the normal deal is about 25% public money, 7 5% private money can get a deal done, and then you pay user fees, tolls. it's a lot more efficient to pay tolls over long rural stretches now than it used to be. with speedpass it's almost transparent, so we think we can leverage that money in a much better way now than we could a while back. so those two together, i think, are going to actually mean it's not just a $4 billion package in virginia, it's more like 9 billion because of the projects we're going to be able to get done. >> all right. i think we're actually about out of our time on c-span. governor, i want to thank you very much for coming and thanks to e21 for making this happen, and good luck to you in the future. >> thank you, byron. i appreciate all of you coming and thank e21 and the manhattan institute for their work here. >> thanks very much, everybody. [applause]

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[inaudible conversations] >> as this event comes to close we're moving to another room at the national press club for remarks from pbs news our anchor jim lehrer joined by national public radio for the future of public broadcasting. one of the main focuss will be the congressional republican effort to eliminate federal funding for public broadcasting. the journalism school let the university of missouri posted this event.

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[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> we are live at the national press club for remarks from pbs newshour and jim lehrer and national public radio on the future of national public broadcasting including the discussion and congressional republican efforts to eliminate federal funding for public broadcasting. this is hosted by the university of missouri's school of journalism. we expect it to get underway in

just a couple moments. we will have it for you live when it does get underway on c-span2. in the meantime and look at the first prize winners in our studentcam contest. this year's studentcan competition ask students to consider washington d.c. through their lens. first prize winner for high school addressed in any event that better help him understand the role of the federal government. >> my name is matthew and i am a junior. on may 25th, 2008, my life was changed forever. >> history making a twister through winds in excess of 200 miles per hour. the severe storm system virtually wrecked the town in half. destroyed 22 bits, of election

222 homes and damaged 408 others in the community of only 2,000. these films don't do justice to the heartbreak and the hurt. >> my home was located here. it took a year to build and we were finally able to move in in late 2005 but in a matter of seconds it was gone. after the tornado, our spirits did not cease to exist. there recovery began but today the high school, city hall and majority of the buildings destroyed in the storm have been rebuilt. >> it was amazing to see the resilience, the determination. it was inspiring to see the community come together. >> there's still a cloud. harpersburg still struggles with

the federal government. >> we stand two years removed from that day and we're still working with fema. >> in the 1990s fino was a model agency. as hurricane katrina showed the personal cronyism legal a underfunding and lack of leadership turned it into the most ridiculed agency in the government. >> how the federal government affected my life in the community, continued disaster relief in parkersburg. >> parts of it really love and parts you're not so crazy about. a real love/hate relationship. >> sometimes, some natural disasters that fema has not functioned so well. we think in the last five years they got their act together and done a better job. >> in several areas they handle

beat tornado very well. >> ready and able to assist state partners as needed and requested. >> they are invaluable as far as one of comes to recovery from disaster. >> fema has been good to us. they helped us with school buses, all weather track down by the football field, playground, parking lots, and number of other areas they help us with. >> once the tornado happened was apparent from the damage that was a catastrophic event beyond the needs of the community of parkersburg and the state. fema stepped in early in the process. >> definitely benefit to show -- they also set up a command center here not only for helping the disaster and recovery but also helping citizens seek funds. >> we distributed $2 million in the first two weeks of that tour

nato. >> without fema funds they would not stage -- they would not exist at the current stage. >> due to miscommunication, parkersburg find itself in a critical struggle. >> at the very grass roots there's a little problem with different people having a different view of what the government can do and not do. >> personnel changes so often and with those changes so goes the story. it is easy for misunderstandings like that happen because they don't keep enough people on the payroll to just handle a disaster in that part of the country. >> fema has a full-time staff of 3,000 folks across the country and our ten regions. we have polls from reservists and national assistance employees. the way reservists' work we do rotate them in and out. >> that is difficult and

frustrating. >> we found out two years later that a lot of their information was inaccurate. some of what we receive is not policy driven. decision to remain as a school board and the district and behalf of students and communities was based entirely on that information we received and we find ourselves two years later in kind of a financial crisis of sorts as we await official word on funding. some fund and we received, almost $700 worth. fema is requesting that it be returned. >> we give out an estimate of the amount of funding in project work sheet. there are likely to >> reporter:s that happen until the money is obligated and even after words in some cases as more information is shared so that is how those situations where we have those stations liquor. >> that is the 180 degree

difference to allocating money. you sign a product worksheet that says the federal government will help give this much money towards a project. months ago by or years go by and they come back after a third or fourth review and said that is in power should have been handled and they're going to non obligate that money. >> they can take away. we should have known that could happen. >> >> we don't do whatever we want with it but fema as very strict guidelines that if you don't do this or that or everything right they have the ability to be obligated it at any point. >> changing of the people has been such a factor for us that the people we originally worked with and understood we needed to get back into our high school in the year, decisions were made to move that time line along

quickly and the understanding was there. their assistance was understood and is being reviewed by the third or fourth reviewers. they are just not aware of that emergency situation and the extra costs associated with that. >> without fema and the federal government the city of partersburg might never have recovered. my community's restoration is the result of federal assistance. >> we don't wait for the government to do everything. we wait for the federal government to do what i do. which is have a can-do attitude. we went in and did it. >> we the people of parkersburg created our success. >> all of the challenges that freshness and the progress we made, lack of funding jeopardize my school and education of our

people. without renewed aid from the federal government, my life and my community face continue devastation after the storm. >> go to studentcam.org to watch the video is and continue conversations about today's documentary at our facebook and twitter pages. you can see a live interview with matthew hicks, creator of the first prize winning video right now on washington journal on c-span and a reminder we will be airing that segment tonight at 7:15 eastern on c-span2. going back live for remarks from pbs newshour anchor jim lehrer live from national press club. >> a couple of them from st.

louis. one time intentionally i began by saying good evening from st. louis, missouri and 90 minutes later when i ended i said thank you and good night from st. louis, missouria to see if anyone would notice or care. i only got one phone call the next day. it was from bill safire who rode a language column in the new york times sunday magazine, what is this missouri/missouria stuff? i said it is the deal about east and west end there are two country -- cities in missouri. kansas city on the west and st. louis on the east. in the west they call litter around kansas city missouri, and in st. louis on the east side neck collar missouria and he said thank you.they call it mis

said thank you. i just made that. he put it in the column and it became gospel and it came back to me as if it was for real. the only time i ever get caught is when i am with someone from kansas city or st. louis who said where did you get that? my only theory how it happened because the how missouri became missouria is in the past there was a cheerleader dean who invented the yell missouria tigers so they had to call it that. i don't know. my second mission beyond telling that story is set the stage for context for what you are talking about here. let me do that as quickly and

straight as i can. serious journalism as you may have heard generally all levels they're too few resources the web is thriving in usage but not in terms of income and revenue. there are floods of information

available from and for every body as well as floods of opinions, floods of opinions and entertainment about the information and the mechanical ways and means to deliver it all. thank ipods and andrew lloyds and stuff like that. too much of theoids and stuff like that. too much of the various flats are designed to to east and entertain rather than go below the surface. the source is thomas jefferson who told folks, the only way this democratic society we just created is going to work is if there is an informed electorate.

the only device for the information process is the first amendment. people in this room, the journalists, it is not happening. we are hurting in this area right now and this is what you have come to talk about. there is a major role for public media to play in making sure serious journalism performs its responsibilities and its duties in this serious journalism area. we must fill the gaps that are being created by some of our resource starved commercial colleges. the only opportunity is a responsibility in public media to do more than we are doing. i mean every element of public media. we are all levels.

television and on-line, and everyone of us has to step up to the plate more so than we have done. we have to declare we are here, public media is here and we're in a serious journalism business and we have a mission to perform and our community and our country wherever we operate, we must get at it. we must raise the money and resources to create a or expand what we are doing at the local, regional, international level. we must be willing to reach out within our own public media world and cooperate with each other and do joint projects and form partnerships with any and all other journalism organizations both commercial and noncommercial to spread the reach of serious journalism and others in the same business. it is neither bragging liberal

that is a word i picked up from one of my daughters when they were small, to say that we at the pbs newshour are hard at it, as far as we can go. you will get the details later this morning about the specifics of that from hari sreenivasen. we will rethink everything we do in order to adjust to various floods and changes in the world of journalism. when i say journalism i mean serious journalism. i hate that i have to put that word in front of it but that is what i am talking about. the business we are in and the business of public media must be more in is serious journalism. i would like you to also know with all the changes we have made and continue to make there's one thing that will never change and many of you heard me say this before but it cannot be repeated too often is

how we go about the practice of journalism at the newshour. a few years ago i was asked at a seminar in aspen on journalism, did i have any personal guidelines for the practice of journalism and if i did what i mind sharing them, and i did in fact do that and here's part of what i send them. do nothing i cannot defend, cover and present every story with the care i want if the story were about me, assume there is at least one other side or version to every story, assumed the viewer is as smart and caring and as good a person as i am, as soon the same about all people on whom i report, assume personal lives are private matters into legitimate turn of the story mandates' otherwise, carefully separate opinion and analysis from

straight news stories and clearly labeled everything. do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasion. no one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously. finally, i am not in the entertainment business. those are our guidelines that we practice to this day and always will. one more thing i want to do, that is to close my little welcoming to you by performing a bus call. reason for that is very much relevant to what we are doing here today. before i went to the university of missouri school of journalism i went to a small college in texas call victoria halfway between houston and corpus christi on the texas gulf coast and in order to get the money required to go to missouri later i worked eight hour the day at

the bus depot. for two years. one of my duties was to call the buses on the epa system and here's what i did. may i have your attention please, this is your last call for continental railways, air-conditioned through houston, now leaving for ines, el campo, beasley pleaded children rosenberg, staffland, and houston, all aboard! don't forget your baggage please. why that is relevant is if i had not done that and would not have been able to go to the university of missouri because i couldn't have afforded it and you should know that was the first time i was ever paid money to speak into a microphone. thank you very much. have a great seminar. [applause] >> thank you.

