 But it was great that New Genes talked to here, public media kind of called out in this way. Both, you know, we're sort of used to in our travelings within the public media world to either be beating up on ourselves or patting our own back, and to hear called out in a way that actually sets up a promise and a purpose within the context of the broadband plan. And to point the way to this discussion, which is going to try to talk about some of the challenges of this transition that we as an industry are in, and not dissimilar to some other media moments that are happening. So my name is Jake Shapiro. I'm Executive Director of PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. In many ways, we're one of these born digital new public media enterprises. We operate as an open distribution platform connecting independent producers with local stations, really as a hybrid between broadcast and digital opportunities, and trying to focus on the intersection of technology and talent, really trying to nurture new voices and content. And there's been a long-term interest in this topic of the transition of public broadcasting and public media into the participatory culture. We're at a nexus of opportunities. We've seen disruption in other media industries that we've observed in music in particular, which has been an interest of ours. And in newspapers that I know the Knight Foundation's report has really focused on, where that's coming up. To Eugene's point about mediated versus unmediated, I think one of the themes I'm hoping will emerge from this conversation is if you take seriously the role of being a mediator still in this age, how are we addressing that through the public media system? A word about when we're describing public media, there's definitional issues that are bound to come up. We have here with us really a group of public broadcasters. In many ways, we're, I think, all discussing public media as radiating out from and well beyond the boundaries of what public broadcasting has traditionally been constituted to be, which can include and has been referenced public access, television, low power fms, other nonprofits engaged in public service media activities. There's an interesting question, especially as we get into some of the opportunities ahead as to where some of those boundaries end up getting drawn, especially as you talk about potential reform or even legislation that might change some of the definitions. So what I'd like to do, you know, what's one thing about this panel is that rather than policymakers or policy observers or academics, we have a bunch of practitioners here who are really engaged in the day-to-day of building a next kind of public media architecture, infrastructure, operations across the spectrum of roles. So in order to get our heads around the opening of where this transition to digital public media is headed, I'm going to ask each one to sort of introduce themselves and then doing so and address the topic as they'd like, but also talk about a project or a particular initiative that is illustrative of what we think this next incarnation of public media might be. And I guess I'll just start to my left, so please introduce yourself, Rob. Sure. Robert Bull, I'm with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and my role is to lead our digital strategy and investments. I think one of the essential themes that I see, and I'm relatively new to public broadcasting, I came from an organization that worked in public media with low-income populations and then moved into this role about 10 months ago. And one of the great things that I see happening, one of the reasons why I was so attracted to coming over and working in public broadcasting is the two mediating influences. One was that you have the power to broadcast. The power to broadcast means that you can reach everyone in the United States with free, universally accessible content in general. And that is not necessarily true in the digital world, that digital content costs money to get access to and to utilize. So the ability to mix broadcast and digital platforms seem to be a great opportunity for where public media is going. I also saw organizations and people like these that were starting to turn public media from a purely broadcast environment to a more of a platform approach where there was other types of collaborations, other types of voices, and other types of opportunities to get information out into the world that are nontraditional. And so those two things are sort of in full swing. In terms of, I so desperately want to talk about the public media platform, but I know Kinsey is going to want to talk about that, but I want to talk about one thing that I think is a little unusual or it's a little changing. And that is what some of the role of where PRX and where a number of other folks are in developing a series of very flexible applications, whether they're on mobile platforms or online, that allow people to engage and participate. WNYC is a good example of that in New York that's doing work about sort of uncommon economic indicators where they're actually asking people from the community to start to crowdsource knowledge about what's happening in their community. It's all centralized around a broadcast, a radio broadcast, but it is being visualized on the online space which is generating even more broadcast. So that opportunity to really sort of have this engaged conversation in that space is really adding a great value. And it's an example of very flexible, very agile tools coming to bear in an industry, a broadcast industry, which can also mean a lot of capital and a lot of inflexibility because some of the rules around that broadcast. So there's a lot of very interesting sort of dynamic happening. I'm Marita Rivera. I'm a vice president at WGBH, the public broadcaster here, and I'm the general manager for radio and television, which now means you're the general manager for mobile