Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

The first Public Radio Camp is now history, committed to scores of tweets on Twitter, a hoped-for wiki entry or two, and a lot of work yet to be done.

Behold, a Wordle from Quiddities’ Margaret Rosas reflecting the Twitter traffic:

The second day of this event was much smaller than the first; about eight participants versus the 60-70 present on day 1. One of the things we did was spend some time discussing the overlapping spheres of public media; one model put public media organizations into three groups, shaped by significantly different histories and schemes for regulation… public broadcasters (over-the-air radio and TV) in one sphere, the community media centers with roots in cable TV public, educational, and governmental access (PEG for short) in a second sphere, and the print-based and/or Net-based media groups (Wikimedia, projects like Public-Press.org in the Bay Area, and so on) in a third sphere. Some public media efforts (Democracy Now! came immediately to mind) touch all three spheres, others only one or two. Thinking about these different approaches to public media might help us be more effective in the roll-out of RadioEngage.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who took part in the BarCamp, and we’ll push forward from here…

I thought today’s Public Media Camp was a success, on the whole. At least 60 participants came to NextSpace in downtown Santa Cruz on the first of two days of visioning and planning about web content for public media organizations. Most participants were from the Santa Cruz area; many were from the San Francisco Bay Area, including folks from KQED and KALW; and I was especially happy to see people from NPR’s Public Interactive division, and from American Public Media.

Great thanks to all the event sponsors: the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, NextSpace, Sunkist Naturals, Lifestyle Culinary, Armanasco Public Relations (special tip of the cap to Tom Honig), Drew Miller Insurance Services, B. Ruby Rich, and above all to our colleagues at Quiddities that put it all together.

Significant take-aways for me included these:

KUSP’s on-line ambitions are greater, and closer to realization, than most public radio organizations of similar size;
Many KUSP people, and many other Santa Cruzans, want to use on-line public media to strengthen our community;
KUSP’s fire coverage this past spring and summer had a sizable influence on people’s perception of the station and its potential as a media organization operating on-line;
I saw a number of content producers working on news and information that have fairly concrete ambitions for how they want to serve audiences on-line, but not as many content producers focused on music are as far along;
Ideas abound about ways to generate financial support for public media from on-line users, but (at least with this group) I saw very little agreement about which ideas were most likely to succeed, and few of these ideas have actually been tested;
In a related story, few people if any thought the main ways public radio has raised money from people over the years — pledge drives and direct mail — will work effectively for on-line audiences;
And the last two points combined could mean real trouble for public broadcasters in the near future.

The Santa Cruz Public Radio Camp may spawn similar BarCamps elsewhere in the U.S. in the coming months, which will be a welcome development, as this seems like a productive way to advance planning for public media’s on-line services to viewers and listeners.

The event will continue tomorrow.

Tonight is the first night of a BarCamp event called “public media camp,” sponsored by Quiddities Dev. Inc. — our collaborators in the RadioEngage project. Follow the above links to find out more about what we’ll all be doing. If you’re in the Santa Cruz area, you can register on site Saturday morning between 9 and 10 AM.

And, it’s free!

Look for reports on the goings-on this weekend.

In recent months, and particularly since September 1st, we’ve been expanding KUSP Reports, the feature stories about news and cultural events in our area that are part of our morning and afternoon news programs, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and All Things Considered. The number of volunteers working on KUSP Reports has now outstripped our inventory of portable recording equipment — the gear they need to go out into the field and record sound at news events, do interviews, and so on.

KUSP Leadership Circle donor Paul Johnson wants to see more local coverage on the air. To make this possible, he has offered us a matching challenge grant. If KUSP members donate $1,000 to buy our volunteers more field recording gear, he will match that with a $1,000 contribution of his own. This campaign is starting today and will run until the end of next week.

You can support our news volunteers and meet Paul Johnson’s challenge by making a donation via this link!

This morning NPR announced that Vivian Schiller, the Senior VP and General Manager of NYTimes.com, will be the organization’s new CEO. She takes over on January 5. At 47, she will be one of NPR’s youngest chief executives, and the first woman to hold the top post.

She has been with the Times since 2006; before that, she was a television executive, most recently at the Discovery Times channel (a New York Times/Discovery Productions joint venture), and prior to that, at CNN/Turner Broadcasting.

Throughout the recruitment process (which has been underway since spring) NPR has stressed the importance of having a CEO with a deep understanding of news and of on-line content delivery. Given her resume, they appear to have succeeded in meeting those objectives. I look forward to meeting Vivian and sharing my impressions of her with you…

Full details are available elsewhere at kusp.org… but in capsule form, we’ll begin election coverage at 4:00 PM Tuesday on KUSP and continue at least until 12 midnight. On our main FM channel, we’ll be combining national coverage from NPR, statewide coverage from The California Report, and regional reporting by our staff and volunteers around the Central Coast.

On kusp.org we will have our live stream as described above, plus a second stream with five hours of special election coverage from Democracy Now from 4:00 to 9:00 (followed by a simulcast of our KUSP-1 programming from 9:00 on), and extensive on-line content from public broadcasting’s web collaboration (major partners include NPR, the NewsHour from PBS, Minnesota Public Radio, and KQED in San Francisco).

The launch of KUSP-2 is something we’ve been waiting a long time for; we had planned on this content being on our HD Radio channel too, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, we are experiencing technical problems right now with the part of our digital transmission system that carries the signal from our studio to our transmitter, and our analog back-up system can only carry our primary FM signal. So for this election special, KUSP-2 will be an Internet stream only.

I’m also excited about being in on NPR’s Vote Report Project, which involves use of newer on-line tools like Twitter (and relatively old-fashioned technology like voice mail) to get a sense of whether people are experiencing problems voting, from now through the time the polls close. Alison Stewart interviewed Andy Carvin of NPR about the plan on Weekend Edition Saturday this morning; you can hear that story here.

On Wednesday we have two special programs following up on the election results, in addition to coverage in our regular programs; Democracy Now will be extended to two hours (from 9:00 AM until 11:00), and a California Report special on the election results in California will come your way from 2:00 PM until 3:00.

I’ll post more updates as needed.