you got us off to a rousing start. good morning and welcome. my name is barbara cochran, i in the curtis b. hurley chair for the university of missouri. i still say missouri. i am from ohio. what do i no? it is a delight to see all of you here. thank you to dean mills for coming from missouri and going through tornadoes and all kinds of dangers to get here. we appreciate it and thanks to all our speakers who made it today and i want to thank edgar mclaughlin for creating the curtis b. hurley symposium and to our colleagues from the eric freedman national press club. thank you for being here. i am glad to see some of many of you share in the interest in the

future of public broadcasting. some of you have a professional connection because you have worked in public broadcasting or the federal communications commission or congressional oversight committee or policy organization that studies the nation's communication system. in the interest of full disclosure of the need to tell you i have worked in public broadcasting. earlier in my career i was head of news at national public radio and saw the creation of morning edition. when i look at my career that is one of the things i am most proud of. some of you are here today because your viewers and listeners who have become alarmed at the headlines you see in recent months about a partisan divide overachieve value of public broadcasting and efforts in congress to end federal funding. if you were concerned about the possibility of deep cuts or even the elimination of federal fundss you are not alone. as we will hear in greater detail this morning 69% of the

public opposed plans to eliminate federal funding for public broadcasting and that was true no matter what your political persuasion. among democrats, independents and republicans a majority of each group opposed eliminating federal funds. in the recent budget agreement for funding public broadcasting mostly in fact many of you probably leave the side of relief but as we will learn today the debate over federal funding is far from over. funding is just one of the issues facing public broadcasting today. like the rest of media public broadcasting is buffeted by the whirlwind of change brought on by the digital revolution. public broadcasting producers of news and information which is the focus of our program today need to adapt just as speedily as their colleagues in commercial media do. to help us understand the challenges and opportunities

that lie ahead for public broadcasting we are very fortunate to have assembled a roster of knowledgeable chief executives and innovative journalists. the printed program you received outlines the agenda for this morning along with biographies of our speakers and the list of online resources about public media. there are publications available at the registration table outside including a white paper i wrote for the aspen institute and knight foundation called rethinking public media: more local, inclusive and interactive. that is available online night, this is a conversation with the ceo of national broadcasting and general manager of a local station. then we will take a short break and return with journalists and producers working at the national and local level to

utilize digital platforms and engage new communities. by the end of the morning i hope we will come away with a better understanding of the transformation that needs to take place for public broadcasting to fulfill its mission. that mission was expressed in the public broadcasting act of 1967 to be responsive to the interests of people in particular localities and throughout the united states and constitute an expression of diversity and excellence. ..

>> please welcome tom rosenstiel. [applause] >> thank you, barbara. but no thanks for having me have to follow jim blair. -- jim blair. but i will do my best. in the next few minutes what i want to do is share with you some information that we've got conservation information that lays down some facts about public broadcasting both on radio and on television. first, i want to make a couple of quick points, which is that about the impact of technology generally on journalism. one is that the technology has

many ways disconnected audiences. advertisers and revenue sources no longer need the news media to reach their audiences. this is creating a major revenue collapse in the news business. the second is that one of the things that distinguishes public media, and particularly in journalism, is that somewhat related from the immediate commercial pressures that other commercial media have faced. and i think we have some empirical sense of what difference that makes. we have in public media a different product, and we also have over the last 10 years, over the last 15 years, a different audience. public media has either growth or held on to an audience much better than commercial media

have, because i think some long-term approaches they have taken to the content that they produce. the fact that jim's principles haven't changed a whole lot has something to do with that, and long-term in the marketplace that has benefited the media. and the third point i want to make, is that much of the new technology that has -- is transforming the news landscape is distributed and dispersive in nature. it is not substantially reportorial. so what we have seen in the media culture is an enormous expansion in outlets that are aggregating and repurpose saying and commenting on the news, but not an enormous expansion in the number of organizations that are going out and turning over rocks and finding things out.

so, what are the facts about public media? well, what is that the audience is holding up. about 11% of adults listen to npr regularly, which is to say three times a week or more, and that is often present is remarkably consistent across all age categories and demographic categories. you don't skew older or npr doesn't skew older as much as other media outlets. now, we don't have, this is in 2010. now, we don't have data from the news hour from 2010 for the simple reason we use the news name of the news hour in our survey. and the results came back in the way to suggest that people didn't recognize the new name without your name in it, and the number of -- [inaudible] >> the number of people who answered that they were regular viewers made it pretty clear

they were talking about being regular viewers of pbs pro at any time. so the data i will give you for the news hour is from 2008. what i have from that is that about 5% of adults listen to the news hour, just one program, at least three times a week. or more. and that audience is also price table and, in fact, hasn't changed in the last few years, which really distinguishes the news hour from what we are seeing anywhere else in television news, including now cable news. npr's audience doesn't skew more independent and democratic than it does republican. in 2010, 14% of independents, 14% of democrats, and 6% of republicans identify themselves as regular listeners to npr. that ratio of a two to one tilt

toward one party over another is similar to what we see at msnbc, cnn, and the network morning shows. it is lower than fox news partisan tilt which is close to four to one. and much more than the talk shows that we see in prime time cable news. the only news outlet in the country that really reflect the population without some kind of partisan tilt tend to be local newspapers and local television, because they reflect their communities very closely, and then you aggregate them all together and you get a picture that is pretty close to the u.s. the news hour, again in 2008, also skewed about two to one democrats versus republicans. which again is not unusual. we also asked something new last year in this survey, which probes the reasons that people say they go to different news sources. and npr stood out in those

results. it was the only news organization in which the number one reason that people said they went there was for all the different categories, for a mix of all the things the news might provide which is to say everything from breaking news to in depth reporting the news and opinion, and entertainment. it was also one of only two outlets of the 20 or more that we queried about, that was in double digits for every category. of reasons that people might want to go there. unfortunately, to have this data for the news are because of the name issue, but we will have this question going forward. npr ranks first among all news outlets, also interestedly, among audience numbers who say they want their news delivered without a point of view. foley, 77% of npr's audience wants this kind of objective or disinterested reporting. more than any other news

organization we surveyed about, and in the sample overall 62% say they want the news biz with. we do have the data from two years earlier at the news hour and there it was also much higher, 67%. npr also ranks among the few news outlets whose believability rating are holding up. it's actually the highest at npr that it's ever been to the news our credibility was also held up lately, though it is down from 1998 when it was 29%, that they believe most or all of what they heard on the news hour, but it's been stable for the last seven years, 23%. and most, most all other news organizations are decline. the 23%, you have to recognize that many americans are not watching these programs offer no opinion. so it's not 23% out of 100%.

but there is some challenging news here, and npr in the "newshour" are among outlets that have the biggest partisan gaps in believability. at the "newshour" its 37% of democrats say they believe most of what they hear on npr, 29% of independents, but only 16% of republicans. that is a democratic versus republican gap of 21 points, and it is rising. and that number is similar actually to npr's number two what we have for fox and msnbc. the gap for the "newshour" measure two years earlier is smaller, 18 points, but still among the higher. now, what do consumers get from the "newshour" on npr? i will speed this up, but one thing they get is for the news at a much higher amount than they do elsewhere.

31% of the time on npr is devoted to foreign affairs. that compares with an average of 3.5% for the rest of radio news. the news hour, 30% was devoted to foreign affairs, that compares with 19% on the commercial network newscast, 16% on the network morning newscast, and 13% on cable news. so is public media bias, the public perceives that it is. there's a belief ability gap -- a believability gap, a partisan gap. i would say this is unanswerable. to much about biases in the eye of the beholder. i can show you studies that we have done that pej that show pbs and the news are, the news our own pvr or more neutral the most other news outlets towards obama in his first 100 days. 50% of the stories in the

"newshour" and 52% on npr were neutral compared with 40% of the media generally. 28% were positive on npr, much less than 37% in the media generally. the "newshour" was similar. we updated suggested offered more coverage of policy and less coverage than the press overall. and tv in particular. the same is true of npr. to a smaller degree. i have dated that npr and the "newshour" both have a bias towards longer stories. the average length of a pbs segment is more than twice as long as that on commercial television. some people that might suggest a bias towards being boring. to some people it might suggest a bias towards nuance. these things are in the eyes of the beholder. you can analyze the sources

interviewed, but that doesn't tell you about the questions that were asked of the source of their ultimately it is impossible to say that bias is not to some degree a matter of perception, but i can say that the journalists at both npr and the "newshour," many of whom i know, believe deeply in the idea of getting the facts straight and striving for fairness in trying to throw the pitch down the middle. when they fail to do so, i believe it is a mission or if there to live up to the principles. they are not doing it in a marketing strategy to maximize an audience or to pander to an audience. that cannot be said of all news organizations today. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, tom. there's been an awful lot of opinion and guesswork thrown around in the debate over public

broadcasting so it's good to have some facts. i'm not going to invite our first panel to come up and take their seats. and we will get started. thank you. and now if everyone is settled and seeded, thank you. and i will introduce our first panel to everyone. starting on my far left, you're right, is patrick butler. pat our public are you doing this, that is the president and ceo of the association of the association of public television stations, which is the washington representative of public television stations, and lately he's also been doing a combined effort on behalf of public radio as well.

next to pat is paula kerger. paul is the president and ceo of pbs. next to paula is joyce slocum as the interim president and ceo of npr. she's been the general counselors there for several years. next to choice is bill kling who is the ceo of american public media which is both a national producer of programs and also has under its umbrella 44 public radio stations across the country. and next to bill is caryn mathes who is the general manager of wamu here in washington. so welcome to all of you. 90. i'm going to start, pat, with you. because we're going to start first of all by talking about the federal funding debate, crisis, and what lies ahead.

and as i ask you were talking a little bit before, before this session, what happened in the budget deal? we were hearing that public radio and planned parenthood were definitely on the table, definitely going to get cut. the deal gets made. we look in the newspaper and the cpp which is the funding corporation, congress gives the money to the corporation for public broadcasting corporation of public broadcasting gives it to stations and other producers and public me. the cpb budget had emerge pretty much unscathed. so what happened? >> well, i've always maintained, barbara, that this is not a partisan issue. i mean, there are more republicans who would like to defend us and our democrats obvious a, but not all republicans have felt that way and greg walden who is the chairman of the house

communications subcommittee, has come it paints is a, the house of representatives is one half, up one-third of the federal government, and with the house of representatives does is only the beginning of a debate and not the end of it. and what happened in the course of this challenge is that the democrats in the house and the senate have been quite firm in their support of public broadcasting, assess president obama. and so when you have a tripartite negotiation at the end of the continued regulation process with speaker boehner and majority leader harry reid and president obama in the room, the forces who are opposed to public broadcasting are all of a sudden outnumbered. so i think it's been an encouraging affirmation of the

fact that we are, we are held in high esteem across the political spectrum, as tom was suggesting. and that once these votes are actually counted, i think there will be plenty of republicans in both the house and the senate who agree that public broadcasting is valuable, is essential and deserves continued federal funding, even in an era when budget deficits are very difficult to control. and everything that needs to be examined quite carefully. >> so is this all over? >> oh, no. no, it's not over. there are a good number of people in the congress in both the house and senate, who are quite committed to defending public broadcasting. and this is going to be a continuing battle for us for quite some time. so having finished the fiscal

year 2011 funding process, we now go immediately into the 2012 appropriations process. will have to fight this all over again. but the fact that we been able to mount a very vigorous grassroots campaign of people around the country who are big fans of public broadcasting, i give a lot of credit to bill kling and the other 70 million americans organization that has created this grassroots effort, that grassroots effort, the station managers and the leaders at local communities as well as what we've been able to do here in washington has been a very good strategic alliance that has yield a good result that we've had in the last couple of weeks. >> paula kerger, your pbs did some polling using a bipartisan polling consortium.