video, broadband, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I find this a moment of great opportunity and interest. So while we started in public broadcasting, thinking about radio and television, it's been well over a decade since the work we've done really has moved on to create specific projects for many media devices and using many tools. So I think I'm here from the perspective of producers, kind of the editorial side of what's happening in public broadcasting. And Jake suggested I use as an example a large national project that we're beginning to work on called World 2.0, which is an online civic engagement project. We're really asking the public to help us define some of the issues of the day. And we're really looking at how we might target, in fact, a younger, I'll point a finger at 36, but a younger population of people and put in front of that group opportunities to begin to become more engaged and share information about what's happening. When I was thinking about this, I wrote down four or five things that I think are distinctive as we as public broadcasters, the traditional public broadcasters have engaged over this time. I think we use our strengths as curators. When we talk about news and journalism, news is the primary example of curation. And we're past grandmasters at taking very complicated issues and be able to present them back in ways that allow people to address them and digest them. Public broadcasters have a national base. As we've done work with many of the new media providers and partnered with new media providers, we realize one of the strengths we bring is that there are stations and communities all across the country. And being able to partner outside traditional public broadcasting means that we share a number of things, but one of them is that particular reach. We can use our current investments, that's what this project imagines. We've put money into building the National Black Programming Consortium. And that consortium has connections with the African American community all across the country. There are opportunities for us to take investments that we've made in that and many other communities that we've developed over time and think about how we bring them back together, reformat them using the capabilities we have now to have that voice part of the issues. Obviously, we're looking at creating a grammar that attracts people. That's what we do. We try to take some of the data and the things that might otherwise be dry and turn them into the possibility of bringing people in. If we can't do that, we're out of the business. And finally, I just say that we're looking at obviously right now a kind of transmedia and really distributed model of programming. So these are kind of five areas that I think some of them are unique to public broadcasters, established public broadcasting. But for us, they've all been part of what we've been experimenting with and what we're intending to bring into the World 2.0 project to look at a broader group of people coming together to empower themselves and talk about the issues of the day. I'm Sue Schartt. I'm the Executive Director of AIR, which is based here in Dorchester. It's the Association of Independence and Radio. It's an organization that's 21 years old. It's one of the oldest and largest professional membership organizations in public media. And what we have just briefly in terms of the organization, it's a very broad group spanning ages from about 18 to 70 years old. We have practitioners who have been in the business for 35 plus years who helped lay down the pipelines from the earliest days of the industry to the youngest and most emerging group of media practitioners. And hopefully we can talk more about that a little bit later. We had a project this last year, Makers Quest 2.0, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That was a tremendous demonstration project. CPB came to us and asked us to help figure out how producers, how individual-inspired producers could help lead the industry through the transition from public radio to public media. And what we saw emerge was really some just tremendous fodder and tremendous information and models for us. Briefly, I would welcome, invite you to look. There's a brief video at mq2.org, which will give you more of a scope on the projects. But briefly, what the principle behind the project is that the change is happening from the bottom up. It's individuals who are leading the change. It's the craftspeople who are leading, who are on the front edge of what's happening. And so what we did was we basically turned to them and these nimble, not risk-averse, very crafty people who figure stuff out for a living and said to them, how can we blend traditional platforms, the power of the converged audience that we have in public radio, which is tremendous, with this new circulation system, these new digital tools and pathways. We gave them five months. We gave them $40,000 each. And they came, I won't, again, won't go into detail here, but what we saw come out of this were they invented new formats. Participatory documentary, they went into the communities. We partnered them each with incubators, so they were incubated, sort of seeded. Four of them at NPR, one of them at KPCC in Los Angeles, one at KUOW in Seattle, WNYC. And so they had this relationship but retained their independence and their freedom to invent. So that's a project that I would say demonstrates the new face of the public media journalists where we still see these gifted individuals, again of varying degrees of experience too. Some were very inexperienced and some were much more experienced, but basically in the role still, as Jake is mentioning, as a mediator, still the person who is gifted at identifying good stories and good storytellers and then figuring out how to get that story out, but the whole landscape in terms of the tools that they can use is what's changed. And this is what they figured out. They don't have to go out with the microphone