Public Broadcasters vs. Public Media
The fantastic Search Engine radio/podcast program was recently canceled by the CBC, but thankfully TVO has decided to pick up the show. Hosted by Jesse Brown, the show focuses on the intersection of the internet with culture, society, and politics at large. This is not your news network’s three-minute segment on “the twitter craze”; it’s a really interesting conversation about the effects of this massively distributed and powerful system on a lot of entrenched structures.
Jesse Brown perfectly walks the line between the time-tested format of a news-magazine/editorial radio show and the community-driven online presence of a successful podcast. When the CBC cut back the show’s funding and canceled its on-air slot last year, it lived on in podcast-only form. Without a producer or crew, it’s survival is largely owed to Jesse’s desire to keep making it, to keep having that conversation with his audience.
Now it’s found a new home, with podcasts continuing to be released throughout the summer (albeit at a new address), and a return to air in the fall.
If you’ve never heard it, I strongly recommend checking out some of the past episodes.
The Torontoist blog has an excellent interview with Jesse Brown. One thing of particular interest he says is:
[...] I had done work before for a show called The Contrarians a while back on the CBC. The idea of the show was unpopular ideas that just might be right, and that was the first time I discussed copyright. Ironically, after the show was done, there was a lot of interest in listening to the back episodes. CBC podcasting was just getting started back then. I didn’t own copyright to the episodes, and there was no way for people [to listen to them]. Even to this day, you can’t get that show. Canadians paid for the show. So, I started thinking, everything a public broadcaster does should be accessible and open.
Which is an excellent point. Public broadcasters are in an amazing position to take advantage of the distribution power of the Internet. Their widespread embrace of podcasting is one of the ways in which they’ve already done so, but let’s take the idea even further: traditional media can be defined as media which is one-to-many and unidirectional. The radio station, book publisher, newspaper company, TV station all have this in common. One source, speaking to many, who don’t generally speak back. New media is many-to-many and bidirectional. Think MySpace for bands, Twitter, Wikipedia, craigslist. Many people broadcasting to many others, and frequently engaging with them in two-way conversation.
So while a “traditional media” public broadcaster is still a way to culture, entertain, and inform the citizens of the country, a “new media” public broadcaster can become a way for them to speak to the government, or to each other. The term “public broadcaster” would then be a bit of a misnomer: we should instead be talking about “public media”. Rather than cutting back funding these services in the face of their economic woes, governments should be pointing the agencies in these new directions, because an citizenry which is not only informed by its public media but also empowered by it will be far more able to enact a lasting recovery.
