 Jake Shapiro is the executive director of the public radio exchange, and also affiliated with Work and Center for the Fellowship Advisory Board. And Ellen Bibbin is a professor at Rutgers University School of Law at Camden, as well as a fellow at the Center for Social Media at American University. Welcome. Thanks. So welcome, everybody. The idea was to take a chance and jump into some discussions about public broadcasting as it becomes public media. As Amra mentioned, I've been involved in the Berkman Center for a long time, but my day job is running PRX in the public radio exchange. It's really one of a number of new intermediaries that have emerged in public media. We started about seven years ago, and we operate as an online platform, an open system that lets anybody distribute work online, as well as to local radio stations. So it's an online marketplace on prx.org. But we've also been very involved in a number of further innovations in bringing web and internet technology to the expansion of public broadcasting as it faces its own transitions and disruptions. I've in the past tried each semester or a couple of semesters to give a state of PRX discussion, but rather than doing that today, I wanted to take advantage of an opportunity to bring Ellen into the center because she has been working on some policy dimensions of where public media is headed. We've found ourselves at the series of meetings in the past year, some through the Aspen Institute with the Corporation of Public Broadcasting as they try to chart internally some reform and changes around that institution, some through the Ford Foundation, which over the last five years has had this reinventing public media initiative with a number of grantees. PRX was one of those grantees. And Ellen can talk a bit about what's coming next with the work that she's doing with Ford. And it also just seems like that, even in the last couple of weeks, there's been more focus on this. The Knight Commission came out with this report on the sort of health of community information. The Columbia Journalism School, I think it was, had their report that came around the future of journalism and had a section around public broadcasting. Last year's media republic project that Persephone here spearheaded focused on this. And actually Ellen Brott with her, the Public Media 2.0 report. There are a bunch of copies up here. That the Center for Social Media put out last year, which has a really interesting digest and kind of cross-section of current innovations going under way and some analysis of what public media might look like in the future. So the notion was to try to get into the broader story of public broadcasting transformation. But one of the things that I was using as kind of a hook was the phrase of the new product that Google put out, Google Wave, and the task that the engineers had been assigned, which was essentially, if you had to invent email today as opposed to 40 years ago, what would it look like? That was their sort of task around creating that product. And public broadcasting is 40 years old. The landscape has entirely changed. One of the things that I try to think about as we build PRX is what would you create today if you were trying to create a public media system? What is it that the country either needs or deserves? What does the technology dictate? How are people operating in that sphere? Do we need it at all as a sort of tax-driven subsidy? So those are some of the sort of setup questions that prompted me to wanna have a session here at Berkman that we would bring Ellen in to talk it through. So Ellen. Great, okay. So sort of foundational question, which we're not gonna explore too much is what do you mean by public media? If you mean something more than public broadcasting. Before you could even begin to address that, I think you have to ask a prior question, which is what is the purpose of public media? And particularly in light of technological convergence, information abundance, a vastly more diverse public than existed 40 years ago in this country and participatory capabilities and new models of participatory creation of media. So we know what public broadcasting has been and it's been easy to define based on FCC broadcast licenses and associated national structures. Public media is much harder to define like so much of the definitional project in telecommunications, we will have to arrive at a functional definition rather than a technological one based on structure and protocols and that's really the challenge here. I think the challenge in inventing a new system of public media is that it's not gonna be defined by the broadcast platform. Public media presents a solution to many problems and you're seeing that in these reports, especially the journalism crisis. Also it's being pointed to as a significant contributor to solutions in education, in inequality. These possibilities and underlying existential questions about what public media is arise and must address a particular policy context. So I wanna spend a minute on just framing this question about public media in the broader media policy context. First is the broadband plan. As most of you know, the FCC is going to produce a broadband plan in February and the idea is that it's not just going to talk about things that are jurisdictional to the FCC but make broad recommendations to Congress about our informational ecosystem and look 10 years out and make recommendations. So in that context, regulators are asking how public media, however it's defined, but let's just start with public broadcasting and related ancillary broadband services. How public media drives adoption of broadband and fulfills broadband public purposes. They're also asking, we're all asking whether net neutrality alone, so whether structural regulation can fulfill the public media mission. Do you still need to have subsidies, not only of content but a certain kind of networked and intentionally networked structure the way that public media has been networked. Second of all, the journalism crisis. So I don't need to say too much about that except that all these reports sort of throw a bone to public media and say, and it's actually not obvious that they would do so because there's a historic tension between the journalism folks and the public broadcasting folks. So for example, the Columbia School of Journalism, neither the Columbia School of Journalism nor the Knight Commission have ever been big fans of public broadcasting and yet in both cases, in both these reports, they're arguing that public media may be part of the solution to the market failure, especially in accountability with what the CSJ calls accountability journalism, investigative journalism. So third, media ownership. Don't want to get too much into the weeds on this one but 2010 will be the year in which the FCC revisits its media ownership rules and in that context, it will be asking questions. I think this commission in particular will be asking more sort of foundational questions about what do we mean by localism and diversity? How do we define that? And in that context, there's a question about public media, what are their contributions, especially to localism since public broadcasting stations really are the last major media enterprises that are locally owned in communities. Finally, there are all the copyright debates about rights and fair use and I think it's especially interesting that the question of public media has been joined in some circles to the issue of Google books and the Googleization of everything and is there a role for a public archive and what would it look like and what would the terms of use be? There's one more, yes. Can't forget spectrum, right? So I've come up with this number of $100 billion tied up in TV spectrum which is a pretty bogus number but it's just extrapolated from the 700 megahertz auction of TV spectrum. But in any case, it's a lot of money. 