The
Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy made 15
recommendations on how America can have a bright info-future. One of
those recommendations was for increased support for public media
predicated on public media efforts to “step up,” for lack of a better
term.
Public
media has been on the minds and lips of a lot of Americans. Certainly
the last few years have seen a growth in public media across the board
from Corporation for Public Broadcasting entities (PBS, NPR) to less
formal public media entities like PRX and PRI. Recently, as a follow-up to
the work of the Knight Commission Barbara Cochran wrote a policy paper “Rethinking Public Media: Mort Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive.” From the Knight Commission blog post:
At
a time when government funding for public broadcasting is hotly
debated, “Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More
Interactive,” a new policy paper by Barbara Cochran, offers five broad
strategies and 21 specific recommendations to reform public media.
It’s an excellent piece of reading that breaks down some of the roadblocks and opportunities that lay ahead for public media.
Beyond
white papers, however, it’s important that the public be able to speak
their mind about public media. That’s why, thanks to the support of the Aspen
Institute Communications and Society Program, the institutional home of
the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a
Democracy, Spot.Us surveyed 500 members about the state of public media
in their community.
The
goal was to find out where public media is strong, weak and what
suggestions the public might have for public media. Not only did this
survey raise awareness about the growing role of public media, it
supported media as well. Every member of our community that took the
survey was given $5 in credits to fund the story of their choice on our
site.
And The Survey Says….
How Big Is Your Community?
Before
we can examine the survey in-depth I should remind folks that this is a
sponsored survey of a somewhat self-selecting community (and our community is perhaps more
media-savvy than other websites). That said, our first question was aimed at
getting a sense of where people lived. One of the trends we often hear is
that major metropolitan areas are better served by public media than
smaller locations. Our survey affirmed this.
Just
over 60 percent of respondents were from major
metropolitan areas. Another 17 percent were from large cities. Only a
handful (12 percent) came from towns with a population of 50,000 or
less. Our survey skewed toward major metropolitan areas and in total
they were happier with public media than folks in more rural areas. This
should be kept in the back of our minds when we dive into the remaining
questions and answers.
Spot.Us community member Mike Labonte summed up the frustration with public media in small towns when he wrote his suggestion to improve public media in his town:
“Presence. The only public media in my city of 70,000 is the local
public access cable TV station.”
The next question in our survey allowed for multiple answers: “Who has an influential role in shaping media in your area?“
It’s an important question to ask because while the ecosystem continues
to change many charge public media with the role to unite various media
forces together. The results of this question were proven interesting again; as much as things have changed — they also stay the same.
Newspapers
and national broadcast television were considered influential by the
most respondents. Just over 75 percent of people who took the
survey selected papers as being influential. Local bloggers garnered 188
votes or just 37 percent of those that took the survey. While
that’s still a hefty number, it was the lowest concrete choice (it
performed better than “other”) and came in just below “elected
officials.”
Community
member Laurie Pumper noted: “One small but telling example: Public
radio went out of its way to keep a citizen journalism organization from
providing live-streaming of a gubernatorial debate in Minnesota. If an
organization accepts public funding, I expect better cooperation with
other sources of media.”
Next we asked how people got involved in public media.
The respondents had three overwhelming answers: Social media, the
general website and donating. The overlap between these three was also
very strong. Almost everyone who said they donated engaged through the
website and social media. Although the reverse trend was not as strong
(i.e. somebody who engaged through social media might not donate), there
was still a correlation.
In light of the number of respondents who said they volunteer or worked for public media, the number of people who attended events at their
local public media station seemed a little low. Getting out the word can
be very important as community member Ben Melançon said: “Dedicating the resources to come and ask what’s up, once a
month. Taking matters of interest common to multiple local areas they
cover and doing very in-depth reports on them.”
Next we got to the heart of the survey: How effective is public media at serving the needs and interests of diverse members of the community?
While the responses to this aren’t an abysmal failure, it does show
large room for improvement. A total of 11 percent thought public
media in their community was doing a poor job of reflecting diversity.
