What Constitutes Public Broadcasting Now?

A number of students have been chatting with me about the role of the CBC as a subject in preparation for term papers. They ask me to compare CBC Radio and NPR. It's a subject I'm happy to talk about although the comparison is often a sad one to make.

Interestingly, there now seems to be a meme among journalism professors or possibly journalism students; a number of people are pondering this issue - all at the same time. Co-incidence? Or...?

As news organizations in general, and public broadcasting in particular confront a serious economic crisis, it's worth asking if public broadcasting, in its present forms, will survive intact or whether this is an opportunity too good to miss.

NPR is going through more stresses as funding sources dry up and stations are unable to meet their program fees and membership dues as NPR stations. NPR has already laid off or not fill a total of 70 positions - around 10% of its total staffing.

But there are fears that more cuts will have to be made. Already some internal battle lines are being drawn between the News and Online department - or as some would describe it, between NPR's past and its future. My guess is that Online will have to retrench in order to save NPR's best loved and most listened-to content. It will be tough to choose between your two children and it can't be an easy time to be in management at NPR. But since NPR works best when it serves the stations' needs, the choice is an obvious, if difficult one.

CBC is a more complicated beast. It now finds that, it too has a revenue shortfall of more than $C60 million (about $US48m) due to declining advertising. That plus an annual $C65m as a discretionary allocation from Parliament which may not be available in a recession means that the CBC may be out by about 10% of its $C1 billion ($US800m) annual budget.

Recently, a CBC spokesperson was quoted as saying that the CBC is in fact, no longer a traditional public broadcaster but a "publicly funded commercial broadcaster." If that is so, then surely its annual appropriation might be claimed by commercial broadcasters as only their fair share.

Like many media organizations, the CBC is overextended in terms of content. In short, it produces too much for too few people. Its flagship TV newscast runs third in the ratings and its news department has lost money and influence to other programming department. CBC says it has no choice; the Parliamentary mandate of the CBC demands that it be all things to all Canadians.

But in the 21st century, that may no longer be possible or feasible in large part because the mandate has been superseded by technology. More things are available online than one broadcaster can possibly provide with any degree of quality. Perhaps it's time to scrap the mandate (or at least re-evaluate it) and look at what is both possible and necessary from a public broadcaster. Public broadcasting in Canada appears to operate more as a government dependency than as an independent public service broadcaster.

It is not, I would suggest, the mission of public broadcasting to run American game shows and to define success largely in terms of ratings.

Our Sub-Prime Journalism Crisis

The economic meltdown that is shattering the world's economy can be traced back to September 15, 2008. That's when Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail and buried in an avalanche of failed financial schemes that appeared to work for a while. But didn't.

In the end, the flow of collateralized debt obligations, hedge fund bankruptcies and worthless mortgages left behind a blighted landscape of twisted wreckage and shattered lives that will take years to recover.

Journalism, like the financial industry on which it depends, is also going through its own avalanche, of sorts.

Instead of a sub-prime mortgage crisis designed to create wealth by generating financial products to benefit (many, some, a few, no - pick one) consumers, journalism also has been creating a mass of products to benefit (many, some, a few, no - pick one) citizens.

The internet was and still is - a phenomenal technological development that, when used wisely, creates new communities of shared interests that heightens democratic thinking and empowers citizens. What the internet also does is to be a vehicle for disseminating more information resulting in less knowledge. It is more than an avalanche. It is a cyber-tsunami.

News organizations are producing more and more content for fewer and fewer people. A study on newspapers in France recently published by the French government observed that all media content increases at a rate of 30% a year. At the same time, the ability of media organizations to find a way to monetize their products continues to decline.

In Economics 101, this is called "deflation." In other words, too many goods and too little money.

In Journalism 101, this is called "stupid." We have created too many media products for too few people who and can't and won't pay for it anyway because of the recession and because the value of the journalism overall has now been downgraded by the volume available to us on the internet.

But through the thickening gloom, I think I detect a couple of rays of hope: first, HBO is doing well. According to tvpost.com, "HBO co-President Richard Plepler told TelevisionWeek’s Jon Lafayette that he’s confident in the premium cable network’s growth, citing the network’s performance in past recessions and the performance of HBO Entertainment President Sue Naegle." So far he's right.