themselves and ask somebody a question and gather half an hour of tape and go back and cut it up into four minutes and put it out on the radio station. It's a whole different participatory model. These are participatory models that they invented that are tremendously exciting. Hi, I'm Kinsey Wilson. I'm Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital Media at NPR, which means that about half of my time is spent sort of on the operations of NPR's digital media operations and the other half is sort of gazing into the future and trying to figure out what NPR's future and station's future digital strategy will be. I've been in journalism for 30 years, been in digital media for about 15, and like Rob, I'm relatively new to public media having been there about 15 months. A couple of the speakers made reference to the enormous technological disruption that's going on, and for us from where we sit, it's created both an imperative and an opportunity. The imperative Eugene referred to in terms of public broadcasting having to move from sort of its 20th century analog broadcasting model to its 21st century digital future and make sure that it can make that transition. The opportunity is one that I think has become much more evident just in the last couple of years as both the technological transformation has accelerated and the challenges to the business model around journalism have become accentuated. And we see an opportunity that one of our board members at a meeting the other day summed up as saying that we need stronger, more vibrant news organizations in more places. I would add to that, that reach larger and more diverse audiences across all platforms. It's an ambition that even just a couple of years ago probably would have been beyond the scope of public media, but because the technologies and the tools have become lighter and because monopoly or near monopoly news organizations that completely dominated the local market are beginning to see their franchise erode and the opportunity is opening up for lots of different players to come in. There is a real opportunity for public media to step into that space. So our efforts have been focused really in two directions to try and help stations figure out what the best opportunity is in that space and where the appropriate divide is if you will between services and guidance that can be provided at a national level and economies of scale that can be provided at a national level and where the opportunity is best left to the bottom up kind of creativity that Sue was describing. And so we've got two projects underway. One is aimed at sort of understanding the audience proposition. What will attract people? What is the best editorial journalistic audience play for public media in these local markets? Because there are lots of different choices that you can make and it's very hard for individual properties to figure that out one by one. So we're trying to provide some guidance there and have a project underway in 12 different markets that actually launched today with the signing of a contract with the CPB around that that will be attempting to in essence do rapid prototyping over the next two years of some local news sites in those markets. The other sort of trailing behind that but began with what Eugene referred to as the NPR API is an effort to create a common platform and think about networking public media content however that's ultimately defined in some sort of common repository. The larger goal of which is to encourage the kind of innovation that needs to go on at the local level to in essence stimulate open source development on top of that repository and give people the tools with which to invent the next generation of news gathering. So one piece is sort of intellectually focused on what the audience proposition is, the other very much on infrastructure and platform and common standards and economies of scale. In a way that sounds almost just striking me now that the analogy to what might be the collected assets of public media made available through an open platform is the data.gov proposition where then you hope and encourage further innovation to happen on top of that collected content. And then the sources of that content unlike not being government sources this is where I think the conversation gets interesting is and you're talking about the first incarnation of the platform thinking about NPR content or the related partners national producers but then we might get to where Sue's purview into a much broader range of individual creators or others who are not necessarily holders of licenses to bits of spectrum. So one question that I would like anybody to jump in on go through first is as we think about this transition we've talked about a few of the assets already that we bring forward with it existing knowledge and expertise even in storytelling and this mediation role some powerful relationships community organizations across the country that are already in place and providing valued service over broadcast. One of the ones also that is interesting in contrast to the declining trust in other institutions nationally government congress being examples that were just brought up is the trust in public media brands the ones that are best known is actually very high and in many ways growing. But what if you were looking at it and the two of you who are newest to the system as we call the system might have particular insight in this are the are the hindrances we have you know you can mention another asset that maybe I didn't mention that we're bringing in but what are the ones that you actually see as obstacles to public broadcasting playing a fundamental role in the new space. I think I think there are two that I would I would say I think one of the really you were talking about one of the great one of the great assets of public broadcasting is localism and I think one of the great challenges of public broadcasting is localism meaning that we have 800 plus