20% of that is in non-commercial television and so it is likely that the broadband plan will suggest or at least allude to the possibility that the spectrum shortage that we experience in broadband could be solved by reallocating a bunch of the television spectrum and that obviously implicates the non-commercial television spectrum and I'll get to later the linkage between public media and the broadcast spectrum and a broadcast tower is problematic in many respects and calls into question the whole structure, the 1960s structure that we have for public media but when the time comes and it may come sooner rather than later for the FCC to really examine TV spectrum policy, it will affect these discussions about the purpose of public media. So to begin this conversation that I hope will be dynamic about what the mission of public media is, we can look at public media as and I think many people do as Nova, Frontline, Big Bird, all things considered and wonder what it's about, what unites, what is all this about and what should it be about in a broadband mobile participatory media space. But I think what's interesting is that if you go back as I will in a moment to the 67 act, the original vision for public broadcasting was surprisingly contemporary and surprisingly innovative in that it was not just about particular kinds of content that serving the underserved and with particular kinds of underproduced content but was really about three other things, just go pull them all up. Outreach, access and engagement. So let me tell you how I see those. So these are quotes from the act that public broadcasting system was supposed to provide delivery technology, fostered technologies for the delivery of public telecommunications services and even that term. There's lots of discussion about television and radio broadcasting but there's also this discussion about public telecommunications services which was a broader category. So access was one value. Outreach, which is something that public broadcasting has not done all that much of until recently and there is now and I think CPB has sort of champion this notion that outreach and engagement to democratic engagement, some people call it, increasingly has to be at the core of the programming and the other services that public media does not as something that's tacked on afterwards and that can be traced to the 67 act which is that what these guys are supposed to be doing is exploiting their local presence, their presence in a community and reaching out to that community and networking individuals to community resources. So embedded in that notion is not just reaching out proactively but also sort of being a clearinghouse not only of their own content but of community resources and I'll develop that point in a second. And then finally related to outreach is this notion of engagement. So in this quote you see a lot of the content stuff which is mostly what we I think focus on, diversity and excellence, creative risks, addressing the needs of underserved and unserved audiences, particularly children and minorities but I think the idea of being responsive to local and general interests combined with the idea of outreach supports this notion of engagement, public engagement not just a push, a sort of content push model which is obviously easier to do today than it was with 20th century broadcast technology. So I think the most optimistic way to look at the 67 act, maybe the most productive way to look at it in our context is that its eyes were bigger than its stomach. You know it was imagining a system that really couldn't be effectuated with broadcast technology but could conceivably be effectuated with broadband technology. And so what we're trying to do through this project with Ford is figure out sort of how would you effectuate it? What are the structures that need to be created to effectuate it and what are the functions that these structures ought to be geared towards supporting? And right now, the baskets that we've come up with and this is in a sense a sort of functional reinterpretation of those 67 act principles is that what public media, however it's defined and let's just for our purposes define it as non-commercial media makers with a mission, a public service mission, platform neutral, technology neutral, that what they should be doing is creating content where that falls into some category of public goods or market failure. They should be curating content either that's their own, so archival materials or that's a platform for third party materials. And they should be connecting information and content. And I'm increasingly not using, instead of using the word content thinking more about the word narratives, whether it's journalistic narratives or fictional narratives, long form documentary narratives. But if you think about the value that we're talking about and really the value where there may be a market failure where you're not gonna have sort of crowdsourced citizen journalism, you are talking about constructed narratives. So narratives and information, which could be raw information, connecting individuals in their communities to that information and narratives. And now Jake, you're gonna talk about what that means. Well, sure, and we were thinking that we might dive into some real examples, but rather than jump on the web and do that, the fact is actually there's been quite a lot of experimentation innovation in the field in the last couple of years that fall into these kinds of categories of creating, connecting and curating. Certainly, you know, Purex itself has sort of taken this as our approach to things, being very much an open network. The curatorial role being one that I think is a powerful possibility. It's certainly inherent in some of how stations operate currently. They select programs to put on their air. They're curating from abundance of content and choosing things that they think connect locally to their communities. But given the opportunities on multiple channels, that curatorial role can really be expanded. We did a project last year that I may have talked about here then, which was funded out of a CBB initiative where it tied together a number of investments in public media groups working on covering the campaign and the election, 2008. And we did one called Ballot Vox with a V where we had, it was an experiment. The experiment was to do a pure curating challenge where we had five editors whose sole job it was to go out and sift through Flickr photos and YouTube videos and blog posts and the forums on sites that were unexpected like the, you know, we found a particularly ripe discussion around the election on the forums on the American Idol website, you know, the off-topic forums. So like you have all the topical forums around each contestant and then there's the off-topic forums. Some of the best discussions on the campaign were there and the experiment was to go in with a couple of lenses, a journalistic lens and a kind of quality lens for the kinds of things that you might actually want to pull out and present on somebody else's website or to somebody who wasn't doing the digging and seeing if you could create something compelling. Because I think often we're falling into the notion that we have to create the spaces where people upload their user-generated content or we have to create yet another social network for that all to happen. But there is a role and we tested it out there of going in with a purpose and sort of intentionally trying to pull some of that stuff out. Now there is an example, another ambitious example in Chicago is a service called Vocalo and one worth looking into where Chicago Public Radio took as its challenge that its core radio service was really only serving a part of the audience and that there's many people either by demographic reasons or local reasons should be tuning in and using their service but weren't and rather than create one more format that's a familiar public radio one they decided to really be ambitious and create something that was a hybrid between a web site and a radio station where most of the program would be contributed by listeners who were recording things locally and sifting and uploading to the site and that the radio program itself would be essentially curated. They'd have DJs who instead of spinning music were spinning these kinds of narratives and short documentaries in. It's worth tuning into, it's still early on in its evolution but it's an example of I think many other efforts that are underway seated and sometimes by CPB and other funders and locally that fall into these domains and I think one of the challenges that we're now up against is that we're three to four