The vast majority of responders selected either “good” (33
percent) or “fair” (32 percent). Because these two combine for
65 percent of all responders it’s worth examining the exact language of these answers:
- Fair — There are occasional examples of diverse programming, but it’s not the norm.
- Good — While not perfect, there are obvious efforts to make programming more inclusive.
While
these lukewarm answers were the majority only a handful of responders
thought public media was doing an “excellent” or “very good” job of
reflecting a community’s diversity.
And then came the meatiest question: “How well do public media do of informing you about local issues?”
Again
we find mixed results, but the overall trend was positive. A majority 69 percent said public media was doing either “average” or
“above average” at covering local issues. While it’s great to see so few
select “poor” (six percent) or “below average” (17 percent),
there is still lots of room for improvement when we note that only 8
percent of responders thought public media was doing “fantastic.”
In an interesting contrast with an earlier comment, community member Alexis Gonzales said this about the size of a town:
Because I live in a large city, news media — including public
media — just don’t cover ‘neighborhood’ issues. Frankly, I stopped
expecting them to do otherwise until I spent time in
smaller-but-not-that-much-smaller city (Portland for example) and
noticed how public media seemed so much closer to and integrated into
the local community. I think public media could do a better job of
covering local issues by reconsidering what is newsworthy … i.e.,
neighborhood issues can be of broader interest to the greater
community.
Taxes
The
survey also threw in a playful question regarding taxes. Since public
media’s funding has been a topic of discussion, why not ask the public
what they think? The question was arguably loaded, but still worth
asking.
The
exact language was: “British citizens are taxed $80.36 a year to
support the BBC. United States citizens are taxed only $1.36. Knowing it
would mean more taxes you believe the following.” Then respondents
could decide if they wanted to lower taxes to $0 or raise them to “beat
the British.”
This
question was asked in part to educate, since many people don’t realize
how little our media is subsidized by taxes compared to other countries
and in part to provoke responses around a hotly debated topic.
About
20 percent of responders thought the taxes should stay the same or even
be lowered to $0. Nearly half thought of expanding the taxes a little
either doubling it to $2.70 or expanding it to $30. And perhaps because
of how the answer was worded (“Let’s beat the British”) a whopping 34 percent wanted to raise taxes to $80.37 to fund public
media. Either the Spot.Us community has lots of public media fans or a
reminder that the British public media is out-funding ours 80-to-1 was
too much to bear. (Also note 49 individuals who took the survey
work for public media according to their answers to question #3).
From the public’s mouth
Finally,
our last open-ended question sought advice and input about how public
media could improve at the local level. We received 500 responses and
below I have republished some of the best with the survey respondents’
permission.
I
live in East LA / Boyle Heights. It’s very rare that good positive
stories are told about my community via TV news. LA Times covers some
good stories, but it’s not the norm. I would like to see my community
being covered w/ national issues other than immigration. Like Latinos
who serve in armed forces, or those who are making a difference in the
classroom.
Engage
the emerging local blogosphere — providing them promotion/audience and,
potentially, revenue via bundled sales using the bully pulpit of
public media. In other words, why can’t a local PBS or NPR station serve
the same role as a TBD.com in Washington?
They
could spice up the reporting. The no rant/no slant approach is
appropriate, but the reporting is often simple, dry, and probably not
engaging as broad an audience as possible as a result.
Right
now, Los Angeles seems poised to lose its PBS station, which is going
independent. This is a good news, bad news situation. Some of its best
current projects are local and these will continue and grow. But we will
also lose some of the programs from PBS which we have come to expect
and they will be missed.
Deploy
the resources of journalism majors and graduate students in the many
universities and colleges located in and around the major metro areas.
Collaborate with universities and colleges to cover more beats, produce
more stories, create more outlets, uncover more potential advertisers
and train better journalists.
My
community, Newburyport, Mass., is an hour north of Boston, a half hour
south of Portsmouth, N.H., and an hour and 10 minutes south of Portland,
Maine. I listen to public radio from all three, and no one covers
Newburyport or its surrounding area. In fact, we’re in a fringe
reception area for all the stations. What would be really cool would be
to have a low-power, listener-supported station right here in
Newburyport. There’s a local AM station that plays old music but has no
local news presence.