independent businesses with their own boards with their own you know balance sheets with their own infrastructure that can work together and have the opportunity to work together but sometimes it's hard. So you have uneven distribution of capacity whether it's a small little radio station done by two people in Marfa Texas to GBH or some of the larger producing stations. So I think that's one of the one of the big challenges and I think CPV's role in that challenge as well as NPR and PBS and other big organizations is to start to make some systematic wide investments in things that Kinsley was talking about in terms of public media platforms and another project I would cite which would be one that I'm working on is called the American Archive which is not a news based archive though I think Eugene's point about helping and trying to help improve the ability for people to get access to journalism content is very important. The American Archive is a much larger archive than just journalism and we have to understand that public media is you know something that is very much involved in education and arts and cultural life and it's amazing actually I have a little thing right now for the American Playhouse if anyone remembers that I just got a book with all of the American Playhouse productions and it's you know it's every significant actor, producer, writer or director in today's Hollywood scene has created over the age of 35 has created content for the American Playhouse series like every single one and they didn't do it for commercial interests they didn't even really do it for themselves they did it for the American public but it's hard to get access to that material because of the myriad rights issues so I think if I was going to talk a little bit about some of the big challenges it's that question of how do you even capacity and I think technology infrastructure equal access to very robust flexible technology infrastructure whether it's something that is put together by an NPR or PBS working together or whether it's something put together by outside entities like Google or Cisco or whatnot are very important as well as this addressing of this digital rights issue that American public has made significant investments in this fantastic stuff but you know what you can't get access to it. Just on the obstacle side I guess to build on what Rob was saying you know as I look at sort of this transformation over the last 15 years over and over again you see that the organizations that have the greatest difficulty are those whose legacy structure governance whatever profoundly inhibits their ability to sort of make this transition to take the risks to make the investments that they need to because their loyalties are divided or structurally they're simply not set up and organized to do this and I you know clearly that's one of the challenges that public media faces. I'm quite optimistic though and particularly coming having come out of the newspaper industry and having watched what occurred there. Public media is generally operating from a position of strength public radios audience has grown 67% between 1998 and 2008 while programming most other news programming has declined on other platforms traditional legacy platforms. We are not rocked back on our heels as we're trying to make this transformation. We actually enjoy trust reach a vibrant news organization and can build from there and I think have become aware of the necessity of moving quickly at a time when we're still strong and that unfortunately newspapers when their cash flow was at its zenith in 2002-2003 were not as quick to act and are now finding it very difficult to respond to the technological challenges that they face. I would just add one sort of another dimension to what Kinsey is saying here in terms of the legacy and the culture. You know a public radio is an institution that is a phenomenal success story. I mean it's a 35 year old institution that has basically just had straight straight straight growth and audience in revenues and in penetration and just evolving into the you know the very respected institution that it is. It boils down to the people and understanding that the people who started this whole enterprise 35 years ago are in large part still the ones who are with it. They've written this way they're the architects of success and here they are at a point at this incredibly you know this time where there's this tremendous seismic shift going on and what they were hired to do and what they did extremely well was build this you know this amazing institution and now suddenly they're supposed to somehow you know change everything or help it through this whole transformation and I think it's a really basic kind of awareness that we have to have that they did their job. It's not their job to necessarily come up with the transformation. The answer to the transformation and the agent the agency of transformation isn't those who are sort of holding the you know sort of holding the keys to the kingdom so there needs to be a very sort of it's kind of simple but it's a powerful kind of awareness that needs to happen within the institution and I don't think our industry is alone. I'm sure this this is this happens you know all the time with industries that enjoy tremendous success. It's really hard for those gatekeepers who did their job and they did it extremely well and who are sort of looking at you know retirement you know they're they're they're moving out how to make that transition. The other thing I would just add quickly is that related to this is there's a tremendous gap in infrastructure and investment. We have this so we have this legacy at this institution that is under siege with the economy and and tremendous amount of money being pushed into it to keep it short up to keep the lights going to keep the electricity on at a time when we have such a need again of this nimble kind of risk taking energy and enterprise and there's a real gap