Second, at Ground Zero of the recession, New York City, public radio's WNYC raised more money than they expected, in their winter according to the Times.

What does this indicate? That HBO and WNYC must be doing something right...something that people both want and need. In the end, the only things that will save media companies are quality programing and excellent journalism.

The recession may purge us of our nasty financial habits. Will it also do an equivalent job on media companies that produce more than the public wants?

Or needs?

Working in a Restructured News Organization

Total numbers of laid off journalists are hard to find. Numbers for broadcast journalists seem to be particularly hard to track down. Neither the National Association of Broadcasters website nor the Society of Professional Journalists seem willing to allow the word "layoff" on their websites. All is well in the land of commercial broadcasting and journalistic lobbyists, it seems. Feels like whistling past the graveyard, to me...

But for print, the search is easier. Fifteen thousand newspaper employees in the US have now been laid off according to NPR (where 70 positions have just been lost). And that's just since September, 2008. Whether some, all or none find jobs in journalism again is impossible to predict. My guess is that very few will ever set foot inside a news operation again.

Much is being written, especially in an excellent New York Times series on the news operation of the future.

Let's assume that journalism, in various forms, will survive. What will it be like to work inside one of those new organizations?

My fear is that it will be an awful lot like working in an old newsroom, with the stress on the "awful." That's because in the past, news organizations may have produced a valuable product. But working there was often a dreadful experience.

I've never been a print journalist so I have no direct knowledge of what it's like to be an ink-stained wretch. Rather like being an electronic wretch, I always assumed.

At a Washington, DC gathering a few years ago, I chanced to chat with a reporter for the New York Times. A woman joined us and told us that her mornings were incomplete without NPR on the kitchen radio and the Times in her hand.

"The Times must be a wonderful place," she opined.

"You haven't worked there," he replied.

We agreed that there was an looming irony here between the intellectually open and generous vibe of both the Times and NPR and the often oppressive and depressive environment of both newsrooms.

Part of that is I believe, because both organizations see themselves as the acme of their respective media. As a result, people who end up there guard their prerogatives jealously. Newcomers are given a very hard time. New ideas are give a worse reception.

So with all the "restructuring," downsizing and re-thinking going on, perhaps a better approach and attitude might emerge inside news organizations, especially with regard to creating a better approach to the organization and one that is managed less by fear and reprimand.

One positive outcome of these changes to media might be that the "Moses" generation of older journalists will be gone and the journalistic "Joshuas" might take their place. Some things (mentoring, institutional memory) will be lost and that would be regrettable.

But if a new approach to news management might emerge that would be a result devoutly to be achieved. And not a moment too soon.

Too Much Content Chasing Too Few Eyeballs

The numbers keep going up.

The latest numbers as tabulated by the US Department of Commerce show that for newspapers alone, more than 15,000 print employees have lost their jobs in 2008.
Most of the those cuts happened after the economic crisis began to unfold in September of that year.

In Canada, the number for both print and broadcast is 1200 as some major media organizations go through a restructuring (aka, firings) to try to save their companies with their immense debt burdens of around 9:1 debt to revenue ratios.

One other big difference is that media is much more centralized in Canada, so cutting positions means that the quality of journalism, especially local and investigative journalism has been really eviscerated.

What is it about modern journalism that people don't want - at least enough of to sustain the enterprise? The problem is with the enterprise itself, not the product (although the product has some serious deficits). It's that debt-to-revenue problem. There just aren't enough paying customers to support everything that the media is producing in print, on air and online which is now growing at an annual rate of 30% according to the World Association of Newspapers.

Too much content chasing too few eyeballs.

The premier of Ontario (a Liberal) asked a couple of experts from the University of Toronto including the urban futurologist Richard Florida to come up with ways that the province should take advantage of the economic crisis and evolve.

They suggested that Ontario abandon the idea of being an agricultural and industrial producer and concentrate on creating services, not goods. It should create intellectual capital in the universities and the cities and forget about hewing wood and drawing water.

Sounds good to me, but I'm biased...

That vision of the future may auger well for media organizations - even those that have over extended themselves. One website claims there are now about 40,000 resumes floating around out there.

But can media organizations restructure themselves in time?