Hi all. Greetings from South by Southwest. This week I’ve got a longer column on a fundemental shift in the media landscape. There’s also few links to some interesting thoughts on public media, but otherwise this edition is lite on links.

Great to see so many of you during our webinar last month, How NPR is Using AI. I don’t know that we’ve had a chat quite as active as we did for this one, a it was largely driven by questions from the audience. So if you missed any part of it, you can catch up with it here.

Also, there is still time to register for our March webinar, a session for anyone thinking about audience growth, digital strategy, and new pathways in a changing media landscape.

Myths & Truths of Working With Influencers will be live this Thursday, March 19 at 1PM ET / 10 AM PT. Produced in collaboration with our friends at the Marketing & Communications PLC, this webinar will be a joint conversation on how public media stations are evolving audience engagement through collaborations with creators and influencers. As we seek to reach and engage new audiences while telling stories in modern, relevant ways, many stations are experimenting with nontraditional talent — from local subject-matter experts and digital content creators to community bloggers, social media personalities and even internal staff who can authentically play the role of “digital influencer.” We’ll discuss the real-world mechanics of these partnerships: how to identify the right creators, how to balance brand standards while empowering external voices, and how to integrate creators into your station’s ecosystem, from guest-hosting to co-created events. Register here!

Toward the end of last year, I started working through a self-generated reading list of books on media theory. It was early in that quest that I stumbled upon Jeff Jarvis’ The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet.

Here’s the gist of this particular work: Almost 575 years ago the world (first Europe and eventually its colonies) changed with advent of moveable type print, which gave knowledge permanence and in so doing made it replicable, verifiable, and critique-able. It fundamentally changed how humans ingested and processed information about our world as private study led to private thoughts which led to a clearer delineation (and eventual elevation) of the self. The squishy circularity and community-orientation of oral culture gave way as the dominant form of information communication over decades to the crisp, individualistic linearity of printed type, and in so doing eventually (I’m glossing over a lot here) created the knowledge economy we know today.

The theory of the push/pull between orality and literacy^* isn’t new. Media scholars have been focusing on the seismic impact of the printing press for 65+ years now. Jarvis’ thesis, written circa 2022, is that, in human history, our knowledge economy is the exception even if it feels to us like the rule. As we are nearing the closure of the historical parenthetical and that economy is starting to come to an end, what lays on the other side, he reasons, is very likely to be more similar to what came before societies crossed into the parenthesis. “The future is medieval.”
^*“Literacy” here isn’t the ability to read, just that the norms of society are encoded via written, linear text.

Look around at the media landscape and we can feel the truth in that. The Internet, but especially social media, opened the doors for orality to begin to erode the potency of literacy. Now we watch the rise of the creator economy and the documented shift of audience trust away from institutions and toward individuals. Vibes – a source’s feeling of authenticity – increasingly matter today as much as (sometimes more than) facts – the verifiability of the information being sourced. Once you factor in the conversational nature of chatbots and chatbot-based web search, it’s not hard to see how these tools orient toward natural language conversation and hasten the societal tilt toward orality.

Of course, there was a time (pre-1450 C.E.) when the written word was highly distrusted by the majority of people because one couldn’t size up the source. But for the whole of our lifetimes, there have been layers of institutions with transparent values and standards that make disembodied information trustworthy. That is, in part, the audience trust that we in public media work so hard to maintain.

What does this shift back toward orality mean for public media?

To start addressing that, we have to first acknowledge that at the birth of public media in the US, radio and television were the state of the media art at a time of near peak-literacy (again, defined versus orality, not defined by the ability to read). Today the state of the media art is math – algorithms and feeds, reasoning models and chatbots. Excelling at linear video and audio is not the media that our democracy needs us to infuse with our values. There are many avenues to explore to figure out how to position public media for relevance in 2050. But it does seem like we should start by at least agreeing that it cannot happen while we pursue a media model from 1950.