to five years into a pretty fervent round of experimentation in the system and then we're now trying to figure out where any of these things actually can scale or can actually break through what I think is some real barriers to both perception and reality around public broadcasting as a whole not necessarily living up to its aspirations in this domain. This is the case four. Okay, yeah, so now let's spend a minute on, we'll get to in a moment kind of where public media leaders and entities and I am talking inclusively not only about public broadcasters but sort of organizations like Bayback, I don't know if you've heard of that but that's a Bay area. Bay Area video collusion. Yes, Bay Area video collusion. And then CCTV would be another one. Yeah, so a lot of, so public access, community, media centers, LPFMs, that entities that think of themselves as being part of public media are all sort of joining and this AU study has a very expansive, more expansive than my definition of public media. There's a lot of movement to try to figure out where it should go and it all depends on making a case for public media because the case against public media is quite strong and quite widely held. So let's start with the case for public media and all of these need a hell of a lot more research and sort of articulation. I think surprisingly given how long public broadcasting has been around, it's actually hard to find really good literature to defend these in anything more than theory. So the classic justification for public subsidies is that there are market failures. That's why we fund basic research, scientific research and that's why maybe we should fund basic media production, whatever we think of as being basic. Now in the broadcast world, there were obvious market failures even with respect to sizable pockets of consumer demand because of the mass audience model. So that who were these underserved audiences at the Carnegie Commission Report and the Public Broadcasting Act were thinking of, well they included quite large bodies of the population, children, ethnic minorities and also taste minorities. And not necessarily low income taste minorities but in fact people who liked opera or certain kinds of drama could not find what they wanted on the commercial airways because they weren't significantly, they weren't represented in significant mass. Now that's all changed and in the long tail environment the question is where are there still market failures in terms of satisfying existing consumer demand? Is there still a need to provide certain kinds of content or curate content that's of interest to particular minority or taste groups or ethnic minorities, language minorities, demographic minorities, et cetera. And that's a very contested question. I think it's quite clear that there are and having just come from WGBH, they make an awfully compelling case for things like historical documentaries that if you were to leave to the market all of the history making function, the only thing that you would have would be World War II videos because that's the only kind of history that the market supports. But you can imagine the richness of that conversation. The second argument would be non-market objectives, there's sort of public goods like journalism that there really never has been a market for accountability journalism, there never will be one, but it's really important for our democracy. And that you don't need a lot of consumption of it. So when frontline does a documentary on the war in Afghanistan, all you need is one phone call from the administration to say that it was, they cared about it when they had their meeting on the strategy for the war in Afghanistan to know that the accountability journalism was doing its job even if no one else is really paying attention. And then the third category is a little bit, third justification, a little bit more ambiguous and I think maybe the most fruitful and interesting today which is really does public media serve in institutional functions, particularly in communities around convening, real space convening, also virtual convening, facilitating certain kinds of debates, discussions, being a safe space for discourse that's not part of the sort of talk radio polemic, polarized polemic capacity building in terms of building capacity to tell narratives. And also some of the proposals now almost border on social services. So for example, this proposal for a geek core or a youth tech core to take particularly low income teenagers and bring them into public media and then send them out into their communities to be both sort of promote digital literacy, promote media literacy, promote connections. That's the case for public media that those are all three important functions and we need them and we still need them. Okay, now the case against public media we're all familiar with and some of them are quite compelling. To some extent they look at the existing public broadcasting system and note its failures. So as good of a job as it's done as important as some of its moments have been, I think there's widespread agreement that it has never really had served a public service mission at its core or at least if it was at its core, it was distorted by the pledge drive model and the need to produce programming that would appeal to the pledgers. That has never been sufficiently diverse and that as management of public broadcasting stations has grade that they have been content with reaching their own demographic and especially when that demographic is contributing. Second, that it's just not relevant anymore. This is the abundance of information, sort of long tail argument that it made sense when there were three networks, it doesn't make sense now, everything that you want you can find. I think it's intention with the market failure argument or at least those two need to be squared and reconciled. And then finally, sort of an institutional argument that even if everything, even if public broadcasting had all the best motivations and intentions and were properly oriented, the fact is the institutions are not properly structured and just to give you an example, where I think this is a valid point, where public broadcasting stations are part of state universities. They are often, the station leadership gets picked just like a professor would get picked, right? It gets picked out by the communications department. The board is the board of overseers of the university. In other words, these are not media people. The station is not their principal product or their station performance is not their particular principal goal. And so when you have institutions like that, they're just not well suited for the goals that we're talking about. And then there's all the politics we can, that sort of self-explanatory. You wanna do this one? Yeah, I mean, we'll just jump through these, but I think part of the interesting thing is to think about what are the inherent strengths that the public broadcasting, as it becomes public media already has that are well mapped or well suited to the current transition and the digital landscape. Some of those being actually the mission itself really carries through and across, I think some of this moment of real openness and change in business models. The public service mission ends up driving that. Clearly there's some really valuable national brands. Anybody trying to map over to a new media system that has brands that have real trust, trust being inherent under that as one of the values, a very important piece of the puzzle. The decentralized network you'll see is also a weakness, but it's a unique feature of the US public broadcasting system that it isn't run like the BBC. It's not some centralized organization. Each of these institutions and there are hundreds of them are run individually. And they do think of themselves as a system and as a network and behave that way, but it's not centralized. There are sizable audiences. Public radio reaches about 30 something million people a week. I don't remember public television audience numbers, but it's higher than that. Those are audiences that have been relying on and seeking out that service. It's not the entire country, but it's a large group to base something on. The local presence is, again, especially in institutional terms, a