Stop obsessing on the canvas and fix the painting

Almost as though we have no right to acclaim the success of public radio in doubling its audience over the past decade, many industry leaders are predicting its eminent demise at the hands of the web, and those frightening and unthathomable aliens driving its expansion, the nation's young media consumers.

Take this piece of neurotic recreational worry from Robert Paterson, a knowledgeable leading public radio consultant who shares many of my public radio "core values". For those friends of mine (most of them over forty, of course) who are too impetuous, obsessive-compulsive and gadget-obsessed to click on the previous link, here's the nutgraph of Rob's panic:-

"As stations diet to death, what happens to NPR? They themselves also implode as their market shrinks, costs mount and underwriting and revenues shrink. They too go into bailing/survival mode. All now depends on ME. What about the [NPR's proposed] new building? Anything that does not pay today's bill, has to get cut. That includes the future!"

His premise is that traditional public radio will be gobbled up by the web, and that we must all focus on the new "delivery platforms", or die.

I don't know many public radio stations with some modicum of resources who are not focussed on this. Its why we launched The Conversation. Other sophisticated sites like NPR.ORG and WNYC,ORG offer interaction, news, information, audio, podcasts, blogs, streaming, and archives. Many stations communicate daily by email with their listeners. Like BluegrassCountry, many public stations now have cutting-edge online streams and theme-specific podcasts.

What gives them a head start? Good content, and good journalism. Which is why the best public radio (whatever it is called in the future) will survive and Rob should get some apparently much-needed sleep. Consumers will find the good stuff if its available in the right places. Which is why we've developed three different HD stations; you can talk to Diane online, download the Kojo Nnamdi Show to listen to later, or retrieve a news report in script form to share with your friends.

Here's what we really need to worry about in public radio; the content needs to be more surprising, renewed, rejuvenated, innovative, of wider and more diverse appeal, funnier, and striving constantly to stay relevant. But its the content that counts, not the platform. The job of public radio's leaders is continually to question and reevaluate the quality, scope and reach of its journalism and entertainment. Are NPR doing a good job reporting the news? Are we talking to our listeners in a way they value and appreciate us? How can we do better in our local newsroom? Are we covering the election in-depth, offering material not heard elsewhere, generating exclusive or original stories, in an appropriate and balanced way?

Lets concentrate on continuing to offer broadcast material which captivates citizens and highlights the challenges facing our nation today, and invest appropriately in the exciting emerging technology. That's the business model. And lets give our bright young broadcast professionals space to be creative, and not panic about the canvas on which they will paint.

Serious Journalism from Condit to Karadzic

I' read the Washington Post's curiously-timed series reconstructing the events surrounding the unsolved murder of DC intern Chandra Levy more than seven years ago. As an aside, I must confess I've always thought it would make a great "ripped-from-the-headlines" Columbo:

"O, Mr. Condit, just one more thing Sir. Er, Congressman, did you ever go to Klingle Mansion? my wife loves it there."

But it was a deeply disturbing event in modern DC history, and in WAMU's Newsroom we gave it appropriate local news coverage to solicit information from people who knew Chandra, who may have come across her, or who may have seen her. But ultimately, and especially after her body was discovered more than a year later, the saga received far more press than it, or any participant (including her family) wanted or deserved.

The American media's ill-proportioned judgment on the Levy murder was drowned weeks later by the September 11th attacks, which demonstrated in a cruel irony that they had failed to prepare their readers, viewers and listeners for a nation-challenging event, preferring - as they had done - to cling to human interest and consumer-driven news. Then in the aftermath of 9/11 there was a naive consternation born of an ignorance of global change and a self-deluded arrogance about what mattered to regular folks. It amounted to a crude demonstration of just how much this country's journalists let down its people by failing to warn them of the potential perils they faced.

Seven years on, and I worry that the Post's reconstruction of the Chandra Levy murder might be evidence that history's ignorance might be repeating itself.

As a BBC producer in Europe in the early 1990's I met some of the victims of Radovan Karadzic, the architect of "ethnic cleansing" and described by the heroically brutish American diplomat Richard Holbrook as "one of the worst men in the world", who was arrested this past summer after years of hiding from justice abetted by the guilty and powerful of the Balkans. He's accused (among a lot of other horrid stuff) of fifteen counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, where a nasty racial and religious war was reported bravely and desperately by news organizations like the BBC, determined to document the world's historic events in the early nineties.

But did it merit a headline that night on the evening network TV news in the United States? Unfortunately, no.

It was a tough one - a national election candidate is in Iraq for a photo-op, and there is fresh controversy about Janet Jackson's nipple, an American war crime now nearly as old as the murder of Ms.Levy itself.

Could it be that we're just as capable today of ignoring important events as we were before 9/11?
If the arrest of Karadzic doesn't matter, how many tomorrows will there be before the arrest of Bin Laden doesn't matter? Do we forget the really significant news stories too soon?


If not, let's play a new reality show :"Wait, Wait, DO Tell Me what happened? " and try to explain its significance to our young journalists, and our newest generation of serious journalists.