Listening Post: Paying for it
There is a large chunk of media consumers who believe that everything online should be free of cost. Even those who have some awareness of how expensive it is to do credible journalism balk at paying for it when the delivery mechanism is the Internet. They pay the cable bill, or the cell phone bill, or whatever service connects them to the Internet–shouldn’t that be enough?
No. Paying for the pipeline is not the same as paying for the oil. This applies not only to consumers, but also to organizations like public radio stations. Case in point: over the last fifteen years, the NPR network has made an ever increasing investment in online services that give digital access to the content stations broadcast, as well as to additional journalism and features not designed for broadcast. To date, all that has been free of charge to stations.
NCPR has long been accustomed to paying for value received in online services, being an early subscriber to Public Interactive. Their tool set includes (among other services) our broadcast stream, the online pledge service whereby we receive member gifts, and the email newsletter service that delivered this message. NPR bought Public Interactive in 2008 and began the process of transforming the business from a subscription-based service provider into the digital technology arm of the network devoted to serving all member stations.
The day had to come, and has come, when stations would be asked to contribute to the cost of the online network infrastructure, just as they pay for broadcast programming. Nonetheless, the move has occasioned much controversy, leading NPR to put together an 18-stop road show by top staff to pave the way for the change. NCPR station manager Ellen Rocco and I attended stop 16 on this tour yesterday, at joint PBS/NPR licensee WXXI in Rochester.
Since we already belong to the paying crowd, it turns out the impact on NCPR will be minimal. We’ll just get some new and improved tools for our money. And the change is designed to insulate the smallest stations from prohibitive cost, with fees on a sliding scale based on each organization’s annual budget, and phased in over a three-year period. But every station will have to pay something.
This is an important turning point for public media in the digital realm. If member stations accept the paradigm shift, NPR– with a stable funding model–can ramp up its station services, nearly doubling the development staff devoted to the task. If stations balk at paying, everyone will be pretty much on their own to develop the technology they need. This would be bad news indeed for smaller players who seek to compete for attention in the new media landscape, and who have fallen a little more behind each year.
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Maybe, just maybe…. once all stations are paying for the service… they can figure out how to automatically remove those funny little squares and squiggles that occur instead of apostrophes and dashes when one doesn’t compose in Notepad.
This leads me to assume that Public Interactive has not been the means by which member stations have been accessing NPR’s broadcast content (typically some sort of satellite service, I suppose), but rather, has been one alternative to support individual stations services, such as webstreams, station email, and the like. Because of NPR’s ownership, is it soon to become a means to access the actual program streams; or perhaps even the only means to access NPR content? What about PRI, et al — how does their content relate to Public Interactive?
Hi Bob–
Broadcast programs are handled by a different infrastructure than content for the web. NPR broadcast programs are delivered to stations via Content Depot, Some non-NPR programs distribute via PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Others, like American Public Media and PRI distribute both directly and via PRX.
Public Interactive began as an offshoot of PRI and was spun off into an independent company. NPR’s ownership will not interfere with anyone’s ability to access content to which they have distribution rights. In fact, NPR is putting together a set of tools called the Public Media Platform that will allow stations easy access to all the players, network or independent, in the public media sphere, including assets from public television.
PRI continues to be its own independent production and distribution operation and will, we hope, continue to provide great public radio programs to our broadcast and website for many years to come.
Dale Hobson, NCPR