in the infrastructure and how we actually fund that how we actually make that happen in dollars and cents. So Rob I wanted to hear from you and also from Rita in the parallel of assets versus obstacles the fundamental piece of the architecture of broadcasting is a local station a local entity and there's a lot of ways of thinking around and beyond that but what is that role going forward. Yeah that's actually why I wanted to follow up I think there's a couple of things to be said I mean again I wanted to reiterate I came from the digital media world where I had no ability to transmit and now I'm working in public broadcasting where we do have the ability to transmit and that's a really incredibly efficient thing to do you build a tower and you sink some costs into that but the cost of adding more clientele to the get that signal is pretty much zero you know you the cost to transmit to one is a cost to transmit to a million and that is not true that's not the same scale in digital media and so those local institutions all of that those local organizations are truly these amazing anchor institutions in the community you know they have the ability to collaborate and to curate they have the ability to work with the local community in new ways and provide content and broadcast into schools and healthcare clinics and to people's homes and so I think that before we give up on the infrastructure that we spent the last 35 years building we should realize that there's still a lot of energy and a lot of power in that and that infrastructure is tied to staff on the ground as Maria said in every community in the country including Marfa, Texas you know when there are two dedicated people out there trying to tell the public story and I think that's a really important you know a really important point I think just lastly in terms of localism and stations there is a transformation that's going on in those stations we have to balance really savvy media executives who understand how to run a media operation with people like me who are coming in and who never run a broadcast media operation and who understand how to do new things in new ways and there's that balancing point that's important. Rita? You know I am you know so wrapped up in the notion that our stations are the opportunity we have to provide and to provide for voice in our community at a scale that's not really available to us in many other instances and I find this what I'm dealing with partnerships now people inside and outside traditional public broadcasting that question of voice to me is one thing I hope we don't see at risk you know as we as we move toward new ways of engaging with the public and it's one of the real opportunities I see certainly in a local community with the tools that we have now we're finding as a station that this is when we can go to Dorchester this is when we can stop talking about you know populations in our community who have no way to talk to us to themselves I think becoming the vehicle for those kind that kind of dialogue and shared information is is very exciting to me it's very exciting because that's we can do more of that now than we used to be able to do and I see that with our local television you know our basic black that's suddenly doing live programs but the dialogue is right online that they're community video reporters that they're bloggers we look at somewhere we call the lab open calls which are doing locally and then nationally which are calls for people to upload video to really participate in the dialogue that's that's being addressed through the other platforms so I would say that the ability for those local stations to continue to partner with organizations outside of themselves is critical. So it's I want to move from the broadcast portion of the event to the participatory portion of the event so if you have questions again please go to the microphones on the side and also if you're watching the stream I did manage to get online and if you want to tweet a question in or we're wanting to open the panel before us we're going to iterate so just tweet me Jake Shapiro just at Jake Shapiro and hopefully I'll see you here in the direct message while while we're gathering at the microphones I wanted to ask this a question about the business model as a strength so we you know often describing limited resources of public broadcasting and the strains between the undercapitalization of the tax-funded dollars and the strains that public television particularly has to do around pledge and underwriting and sponsorship but in some ways and Kinsey you were sort of alluding to this that diversified business model and certainly the direct reliance in relationship we have with people pledging money to support something that they value could be seen as a strength do you see that actually is something that is not only to carry forward but map beyond what we've done so far I think it not only could be seen as a strength I've increasingly come to appreciate just how essential our diversified revenue model is to our independence to our ability to be able to report without your favor and to being able to weather the kind of technological disruption that we're going through now again having come from commercial media one of the things that that you're seeing happen right now is the extreme dependence on advertising revenue really drives all conversations at a moment like this where revenues are declining whether they're trying to make adjustments in the business and we're fortunate in having a relatively even mix between in the case of NPR it's about 28% of our revenue comes from corporate sponsorship little under 50% comes from licensing which at the station level comes from listener support licensing meaning state fees the stations paid for the programming right and then the remainder from foundation and gifts and a very small proportion in our case comes from the federal government so that may change over time how that business model translates