unique feature. There's a station in every community or at least in many geographic locations across the country. The narrative skills that I think is the right word for it, the storytelling, content creation capacity is actually really powerful. It's threaded throughout. I think you'll find remarkably creative producers at the national and local organizations whose skills are now evolving to be digital storytellers in a way that I think in the public service realm means that there's some advantages that are ready to be grasped. Diversified funding, you'll see, actually, Ellen gets into some of the numbers here. It's not, even though CBB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is a major vehicle for taxpayer dollars into the system, there's actually quite a number of sources of funding. So pledge drives and contributions from users and listeners and viewers, advertising and the guys of sponsorship and underwriting, but sometimes really genuinely sponsorship by local businesses and national purveyors and then some other monetization across other kinds of content distribution. On the weaknesses side, these are all fairly obvious ones. The resources really are constrained. I mean, you're talking about a pretty large system that has very thin margins. There's not a lot of risk capital, there's very little money in R&D. There's not room to really evolve beyond some of the core models that have driven the current success to be able to slingshot into the next domain. To the extent that we have these powerful positive brands, there's some real negative brand associations too. There are plenty of people who think they know what NPR and PBS mean and have dismissed it or have decided it's not relevant to their lives and assume that there's nothing beyond that available to them and public radio reaches 10% of the radio listening audience. Some of that 90% that doesn't listen just hasn't discovered it yet, hasn't tuned in, doesn't land on that part of the dial. But some of that has, those folks have listened and don't like it and don't think it speaks to them and are not coming back anytime soon. And even as we try to leverage the brands we have, we have to realize that that can be a downside and it interestingly goes back to the Vocalo example where they tried to start a completely new brand in Chicago. The decentralized network is a weakness as we're trying to foster some of these kinds of reforms and changes and discussions, the herding of cats phenomenon is powerful, the local rootedness and the institutional kind of inertia that's built up around that is intense. I think there's an interesting feature that we have not well explored, which is the broadcast culture itself. You know, I've been increasingly thinking that there was amazing pioneering work done in broadcasts over decades and broadcast engineers who figured out how to move content around and get their towers optimized and build master control systems and understand the contours of radio signals and a huge amount of that work is done and the engineers who helped do that are in many cases the leadership of the system. They are not part of the new engineering which is around the web. One thing that we've worried about at PRX and we talked about with NPR and Public Interactive is in a field that maybe employs something like 18,000 people as a whole. My guess is that there's under 100 people who are full-time code writers, software developers, people who actually are the new engineers for the new space. So it's a very thin pool within the field who really is sort of an inherently get the structure of what the technology is now bringing. And then this lack of diversity and new talent, there really isn't much of a pipeline or hasn't been. We're seeing some encouraging signs on that in different facets of the system where we're now opening up channels for training, creating the possibility for multicastware instead of having just one channel. We now have several, we can now use that as a place to showcase new programming and new content rather than just porting over the same stuff. But that in traditionally has actually been a real stop-gap kind of problem of really not cultivating any new talent in the system. So. Let's skip this one. Okay. We'll come back to this hopefully in discussion and maybe Mark you can talk to about how to build on these strengths and what's kind of in the pipeline to build on the strengths. So the next one is that so as you might imagine, projects that would build on strengths as you think about all these broadcast engineers and why there aren't more code writers, federal support in the system is overwhelmingly overwhelmingly resides in broadcasting. And by law it must go to support broadcasting and it's a real, it's the, I think the fundamental structural problem with the system. So the appropriations and they're very meager and I'm sure you've heard the international comparisons, how little we spend on public media to give you one comparison. It's about $1.70 per person in the US. It's about $200 in the UK per household, slightly different measure. But you get a sense of the magnitude. In any case, those appropriations we'll get to in a second, how the lion's share of them are going to broadcasting stations and of the money that's going to broadcasting stations. The lion's share of that is going for sort of broadcasting infrastructure and transmission. Other assets that aren't usually, that aren't necessarily thought of, they're the reserve spectrum itself, right? The spectrum asset is obviously a broadcasting asset. And then there are the special copyright provisions which in a way are not so much a public subsidy as a mandatory private subsidy. So they're copyright owners that must under a compulsory license or under sort of an outright grant, copyright rights grant, must sort of give public broadcasters a break when using their material, but only or arguably only, depending on how you interpret the language when they're broadcasting it, right? So when they're streaming it and they're using it for in broadband applications, they don't get the benefit of these copyright licenses. So all of these are incentives to stay in broadcasting and sort of disproportionately support broadcasting and broadcasters. Next one. The budget? Yeah. So this just gives you, this is the CPB 2009 budget. That big gold section are TV station grants. The purple one, the 62 million is radio station grants and everything else is sort of other stuff. The other significant one is the 71 million. That is TV programming. So that is really when CPB, and correct me if I'm wrong, Mark, when CPB wants to do something really innovative, right? And support some sort of digital initiative it's coming out of either that blue slice or the radio programming that the, what would you call that? Aqua, the 28 million slice. The other stuff is kind of already spoken for. It's essentially a federal entitlement to the broadcast station. So you see how very little of the CPB funding is kind of discretionary and can be used for really innovative things. Yeah. So why don't you do what you want? They do, there are additional appropriations above and beyond the budget that can occur and there's stories behind them which we won't delve into. But that is currently actually where some of the funding for more innovation on the digital front is happening. For example, under the digital conversion green slice, the money over the number of years now that had been going to pay for the transition to digital broadcasting. So for the hardware for TV and radio to transition to HD, that money was specially appropriated by Congress above and beyond the usual budget to help pay for that transition. As the hardware needs have declined because the transition is complete, we've effectively been able to use the ongoing appropriation around content and services. So projects like PRX has gotten some funding from there. The NPR Argo project is getting some funding from there which is an interesting one to track. The American Archive which is a very big ambitious project of digitizing and making available the past public broadcasting content from stations is getting funded through there. And this is actually currently one of these balls in the air that we're all trying to figure out how it will land