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| Monday, June 20, 2005 |
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MoJo 
Returning to the Public Broadcasting Market
| | MoveOn and many friends on The Left have been spamming me with appeals to "save" public broadcasting. I'm with Jeff Jarvis on this one: let's save public broadcasting by weaning it, finally, from the federal teat. |
| | Federal support has been declining over the decades anyway. In fact, public broadcasters have bragged for years about their growing independence from government support. |
| | Jeff lists a bunch of good ideas for public broadcasters on his blog (top link, above). I'd like to add one more: Take advantage of your direct relationship with viewers and listeners. |
| | See, public broadcasting has a huge advantage over commercial broadcasting: it sells its goods directly to its viewers and listeners. Put another way, its consumers and its customers are the same people. Commercial radio and television have a huge (and problematic) split between customers (advertisers) and consumers (viewers and listeners). Yet, for some dumb reason (too many staffers coming over from the growing labor pool of laid-off commercial broadcast marketers?), public broadcasting has looked to commercial broadcasting as an ideal model. Rather than make it easier than ever for its consumers to become customers, and for its customers to become more involved with the stations, public broadcasting whored itself to underwriters and other "sponsors." |
| | Maybe that's an unkind characterization, but there's a follow-the-money effect at work here. As dependence on federal money shrinks, commercial sponsors take up the slack. There is a natural drift of energy toward pleasing those advertisers (which is what they are), and away from customers that really matter: paying listeners and viewers. In other words, public broadcasting has been doing its best to behave like commercial broadcasting. Not helpful. |
| | Meanwhile, they continue to raise money from listeners and veiwers the same way Pacifica radio taught them in the '60's: with pathetic woe-is-us fund-raising marathons. Addictive tiered-donation schwag incentives serve as the broadcast equivalents of K-mart coupons. |
| | Meanwhile the stations have made it little if any easier for listeners and viewers to subscribe on the Web. (On the whole, public broadcasting Web sites are crap-packed slow-loading messes straight out of the portal school, during which far too many Web designers had their educations funded by dot-com venture money.) |
| | Here's a clue: think of your listeners and viewers as customers. Make it easy for them to buy retail the programs you buy wholesale from NPR, PBS and other sources. Sell them good local programming as well. Don't think of them as sources of "support." Think of them as customers for your service. The difference is huge, and will save your stations' lives. |
| | Become accountable to those people, not to the politicians. Your customers are not just "the audience" any more. In many cases, they're producers as well. (Which is why you should watch what's happening in podcasting and videoblogging.) |
| | The old way is just more politics as usual. And that ain't gonna get any better. |
Spacerise
| | Since the clouds are at the edge of space, a couple hundred kilometers or more above the Earth, it's likely all these photographers in different countries are watching the same clouds. |
| | Unlikely we'll see them here in Santa Barbara, but to check for sightings, watch Spaceweather.com. |
discuss
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