and you found, what about public attitudes? >> quite significant support for public broadcasting, and i think that as i listen to pat i think that, in my view, to answer the question of what happened, i think you could sum it up in was one word, that's constituents. there were a lot of people around the country that reached out to their members to say that this is something, this is a service, public television, public radio, extraordinary libel. we saw in the research that was done after defense of our country. the value that american public placed on use of tax shelters for public broadcasting came in second. so i think that there's tremendous support. you know, when you put into perspective on the public television side, 15% of her funding comes from the federal government.

the rest of it we raised community by community. but that 50% is usually important because that's money that our stations leveraged to raise the rest of the support for the work that they do locally. it helps to pay for a lot of their transition -- transmission expenses, local expensive. it is an aggregate number so in communities like washington, the percentage of federal funding that comes to support our stations here is less than it is in parts of the country where it is in the height 50% were communities our spare sure, there's less ability to raise the kind of money to provide the same services that what happened in this community. so it's a tremendously important piece of our funding, and i think that most people understand that this private public partnership that we have worked through over the last 40 years is something important to

maintain. and i think that came to very loud and clear. just in the serving we did, in advance of the debate on the hill, but also as we watched the number of people that reached out to their legislators to let their opinions be heard. >> bill kling, public broadcasting hasn't always been so organized in stating its case. how do you -- what do you think public broadcasting needs to do going forward? >> well, when you see organized, i think pat refer to the 170 million americans. this is a piece of research that was done by a variety of people, including the station research group, that try to determine how many people access some form of public broadcasting a week. and it turns out to be more than half the american public. one of our problems is that we are loved almost too much, that people are willing to

voluntarily support public broadcasting. but they haven't been engaged to do anything more than that about it. and this time we said to them, federal funding is important, it's not just the base funding of about $459 a year. it's a question of what should the government's role be in public broadcasting. if you read "the new york times" story about the bbc last sunday, you saw this debate about 3.6 billion pounds, not dollars, pounds at risk at the bbc. and the way in which british people rally around that. so having them rally on what we call a grassroots basis to let congress know how important this is, i think made a difference. there were 500,000 letters and e-mails sent to congress, uncountable numbers of phone

calls. but pat refer to the leaders, community leaders who seem to have more clout. these are people that no cell phone numbers other congressmen and senators who can make the call, get heard, and i think that is our next challenge is to get those people who support the congresspeople, their senators, but also strongly support public broadcasting to make the connection and to move forward. not just to defend $409. public radio appropriations, our portion of the $450 million hasn't caught up in real dollars since 1980. so, the role that federal funding is playing at a time when media is changing so dramatically, when we've gone from being radio to public media, when where distribute content in so many other ways,

and when all of our colleagues, as you heard jim lehrer say and tom rosenstiel, are beginning to weaken in terms of their ability to do original journalism, we've got to step up and we've got to do more. you can do more with an appropriation that stays static for 30 years. so i think looking forward, the answer to your question, trying to determine what to write about this and making that case, that you can't really be trusted with your government if you are not well-informed. a famous jeffersonian quote, is the key. >> choice, how does federal funding affect npr and the member public reader stations? is a similar to what paula was reporting, or is it a slightly different situation because of the way the funding is

structured? >> npr gets very little federal funding, what federal funding we do get is not general budget support. it's specific grants that have deliverable -- but public reader in general on average it's about 10% of its funding from the federal government. and that is important funding, and has paula pointed out in public television, its most important for smaller room communities that in many instances are underserved or perhaps unserved by any other source of journalism. and that federal funding is critical in supporting the local journalism, and that is an amazing resource for the american people. i mentioned a couple of times a story that we heard about in martha, -- marfa.

jim lehrer and i may be going to people in the know what that is good but it's a small town out in west texas served by a public radio station. nk rts was critical in the wildfires that were playing at being informed people where roads were closed, giving them evacuate and notices, they were often out ahead of even the texas department of transportation and letting people know where they could safely travel and where they couldn't. those are the kinds of stations that would be really in dire straits without federal funding. but it's important for all of our stations. and has paula said, it's an investment that the stations leverage for the rest of their funding. >> i want to leave the impression that npr would be an effective if federal funding disappeared. you i think get 60 to $70 million a year from stations. and the money that the stations

give to national public radio comes from grants from the corporations of public broadcasting that are set aside, called national programming grids, that only can be used by national programming, thereby programming from public greater international, on the radio side, and from national public radio. and if the money doesn't come to the stations, the stations ability to past 60 or 70 million on to npr will change dramatically. so it will affect new york city. it will affect our largest stations just as much i think as the small ones. and it will affect npr in a much bigger way than the impressions some people have that it's this tiny amount of money. >> thank you. caryn, you're at one of the local stations. what does federal funding mean to you, and how have you reacted? how has your station reacted to

the potential loss of federal funding? >> at major stations will be impacted as well. our revenue by up to 5%, our corporation for public broadcasting grant, around $1 million a year. and even as large as we are and as well resource as we are in this region, our average individual get is about $135. so the loss of the federal grant we would have to would have to instantly acquire 7400 brand-new never before contributors to supplant that money and hold onto them. our retention rate is 66%. so 7400 brand-new contributors right off the bat, increasing getting about 2500 new contributors annually after that, just to supplant the federal money, let alone trying to fuel the aspirations at the station has in its other general operating pursuit.

so it's quite critical. my concern about this latest legislative challenge, it's quite different from what we have experienced before. and i've been in public radio since 1982. the sustained nature of the attack is different. in past years, we had a threat to public funding almost every year come sometimes there are peaks as the was in 94-95, but this kind of sustained attack where we have to battle, random bills that came up, to fight for the continued resolution, now the battle for the 2012 budget. there's an issue of, that's going to come up about removing the tax deduction, federal tax deduction for nonprofit. so that's going to impact come and as a challenge with keeping our constituency mobilize over a long breed of time rather than just giving up for one big

battle. i spent 10 hours on capitol hill on the hill talking to friend and foe, a like. all commented about the groundswell of support, in the thousands. and that made an impact, you can own sake the wolf is at the door for so many times for so long. and so my concern is about keeping our constituencies energized, informed. we have information on our website about federal funding. we have to strike that balance between not seen too much where people just become a new to it and don't want it anymore, then keeping them energize so they feel mobilize and we needed. so that's my concern. >> good, thank you. anything else -- yes, pat? >> one more thing. to karen's point, what we don't want to do is to perpetually be in the position where we are sort of gasping for air, and

this is the perils of situation with congress. the cure to that i think is making sure that they understand, as some do not now. the essential nature of what it is we do in public broadcasting and the fact that americans have ever a million to 170 million, value when it is that we do. i think there's no reason why we shouldn't have a broad, broad bipartisan consensus on federal funding to public broadcasting. it is a small percentage of the federal budget. it is not a lot of money but it is, as jim lehrer, tom and bill have been saying, it is essential to the objective of having a well educated, well informed citizenship, which is up to the task of self government in a very difficult world. and if that's not essential i don't know what is in a country

like ours. and it's our responsibility as leaders of these organizations, and as the station manager who do this work day today like caryn does so well, to make sure that people, that people understand what it is we do is essential, that we do it well, that we do in an unbiased way, that we cover the waterfront in terms of opinion come in terms of geography, in terms of cultural background and in terms of anything you may want to say, generational and so forth and so on. that we are truly public and we represent the public. we reflect the public. and when we can do that and when we can show our friends in congress that's what we do, i think the broad bipartisan consensus that i'm looking for will be there. >> and i'd like to just add on a moment to what pat just said. i think one of the challenges that we also have a head is in this debate, we did hear from some on the hill that express

interest in helping us, by helping us become commercial. and that was viewed as a way of getting us off this cyclical challenge with federal funding. and on the television side, the radio, on the television side there are many examples of cable channels that started out with the aspiration of being the commercial version of public broadcasting. and when you look at how those channels, bravo, history channel, even have evolved, their focus shifts when the nation, or the final outcome is based on shareholder return. and so, you know, amt is now largely csi type of progress. brothel which maintains its position as the cable shows focus on the art that went out

its own path, and even history channel now where there not one program is part and start. i say that very carefully. everyone understands what i'm saying. it's just different. and if your true purpose, and i say this in many of the talks i give about public media, if your shareholders our main street and not on wall street, it takes you a very different path. and i think when you look at news, we'll bring this back to the subject to this bill, when you look at news utc the consequences and pressures that tom referenced during his remarks of what happens to news organizations that are suddenly responsible for a bottom line. and they are still doing news, but it is a different focus than the kind of work that we tried to do on a day-to-day basis when we are constantly challenging ourselves, and our best days i think choosing the work that no one else is doing.

