makes this point - that if you really want to grow your audience make it easy for them to find you on their terms.

A core idea that emerged from New Realities - a project to discover the future for pub radio back in 2005/6 was the idea of content being available anywhere, anytime. Of course the only way that is possible is when the web is the source.

These streaming numbers suggest that we were correct.

I offer these words in the context of the project Growing the Audience that is jus concluding. A lot of effort has been put into thinking about how to Grow the Audience in Pub Radio.

My sense is that this may be an illusory goal in this way - the kind of people that watch Pub TV and Listen to Pub Radio are not all people. There is a limit to the size of the audience. For they and our approach to the world are surely not a majority of people?

If you program to get more audience don't you in the end have mass audience? In so doing don't you lose your core audience?

If however you allow people to reach us on their terms we do in fact increase our audience for the barrier of the schedule goes away.

If you wish to increase the number of people that we have an impact on - then that is a separate question.

We have learned at KETC and at many of the 60 plus stations, Radio and TV, that participated in the Facing the Mortgage Crisis project, that if you act as a Public Service station, you will help millions of people that will never listen or watch our regular content.

Is not "Audience" tied to content and the Public to what we do?

If we really want to grow both, then the web allows the Audience to grow and public service allows our Public to grow.

That means that the focus for the local station is clear - to focus on the public service that its Trusted Brand can facilitate. More later