Public radio made it to space, but can’t agree on a CMS (or why we decided to host a Public Media Potluck)
The magical experience of public radio — hit a button, get content you want — is trickier than expected when delivering digitally.
We’ve always been agile problem solvers with limited resources.
Public radio has a strong history of technical innovation. Legend has it that before there was infrastructure to support public radio, certain people would spend weekends parked on a bridge with a makeshift antenna on their car roof to ensure the signal reached audiences on the other side. This was in an effort to prove the argument that there existed a sizable public radio audience. Later, but still early in its evolution, NPR distributed content via telephone lines to member stations on the other side of the country.
Considering this storied history, we take our venture into advanced satellite technology for granted — especially in how it, and all the technological advances before it, figures into the “one button” experience we deliver via radio.
Perhaps these examples are oversimplified — telephone lines were the standard for all of radio, and NPR was mostly responsible for the satellite solution, not member stations. The larger point here is that this consistent escalation in ownership of technical expertise and innovation overall shows public media’s collective appetite for serving the public good has always outpaced technological and resource limitations.
Then the Internet happened.
The endless potential of the Internet was not always well accepted in public media organizations. Like many other businesses and industries, we were late to the party. Of course there were websites for stations, and some interesting web related content and products have happened along the way. But many digital teams (of which there are many names: Product Teams, Web Teams, etc.) are still perceived as service departments, instead of strategic ones.
Another way to articulate that is, still too often, people approach the digital team with a request to participate in a project at the point they think they need a web page or app. A more strategic approach would be to define the problem or goal, and work with the digital experts to determine the best approach.
This is not unique to our industry, nor our field. However, it’s worth recognizing that, in the evolution of digital expertise in public media, it’s only recently that these teams have been viewed as strategic assets.
Still, earnest digital collaboration hasn’t taken root.
Digital teams now have more of a voice and impact in public media, but are again late to the party. Four developers is considered a very large team in the world of public media, but a small squad of many within a large organization like Spotify.
And there are a growing number of multi-media competitors who have a bounty of resources. When considering companies in competition for our audience’s time like Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, or any other well resourced, digital-first outfit, we are outmatched before we begin. And now, even on the content side, new independent creators like Gimlet and Pineapple Street Media are making a strong play to capture the public radio audience with excellent, public-radio-like podcasts.
KPCC’s digital team, in its current form and many iterations before it, has been made up of stellar talent with a desire for genuine participation in the open source community. In fact, the majority of our most successful products are or were once available as open source projects. However, the actual usage of these products by other stations is somewhere between very limited and none. It’s safe to say this is a common feeling and outcome at many other stations, too.
Again, there are a handful of examples of collaborations and open source code that was successfully distributed and used (ex. WNYC’s Audiogram). But overall, public media digital teams have not yet harnessed the potential of collaboration. Stations struggle to find resources to build new things, bogged down by supporting legacy software. And when we do build new stuff, there’s a good chance another station is building something very similar, encounter the same problems, and establishing similar solutions. Worst yet, this approach produces an output that tends to pale in comparison to the well established infrastructure of our Broadcast brethren.
When the 9/11 attack happened, WNYC lost it’s ability to broadcast. Some genius engineers figured out how to send the feed to California, and KPCC was able to broadcast for WNYC. Here is the epitome of admirable collaboration and problem solving so our audience could understand what was happening on the ground in uncertain times of a terrible event. Certainly no digital team (or any sane person) would want a repeat of that scenario, but there is an understandable desire to create digital products that solve problems for our audience at that scale, with that kind of impact.
We planted a seed with the Public Media Kitchen.
It’s really just a list of links that are useful to folks in our field and industry, which has already paid off, as organizations are discovering tools they didn’t know existed, let alone things they could use off-the-shelf.
After creating this list we heard a desire from many organizations and individuals to discuss things listed in the PMK, in order to understand usage and answer questions. So we also started bi-weekly calls that are an ongoing conversation as an extension of the PMK.
Through these conversations, with the folks who use these tools in their everyday work, we figured there was potential for deeper collaboration. However, given our organizations would not otherwise have an immediate and obvious reason to work together, it first requires building trust.
We realized there was power in gathering designers, developers, and product managers.
Too often collaborations are decided top down, and those of us on the ground figure out how to make it all work after the fact. A strategy will not work if the tactics aren’t considered. So our approach was to gather those who implement the tactics in support of larger strategies, to get to know each other and establish a path to manageable, ongoing collaboration.
In attendance at our first Potluck, held at the Crawford Family Forum at KPCC headquarters in Pasadena, were folks from digital teams at NPR, PRX, and twelve member stations (WAMU, WBEZ, WBUR, KCRW, WGBH, WHYY, Marketplace, MPR, WNYC, KPCC, KQED, and KUOW) from around the country. Being a public radio station, we started with other radio organizations, but see potential in this type of collaboration extending to all of public media at some point in the future.
Our first session had each organization share about smart speakers — the headliner of the conference. We discussed what we’ve already built, what’s on our roadmap, or why we’re blocked on developing certain skills or features. It was immediately illuminating to see how many of the same problems we were encountering and solving, and how closer collaboration and communication could lead to more efficiency and better products. For instance, multiple organizations mentioned trying to address discoverability of podcasts, and butting up against limitations, especially in terms of user expectation outpacing a technology in its infancy.
We also had a failures show and tell from each organization. This was cathartic for the presenters, but also really valuable in sharing key knowledge on ways to avoid big mistakes in the future. For example, KPCC shared a hiccup in rolling out our new site design, while MPR shared some headaches in migrating one enterprise system to another. To not wallow in defeat, we also had sessions for developers and other product folks to share tips, tricks, and tools that they use in their daily work.
A few stations, having recently overhauled their site, walked everyone through the approach to those projects, how they were implemented, and large lessons they learned along the way. We also shared experiences at many different stations in terms of membership and donation related technologies — again exposing many areas of crossover, where better collaboration would make everyone’s lives easier.
There was also a session that allowed developers to take a crack at building a basic skill, and product managers and designers to discuss the processes around building in the space, from prototyping to promotion.
We set aside ample time between sessions, where there were many other important things discussed and a lot of valuable interaction happened, too.
Momentum is crucial as this effort germinates.
In many ways the Potluck was a success. We built trust across stations, got survey responses from a majority of participants who emphatically said they would attend another one, and have already begun planning the next one in Boston this summer.
But this effort will not succeed unless we commit to an ongoing collaboration.
Dreaming big, this type of commitment is a step towards whatever the digital equivalent of an advanced satellite endeavor might be. At the very least, it’s necessary for our survival against the internet giants who are already eating (and delivering) our lunch, and will be for the foreseeable future.
In any case, a connected but distributed system of innovation gives us a better shot at finding more magical experiences for public media audiences on digital platforms. Using this mentality, we set a solid foundation that gives us the potential to grow beyond our perceived limits.