we were created to fulfill in part, to fulfill what is in the public interest that is true market cap from commercial media. and i think helping us to become more commercial is not necessary going to take us down a path that is going to serve the country well. >> thank you. i want to shift subjects slightly now, and, tom address the country -- we essentially heard of two arguments. one is where in a fiscal crisis and we can't afford this anymore. even the president's own death the commission came out for zeroing out public broadcasting. but the other argument was that public broadcasting is biased. and as tom said, bias is in the eye of the beholder. so bill, i want to ask you to start us off on this. how do you affect the perception

that public broadcasting is biased? >> well, i don't think i have to do much about it i think we were granted quite well by the last debate in congress, that broadcasting is liberal. what we've discovered, and it's the same thing that mark thompson, director general of the bbc, six months ago, he said if you look at individual stories, the stories are well done and they tend to be straightforward. if you look at stories selection, it's a different question, and it's the hardest thing to do. what stories should be covered. news is about change, so if you talk about change, that tends to some people to be liberal. if you simply report this, the world went on today and nothing happened, then you have less of

a problem. from my perspective the issue is governance, and i think if there one word that i would say about this entire panel, this entire issue, is governance. where is the governance of the corporation for public broadcasting? how strong is that? they are giving out a lot of federal money. one of the standards? what are the measurements? how are you determining whether the product is a product that should be supported or not. the boards of production countries, the ones i know best in radio and national public radio and american public media, are they talking about this, are they looking at and examining in determining whether they are straightforward or not. bias can be as simple as an anchor, interviewing somebody and saying, hmmm.

just change the turnout and you change the bias of the work. is the governing body that have to be looking at what is the intention, what is -- what kind of people are being hired, what is the management like, and you come right on down to the station. 60% of our stations have no community governance on radio. they are largely parts of other institutions which have a board of regents or something at some point. but rarely meet anybody that has anything to do with the public broadcasting corporation public media company. so, the importance of the governance and the importance of having a community based board that is made of people who will demand these kinds of standards, to me, is the key. and before we finish this i would like to come back to the question of where we go rather than just defending the status

quo, what could it be. >> we will get to that, i promise. paula, one of the contradictions in government, obtaining government funding is that it could be seen as compromising the indie pendants, especially the journalism, this being performed. i think jeff jarvis who is a blogger and media critic who has a way with words suggested that npr should just give up federal funding because, to have federal funding at creates the appearance of political strings and pressure. so, how do you respond to that? is federal funding going to automatically create timid journalism? >> i think a few things. let me speak specifically about

television and my radio. as caryn wrestles with the same issues come at such acts are not important station in this market. on the radio, on the television side, excuse me, 15% of our funding comes from the federal government. the largest% of money comes to her station comes from individual philanthropy in support of the viewers like you. and lots of contributions from smaller contradictions. and i think that the fact that we are very anchored in committees and many committees are the last locally owned an operating broadcasters on the tv and radio side, ties it to commute. on the tv side with slightly different government. bill and i talk about governance questions all the time. i came from a station in new york we have both a bore and a committee advisory board. we talked a lot about issues of

coverage, and they were terminus the helpful to us. at pbs, we spend a lot of time looking at editorial issues. we are just in the process action with tom's guidance of including -- including our practices which we review every five years. and this has been a particular interesting time to look at those standards with a change in new media. and how you really reconcile issues at the same time of really trying to encourage the connection to local commuters that i think social media offers. we have an ombudsman who happens to be sitting in the room, and believe me, he operates quite independent. i rarely talk to but it's nice to see you here, michael. [laughter] and there are many times that i read is the to and, well, you know, he got it right. and he is our connection to the viewers in the viewers of our content. and they have a vehicle to him

where they can express their opinion, and he in turn expressed his own and his is helpful. all of our producers look at his material. so i think that the fact is that the lion share of our funding has come from individual philanthropy, if we get that wrong, the thing that is the most valued asset that we have is our brand and the fact that we are a trusted brand if we violate that, then i think everything else unravels. and so i think from my perspective on the tv side, i don't spend time worrying about government influence affecting our journalism. our journalists are fiercely independent. both our colleagues at the "newshour" and serve our colleagues at the frontline, which is our significant investment in an investigative journalism have tackled very difficult subjects that make people uncomfortable. and that's our goal, and that's what they believe is their mission, both in broadcast as well as on the line.

>> one thing, barbara. mike path to the former chairman of the house republican policy committee, house republican conference actually come has worked with the over the last five years on trying to pass a federal shield law to protect the confidentiality of journalists sources. mike is one the most conservative members of congress, but he also believes quite deeply and passionately that the news media are the only real check on government power in real-time. that's his phrase, not mine. anti-beauties that -- and he believes that the work that "washington post" and others do is essential to the proper functioning of this democracy to the accountability of the officeholders and so forth. it is an interesting question about whether government funding will tend to compromise independence, but, in fact, we have more than 40 years of

experience in this field now. and i think we have built a very good record of independent, of accountability, of dallas as there is and so forth, that is there for anyone to see. so i think this is not a theoretical issue anymore. this is for use of expect without that has worked out pretty well. >> joyce, we know that npr has certainly been particularly singled out for some of the criticism about liberal tendencies and bias in coverage and so one. and npr has gone through a lot of turmoil in the last six months beginning with the juan williams episode and going to the departures of the chief fundraiser and the president, dean schiller. how is npr doing now? and how are you coping with the

aftermath of all of this? >> well, npr is doing great there to have to do to know that is to turn on and listen to dubya a new and npr reporting. you know, our journalism has not missed to be. the issues have been on the management side of things, and we have, you know, we have learned from what we've gone through. i think we're a little bit more disciplined about a process is now. but most importantly, we've got my management out of the limelight and put our chosen back in the limelight where it should be. dick meyer is a. i know mark is here somewhere. they are two of a team of people who pretty much sacrifice their easter weekend to produce the incredible store on the guantanamo they detainees that we heard yesterday morning. you know, i heard part of a six

part series on prostitution in national. when you see what we're doing in north africa, what we have done in japan, i mean, the reporting is incredible. and anything but timid. we do have careful editorial process. you know, from the beginning people challenge each other, they challenge their own thinking, strive for accuracy and fairness and balance at all times. but it is, it is definitely courageous reporting that is going on. >> and npr has undertaken an examination of its standards and so on, correct? >> yes. we are in the midst of a review of a code of ethics. will have a draft of that sin to present to our board for their consideration, and their final approval. as paula does, we also have an ombudsman that works for us and she is here, too.

there you are. hi. i don't get to talk to her a lot. she is an independent as well. we're also considering the addition of a standards and practices editor position. so, we are, you know, we work very hard to ensure that our coverage, as i say, is accurate and balanced. but we are, you know, our journalists are incredibly courageous in the reporting that the do. >> caryn, from stations point of view, how does npr situation affect you, how did your listeners respond, and what have been your own, the station's own considerations in dealing with a city where there is a lot going on? >> well, interestingly it really caused a rallying of support i think when you take a temperature around the country.

a lot of stations were in fundraiser and they are having record fundraisers. and i think that is testament to what joyce is think about the quality of the journalism remains a question. and people value that and supportive. i think station managers were just concerned about what was going on at the top, but i think npr recovered quite quickly. and we're all powering forward. we have a number of a local member station that is a mile and a half from hq. we have a number of collaborative projects, major givens, technology, web and other digital distributions, platforms come and all that is moving forward. i think the practical day-to-day work relationship between member stations and npr are moving ahead. >> i'm going to add something to that. it has had a trickle-down effect

in the minnesota legislature, for example, where we have a number of stations. there is a caucus that is holding back or cutting funding significantly for arts and culture program. because of what they claim to be the juan williams affair at national public radio. the story hasn't gotten out clearly, despite the efforts that many of us have made to talk about the importance of looking at journalism for the sake of journalism. we are looking at arts and cultural broadcasting as one day could be the board of directors of minnesota public radio spent an hour of the board meeting, which is very rare enough time to spend examining the question of bias, and is there any basis in which to think that, that the news leaders of the organization

who were part of the discussion are missing something, that they are not examining the story selection or the possible ways that bias. and tom rosenstiel is part of that. board left feeling very good that a discussion had occurred. the stations around the couch are beginning to look much more carefully to make sure that any charges that could be made are not accurate. but there is an overhang. and probably will be for some time. i think we got it bad brand in terms of all of the coverage, as did planned parenthood, all the coverage of npr and public radio. and some of that will affect us for sometime. >> thank you. we have about another seven or eight minutes before we go to

questions from our audience. and i hope you will be thinking of those questions. and i'd like to turn now to the subject of digital media and competition. and paula, you refer to this. people will say there is so much choice out there. there is so much, that's available. you know, why do we need to put broadcasting? and, you know, you started to address that, but continue to talk about some of the things that you are doing to extend the brand of public television. >> i mean, i think this is, actually shifting to this part because i was say that were not for the money is would be the most fascinating time for the media. because the opportunities are so extraordinary, and i think that jefferson has been quoted twice. i mean, and engaged citizenry is

powerful, and looking at the opportunity of social media to try to bring viewers into a more proactive role in information is important, but also professional journalism is important and i think the to operate side-by-side. and we have over the course of the last few years spent a fair amount of time thinking about and experimenting and doing work in this space, and i'm glad harry is a because i think on the new site is by doing so the most interesting work in public media. and he has done everything i know about twitter, and i'm trying really hard, i hope you're proud of me, but it is fascinating to me. and had a discussion with a friend, not that long ago, about the fact that i think for a lot of people, there is the feeling that social media is somehow frivolous and it's about where i

had lunch yesterday. and if you really look at some of the work, and even outside uphold journalistic space, people who have worked with us on a series coming he uses social media as a way to really try to get a handle on subjects and topics and really engage discussion before he stands in front of a large group to give a speech. and if you talk to him about it has changed the way that he interacts with his audiences, and he interacts with people that he is trying to connect with around science information, it's actually quite profound. so i think the opportunities for us in public media are huge because we are such an interesting organization at both national and local. we have stations in every part of the country, and we have the ability to achieve scale to our national organization. so the real challenge for us and

what we've been spending a fair amount of time thinking about is how do you really linked the two pieces together so that you have true local connection with -- wiccan community, at the same time you use the national work as a way to connect together. and so online we have just been efforts building out the architecture for video online, both as a national distribution, but also as a place where every station, no matter if you're in a big market or a small market, can connect your own work there. we are spending a fair amount of time thinking about how we can help our stations build their local journalism. and there are things that you can do scalable, particularly and the architecture of it that will enable stations to more of their resources into the actual journalism rather than creating

the platforms themselves. and so, i think this is, in fact, a really interesting time. and as we've been talking about, particularly richard journalistic standards, you know, we did a fair amount of work this year. i think five years from now if we look back, this will just continue to accelerate and evolves as we look to ways to think about professional journalism and engaged citizenry and we tried to bring them together to truly meet the needs of the community. >> things are changing so fast you may have to do more often than every five years i think. i'm going to quote from vivian schiller we mentioned a few minutes ago who i think it's agreed that she did a marvelous job at npr of bringing it into a digital innovation, and last week she was speaking at harvard. and she had this message for public radio. she said you are now competing in the big leagues and are no

