Pubmedia Considers New Media to Fill Coverage Gaps

Partnerships with non-profit and for-profit news sites and blogs will bring diversity to public media and create opportunities for pubcasters to carve a niche where market gaps exist, speakers said Friday at an FCC workshop on the future of public media. “It’s critical to expand and embrace the nonprofit online news startups,” J-Lab President Jan Schaffer said. “Collaborations can produce a lot of journalism.” With a focus on public service journalism, panelists noted gaps in investigative, local/statehouse and foreign reporting in both the private and publicly funded news industries and warned that traditional efforts to fill those gaps will be expensive.

Chairman Julius Genachowski promised the FCC will be an “active” and “helpful” partner in public media’s effort to recreate and reposition itself in public service journalism. Commissioner Michael Copps told pubcasters they needed to “stop playing defensive and get on the offense."

The panels were the FCC’s second public Future of Media workshop and the first to address the role of public media. While highly complimenting public broadcasting, Copps said pubcasters, like commercial broadcasters, in his view, are not fulfilling their obligation to public service journalism. “Facts go undug. Investigative journalism is an endangered species,” Copps said. “Doing something about the news, real news, is so important.”

Advocating for working with non-traditional media partners were NPR President Vivian Schiller, CPB President Patricia Harrison and CPB Chairman Ernie Wilson, along with Schaffer and Association of Independents in Radio Executive Director Sue Schardt. They said there’s a way to create low-cost yet valuable content on traditional media’s shrinking beats. “Innovation and partnerships” are the answer, Schiller said. “We can have more original independent reporting, especially in foreign, investigative and breaking news, but also analysis of the most complex issues of our times and local accountability journalism."

For CPB’s Wilson, “hyper-local experiments” are “critical” to redefining public media in the changed media climate, not just for creating news content, but because they create content “in ways that are relatively inexpensive,” he said. “They have a high production value.” Such partnerships could diversify public broadcasting, Schaffer said. “When you begin to partner with blogs and hyper-local sites you immediately get diverse voices.” Specifically, hyper-local news and blog partnerships could introduce a variety of previously silent voices to pubmedia, she said.

Harrison views the CPB’s new Local Journalism Centers (LJCs) as a partnership with several types of local news organizations across the nation, diversity has been written into the LJC’s mission: They're required to promote available jobs through ethnic trade organizations like the National Association of Black Journalists and at least one LJC will create a bilingual product. How exactly public media would form those partnerships remained up for debate and Harrison said financial roadblocks could derail partnerships. “The CPB wants to invest in all of these new voices but to say that we can do it on the funding that we have is just not realistic."

Schaffer suggested a number of ways to fund partnerships that produce local, investigative and foreign reporting. Among them: Funding a “Public Media Participation” money pot through a tax on cellphone and laptop purchases, with a matching contribution from phone and computer manufacturers, or tax credits for citizen journalism producers.

Now is an appropriate moment to rebuild public media and new funding is needed not only to evolve but to survive, said Free Press Managing Director Craig Aaron. “There is no longer enough private capital —- in the form of advertising, subscriptions, philanthropy and other sources -— to support the depth and breadth of quality local, national and international news reporting our communities need to participate in a 21st-century democracy,” he said. “This is the moment to re-imagine our old public broadcasting system and rebuild it as a new public media network committed to education, to community service and, most importantly, to local newsgathering.”

National Religious Broadcasters doesn’t believe more funding to CPB is the answer to strengthening public media, said General Counsel Craig Parshall. He advocated changes to FCC rules about fundraising and sponsorships. He proposed the FCC change the rules for non-commercial stations to raise funds for other charity groups and relaxing rules to permit non-commercial broadcasters to give short sponsorship mentions.