Perhaps
where I live makes me an outlier, but I suspect that my situation is
quite common — most public radio stations are in big cities or on
university campuses in smaller places. That said, most smaller
communities, including mine, don’t have colleges.
Public media is largely the only not-for-profit trusted local and regional
source of info, and source of curated content. I’d like to see that
trust “capital” realized — my local station is in the process of
retooling for the new media revolution — it’s not easy to change the
battleship’s direction. More and amplified info like that from the
Knight Commission needs to be put out there. The public at large doesn’t
yet understand how vital public media SHOULD be in their lives as info
consumers. Public media orgs all should adopt “Community Media Projects”
in order to learn, listen and meet the information and democratic
needs of the communities they serve… everything else is broken,
untrustworthy or unsuitable.
Awareness
that public media is frequently a partnership between national
providers (NPR) and local stations. Those that don’t understand this
partnership can dismiss the programming as not locally relevant.
Visibility. Police who are present and interacting with local residents
can generate greater trust and participation in public safety. Similar
thing could be true of public media. If they are visible — if they are
not “they” — then we feel more connected to the stories, more
possibility to reach out to them when new issues arrive, etc.
Engagement. Partner with schools, libraries and service orgs to unearth
essential local stories, create broadcasts about them, and follow up to
track impact.
Be
more aggressive about giving up old ways (and sometimes long-time
staffers) to free up resources and time to explore new ways of sharing
information. Note on the tax question: I’d support more taxation for
public media, but I’m discouraged about the track record used to spend
tax money recently and would need total transparency (and some
influence) on how money is spent in order to support more taxation.
We
have a very active NPR-supporting community here but the simple fact is
that they are charged with providing service to a huge, mountainous
geographic area and while we may, as a community, have an above average
rate of contribution, we also have greater infrastructure expenses than
many other areas. Considering what Boise State Public Radio does with
their resources I think they are doing okay. One of the features of
public broadcasting funding in Idaho is that up to a fairly generous
limit our contributions are counted as a tax credit. Not a deduction. A
credit. “Do I want to give Butch Otter my money or do I want to give
Terry Gross my money? Hmmmm.”
Experiment.
Be willing to try and fail at new shows, new ways of delivering the
news. Invest in reporting. Pay freelancers a fair wage so that
journalists without financial support can enter and stay in the
profession (not possible now).
Public
media should pioneer efforts to build real-time citizen journalist
networks. Using low cost distribution and collation tools, public media
could become hubs for high-quality, low cost information sharing —
school test scores, water quality, traffic needs, etc.
Through
reaching out to organizations and individuals representing under-served
parts of the community, especially economic and ethnic minorities. The
demographic makeup of my metro area is changing rapidly due to growing
Hispanic, Marshallese, and Hmong populations; except for some
Spanish-language newspapers and radio stations, few media outlets report
on issues such as immigration, wage theft, bilingual education, etc.
Public media could a) report more extensively on those topics — not as
“minority” issues but as issues affecting members of our community; this
would require b) establishing a broader definition of what our
community is; and c), public media could offer internships and
fellowships to young and/or freelance journalists, especially because
the local NPR station is run by the university’s journalism department.
I
like the Bay Citizen model, and the Public Press … one for exposing
local issues to a broader audience, the other for in-depth local news
for locals. I don’t know if that counts as public media? Overall, I
don’t pay much attention to TV news, even public channels…so I’m not
sure about that. Public media seems generally underfunded; I’d like to
see more funding for it, as well as movement towards a more
public-serving private news media (though we know, of course, that’s
easier said than done).
Because
I live in a large city, news media — including public media — just don’t
cover “neighborhood” issues. Frankly, I stopped expecting them to do
otherwise until I spent time in smaller-but-not-that-much-smaller cities
(Portland for example) and noticed how public media seemed so much
closer to and integrated into the local community. I think Public Media
could do a better job of covering local issues by reconsidering what is
newsworthy … i.e. neighborhood issues can be of broader interest to
the greater community.
Find positive happenings to report in communities that are typically only covered when something negative happens there.