longer a scrappy underdogs. you must become your own disruptors. if you don't aggressively reach out to new audiences on new platforms, someone else will. there is no such thing as lasting media loyalty, especially in this age of media promiscuity. bill, i suspect you may agree with that. >> in part. i think you will win on the basis of brand, and if that brand represents quality. so, yes, you are going to have it sent pieces of content floating around in every conceivable digital platform. but how do you know what you can trust and what you can't? jim lehrer in his opening remarks talked about what i would maybe put words in his mouth to say derivative reporting. it's blogging about what someone else reported that someone else reported that someone somewhere reported. it's not a pulitzer prize-winning reporter doing

direct journalism. if you got that, if you got that kind of quality, we have something linda will talk about later called public insight journalism that draws from expertise of the audience in a database of 100,000 experts around the country. and makes journalists more efficient and helps them get their stories to be more accurate. that helps the quality of what we are producing, and that improves the brand. but you have to be able to know what you trust. you have to be able to have somebody doing the quality original journalism, rather than everybody blogging about what everybody else thinks what anybody else reported. >> caryn, same question, but applied to a media market like washington, which is very rich in news sources, newspapers,

very aggressive television operations. wonderfully, i learned from tom rosenstiel, 31 all news reader stations which is likely the number one station in the market. so you got a lot of competition. how do you as a public radio station -- what's your role in this media ecosystem? >> well, that number one commercial news station that shall remain nameless, -- >> you mean it's on top? >> wamu beats them in the audience in our audience in morning drive an 18-34 audience. so i think that the content, the quality, we have a different mental i think than -- we carry a different mental better commercial colleagues do. information dissemination is one thing, but knowledge building is a completely different thing. we are about helping you understand on the backyard to

the globe. i tell my staff, i want my move at the kitchen table level of helping people figure things out and navigate the world, whether it is a new budget plan, a health plan. we've got our great local education reporter right now doing a five part series on childhood obesity it and we go to wamu.org, there's a story. also interactive widgets for u2, kids can put things on their plates on this little virtual plate and see how calories add up and what kind of activity they would have to do to burn that off. so community engagement really, really is key to it and i think another telling figure, twice a year week, i know the only major markets get this, but we get an aggregate audience report from arbitron that shows all of our platforms.

we are at about 770,000 people consuming all of our content on all of the platforms on a weekly basis. 165,000 of that 770 is on a platform other than channel one. it's been a stretch. it's been a red but for individual stations to figure out a way to beat on every emerging platform, but you don't know where your next listener is coming from so you have to be ready. >> pat? and just before pat answers, we will have handheld microphones, and think of your questions and as soon as pat is finished i will turn it over for questions. >> caryn has said this exactly right, and so has the bill. in my previous incarnation at the "washington post" company for 20 years, we created washingtonpost.com back in the mid 1990s, and i see a lot of fellow posts alumni here in the audience here.

but the initiative here, the mission was to create some world-class journalism that people around the world could actually enjoy through this new venue platform called the internet. and we now have a i think 12 or 13 million regular viewers of washingtonpost.com. and so exponentially more people are reading "washington post" journalism today than ever before. the same thing can happen with public broadcasting, public broadcasting and public radio because of this trust factor we been talking about here. and there is this flight to quality that i think will be very useful to us as time goes on. "washington post" has not spent a dime outside the washington area to promote washingtonpost.com. these billions of people have come from around the country and around the world because of their faith in this franchise. the same thing can happen, i

think will happen across a lot of platforms that are going to be available to us in this new century for the public broadcasting people who are at the national and local level. >> great. we will be hearing a lot more about these digital platforms and new experiments, at the national local partnership is one that i'm particularly interested in. and so now we're ready for some question. when the mic reaches you, please identify yourself and there's a question there. >> hello. hello. i'm the host of white house chronicle which appears on some public television stations, also a large number of public access stations. and then one of the retired comedies of british journalism.

so loved by public broadcasting. [laughter] i just want to thank the organizers for bringing together the high priest of public broadcasting because if you work and produce as i do as an independent producer, a television program, we get no money, we don't even get a postcard at christmas. we been on the air for 15 years and we don't exist. and we talk among ourselves as to what we don't exist. we can watch our programs on varying public television station but we get no recognition from the larger public television. and we are never asked for any input which seems to be quite exporter. we actually pay to get on the satellite. so our situation is the orphans of public television, and i wonder why we are treated as orphans ever pro is sufficiently valuable to be aired? thank you.

>> okay. >> i guess that would be my question. >> yes, paula, please add him to your christmas card list. >> you will be on my christmas card list. the think about public television that i think most people don't understand at pbs, we are not a network. and, in fact, we aren't the network model that is upside down, is the decisions i made a public broadcasting are made at the local level. we do aggregate a schedule and we distributed. we do all the things for skill to station. we do put together schedule programs. we do maintain satellite interconnection. we have done a significant amount of work on pbs.org, others a significant amount of programming that goes directly to stations, and the stations purchase, and that is the situation with your programming. and that enable stations to really think about what will work for them in the local market, and what is of interest to them.

we have limited funds, what we are able to distribute, and so we put our resources at pbs around a smaller amount of programming that we destroyed out to all the stations. then if you travel from market to market, you see when you visit a public television station, you visit a public television station. they look very different. and i think as i mentioned earlier, part of the strength of what makes us so different and unique is that we are the ultimate local organization. >> okay, next question. i think we have a hand here. >> i'm a correspondent for japanese public broadcasting. coming from the countries like worthy broadcasting is doing a major role, i'm kind of surprised to see all this conversation npr and pbs,

they're doing a great job and to the public -- [inaudible] my question is, is there anyway pbs and npr could combined together and build a new, stronger broadcasting in this country? that's my dream. >> what a good question. the question is, why do we have a separate public radio and public television system? and why can't we all get along? [laughter] >> we do get along. i would say that there are very different business models, one from the other, and you know, the reason for them being separate our historical. but we are more and more collaborating on projects and combining forces, and doing some

really exciting things. and i anticipate that that will continue. i think combining the two organizations as business would be hugely complicated. i don't know that they would necessarily create a stronger combined organization, but i do know that we are, you know, we are really interested in working together to best serve our public. >> we've done a lot, particularly over the last few years together, both in areas that you don't see it we work together, for example, on corporate underwriting and trying to bring those resources in. so in the business side we are working together. we have been working together on some of the architecture for the work that we're doing online. but more apparent to the viewer is the work that we've been engaged in in journalism, and "newshour" and npr have come together on projects. "frontline" and come together

with other organizations like propublica. so i think that npr has very deep reporting capabilities that we do not have on the public television side, will never have on the public television psychic it makes no sense was to try construct a system like that. it makes more sense for us to work together and really try to leverage the assets of both organizations. and, of course, online everything does come together and that's why think a lot of partnerships have taken place. but i think that again, the way that we are a little different than tasha i want to commend in hk for doing such extraordinary coverage, both in japan but more important to the rest of the world of what has happened in your country over the course of the last month, i think really the journalist and from a nhk makes us all proud to be a partner of yours in the whole public media world. i think that we're also doing partnerships with you. i mean, i think there's lots of

really great opportunities. "frontline" did a piece about a month ago called postmortem which was on the corner medical xm system in this country and the challenges of it. it is not csi. the reporting that was done between front-line, npr and propublica resulted in a week of journalism for all things considered, a very powerful broadcast event as well as a lot of material that was available online. and so i think those kinds of models in partnership our clearly what we will be doing together. and i think it is no coincidence between public television and public radio this year we have taken more than a third of all the peabody's that have been awarded. and i think that that kind of quality journalism brings organizations like ours together in very natural ways. >> this will be our last comment spent it might be a lot like

trying to merge the nhk and the bbc, but you think about that. [laughter] i think the thing that i'm concerned about is the challenges that come of this year, give us an opportunity to really rethink and we look at how we are structured, what we are funding, why we're funding, what we are funding. and look at what could public broadcasting be. public broadcasting is going to be probably the last person standing at some point in terms of journalism. newspapers are -- i love newspapers. i am carrying one with me, but they are weakening and they may or may not make it through the digital transition. some of them may. lots of them may not. radio, television, cable, increasingly polarized. you make much more money being polarized than you do any of the way and if that's what's informing our country, then

who's going to provide the i could information, everything from health care to social security towards in the middle east, et cetera. and it leads us, we are in some ways fortunately here, but nowhere near as well developed as we need to be to do what you work with at nhk is unbelievable in terms of what we work with here in the united states. somebody has to say how important is this, and when you're cutting things in the budget the way we are taken in the united states, to think about doesn't make sense to cut public broadcasting, $450 million, in order to cut back on the knowledge that people need to make their decisions on what the government should be cutting or what the government should be funding. adding the voice of america

$8 million, cutting out the mandarin service, which the chinese that has made we can have a pledge week and will pay for it, it's important to us. but we need to look at what is the role going to be, because i don't see any other alternative other than the journalism of public broadcasting, and maybe of two of the strongest newspapers. and it's not $450 billion. and i probably the only one in this environment saying we should be talking about tripling or quadrupling that amount of money so that the issues that the congress is trying to cope with are understood by the people that will have to vote and decide that. it's foolish, it's pound foolish to not to do that. >> okay. with that i think will have to bring this discussion to an end, and thank you so much to our wonderful panel for being here today.