because that's where some of the opportunity is for expanding the definition of what public media could be doing. And the other slices here are the Ready to Learn project which I don't know much about but if it comes up it can be discussed. And then this interconnect, in this case it's radio but every decade or so Congress does another appropriation to pay for the satellite interconnection systems for television and for radio which have been the backbone for the distribution for broadcast content. So typically when you're hearing all things considered on a station live it's being beamed out outer space over the satellite and sent back down to all these transponders and stations. This pays for that and it's been the broadcast interconnect system. And there's an interesting question about whether there's a similar or analogous digital interconnect that we should be trying to frame up for our next request sometime down the line. All this, does that entire slice if you then go to look at the entire industry? The CBB is now only 14% of what is at some best estimates a $2.85 billion public broadcasting industry wide economy. And what's interesting to think about is how much that CBB portion is really leveraging or sort of the lynchpin of some of this other funding. This includes subscribers really means contributors and members and donors and pledgers. Business also includes things like underwriting and sponsorship. Lot of state and local funding, a lot of philanthropy. These some of these universities and colleges that can be obstacles are also very often supporting public broadcasting and as a whole that ends up being the full pie. So we'll try to wrap up here if we need some time for. Okay, so in fact let's make this the last slide. One of the interesting things about this interconnect system that was very revolutionary when it was created and it's important to remember something I think we may have lost sight of which was that public broadcast, you see this in the act public broadcasting was meant to and for a long time was and in some ways still is very technically innovative. It was supposed to be experimental and it was supposed to be cutting edge and the interconnection system in its time was just that. And so it is interesting to think about what that would mean today and where you would want and I think that small slice of CPB funds one of the reasons it's so important it's leveraging all those other funds. It's the subject of matching funds from a lot of other institutions. It's also the institution that is most likely or should be most likely the CPB to take chances and to incubate sort of new business models, new technologies, new genres and there have been moments in the history of public broadcasting where that's really happened and I would definitely add that to sort of part of the mission orientation of public media. Okay, so what would we need to do to sort of play up the strength that Jake identified? This is just my list and I think what's not on here is number five which was other. So I think we need to redefine the entitlement to CPB funding so that it's not principally it's not Jake at CPB funding and he's not a broadcaster so it's not only broadcasters that get it but the lion's share is going to broadcasting and the copyright laws are also structured oriented around broadcasting. So I think we need to do that. We also need relatedly to make the flow of funding much more transparent and transparency I think is a value that we could talk about in many ways in journalism and public media, how public media does journalism maybe as a hallmark of what is part of its mission to be transparent. Three, that's sort of one and two. Three here is what you've long heard and I've sort of given up hope for this but we ought not to be annually appropriating funds for public broadcasting, public media. There ought to be some other funding mechanism namely a trust fund or some sustained politically insulated funding source. For the copyright laws that relate to public broadcasting need to be updated along with the 67 act. That's on the policy side maybe what belongs in number five other is all the private sector reforms and I think so I'm working with the Ford Foundation I think that the funding community needs reforming in terms of what they support and how they even define public media and what values they find in it. And also obviously in the field there are many ways in which public broadcasting entities and in other incumbent sort of longstanding public media entities don't collaborate are not open and therefore do not leverage the meager resources that they have very effectively and aren't sufficiently diverse and really don't have public service at their core. I'll stop there. Great, and we'll skip this next step slide. Well, you guys will figure out the next steps. So I mean part of what Ellen was saying is that we're actually in a moment of sorts. So through Ford's work but also CBB internally and then at the FCC just appointed somebody to be taking on some of these media investigations. There really does feel like we have an arc of time in the next year or two or three where some of these issues are gonna come to a head. So we're trying to get a handle on it. Let's discuss. Mark was there anything that we threw in there that was off completely off when we got to the numbers part? Well, nothing of, you know, I mean, basically I think you had it right. I think the interconnection build out numbers, you were actually looking at one fiscal year appropriation, just so you know the last cycle around public televisions interconnection system was $120 million and that was just completed and that's still being built and then public radios interconnection system was in the 70 million, 70, 70 million I think and that was, and the appropriation usually occurs over multiple years and I believe that was the last year of that appropriation. It's a 10 year cycle, which means by the time public radio and public television building what they got funded, they're starting to work on the design and implementation of the next round and you usually start working with Congress about two to three years out from when they will actually appropriate because you have to sort of remind them of this and get them prepared for it and get them thinking about it, but they have never demurred from the fact that they have a responsibility to do this. As I was saying to Jake, one of the goals I sort of put on a table for myself is when we get public radio and television in a room and just build one interconnection system. Just a wild eyed optimist, but I think there are a lot of opportunities there, but otherwise I think your numbers are pretty close. The other thing is on the chart showing how those monies are spent, CPV is appropriation. Those are all stipulated by the act. So even the dollars that show us having some discretion, which comes after we pay the royalty fees and other things for public radio and television, relative to some of the copyright issues and other things, we have about $10 million discretionary funds at the corporation to be able to do things. The beauty of the digital appropriation which was initially funded as a hardware program to help public radio and television move into the digital broadcast world, we have been slowly, but steadily moving this into content and service type investments which include things like the American Archive, but we've used money, which Jake, around iPhone applications for NPR and there are a lot of innovative things being developed and we expect the fund that will, I hope, help to begin this deal with some of the questions around collaboration and sharing of content across platforms and making the content more available to people to understand what the business rules are, they can use it through structures like APIs and through appropriate metadata tagging of this content. So we're making investments in that area. But otherwise, we really have very limited discretion. I don't know if this is useful or not, but I was really struck by your presentation when you described the way that people understand market failure in the production of content and then you had in a separate piece the curation idea as a mission. So why don't you describe this as a market failure and curation? Because it seems