For
lack of a better phrase, they need to grow some balls. My town in New
Jersey is influenced by political boss George Norcross, the unions, and
the mafia. And that’s not even the corruption and hubris that goes on in
the city itself. What our reporters really need is assertiveness
training, media law training, and self-defense courses. But most of all,
they need the courage to use all of that stuff.
Our
public radio and public television are separate entities that don’t
work together. Although our public radio is beefing up it’s news
reporting it seems simple to bring that reporting over to television.
But public media is NOT JUST NPR and PBS. We have struggling cable
public access community (no funding or support from the city) here and a
number of online only community journalism operations (including a
Knight grantee) that are all doing their own thing without coordination.
Big Public Media (NPR/PBS) should be a leader to bring all of these
“under the tent” and provide a real media public service to the
community.
Charles Sanders
Actually,
local issues aren’t my concern. I wish public media reinforced its
international coverage and improved its drama, comedy … content. I
envy the BBC.
Martin Wolff
As
someone who listens to public media daily, it is sad that I have to try
hard to think about a local issue being covered. In that respect,
almost anything would improve the coverage as it feels almost, but not
quite, non-existent. When local issues are covered they seemingly come
in only two forms: 1. A feel good issue that is barely an issue and will
create nearly zero discourse in the community. For example,
holiday-lights festivals. 2. Wimpy. The interviewer/broadcaster will do
nothing while two sides of an issue actively lie to the community and
directly contradict each other. Fixing #1 is easy — nobody really
terribly cares, so we don’t need 10 minutes of coverage about a mayor
flipping the switch and lighting a tree up. Fixing #2 is harder. The
public media must stand up for itself better and call out the guilty
parties. The public media must step up its role as a sort of police
officer of society and arrest those who break the rules.
Yvette Maranowski
ALWAYS
retain vigorous capacity for citizen reporters. Fund them with
equipment and training. People are busy now and have to work
independently, but with lifelines keeping them connected to their media
outlets. Use McChesney and Nichol‘s
idea of $200 in tax credit going to every citizen, so that the citizen
can donate their credit to whatever organization they choose — such as
journalistic ones. Constantly produce and air/publish material about the
importance of journalism — keep hitting the public with that message!
Andy Edgar
Survey
people in the neighborhood for their backgrounds, locations and topics
of interest, get them interested in issues that affect everyone. Focus
on things like air and water quality, advice on picking up litter and
why it’s important not to litter, community events, getting to know
neighbors’ talents/skills, healthy alternatives to fast food and big box
grocery stores. Community based ways to prevent crime/hate acts should
be talked about explored and tried.
William Forbes
In
my community (Minneapolis/St Paul, MN), “public” radio and television
are HUGE cash cows. They do a good job and are influential but the real
inclusive and diverse media that truly serve the under-represented
populations of our area are Community Radio Stations, in particular
KFAI. MN Public Television/NPR/MPR/PBS could do a much better job but
they are more concerned with maintaining (and increasing) corporate and
government funding than with covering issues that don’t always have
universal appeal.
Michael Hopkins
In
its current state, public media is dangerous because it offers the
illusion of complete objectivity and truth. Too many people listen to it
uncritically because of this. I would like to see public media
representatives ask much tougher questions of everybody and hire a much
more diverse staff of journalists. The illusion will still be there, but
it will match reality more closely.
Jeffrey Aberbach
My
community now has a Patch website. It’s too early to judge how
successful it will be in reaching out to our diverse community, but so
far it appears to be more successful than the established,
corporate-owned media outlet in town (a poorly staffed small daily
newspaper that generates little local content).
Jeddy Lin
In
my area, despite being close to a large university, not much of a
public media movement exists. A more visible public media would go a
long way towards creating a more progressive, diverse community.
Kitty Norton
They
could provide better coverage for schools. They seem to report
statistics and not real life goings-on in our schools to the community.
Luke Gies
I
don’t have any television or newspaper service, so I am somewhat “self
isolating” from our local media. I get most of my news from the Internet, so I think one area of improvement for local media would be to
increase the content and improve the usability of their websites. That
is more of an improvement in distribution than in “covering the issues,”
but distribution is a key component to the reporting of news.