and we will be back in, let's say 10 minutes to continue the discussion on digital platforms. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> a short break about 10 minutes. we will rejoin it when it reconvenes. that will happen in about 10:55 each other the next that will look at innovations to connect communicate executives at national public radio and pbs among others. it's hosted by the journalism school at the university of missouri. soaking will come back into the national press club for more of this at about 10:55. our first place whenever a our student him a contest. >> this your student can

competition as students from across the country to consider washington, d.c., through their lives. today's first prize winner for high school, address an event that better helps them understand the role of the federal government. >> my name is matthew x. and i'm a junior in high school. on may 25 '02 thousand eight, my life and applicant parkersburg were changed forever. >> a history making twister blows winds in excess of 200 miles per hour. the severe storm system virtually ripped the account of parkersburg in half. it destroyed 22 businesses, leveled 222 homes, and then damaged 480 others in the community of only 2000. but the statistics don't do justice to the heartbreak and to the hurt. >> my home was located near the

eastern edge of town. it took nearly a year to build and we're finally able to move in in late 2005. but in a matter of seconds, it was gone. but even after the tornado, parkersburg did not cease to exist. our recovery began the moment after. today the high school, city hall, and the majority of the other buildings destroyed in the storm had been rebuilt. >> it was amazing to see the resiliency, the determination. that was really inspiring to see the community really come together. >> but they're still a cloud hanging over my committee. parkersburg still struggles with the federal government, fema and relief. >> we stand to in a half years i guess removed from that day and we're still working with fema. >> in the 1990s, fema was a model government agency. but as hurricane katrina showed,

cronyism, under funding and lack of leadership turned him into the most ridiculed agency in the government. >> how the federal government affects my life and committee is most evident in the way he has handled continued disaster relief and parkersburg. >> parts of it you really love about theme and parts you're not crazy about. i've heard people say a love-hate relationship. >> there's been sometimes in some natural disasters that fema has not functioned so well. think in the last five years, they've gotten their act together and done a better job. >> several areas team a head of the parkersburg very well. >> they are invaluable as far as i guess when it comes to recovery of disasters. >> team has been good to us. it is worth noting they have

helped us with school buses, the all weather track down by the football field, right -- playground, parking lots to a number of areas that helped us with. >> once the tornado havoc is very apparent from the damage it would be catastrophic, there is going to be beyond the need of the community of parkersburg and the state. fema stepped in very, very early in the process. >> it was a benefit. they also set up a command center here, not only for help and that is asked them helping to recovery but also helping the citizens seek funds speak we do should be more than $2 million within the first two weeks of the tornado and parkersburg. >> without the fund's parkersburg wouldn't exist in its current state. >> however, communication, fema's policies, parkersburg finds itself today in a critical

struggle. >> at the very grassroots there's a little problem with fema may be different people having a different view of what the government can do or not you. >> the personnel changes so often, and with those changes, so does the story. >> it is easy for misunderstandings like that to happen because they to keep enough people on the payroll to just handle a disaster in that part of the country. >> theme has a full-time staff of about 3000 folks who work across the country. we then pull from what we call our reservists or disaster assistance employees. unfortunately, the way that reservists work we do rotate them in a. >> that is very, very difficult, very, very frustrating. we found out not to in half years later that a lot of the information we received was inaccurate. some of the guidance we received was not policy driven. >> the decisions we make as a school board and a district one

on behalf of our students and communities was based entirely on that information we received. and we find ourselves two-and-a-half years later in kind of a financial crisis of sorts as we waiting official word on funding. some funny we received almost $700,000 worth. fema is now requesting that be returned. >> from the initial time that we give an aspect of the amount of funding of what we call -- there are likely to be changes that happen from then until the time that money is obligated. and even afterwards. in some cases as more information is shared. so that's how those types of situations would have the obligations occur. >> i guess that's a 180-degree difference to obligating money. you sign a project worksheet instead the federal government will help i can to be this much money toward your project. months go by. in this case years go by. and they come back after a third

or fourth review and then say that isn't how it should've been handled, and they're going to be obligate that money spent they can take it away after they gave it. i didn't you know that was a word. we should've known that could happen. >> we don't expect to just have a federal government's money to do whatever we want with it, but fema has very, very strict guidelines. if you don't do this, if you don't do that, you don't do everything right, they have the ability to deobligate at any point. >> changing of the people has become such a factor for us. the people that we originally worked with understood that we need to get back into our high school in a year. so decisions were made to move that timeline on quickly. and the understanding there was with fema, the assistance was understood, and that something changed now as being reviewed by the third or fourth reviewers. they are just not aware of that emergency situation and the

extra costs that would associate with it. so they do in a much different manner. >> without fema and the federal government, the city of parkersburg me never have fully recovered. my commute is restoration is not only a result of federal assistance. >> we were not going to sit around and wait for the federal come to do everything. the federal government to say what you can do or not do. we just had a can-do attitude and we went ahead and did it. >> they were a part of the. they reached out to us. but we the people of parkersburg create our success. >> theme has a parkersburg tremendously. it also greater challenges that threaten parkersburg and the progress we have made. reversal and lack of funding jeopardized my school and education of our youth. without renewed aid, the federal government, my life, my community may face continued devastation after the storm.

>> go to studentcam.org to watch all the winning videos and continue the conversation about today's documentary at our facebook and twitter pages. >> you get another chance to see the studentcam documentary and the interview with the creator, matthew wicks tonight here on c-span2 starting at 71 7:15 fut. we're bringing you live coverage of a discussion about the future of public broadcasting. attendees are in the middle, actually nearing the end of about a 10 minute break. the next then we'll look at innovations to connect commuters. you hear from executives from national public radio and pbs among others. it is hosted by the journalism school at the university of missouri. live coverage from the national press club here on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] it looks like there'll still be a moment or two before resumption of this discussion about the future of public broadcasting. the next panel will look at innovations to connect communities. we'll hear from national public radio and pbs executives among others. why we have a moment very quickly we will tell you about some of our booktv programming. that we've scheduled for you tonight during our primetime schedule. we will begin at eight with newscaster carole simpson. she talks about her book news lead. -- news lady.

>> again, that is all tonight at 8 p.m. eastern here on c-span2. again, standing by waiting for the reception of this discussion of the future of public broadcasting. this is live coverage on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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>> we are waiting for the next panel in this discussion on though future of public broadcasting to get underway. the next panel will talk about innovation to connect communities. we will hear from national public radio and pd f hosted by the journalism school and the university of missouri. we will talk about our programming on c-span3. they started with an immigration and law policy discussion from georgetown university. it is continuing now. they just got under way with immigration policies come before courts. live coverage of that right now on our companion network c-span3.

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[inaudible conversations] >> ok, everyone, welcome back to our discussion of the future of public broadcasting. we have, as you see, a vast array of people to discuss this subject. they have been told that i will call on each of them for a three minute description of what it is that they are doing that is an innovation in the digital realm and once we have headed at the first round i have a few questions depending on what the

time is, i will ask one or two questions or no questions and go to your questions in the audience so you have a chance to get your ideas across. we have extended our time for our c-span audience until 12:15. that is one tower and ten minutes from now so we have enough time and should have a fascinating discussion. let me begin by introducing everyone by name and i will come back and start the discussion. this is linda winslow, dick meyer from national public radio, laura van stratton from new york, jacquie jones from

black programming consortium, jessica clark from center for social media, mark central from npr, case summers from w from wamu-fm. you are going to -- we talked in the earlier session about how traditional pbs and local stations are going into the digital platforms and we learned you change the name of newshour in 2010. what is behind that and what the safety is? >> let me make sure this is working. tim alluded to the purpose of changing the name without saying so. the pbs newshour was born of his vision that he articulated this morning that if we are going to

survive, we in public media, the translation of the vision is go forth and collaborate. in a world of shrinking resources we have to learn how to share them end make common bond with like-minded partners, people who are interested in preserving and protecting serious journalism. part of the point of taking his name off of the program which i happen to think is a revolutionary action on the part of any iconic newsman, i can not think of anyone else who ever did that and agendas there's a lot of credit for something that was long fouglong fought out on. have a common purpose and takes -- takes a stronger one out of

the two of them. the thing is taking his name off of the program was the most dramatic way to signal to the audience that this is not your grandfather's newshour anymore. we are doing it differently and we are all in this together. that is the message. there may be at downside to that. no one recognizeds the name without jim lehrer's name on it but we see evidence that this is working. in the last couple months, our audience was up 11% over february of 2010 and in march of this year it was up 16% over march of 2010. so the point of the exercise is not slowly sinking in and people are watching it for whatever reason. in part because our mission has not changed. we are still delivering serious

journalism and have more partners now than ever. i am happy to say we have a long list of national collaborators including front-line, nova, npr, american experience, business report. when i say there are collaborators they're not just promos. we don't mind doing that either on occasion when there is a project coming up later in the evening that we know our colleagues will lot of time and energy into because we are trying to say we are the beginning of the evening on pbs and we represent the first entry point and we want you to stay with us. we want you to see us as one family and therefore the project's done in collaboration with others have been designed to make that point. what i am most proud of now was i am out of time, the project we

have been doing on the local level collaborative lee. that is where harvey -- hari sreenivasen comes in. he helps us make the most of our digital platform. a lot of people in the room are the same. >> how do i get out of this powerpoint thing? mr digital die? [laughter] >> i think it hurleysim is working this morning. when jim brought me on he endowed with an enormous budget of $0 and said go forth and collaborate. what we want to show you in three minutes is how we are using that platform to increase the voices and public media, how we're using digital technology

to take the content where communities already exist and what we think are interesting experiment in the future of storytelling in three minutes. what you will see is we talked about the immigration debate with an individual from tucson's local journalism center and san diego, we talked to someone in boise, idaho. it cost me zero dollars because they taped themselves and we had a speakerphone conversation that they sent back to me overs the internet. no satellite costs involved. if you don't have a studio how about these two blotters from cape cod, massachusetts and portland, oregon who reported themselves on their mac books and sent it back to me and we had a video conversation and we did this for jean michele cou a coustaeu and we did this for

louisiana public broadcasting and the gulf oil spill for some time. in the gulf oil spill we also used youtube's moderator to get people to give us suggestions on this bill. 50,000 people submitted 100,000 suggestions. what do we do with those ideas? tournament to a story and cut it together and put it on the broadcast "newshour". ray suarez had questions for bob dudley, the ceo of bp that the crowdsourced thanks to youtube moderator. kind of shifting gears. i have two minutes. this is jim lehrer on the iphone. not his eyephone but our content is there for people wherever they wanted whenever they wanted. this is the pbs "newshour" on

youtube. this is us on facebook. i don't know what my screen is stretched out. this is us on twitter. those of the usual suspects but we also find these interesting new communities popping up. we are streaming our broadcast on youstream every day and allow local stations to embed that so they hang out on the web site for 30 minutes or an hour. we are not trying to cannibalize our friends. this is "newshour" on short form, this is us on frequency.com. this is a widget that we build. i am shifting gears for the third part. i am going with this. this is an interesting ticker we built last year and found the power of this was profound. people put this on 6,000 pages across the internet so we decided to do this to time track if there were delays in airports