like, everybody's excited about the internet, I'm excited about the internet, here we are at the Berkman Center, excited about the internet. But when you have people putting content on things like YouTube, the advertising supported model obviously, even though it doesn't seem curated or it's curated algorithmically and on some pages it says a computer created this for you, there's still obviously biases. I mean, it's difficult maybe for the user to understand what they're not able to find because they can't find it, right? But I mean, if you look at the behavior of the main portals like YouTube or something like that, the way that they make these agreements with certain well-known producers like EMI or NBC and in the way that they direct hits back to those producers, I mean, this seems like a great parallel to 1960, right? When you have a small number of television stations that are corporately owned and similarly, I mean, the growth in Hulu or these other kinds of systems, they actually seem quite parallel to the arguments for the 1960s. So I wonder why curation is so separate in your argument. Well, I actually don't think, I did focus on the market failure argument in the context of content categories creation, but I think you have to make it in all three categories. Why do we need to publicly subsidize connection, right? Why can't market or non-market forces connect people to information? It's there, if they want it, they can find it. And I think it's though, it has to be articulated about why people may not be able to find the information that they want. And there it's sort of easy to see well, there are educational problems, there are broadband problems, there are access problems. I think maybe the toughest place and the most interesting place is curation, right? So then it has to be linked to our concern about Google and commercial platforms, commercial curation, commercial archiving as a sort of subcategory. So there's search, there's archiving, you know, and then there's the editorial, there's the sort of intentional editorial, a lot of algorithmic, but editorial function. And I think there's probably market failures in all of those areas. But you're saying you don't have the evidence, so you don't, there's no- I think the case has been made effectively. I wonder if you think that we may have not so much of the satellite system shut the sky back down to transponders and stuff. But it's being done online. The public radio delivery system, the content depot, is very much that. I don't know how much we're still relying on the satellite system that's in the sky. I mean, I know the goal one day is to bring that thing down and be able to use it, because it's costly. And then all we have to do is keep robust computer lines and then connect everyone. And that seems to be where it's going. I mean, we may have turned the corner. A little more, isn't it? There is an economy of delivering a simultaneous signal to 800,000 locations at once. The satellite becomes an extremely effective- Yeah, right. Christ won't be able to do that. So I think you need to look at that. The other question that you begin to look at, access and use of content, is broadcast is a little bit democrat, really it's a democratic way to deliver things. All you need is an inexpensive TV and antenna and you can have it and you don't have to pay anything and it doesn't, you have access to information. And so without any rate for broadband, we're, here's every household has a broadband connection and not a kilobit, series of kilobits, but a broadband, a real broadband connection, let's use a European definition maybe rather than an American definition, is television still, and digital television, which can deliver, it is data to off-the-air devices, still a player in this environment. So we have a question up here. Actually two, but they're related I guess. When you're looking obviously at a blooming, buzzing confusion out there of all the things going on, people trying to, you see much going on with regard integrating with print and whatever print means as we go forward. I mean, on the way here, walked by the Harvard Bookstore and they printed me a book, took about 10 minutes. And then the second question is it's obviously for obvious reasons, you're a lot of focus on the output, but are you doing much work on the input, i.e. news gathering and what's going on that way in this world and maybe across from this world to the print world? I think there are some things underway in print or at least text and writing and that kind of journalistic enterprise that hadn't previously been part of public broadcasting's set of activities that are now very much so. Certainly station sites, networks, national producers have all been building in that capacity to their own web expressions, sort of doing blogging, doing text, doing articles, doing the sort of companion pieces to the audio video that they're producing. And then we've seen recently just a few weeks ago the partnership that's emerging in San Francisco between KQED, the public broadcaster and journalistic enterprise that's actually gonna be partnering to include, I think actually broadsheet print output inserted in New York Times regional edition and a few more experiments like that underway. On the input side, the investment in journalism is definitely now starting to finally, I think, happen. There's surprisingly thin resources in the local reporting capacity across public broadcasting. A lot of public television stations have zero newsroom capacity and in public radio has some real investments in local news gathering, but probably only at several dozen stations that have any notable newsroom sense. I mean, we're sort of used to it here in Boston because we have some strong stations that have them, but if you look at the, drops off a clip pretty fast around the rest of the country where there's often just one reporter or none, but there's been some new attempts, both the digital front project that NPR has begun called Argo as an experiment to partner with about a dozen stations to create specific sites around topics and paying for a new position that would be a journalist blogger associated with that, trying to then both aggregate and be partnered to other local news resources and then create a presence around a particular content vertical. And then the CBB has been funding something or just is now selecting grants around something called the Local Journalism Centers, LJCs in the latest of our long list of acronyms where stations have been proposing regional collaborations between stations as well as with third parties. And it's sort of in the same vein, I guess, as the Argo project, but with a different slice across public radio. And that actually should bear some fruit. It seems like NPR in particular has been taking a lead on saying that it's intentionally going to try to build local journalistic capacity at stations, not just on the national level. Great, I think the way to stay at Argo is a joint project. With the Knight Foundation. CBB's got significantly more invested in the night, but it's a partnership and NPR's got money and news hours involved as well, trying to build this journalistic capacity. The LJCs, the Local Journalism Centers really could add more capacity regionally so we could see it in the Southwest focusing on immigration across the border states and the South, it could be focusing on health, related issues in the Midwest, they could be focusing on agribusiness, those types of things. And as we start to make these investments, both in Argo and in the Local Journalism Centers, these are two year projects. And one of the things we've done, the reason we did them over two years, funded them that way, was there was a sustainability requirement. So it gives the collaborators on these projects time to secure sustainable funding. So when our funding ends, which inevitably will, that they have funds coming in. So these new reporters, these are new reporters on the existing one, we'll be able to, we'll remain and continue to do their work. Anybody else, somebody? That was right there. Yeah, Dan. Question for Jake and anyone else who wants to chime in maybe, but I come from the bizarre parallel world of public access where we've spent 30 years doing user-generated content and trying to