in the digital era remains to be seen I've got a lot of ideas about how that can happen but it is absolutely a source of strength let's start with the Eric wolf from PBS actually but this is actually more of a personal personal question personal background Eugene in his talk talked about the notion of public media as a source of social cohesion I think or societal cohesion the media today is more and more fragmented right the right listens to Fox the left listens to MSNBC somebody else listens to CNN people people go into their corners and listen to what they want to hear can you all talk about how you see and Maria I think you just started to maybe touch on this how you see public media being having an opportunity to provide societal cohesion as we get into a more and more fragmented world we work hard we work hard not to be put in a box and I think it's essential that we maintain that maintain that as we move forward if there's if there's any box we're trying to get out of it's the it's the tone of voice box you know it's the it's it's the creative box it's the grammar box I don't know what you're talking about that's a different box from the you know how we are being viewed and I think this point about being trusted purveyors of information is core because as media proliferates yes you've got five different six different ten different things you're looking for we need to make sure the public media public broadcasting remains one of your five choices if that's what you have and people will will I think respond to that as as the cacophony goes on so our role is to think about how we invite the participation how we invite some shared the development of shared space with other communities so it isn't all just us talking talking talking talking but really providing the space for those communities to talk to one another we attract people but they have no way to talk to one another and if we agree with the view that intelligence has been passed out evenly among communities rich poor ethnic you know trans media at whatever national part of our role is to convene those people who want to bring intelligence to bear on on some of the many issues in front of us and I think that role for us is being is becoming more possible because of the tools that we have at hand Nolan Bowie again I'm a former public interest communications lawyer long-time advocate for public broadcasting I support both public broadcasting stations here in Boston I say that is background as we all know not all media are regulated in the same manner by government broadcasting is much more deeply and widely regulated than all other media what makes broadcasting different is the legal fiction of spectrum scarcity the so-called scarcity rationale justice Clarence Thomas in a concurring decision this summer in August release in a case title FCC versus Fox more or less invited a challenge to the broadcast regulation based on an attack on First Amendment grounds and the first amendment grounds and the citizens united the court seems to treat the First Amendment the sacrosanct almost as if it was absolute the same rationale if applied to broadcasting would probably hold bracket this court would hold broadcasting regulation as being unconstitutional I'd like to ask the panel in general to regard a more consistent way of regulating broadcasting consistent with First Amendment goals and principles what they think should broadcasting not be regulated as a common carrier first come first serve non-discrimination no censorship and a separation of the owners of the stations of the conduit from content to give everyone an equal opportunity to speak who wants to jump in on that one I'd like to phone a friend I mean I'm no policy person at all I mean just very briefly from a broadcaster standpoint you know we have an 11% penetration into the American public and we do that we do that you know by virtue of what we put out we reflect who we attract as an audience and I think it's you know it's clear that we have a tremendous opportunity now in this age that we're in to penetrate beyond the 11% I think we're all committed to doing that and finding ways to do that using again the momentum that we have going right now to reflect a more broadly a democratic more colorful and diverse America I think that I don't know if that exactly answers your question but could we do that great so is the question in a way when the transition starts and public media is serving perhaps equally or even more so through digital channels that the broadcast that it retains the spectrum that it retains should be managed differently than it's currently managed so that we should actually you know one stations perhaps are primarily now serving audiences through digital platforms then the existing spectrum that we've operated in a certain programming approach here suggesting perhaps might be operated differently right I'm going to switch to the next topic because we don't I don't think anybody here is ready to jump in can see here okay hi I'm stiff and to miss here I'm the director of citizens market we're a new nonprofit in Boston and we're interested in connecting consumers with information about corporate behavior both large companies and small local companies my question is really for any of the panelists we've heard a lot of really interesting things today about how communities engaged the public sector but since you have your ear down to the ground with what communities are doing I wonder if you have any interesting stories about changes in how communities are engaging the private sector this might be local plants from large companies are also local companies themselves have you seen any shifts or interesting things happening in that area thanks you know actually kids I wouldn't mind prompting where NPR I think there's a big focus on accountability journalism soon seems to be the next area where a lot of public media stations are thinking about investing even more resources and I'm wondering