The Future of Publics

I don't come from this space, so speaking of "publics" in the plural freaks me out a little.  That said, this presentation rocks.  It's much closer to engagement in this new socially leveraged world of technology we live in today.

Public Media 09 Presentation | Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics, by Jessica Clark and Pat Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media

View more presentations from Jessica Clark. (tags: for center)

Comments

[Gavin Heaton]

Interesting. For me, the potential for public broadcasters is enormous because they have already spent, say, 50 years building trust with their audience. And it seems to me that this is a competitive advantage in a COMMERCIAL sense.

But to fully embrace a shift from broadcast communications to network communications, there is a lot of business change, process realignment and oh, the creation of an enabling technology platform. All this costs serious money. Perhaps that is where the private-public partnership should start? ;)

[Sean Howard]

Hey Gavin,

I'd be very interested to know, per your line of thinking, just what they already have accomplished and built.

But I, for one, would love to see public broadcasters rethinking sponsorship. If I see one more "green" show brought to me by a giant steel or nickel mining company, I'm going to scream! ;)

As to their primary asset. I think you've nailed it. But it's being slowly torn apart by this shift towards the models of traditional media in a lot of areas. We now have ads and sponsorship on our public TV up here in Ontario, for example.

Sean

[Eli]

Not to mention the CBC's current funding crisis... this after they went and bought a bunch of popular US shows, hoping for more ad revenue, just in time for advertising to dry up. And of course that's prompting talk of even more US shows, and even the commercialization of the radio services. Grand.

I'm still hoping for a phoenix-like rebirth eventually, but it looks like it's going to be a painful process.

[Gavin Heaton]

Just off the top of my head, I am imagining public broadcasters of this kind becoming the CSR arm of any sponsoring organisation.

Broadcasters have audience, content and credibility. Businesses need all three of these things to deliver on their corporate social responsibility programs. Perhaps what this means is not sponsorship, but some form of ecosystem alignment between corporates and public broadcasters?