broadcast with 10 times as many stations, but a much smaller individual reach. And all the things that I hear brought up in terms of new public media are the same things we've been struggling with moving towards, moving away from being focused on our specific cable casting role. And I was curious if you see a role in the new public media that expands beyond traditional broadcast into these entities that serve an even more hyper-local focus, have for 30 years been doing citizen journalism, user-generated content, let's put the equipment in the hands of the people, and now are actually struggling to create the things public media has done so well, which is networking the stations to take advantage of the distributed funding and talent base. Right. So we'd love to get your thoughts on that. I mean, I certainly hope that that's the case. I think that there has been this big divide and it is a parallel universe, sometimes intentional, sometimes not, sometimes because of these federal structures and the carve-outs that have existed and how the money flows. And there's not that many bridges between and there should be more. I mean, PRX itself has tried to be one, so we work with more of the LPFMs and some of the non-commercial stations that aren't necessarily affiliates of all the networks. We have been interested in seeing on the video side how things like digital bicycle and the Denver Project and Peg Media in a similar way are trying to aggregate and distribute using the web that same content. And to the extent that the mission around the content creation and the mission that drives the institutions that are serving that content out to locations, seems like that's the permeable part that hopefully could create a bridge. I don't know if there's any formal steps within any of the structural reforms that have been taken because they really do exist because of the funding mechanisms in these different worlds, the cable carve-outs. Well, I think the bridge really has to be technological in terms of protocols and sharing and maybe in terms of incentives to work together. You wouldn't want them. The last thing we need is some sort of huge madness, unified, centralized public media system that encompassed all these different kinds of ecosystems but what we should see is that they work together and cross-fertilize, especially in local communities with the out-of-work print journalists who are all sort of driven by a non-commercial public service mission. I just toss in the free press has been really pushing the phrasing of new public media at the NAMAC conference, the media art center, really pushing that as encompassing the media art centers, the public access television. Really excited to see you guys using the same terminology even if there's an all overlap directly. Yeah, I would absolutely encourage that. Yes. I mean, what is the definition of market failure and is that failure in the marketplace or the marketplace itself failing these people as in actively excluding them? Because I mean, it's obviously using kind of a pejorative term and so it's a question of how did you arrive at that? What is the accepted definition of that? Does any economist here want to offer a definition of market failure? I mean, so I'm dealing things like carbon trading and I can tell you what a technical definition of a failed market is, which was carbon one in Europe and which they set the allowances wrong and everybody traded at a certain expectation and then the next day they announced, oh, by the way, we did a math error. By the way, there's 10 times more carbon than you thought and the price collapsed, right? Because there was what I'm holding is worthless. Why would I buy it? So there's a technical failure of a market design but what is your definition? Well, so there are two types of market failure that I'm talking about here. One of them, which is the more classic kind of market failure is where there are externalities. In this case, there are positive externalities of things like investigative journalism, right? It does positive things in our world but the market doesn't take them into account and there is no consumer demand for them, right? So in order to generate those positive externalities, you need some sort of external extra market force, whether it's private funding or government funding. The other kind of market failure is the failure, which is I think largely what the 67 Act was talking about. Yeah, the failure of the market to deliver products that consume some portion of the consumer market demands, right? So, and it's in broadcasting, it was because of the sort of two-sided advertising market, right? That your customers are really the advertisers or the underwriters in the case of public media. They're not actually the consumers. So if advertisers can't aggregate enough consumers that are attractive consumers, right? To advertisers, then advertisers won't buy the product even though there are consumers who would actually like it and if there were price discrimination and all sorts of other tools in the marketplace, we might have seen these products delivered but there was a failure in the marketplace. And that's the, if that kind of market failure, we're not talking about positive externalities, we're just talking about goods and services that the marketplace actually demands if we could get out of all the transaction costs and the other obstacles that I think is more suspect today because we do have price discrimination in media and we have a long tail and we have a much better functioning media market than we did in 67 that can actually cater to niche markets. So it becomes harder, I think, to identify where the market failures are. And also given that, I mean, does that mean that actually market failure is not a term to use today? That it is kind of a classicist against the man term to use when making an argument like this? Well, no, I still think it's the right, first of all, I don't think it's pejorative. I mean, plenty of free market enthusiasts and proponents, everyone accepts that there are times when the market fails, right? We've had a few examples recently. Yes, yeah. So I don't think it's pejorative. It's just that the market doesn't always deliver every desirable goods and services either desired by consumers or not desired by consumers but that we think consumers ought to have, right? Or that we think ought to exist. But just to give you an example, I mean, there may be so, and this is something that CPB's minority consortia was sort of set up to address. So Pacific Islanders, right? They are not a big enough group to support a programming market for them, right? It's just, they're just not market, it's not viable economically. So the market has failed to produce programming that they actually want and maybe they would pay for it. So even if we stripped out sort of inequalities and distributional issues, they might even be willing to pay for it and able to pay for it but the market, we haven't put buyer and seller together so properly, so there is a market failure there. So I think there still are some, they're just not as rife and rampant as they were in the 60s when you only had three choices. This just reminds me that there's another, the other feature that's very Berkman kind of critique, perhaps on all of this, is that part of what's been remarkable about the internet is the enabling of non-market behaviors, individual behaviors and participation that are creating enormous value that isn't necessarily even because there's a market failure but because prior to the availability of the platforms and technology, that kind of behavior never amounted to or evolved into the kinds of creativity and innovation and actual real businesses that we now see. Public media never would have and didn't create Wikipedia but it exists and it's now a kind of public media. Markets don't buy and sell the common good. And now that a political scientist is the Nobel laureate of the economy. Yeah, in economics, I wanna squeeze in a couple more questions. She has asked me this. Oh, sorry. Yes, I'm sorry. When you say a non-market value, what is that value or how do you? Well, you know, so this is sort of the wealth of networks. Yochai take on things and if you were here, he would do a much, much better job of it but that there are a variety