across the country so in real time you could check any of the 52 major airports last thanksgiving when there were threats. here's another example of something we are trying. basically curating content with a reviewtube or twitter or images the digital simple and free application we can try for that. if i can leave you with this is something we did with the most -- the oo foundation, this is universal subtitles and we took the entire state of the union address and it is for free captioned and if you scroll down here, it is in all these different languages. german, esperanto is a little tough but that is at 1%. estonian, finish, spanish, part french. here is the coolest one. it is in chinese simplified. just buying the act of this

crowdsourcing turning it into chinese and spanish alone means it is accessible to a couple of billion more people on earth. with this crowd have done this for abc, nbc or cbs or public media they believe in? this is part of the full that is part oftool that is part of the reason it exists. >> thank you. let me pause for a moment and ask you if a little bit about your metrics. what happened to your web traffic that you can tell us? [inaudible] >> i have no idea. she and no more than i do. >> for us last year we knew we were going to have astounding

year over year numbers. when we saw a 50% or 60% growth fine compared to the "newshour" of two years ago. what surprised us was on month over month basis we are still averaging 25% significant growth. we are up on the length of time people spend on the site. and the number of stories on the site or the type of engagement through facebook or twitter. they are staying and engaging farm more. >> reporter: you will talk about what npr is doing to partner with local stations. >> i will do it with the alacrity of jim lehrer since you took so much of npr's time. >> we had the money. >> i want to tick off some

high-level principals that guide our long-term strategic thinking and editorial decisionmaking and npr on a national level which we tried to inculcate into conversation that we have when thinking about how we can help stations or collaborate with stations or more to the point extend the reach of public radio journalism on every level and the most important is it for a paradigm shift where we try to think of ourselves as part of the network that includes all public radio stations and a network that reaches from the local assets can be shared freely throughout that system. that means stations sharing stories with us and other

stations. every level you think of we try to get our people to think about their world in that way. the other driving principle is reporting. it is very simple. the decision that npr has made flies in the face of all commercial broadcast journalism which is to maximize boots on the ground. maximize reporting, not commentary or arguing or aggregation. every spare shekel we have we went to put in service of reporting and help stations do that too because we think and they think that is the way to become important to their communities. guiding some of those reporting decisions we look very hard at areas where commercial media has retreated. where they are not investing. where they are pooling their resources and where we believe

there's a strong information demand like the news consuming public. the final thing we try to inculcate into our conversation is the national and local level, the gospel of partnerships and we have become -- somebody quoted vivien schiller, promiscuous in our partnerships. they have been very successful particularly with the non-profit investigatives and we have tried to be helpful to those interested in the same thing. three specific programs by would talk about, what is the impact of government. is simple as simple can be, we are trying to put two reporters in every state capital in the country. one primarily digital and one primarily broadcasts. ambition is to be in 50 states and they will serve consortium of public radio stations not individual stations or the

partial aspect and it is an area where commercial journalism is retreating with custerlike force. another area is investigative reporting where work at the national level we are always looking for ways to share reporting with stations and give them the tools they need to report on those stories and finally because it is stop and i obey, a project we had to train local stations in more sophisticated economics reporting and it was run out of our los angeles bureau and something we're looking to replicate again and again and again. >> thank you. [applause] >> one of the partnership projects is project argo.

explain your role in project our goal. >> we met in april of 2009. we represent 11 other public radio stations across the country to discuss the possibility of a pilot project to increase capacity of public radio stations to build a reputation and the online audience in selected areas of coverage voting for the proposal. the plan was we would provide an editorial template additional common tools and common platform that local stations would determine subject of the coverage. the site launched in two ways in july and august and launched in august of 2010. our top it was originally conceived as an examination of the intersection of race, religion and evolved to be a lot about race and class in the district we live in. we decided it would examine the

topic that informs all of our reporting but due to its nature is not a topic the newsroom -- this is a complex topic not easily pigeonholed. is part of many things you will hear about but it is rarely a stand-alone story. perfect example, the five part series on childhood obesity you will hear about this week. much bigger story but is that story informed by race in class by the way kids growing class. the plan with each blog would be staffed by one blogger and we elected to hire a blocker who is experienced in writing about race. she is co-founder of indian mutiny the digital focused cultural blog in the south asian bias for a. she brings cash genetically interest, personal interest that race and class affect how everything plays out in our city and she ran the blog solo for

six months. the evolution has coincided with our own growth of our digital effort as a station and we brought an online managing editor from the print world to be our editorial oversight for all our text and video and he saw the need for a broader approach to our blog then one person's force and observation. we realized early observations style of writing needs to be balanced by more traditional journalism with a topic like the census which has to be cast effectively through a prism of race in class. to that end in march we hired elahe izadi who joins me here today. she came from dtv.org which was an experiment. i would love for her to talk about how we are utilizing the dual approach and will serve to compare and contrast how it is to blog for commercial media to blogging for public media.

>> i came from tvd and quite quickly and was able to discern the difference between public me and the corporate world. now i am finding that i am on dcentric.org and i can go more into a nuanced topic whereas you want to provide a regional reporting that readers want to read and was really -- sorry. actually, we have a couple other slides. dido know if we can pull them up. the private world, you have this pressure on you to produce a massive amount of content that will generate as many viewers as possible. you do want many viewers on your sights here as well.

another primary concern is what role you play in the community and how you are viewed by the community and i did have that at tbd but you have to pump information on to the head. we were able to take two different approaches to the same story. i posted the flu witty of race for latino americans and our was able to draw upon a couple of original sources that were done and make some connections and after this post, ana talked about her personal view and how it impacted her life and external resources as well. and provide a more personal merit to the same story and both received many views and comments and facebook post.

we should be trying to reach both. also the race and class is very difficult for a reporter at a newspaper or tv station to devote their time to. it is very nuanced and reporters are often consumed with setting the story in doing their original reporting which is valuable and important but because it is so nuanced and deals with context there is no space in traditional media to devote a lot of time for that so the blogging platform lends itself to that. you can do a regional reporting. i was able to embed the audio of the interview on and p r's tell me more and talk about the original washington post story that led to this discussion and talk to an expert on my own and put that into the post. i was able to drive other

reporters to saying about comments on justification that we have to stop. one of the questions raised by a blocker at the atlantic was no one talked about why this is inherently bad for black people. i was able to talk to an expert about that and i don't believe you can find that at a traditional newspaper website. they have too many pressures to produce a lot of content that will generate news. >> thank you. a little round of applause for tx a new. another one of these national local collaboration's is something funded by the corporation for public broadcasting called local journalism centers and from that rather dry name has evolved 13 or 14 different regional collaboration's.

janice saibi is here to talk about one her station was involved in called hargis public media. .. >> it's nebraska, iowa, missouri and kansas and it's four public radio stations and that means for news directors, for general managers all coming together and collaborating what we hope to be the go-to the place nationally

for agriculture journalism. harvest public media really came about through the vision of kcur in kansas city. their news director frank morris, who was a reporter who some of you will know how he felt. my sense is that he was a reporter that felt the weight of untold unreported stories on his beat which was agriculture. we got together with harvest public media and his vision really kind of brought us together to get this grant from cpb and really try to find the untold stories that were making up the fabric of our region and putting them out there to the world and that's exactly how our -- one of our reporters and our multimedia editor described it in my newsroom yesterday. one of those reporters actually tackled a story from missouri's boot hill. if you look at a map at missouri and this is a good day to talk about missouri. we have a boot hill in missouri like italy.

that's one of the things we have in common with italy. [laughter] >> our reporter jessica has been given the luxury, the time and the equipment and the money to go down to the boot hill and talk to african-american farmers that filled a country church in that region and told their stories about how they were waiting for reclamations as a result of years of discrimination. and she told that story and it changed her life. and she hopes it changed the perspective of other people who heard that story. i've only got one more and i've got 1 minute and i'm going to skip to innovation, another key word. not only are we all going to get together and be on the same page. it's not always that easy to move forward with covering the untold stories of agriculture and all of the many people and voices that make up those stories but we're going to do it across platforms. we're going to meet our audiences at different places through twittering, through online, through blogging. there's a great field notes blog that's been put together so we're innovating.

and the cpb gave us the luxury not only to get together but to get equipment to send our reporters out not only with great audio equipment but with great cameras and to learn how to work them. third word, momentum. when we found a topic like this with frank morris' vision and everyone coming together and reporters with a lot of motivation to tell the stories in their region, a lot of people got behind that. so being located at the missouri school of journalism we have across the quad we have investigative reporters and editors who put an investigative lens and the reynolds institute helped us go digital in the way we met our audiences and just going across the spectrum we are able to do it. there's a fourth word i was not planning to use was promiscuity. [laughter] laugh >> all the alphabet soup what we have made up with the missouri school of journalism to gather

the momentum to make harvest public media a success. harvestpublicmedia.org. join our conversation. >> thank you. [applause] >> now, we're going to keep the focus on local and turn to our representative from wnet laura stratton. who is starting in the biggest media capital of our country is starting a local news enterprise. so laura, tell us why this is something wnet is taking on and what your plans are? >> i will. i want to say what's great about community journalists we are not agricultural journalism. it's extremely different. [laughter] >>, obviously, we're in new york. it's an incredible news town. we have dozens of newspapers and hundreds of hyper local sites and blogs and community organizations and nonprofits

that generate their own content across all platforms. and i think that because of the nature of new york, a key part of our role -- and i might be a little bit rogue here in saying is that i think it's curiation. i think it's pulling from the excellent work being done by local bloggers, by some of the very single-issue often wonky sites that focus on very, very specific policy issues. so even with a layer of curiation -- even with curiation, there's a layer of public media sensibility where we can pull from the excellent work being done by others but sort of add a patina of our own opinion and do important wraps and bring different voices. there's blogs just on bike lanes -- i mean, dozens of blogs

just on the dance offerings in new york city. we have almost too much choice and what we can do best is public media in a lot of ways is to create partnership, amplify the excellent content that's being produced, not just by media organizations but specifically by nonprofits and community organizations and really bring that to a more mainstream audience. and when we do bring that to a more mainstream audience, i think a key part of that is metrofocus will be a get go enterprise. we will launch on the web in the summer. the plan is to become a daily half hour local news and culture show probably by the end of this year but not rushing to air because it's critical that those kinds of partnership that we want to form have a chance to grow and blossom first online.