as definitely from NPR or from NPR what you see about that I mean I think there's a huge opportunity at sort of the intersection of data and journalism if you will and and that's one of the focuses of you know we're starting to put some energy into investigative reporting and accountability journalism I was involved in the project actually my former employer at USA Today where we did very elaborate mapping of the point emissions from manufacturing concerns all over the country and they have to report to the EPA but the data that comes out is virtually unintelligible when you get information about each individual emitter but you can't draw a picture of what's happening environmentally on the ground and we worked with the University of Massachusetts to divide the country up into one by one squares and and look at what the actual impact was and look at prevailing wins and look at the cumulative total of that and then mapped it against proximity to schools because that's where young kids are for extended periods of the day and it drew a very different picture it took government information on the one hand it was publicly available but for all intents and purposes is not actionable in any way and transformed it into something that provided a series of stories around at an individual moment but actually lives on today and is a continuing resource for those communities to use and is a way for them to hold individual corporations accountable so I think it's just one example of a different brand of stories if you will that we can start developing over time. I actually two more very quickly one is a lot of focus well not a lot but there's increasing focus on hyperlocalism in terms of journalism mention every block that ostensibly came from public media and then was went out in through the night foundation and then went into the private sector but there are other examples of hyperlocalism where they're trying in Philadelphia W-H-Y-Y Christa Tullo was running this project as one of the premier civic engagement journalists in the country ran the editorial page at the inquire and worked with the city on helping them structure the budget process with community engagement and he said trying to apply those same lessons to working with seven neighborhoods in Philadelphia around how do you get the community to work on both commercial and government solutions to building that community to be a better place and I think another one I would say is Lens on Atlanta which is a project that's out of Atlanta PBS it's focused on a public broadcasting Atlanta I should say which is focused on trying to give a platform to citizens to talk about everything as mundane as in like why is there this huge pot hole in my street to what's happening in my community and why I don't like it what is the great part about that I think what's the sort of the brilliant part is that Milton Clipper and the folks at PBA are using their journalistic cred to take those stories and those conversations and turn them into questions from a journalistic point of view it's almost in some ways crowd sourcing community engagement into journalism versus the other way around and asking so why is there a pot hole in the street or why store are you doing these things so I think those are examples where we're getting a lot of experimentation what we need to do now is invest in what works and start to build capacity throughout the system so we have another question over here you wanted to jump in so please go ahead this is the one more question and I have one tweet that's coming in a while I can't compete with the tweet my name is Danielle and I'm here from MIT from the Urban Studies and Planning Department but I'm also from the community media and the youth media world and I know this come up a couple times that there's a difference between a mediated and an unmediated space but I wonder if folks on the panel had some opinions about is there a leadership role that public media as is defined by who's sitting at this panel here could play in getting people to use more social media and community media like public access stations and collective enterprises that aren't quite as mediated to have there be more public interest and more legitimacy to those endeavors that's a great question I mean it ties a bit to a phrase that Eugene had used which is this vision of a new public media network which I think implies a more expansive sense of who we are beyond perhaps the entities constituted here hopefully partnering with and actually helping showcase and elevate some of the groups that are doing amazing work in other domains where some of the both the audience reach the platform and technology some of the journalistic skills and training that can come with it really could help I think raise up a much broader segment than we've seen to date let me throw it to you guys to talk about where you see that as the opportunity what is the vision of the new public media network? some of that is what we think about when I was talking about world 2.0 and I really think about it as partnerships with groups outside of ourselves who themselves are creating community to really look at individual youth media of Oakland comes to mind just because you talked about young people but youth media right? youth media who would partner with us on this guys at Bayback or one economy or there are people we talk to who's own work could be expanded and exposed and could attract more people because we're partnering in that case there are the authorities not the public broadcaster the public broadcaster has the platform and the opportunity to really bring people more people to the question but I imagine I'm imagining the kinds of things we could get back are going to be pretty tremendous even in our smaller efforts at WGBH kind of the open lab open call we did with a NOVA program attached to an Adobe youth program to really come back and talk about heat and climate change and I always find that in those sorts of