of incentives and reasons that people participate in things, altruism and generosity and personal behaviors and the things that are captured around a table and conversation that now the kind of technology, network technology that helps harness that can enable people to add value based on things that they hadn't before. So Flickr photo sharing would be a very good example. I guess I might say the plan actually you measure. Oh, that's actually a much harder thing to do which has a list of things that I think Ellen is saying where we need to be able to actually do some documentation of where that value is that, you know, there's entire Yochai's running projects trying to measure that very thing. As anybody on Yochai's project here, there's, we have a couple of fellows who actually work within here, so that's not, I just want to question a little bit about the, say the Pacific Islander contents, I would say. Is that a failure, the marketer failure of technology to enable the market? For example, a traditional radio footprint is a certain number of miles. However, with the internet, you know, you can aggregate a larger amount of contents, not content but listeners via the internet. So you might be able to do Pacific Islander programming because you can aggregate listeners across the world. I think that's, I mean, that's sort of to the curatorial point. I mean, maybe there's, if the investment in curating and aggregating intentionally around areas that are otherwise not being served by the market could answer that issue, you know, that's a great value for a public media role and perhaps started today if you were trying to do the minority consortium. So in the public television, they actually fund, the dedicated fund for five minority consortia groups, I think, if you were starting today saying which are the minority media needs that aren't being served by the programming marketplace, you might take a completely different tack around how you'd find, source, curate, and present content that might have nothing to do with content creation. Basically anything you might hear on BURGBH. Here you go. Timeshifted it for 14 hours the next day. Perfect. And actually a lot of, I guess, that would be like a marketing advantage licensed in 1995 and slowly become an NPR station for a long time. Let's take two more questions, Rob. So one of the hot topics is whether the government should bail out journalism if not newspaper specifically broader journalists and journalism. How does this kind of feed into your thinking about what is public media and what's not and does that change how you look at it? Okay. Yeah, so some of those proposals that the bailout comes in a bunch of forms, some of which are, you know, allow newspapers to have non-profit arms, right? Allow sort of tax breaks as one form. So some, most of them are directed at preserving some sort of commercial structure for news production. The bailout has also been framed as throwing more money at public media. So obviously this project intersects with that to the extent that involves more resources for public media, but that's why, again, I say it comes back to this foundational existential question of, well, what is public media and does it have much to do with the journalism crisis? I think if you look at public broadcasting with the exception of NPR, no, not too much, right? Not doing a lot of accountability. Public broadcasters are not doing a lot of accountability journalism outside of radio, but there is consensus that they ought to be doing more. So then throwing money at public media, refashioned, restructured and redirected towards that particular market failure or public good would make sense. But I don't think, and then on the other question, sort of supporting commercial journalism, I don't think this project has anything to do with that. It should be, Dan Gilmour did a post recently just in response to one of the free press arguments for journalistic subsidies saying the only subsidy we really need is broadband. And that's framing up one of the very much the counter example to some of these discussions that are the premise of public broadcasting. Where do you need it? Maybe it is around curating. Maybe the infrastructure layer is not where we need further investment, I'm not sure. One more question, any more? That last one. I'm just curious about the copyright benefits to the public media. What is the situation at the current stage in the States? And another question is actually, I'm just curious on what's your suggestion to the reform, the change of the current copyright benefits. It's from the extended coverage of the umbrella of that failure or just from the source of the funding to support those public medias to get those copyrighted works by what way? What's your suggestion? Do you have that? Yeah, I mean the copyright discussion is a whole, it's a whole own thing. Just to answer your factual question about what do they get now. There's section 114 and 118 in the Copyright Act. 114 exempts from copyright protection the transmission of audio recordings in programs. So public broadcasting programs can use audio recordings without seeking a license for them as part of the program in ways that commercial broadcasters can't. Section 118 is a compulsory license for certain materials and programs. It's published non-dramatic musical works and pictorial graphic and sculptural works. So that's a compulsory license. They pay for it, but they pay a certain statutory rate. Can you give me an example of that? Yeah, it just means that in and it's particularly important in archival when public, well, if you're making a documentary and you've got a sculpture in it, right, you don't have to seek a license. You don't have to negotiate a license for that sculpture. You pay a statutory fee. If it's sort of a background audio recording, you have the rights to it. Just for broadcast. But just right, but just for broadcasting. So in practice, they have to clear them all anyway because nobody's just broadcasting. So on paper, that's what it is. In practice, they have to go back and clear all the rights because for any kind of web use, for home video, for educational use in schools, et cetera. And that would be the national extension. Right. But it's sort of the bigger question. So you can imagine, yes, make it not just for broadcasting, make it cover more things. There could be lots of permutations of that. That's on, that's so public broadcasters, public media entities, and of course, this poses a great definitional problem. If you're gonna expand the definition of public media, then who gets this benefit, right? It becomes quite tricky and quite, I think, quite contested. But that's on, that's for public media to use upstream for their upstream components. But what about access to public media content, right? Which is itself copyrighted. And that, I think, is where probably, there could be lots of convergence with the work of the Berkman Center on IP reform and other advocates and advocates for reformed public media. Because the sort of curatorial and sort of, we're talking about open platforms that provide this curatorial function. And ideally, you'd want maximal public access to this material. So you'd want it to be fairly open access, if not totally open access. And the problem is, and the incredibly deep complexity here is that the people who make these programs as much as they might like that to have subjected all the creative comments and make it all open, they're dealing with documentary footage and stills and all sorts of rich material that they can't get those kinds of rights to. And so if you think there's, and this is where the Flickr, I think those who have sort of the Flickr, the wealth of networks model think, isn't everything free? You know, isn't everything that you might want just kind of out there and can't you just download stuff from Flickr and put it into your documentary? And the answer is if you think there's value in sort of other kinds of works that do depend on these, on this content that's copyrighted and not free and not open, then you really on the downstream end can't have total openness because they can't get it on the upstream end. All right, we're out of time. We're happy to stick around and talk, but thank you all for coming. Thank you. Thank you.