Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

Jarvis: We don't want to preach to the choir here. NPR is already doing podcasting and other great things, so we needed to see where we should obnoxiously push things.

Phase 1 of interactivity: React.
Phase 2: contribute. Please give us your stuff.
Phase 3: Create. We can all create our own stuff, and that's a social act.

So the question is what is NPR's relationship with that world of creators?

Doc:

When Tim Berners Lee invented the Web, there were two metaphorical systems. When we build a website, it's often static. We borrow the language of construction and real estate to describe this stuff. But there's another system. When you're on the Net, you're no further away than anyone in the world than the distance to your screen. We now syndicate, publish, update, aggregate dynamic content on the live web. Technorati's search engine indexes blogs and other sites that are too new for Google, which essentially searches the static web. The live web changes all the time - it's actually more like radio. Technorati gets pinged whenever a blog is updated, and it's immediately updated. It's a whole other world of live, dynamic content driven by RSS. (Reminds me of Mal Watlington's quote: "If you don't have an rss feed, you're dead to me." -ac)

Jeff:

The other day, Howard Stern announced his engagement. It was instantly all over blogs and even on Wikipedia before People magazine or news sites could do anything about it. This liveness. These people out there own their own stuff, and it's going on all the time. And they're all linked to each other, networked. So what is NPR's relationship to that world?

I would argue that part of the relationship is a new kind of network. You're already a kind of network, of complicated relationships with stations and other producers. What's the essential job of a network? To find the good stuff. In the past, you had to make it yourself within the network. But now everyone's creating it, NPR's network should expand to include that good stuff as well - good content, good talent, good people.

When we hear the term user generated content, we need to stipulate a lot of it is crap. No one is gonna say to you to change your standards and wallow in the crap - you should find the good stuff and help make it better, help teach people how to do it. Teach them to file FOIA requests or avoid getting sued, for example.

David Weinberger: Jay wrote the seminal piece that knocks down the straw man that any of us would make the argument that the media is crap, we're great and we'll replace you. We're all npr listeners and love it. But in defense of crap, it's multidimensional. Lots of people don't like putting out their first drafts online, but that's what bloggers do. Some stuff taken out of context can seem like crap, even though it's valuable in context. A tiny percentage of stuff is high quality, but a greater amount of stuff isn't perfect, but is still valuable and worthy of being shared. Just because people are recording content with poor equipment doesn't mean you ignore it. People can differential between what NPR creates and what the public creates.

Jeff:

What does creating mean? You're making stuff from scratch but you're also remixing things. People pick up the stuff that hits the cutting room floor and remixes it into something new. The public can help organize all of this stuff in really incredible ways.

It's about enabling the public. Helping them do good stuff, based on NPR's definition of good stuff.

Zadi: It's about authenticity. I'm not a teen anymore, but I still remember what it's like. So enabling teens to tell their own stories, I'm offering a way for them to have an authentic voice. I give them a platform to speak to me, each other and the public about what's going on in young adult life.

It's like NPR's a theme park - you create the rides, the games, the feeling of the place, and the public will come and participate in a way that makes sense for that space.

Weinberger: There are three types of filtering. NPR creates something and says it's good. There's stuff that NPR people link to, which carries some of NPR's weight, and there's what the public is doing in relation to all of this stuff, on NPR's site and on their own sites.

Jarvis:

Journalism back and forth: there's journalism, plus there's the ability to interact with this world by the public adding journalism of their own.

Jay Rosen: When Berners Lee invited the web, he saw it as a collaborative medium, not a broadcasting medium. When he did that, the Net was very disorganized. But it was built for that purpose. The audience we usually have in our minds is the mass audience of the broadcast age. They're connected to us as listeners, but they're not connected to each other. They're an atomized audience. In the age of the Web, they're still connected to you, but they're connected horizontally to each other. So now they can inform each other horizontally without going to NPR at all. My new project. Newassignment.net, is trying to explore this. The cost of likeminded people to find each other and collaborate is plunging rapidly. We're trying to figure out how to take all of this and get lots of people working on one story, so the knowledge they have can come together. The people always know more than journalists do. And they can do it on their own, or with journalists. It's really hard to do, but we think it can be done. It's also developing a donation model in the process. People ought to donate money, but we really want them to donate their knowledge, time, sources, energy and enthusiasm.... If we can find a way to measure those types of in-kind donations, that social capital.

Tom Regan: Readers help give us the pieces that end up being the newsiest stuff of the day, but we'd never find it ourselves because we don't have the resources to find everything. So the public helps fill in the blanks.

Jeff: So it's about bringing in the public to do stuff we couldn't do on our own.

Jay: Public Insight Journalism did an amazing job of inviting 25,000 people who want to help APM do their stories. That's just incredible. But what they haven't done is connected those people to one other. It's an expert database, not a community. They haven't overcome the atomization of the audience yet. It's a radical idea, but it's been used conservatively so far. Meanwhile, OhMyNews! In Korea is trying to create a citizen newspaper, where the labor is divvied story by story, while NewAssignment.net will have groups of people divvied up working on the same story. I want to figure out how to help a single beat reporter by connecting them with a social network that would help them get to the heart of a story.

David: Rolodex vs. social is a key point. You don't just request ideas and thank people for sending them. You give them an opportunity to talk about it. Digg.com and Reddit.com lets people rate news stories and discuss them; the readers create their own front page. In the case of NPR, having part of the site that's digg-like, where readers get to decide what's important. It doesn't have to be all of npr's stuff, but sections of it. And you create a social network around it, creating new relationships with you and the public.

Jeff: Yesterday I turned to Zadi and asked what she wanted from NPR in relation to jet set show.

Zadi: NPR has expertise in the field. Young people want to improve their skills, their expertise, connect with correspondents. They could gain so much from having an actual relationship with NPR. They want to be listened to, be recognized their thoughts are relevant. They may not be old, but they do have their own wisdom. It can be a two-way street, even with a younger audience, since they're the ones creating so much of the stuff out there.

Andy: And Zadi got me thinking about a vlog version of globalvoicesonline.org, with social networking like TakingITGlobal.org.

Zadi: NPR is a bastion of storytelling knowledge, and those skills can be passed on to networks of young people to craft their own stories. Jetset set up a wiki for a kid named Brendan, so he could have the public pitch story ideas for an online fiction project he wanted to create. They came together and crafted the plot, the story, the characters, even the costumes. Even young people have expertise, and Brendan was able to tap into this expertise for his project.

Jeff: It's a three-way situation. You've got NPR, the audience and the member stations. NPR has a b2b relationship with stations, b2c with the audience - as do stations. There's one npr, hundreds of member stations, countless thousands of audience members - and they're creating content now. Things are changing for stations. ABC skipped the stations and put shows on iTunes. The heck with them. The stations created NPR, rescued it, so now maybe NPR can use social media to help the stations. And it's all about what goes on internally at NPR too.

Euan Semple: At the BBC, we had employees blogging publicly because we didn't give them an internal outlet. When you give them a social platform to ask dumb question and surface good ideas, they embrace it. It's incongruous to do this stuff publicly without embracing it internally.

Jay: All of these things pose challenges to professional news. One obstacle is visible with Public Insight Journalism. They're tapping about five percent of its potential because of how they think of themselves as professionals. So it's harder to do these things. Technology is the easiest part; changing the culture is hardest.

Jarvis: Think in terms of pilot projects. Don't change everything at once.

Euan: It's like trojan mice.