NPR conference postscript

Wednesday, February 28, 2007 by Dave Winer.

I had a lovely time at the Public Media conference last week.  

It had the feel of a user conference, which are really the kinds of conferences I like. And unlike the entertainment industry conferences I'd been to, these people are not so commercial and not bullies. Later, I was told that the people who come to this conference are the people most like bloggers in public media, but I also met a few execs, including the COO and a couple of board members of NPR, and they were excited too.  

To say we, the bloggers, were well-received, would be an understatement. We were treated like stars and gurus, our words listened to attentively, our ideas received enthusiastically. What a joy and what a contrast to the tech industry, where bloggers are mostly seen as a business model, not a source of ideas. 

Anyway, the post-conference emails are just beginning to be responded to, and I expect lots of good stuff to come from this first visit. There's talk of doing a BloggerCon for public radio. I'm helping the NewsHour people make their podcast feeds a little more useful. Most important I want to work on a vital exchange of ideas and perspectives across the pro-amateur boundary. I want them to teach us how to produce content up to their standards, so bloggers, podcasters and vloggers who want their work to air on NPR and PBS will know what they're looking for. And I want our methods to gain adoption in their space. An example is the way the Scripting News community researched the problem with audio on MacBooks yesterday. This open research method can be applied equally well for public media. You just have to let us know what you're interested in. I promised to help them boot up a research blog, following this model. 

To my new friends at NPR and PBS -- ignore the naysayers -- Andrew Keen and Lowell Bergman can believe what they want, but we want to make the world better, and we feel good about what we're doing, and if they don't like it, too bad!  

Paul Andrews, formerly of the Seattle Times, continues.