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Joint web action for 2008

Thursday, February 22, 2007

DATELINE: Boston, Massachusetts - Next time a media bloviator claims this is very early for a Presidential campaign to be starting, I might scream. (If, that is, I weren't such a quietly brought-up fellow.) The campaign is inescapably upon us already - has been for some time. And what that means for the media is starting to become inescapable, too.

The Integrated Media Association, a combination of public broadcasters in both radio and TV who share today's imperative to operate as determinedly in "New Media" too (though how anyone can call these media "new" anymore is another scream-trigger) has been holding its annual gathering here in Boston - a historic home of public media institutions.

A set of higher-end seminars labeled "CEO Sessions" has wrestled, as so many of these industry navel-gazing events do, with the seemingly intractable problems of mission and of achievability that face the sector's leaders - but they interestingly ended in three hours of free-flowing, agenda-less rap that actually led to a declaration of intent ... one that rang very real and presaged genuine change for the airwaves and the internet.

Attendees, and they included some of the top leadership of the public broadcasting system, determined to combine their forces afresh - under the disciplining lash of what one them called "the most vital election of our lifetime". For the 2008 Presidential campaign, public TV stations, radio stations, and the national services of PBS and NPR - plus the spun-off acronyms that are even less distinguishable to the non-specialist consuming public, like PRI (Public Radio International) and APM (American Public Media) - will all be trying to coordinate their efforts, and to do so will be presenting a shared web presence to the public.

The devil will be in the details of course, and we have yet to see exactly how it will work out. But the intention is clearly there - to quote Paula Kerger (pictured above) the newish - for the past year - President of PBS: "We owe it to the American public to come together around this major event in our nation's history". Significantly she singled out (albeit in his absence) the man in her shop mainly responsible for crystalizing this collaboration, another new appointee, Jason Seiken, Vice President in charge of PBS Interactive, who formerly headed up content for AOL Europe and was a founding Executive Editor for washingtonpost.com.

A sharper tone was taken by communications consultant Rob Paterson - a fairly brutalist one, in fact. He professed to be still bruised from trying to help with "New Realities", a previous planning exercise in media convergence at NPR which gained little traction despite some good ideas. The new determination expressed in Boston to coordinate across different media platforms as 2008 presses hard upon us had better work, he said, and public broadcasting had better finally lay aside its divergent, Balkanized ways.

Or else - Paterson warned a not-dissenting room - "I'll be coming to your funeral."

MEANWHILE A SIMILAR MESSAGE OF CONVERGENCE resounds through Times Square down in New York. Bill Keller, the New York Times' Executive Editor told his staff in a memo this week that, just as Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy online, and John Edwards had to deal with having controversial bloggers on his campaign staff, the Times itself is "moving, too". He means onto the web, or to be fair, further onto the web than the Times has already pushed or been pushed.

"For the first time", Keller writes, "a central political desk will supervise coverage for the newspaper and the web". This new desk, under newly-confirmed political editor Dick Stevenson, is to include not only traditional paper editors, but also staff experienced in web production, database reporting and software development.

In a statement that may seem obvious, Keller records officially what all can recognize as a tipping point truly tipped: "We are well past the day when we can think of ourselves as a newspaper with a Web site on the side."