Next, we have to acknowledge that public media’s power as an institution is magnified by a world of scarcity, where information sources are limited, mostly to a corporate media ecosystem firmly rooted in a capitalist ideology. Today the cost of creating media has dropped to a point that anyone may express their voice and it’s more important for that independent voice to game the algorithm (or to pitch to someone who can) than impress a gatekeeper.

Knowledge is a commodity, not an asset, and orality only encourages that commodification. As Jarvis writes, “Everyone can be connected. One-to-many is replaced by any-to-any and any-to-many. The mass is dead…. For half a millennium, the mediators of media—editors, publishers, producers—controlled the public conversation. Now we may break free of their gatekeeping, agendas, and scarcities—while at the same time risking the loss of the value these institutions have brought in recommending quality, certifying fact, and supporting creativity. What must we create to replace these functions?”

Public media has always strived to give voice to (i.e., “platformed”) lesser heard voices (usually individuals) in the media landscape. What role do we play in a landscape where audiences don’t need us to amplify the points of view of creators, when community-think trumps individual voices? To what are we an alternative when those literate corporate media business models have given way to algorithmic distribution and AI-mediated knowledge that favors orality?

The pendulum is now swinging back away from peak literacy culture and reorienting toward more of a balance with orality, but the two will always be in tension with each other. Even today, when we encounter a good writer, we often talk about them having a distinct “voice.”

In that mixing of orality and literacy, I am optimistic that public media can still play a role, just as a small number of institutions influenced media in the era before the printing press. Can we find our niche in a more oral culture? The first time we took aim at that target it was the social media era. We landed wide of the mark, pulled off bead by our unwillingness to step away from the safe, authoritative gravity of broadcasting. We are getting another chance now that we are firmly ensconced in the AI era. Can we acknowledge the change happening around us, and start seriously discussing how we redirect our energies toward adapting to that change?

And if you want to get a good taste of this topic (without staring down 2,000+ pages of media theory reading) this recent episode of the Plain English podcast can whet your appetite.

I’ve been on the road for the last couple of weeks, first presenting at the Game Developers Conference Festival of Gaming in San Francisco and then on to Austin for my annual pilgrimage to South by Southwest. New this year was brief side step to present at the Hacks/Hackers AI x Journalism Day with previous PMI webinar guests Erica Osher and Ethan Toven-Lindsey.

So, I’m behind on my reading and curating content for this month. I’ll be back to you reactions to those conferences, as well as links sometime next week, but let me know if you like the longer column approach, and/or if you miss the links this time around.

Okay, on to some thoughts on public media…

Stop to Start: Letting Go to Build Future Audiences in Public Media (Michelle Maestas Simonsen & David Lowe - Greater Public) - I like this piece because, keeping audience relevance as a North Star, it takes the practical approach fighting smarter, not stronger, without treating that pivot like a failure or betrayal of mission.

Life after broadcast: What mission-driven media must become as audiences and funding move on (Tom Davidson - Editor & Publisher) - In Tom's last pre-hiatus column for E&P, he ruminates on the question "If we were to launch a new local, mission-driven public-service media entity today, what would it look like?" In it, Tom makes a subtle point that I think it worth highlighting. Most of us still have towers, and likely will for a while. But those can be leveraged in the service of what comes next. The key is to accept that broadcast isn't the future and, with that post-broadcast mindset, figure out how to utilize broadcast's residual value as a force magnifier for the non-broadcast future of public media.

"So many interesting ways that Netflix could spend that money…" (Shawn Halford via LinkedIn) - I didn't want to leave this one to vagaries of LinkedIn's algorithm. Shawn (formerly of American Public Television, even more formerly of PBS) started any interesting conversation around the idea of what a global company like Netflix could do with their "breakup fee" from the abandoned Warner Brothers/Discovery bid. It's worth checking out the reactions (yes, weighed in) and weighing in yourself.

Have a creative, productive week.