partnerships the kind of questions the approach the perspectives the whole thing is much enriched and I see us doing more of that and not less I think we're moving in that direction. So there's a segue for Sue maybe to jump in that question the tweet that came in was asking you about how do you recruit new producing talent. Asking me that question. Yeah. Well over the last two years we've had a 22% increase in and growth in the organization and over the last nine months or so we've begun to actually survey these people to say who are you and why are you coming to us. So and I'll answer that question in a second but just to give you some insight and maybe to respond to that question a bit is what we're seeing emerge is 67% of the new members coming are under the age of 34 55% you know we're an organization of independence in radio 55% are primarily oriented to broadcast radio but we're seeing this growth in online orientation 30% of the new members coming in are oriented to online and then there's subcategories of print and other sort of forms of media. So and other in 25% are non Caucasian so we're seeing emerge I think it's kind of I interpreted as kind of reflective of the larger world of people who are again taking tools into their own hands and and I would say that they lead us as Maria is suggesting they sort of have the power to lead us to these other places and these other collaborations and partnerships and the opportunity and an exciting opportunity is for again how we create the pathway for this group into the legacy institutions the the tweet in terms of recruitment it's sort of viral it's sort of I think it's very much word of mouth with our organization the mq2 project we it was a competitive it was a competitive call out to producers to get grant money so we reached far and it always helps to offer grant money recruiting technique money that's a good recruitment tool so we're winding down and I thought I would give a chance with the panelists to offer some closing comments one of the things that we didn't really get to touch much on but it's been interesting as it's bubbled up elsewhere is that part of the landscape that's really exploded over the last number of years as we've been observing the media transition are these other platforms we're talking about building a public media platform but here we are with YouTube and with Facebook and with Twitter clearly enabling a huge amount of public participation of distribution of a lot of things that you know when public broadcasting was created four years ago we felt was actually the thing that was missing that we needed to address those circumstances have changed where do you see as you think through on the positive side of public media's leadership role in this where we need to be creating that capacity and where we're really hoping to leverage others who are building those platforms so just briefly I just say you know five years ago February YouTube launched and Huffington Post launched five years ago not not this month but recently you see the acceleration of those platforms is incredible I mean they're top I've an eight-year-old and so they're only five years old can you imagine when they get really dangerous I think that you know I think that the challenges is for public media to work outside of itself and start to innovate with these technology companies and young people and collaborate and and it's a very exciting time right now because public media and large measure is excited to do that so this is going to be a critical couple of years and in fact I have to give some kudos to Eugene and the rest of the folks at FCC are really very thoughtfully trying to engage public broadcasting in this work so one of one of the things that struck me coming into public radio is is the extraordinary loyalty of the audience and the level of trust and the extent to which people not only have an affinity for what we do as broadcasters and but potentially for each other and and it is in a sense a latent network if you will of people who imagine that they have something in common with others who listen and shared experience most of which we've not yet succeeded in bringing online the opportunity in the platforms that you mentioned is to do precisely that and to recognize that our job is to make sure that we're connecting people and that we're getting information in front of them wherever they're consuming information we've seen a shift just in the last year as the percentage of referral traffic that's coming in from a variety of different quarter searches still the highest but RSS used to be second and now it's social media that has displaced RSS so you're moving from sort of more mechanical distribution platform to one that's based more on individuals and networks and I think that's only going to accelerate and I see these you know these are tools for us that our work is really our work which has to do with voice and connection and education and dialogue and these are tools and the more than the better I mean it's really how do I use YouTube and if it's Facebook how do we use Facebook so we're content creators and we're engaged now in serious partnerships with people who are they said very much outside public broadcasting with our publics and that's what the excitement is and I think where we can use whatever's out there how we adapt and how we structure our content to fit that particular framework that's fine that's kind of why we're in the business and I find the partnerships to do that I've been very you know I work with everybody at this table or Corporation Republic Broadcasting PRX, AIR, NPR, PBIA I mean they're not that many of us out here so we're running hard we're running hard and I think are happy to feel that we're now part of a much larger community of people who are also running hard so you know bring on the YouTubes bring on the YouTubes okay well we'll close I suppose with that thank you to our panelists and thank you everybody here thank you Chris