Public media links for the week of 3/6

Some thoughts on curation – adding context and telling stories

Just over two years ago I wrote a post about the importance of the resource and the URL — and I still stand by what I said there: the core of a website should be the resource and its URL. And if those resources describe real world things and they are linked together in the way people think about the world then you can navigate the site by hopping from resource to resource in an intuitive fashion. But I think I missed something important in that post — the role of curation, the role of storytelling.

Tom Scott’s article is particularly interesting as public broadcasting begins to transform from distribution into conversation. It’s great to see some thinking about the interaction of user generated content and programming.

Consolidation: CPB renews its economy push for shared master control
facilities

CPB has come up with another incentive and a new demonstration project in its long and sporadic
campaign for the cost savings of shared technical facilities and staff. ¶Under a new rule adopted by the
CPB Board, public TV stations won’t be eligible for master control equipment funding unless they share the facility with one or more other stations, according to Mark Erstling, senior v.p. for system development and media strategy.

I’m probably biased because I started in public media as a master control op, but consolidation worries me. One of the great things about public media has been its incredible local efforts. While it seems like public media drifted away from that, local master control should encourage better programming for local communities.

This is a little older, but the announced cuts to BBC Online (and the
responses to it) are interesting, and I’d love to see a discussion
in US public media about digital vision going forward:

The BBC: still no digital vision

I’ve been meaning for a while to write about a growing sense of frustration with the BBC (and, for that matter Channel 4) for their continuing failure to establish a strategy repositioning them in a way that makes sense for a public service media organisation in the emerging digital ecology. I drafted this before Mark Thompson’s recent announcement of cuts in BBC Online; the decisions he has announced recently only confirm a view that the BBC has yet to find a direction in the new media landscape.

What is the BBC?

Well, so what? What’s so special about the BBC that we should have a right to public money? Well, we have no intrinsic right to this money in the same way that, say, the police and fire departments don’t have an intrinsic right to public money. However, like any public good, society cooperates to share certain resources for public gain.