it is possible that we may even have our app up before we see broadcast. so from the get-go, we plan to be multiplatform. it's no accident that my first hire was our social media editor because when you look at where people in their 20s and increasingly in their 30s are getting their news, twitter comes up again and again and again. so it's not just a place to push the local media out to push our stories out. i think everyone on this panel gets why facebook and twitter are important from a marketing point of view particularly when you don't have a lot of marketing dollars. but i think what -- what is perhaps less well understood is the extent to which people are really getting their news by following individual reporters and how we as journalists can also get our news that way. so from the get-go, again, i

think it's going to be -- would he ever committed in every realm digitally, news-gathering, marketing, and i think that's where the innovation will come from for metrofocus. >> okay, thank you. [applause] >> our next speaker is approaching community but in a different way. jacquie jones is part of the national black consortium. what i would like her to talk about the is the public media corps which is a new way of reaching people. >> i feel like i just parachuted from another universe because i'm not a journalist and we really historically work with documentary filmmakers to

document television looking up a way to open up diversity on public television. and i guess about a year and a half ago, around the time that the knight commission came out with the information needs of societies -- or community -- >> the commission report on the -- community needs -- the information needs of the community. >> when that came out. [laughter] >> i really saw it as a way to focus on the demand side of the equation. that there was a real disconnect between a lot of the values that we heard expressed today and the actual communities that this work is intended for. i mean, we talk a lot about facebook and twitter and the communities we're working in over half the people do not have internet in their home. they do not rely on the internet for their news. and so i think there's a lot of investment in digital that exacerbates a divide that exists. so we thought given our collaborative relationship that there was a way to really look at how do we make the content

that we know has such value relevant in these different communities. and we begin this project, the public media corps, as a way to really explore as the queen likes to say what it could be. along with the challenges over the last year, even before the budget -- the budget crisis, the whole shift of business models and the media landscape, that it seemed that there was an opening and an opportunity so we really began to work with our public broadcasting partners with high schools, with community-serving organizations to really look at creating new pipelines into communities that public media could get traction on. so we recruited a core of 15 public media core fellows, one of whom is here to really start by talking to people in their community, asking them about how they -- how they use

information, where they got it, who they trusted. and align those needs with the services that exist. so our partners including pbs and whet, a local station here -- we worked a lot with wamu in various kinds of ways to really create a network that has a real public service goal. and so we're kind of in the first year of it. it's been really encouraging and really interesting. and there's been a lot of traction particularly around creating dialog around education. and people -- i think humans need to have a voice in public affairs because for us, the information needs go beyond journalism to really history context and experience that create the sense of a public square. so that's where we are and i think how we fit into this. and i've now seen the -- and i

want to say in hari's defense there's two 3's and a 1 so it's a little bit confusing. [laughter] >> okay. thank you. thanks, jacquie. [applause] >> and continuing the conversation about bringing new voices and new attitudes in, we're now calling on jessica clark who is the head of the future of public media project. thank heavens someone is doing that at the center for social media. jessica is going to talk about the work she's been doing. thank you. >> thanks. so at the center for social media over the last five years, we've been running a ford foundation funded research project on the evolution of public broadcasting and to what we're calling public media 2.0. and at the time we started this,

that sounded very futuristic. now it sounds to retro. now we're on to 4.0. but that's what happens when you're on the cutting edge. you have to keep running. we've been really interested in this question of how public media will evolve in this moment of open participatory platforms. sort of the dynamic -- the shifting dynamics not just news but cultural debate. and we've been trying different interventions and different research approaches to try to get at this question, both within the field and with organizations and innovators outside of the field who are doing what we might think of as public media five years hence or maybe even sooner. so one of the ways i've been approaching this is a knight policy fellow at the new america foundations. we've been examining not just how you can inform citizens but how you can increase their capacity the way -- the way that they understand their role as citizens and how information plays into that.

the kinds of skills they need to survive and thrive in an increasingly digital communications environment. and how do we gauge them? not in a partisan way but make the shift from informed citizens to citizens who are active, feel empowered, who participate in dialog, know where to find the information they need and how to make arguments. we've been incubating the public media corps and documenting that experiment and trying to figure out how to really reach beyond the newshour's 5%, npr's 11% beyond the liberal white audience that a lot of people have criticized. we've been examining projects like the makers quest, the association of independence in radio. we're given money by cpbb in creating new media life forms, new public media cross-platform. one of those was the mapping

main street project. paula kerger mentioned they are the people who are on main street, not wall street but the main streets are not all the same. what it does it brings public media users, stakeholders, educators, community organizations in as content contributors to tell us about their main streets. there are more than 10,000 main streets across the country. so far we've got contributions and documentation of 700 plus. we got a ways to go but the platform is there. it's been very exciting to watch it grow. collaboration has been a signature topic here. we've been looking at not just collaboration across the sector and was kind of the closest peers and allies like pro-publica -- propublica and sometimes with risky partners who are experimenting with voices and approaches that represent different kinds of constituencies. finally, we've been working in

collaboration with npr and pbs to host the national public media camps. those are designed to bring national and local public media organizations into the room to brainstorm with developers, with community members, about new kinds of engagement projects and what's needed. so closing it off. how do we move to the perils of pauline. how do we untie public media from the railroad tracks. i'll skip promiscuity, for another day. i'd say not just innovation, not just new platforms, not just facebook and twitter but inclusion is going to be what takes public media into its next phase. >> okay. thank you, jessica. [applause] >> and next we're going to go to another forum of inclusion, and that's to talk about the public insight network which was started at minnesota public media and minnesota public radio

and american public media. and here to tell us about public insight network is its direct is linda phantom. >> thanks, barbara, and thanks, jessica. it's great to be here for many reasons. but one is that you hear all this wonderful work and collaboration and transformation and all of this and the public insight network basically enjoys the position of being kind of the connective tissue that's built into the many projects you've heard. and basically allows, you know, some of this collaboration to take place. my own background -- i have a deep background in newspapers, managing small weeklies in places like medicine bow and pine wyoming and doing public affairs and public reporting in salt lake city. and when i came to apm3.5 years ago it wasn't to escape the turmoil that was gripping newspapers and print media. it wasn't to live in a place

where the baseball season and winter overlap. [laughter] >> but it was because i saw in the public insight network this ability to just address some of the fundamental problems that actually are causing that turmoil and they've actually been building for a long time. and those problems have to do with trust and transparency and transformation as well. and i can say that after three years of working in public media and managing the public insight network and helping it mature and getting into the hands of some of the most imaginative journalists in the country, it is without a doubt is the most powerful platform to do serious collaborative journalism. i'm not sure that was what bill was aspiring to when he thought of the idea eight years ago. but he had built a company that was dedicated to principled journalism and he knew there were smart, thoughtful people all around us who have inside knowledge who can really keep us

relevant. and so he also knew that we could used technology to basically create the back-channels for all these sources to talk to our newsrooms. and to capture all that intelligence and knowledge in a searchable, sortable database or as i like to call it, a library. and we could make that accessible to reporters on deadline. so that's the genesis of the public insight network or p.i.n. as we call it. today we have more than 100,000 sources around the country, in every state. probably a few thousand outside of the country as well. and we have almost 50 newsrooms that are engaging in building this network collaboratively around the country and they range from things as small as the lens in new orleans to the bbc and "the washington post" and a number of other big market players. so think about that. that is truly transformative. i mean, i know reporters -- most reporters i know won't share the sources with the reporters sitting next to them and we've managed here to create comments where not only people are sharing sources they're doing so sometimes in the same market.

so some of the things that we've kind of learned is that p.i.n. is a mindset and not just a tool set. it's about going out and being very deliberative about reaching and inviting people and being inclusive. and we can be deliberative about diversity. so we go out and feed our network with people we know are underrepresented in news coverage and people who often we talk about but we don't talk to. we establish connections and we do it by building networks. through these collaborations and see that we've launched a project with the american library association just this week in which we're trying to find out what the information and needs are of communities through the lens of local libraries. and something else i want to end with is what we discovered is experience isn't ideological. so if we seek knowledge and opinions rather than opinion from people we can cross these kind of boundaries, political and otherwise, and we can engage with people who otherwise might not feel close to the media. so we move beyond the usual

suspects and the stereotypes and the sound bites. and we don't just query republicans and democrats about their politics, you know, we talk to them about autism and parenting and prisons and gas prices. and those are the things that inform the stories we choose to pursue. so i'll just end there and say that one of the joys of the public insight network i go into newsrooms and i hear a lot people have to do a lot more with less. and the public insight network is basically to do more with more. >> thank you. [applause] >> and our very last speaker is mark stencil for national public radio who is the managing editor of the digital enterprise of npr. and who is going to take us behind the curtain a little bit. tell us about some things about public media platform and some other things that npr is doing

digitally to try to share and ramp up the whole system. mark? >> thank you, barbara. and i just want to also mention on the public insight network that is something that some of our national reporters have tapped into as well. and it's a great example of what that kind of partnership and being able to share tools and collaborate that way is a great example of what is much easier to pull off in the public media sphere than it was when my job was making those kind of partnerships work in the for profit media sphere. you talked about looking behind the curtain, barbara. jessica just mentioned risky partnerships. you've heard my boss say that my job is promiscuity. [laughter] >> so i'm going to try to focus more on the g-rated term of sharing and particularly -- i mean, our focus at npr has been to a large degree sharing our

know how and sharing our content with our member stations and increasingly across the whole public media sphere. on the know-how front, that mostly takes the form in our digital services operation in boston, which was previously known as public interactive. and that's a part of npr that's entirely focused on sharing tools and best practices and all of our digital expertise with the stations, and that's -- it's a training mechanism. it's technology. and it's working in really interesting ways. and it's provided an outlet for us to go and engage stations sometimes very one-on-one for extended periods and talk about how to do online journalism well. one of the biggest challenges that we face in our online

journalism and that -- that we share with our stations is how do you stand out in a very crowded media sphere? and in our case, we try to do that with innovative multimedia, with photography, with our social media practices. our blogging, blogging has become a very efficient mechanism for us to do original reporting and get it to our audience. and you've heard about project argo earlier and project government, project and the blogging component of that, our digital services operations, also working with stations to create local news blogs. most of the station that is we work with are not swimming in resources. they need -- you know, they need an efficient way to get original journalism out in front of

people. that platform, blogging, is a great way to do that. it's not just what as bill kling described earlier, people reporting on what other people are reporting that other people are reporting. it's a great way to do and efficiently deliver great and original stuff. on the content side in terms of sharing that, we've had an open api that allows us to distribute our journalism -- >> say what an api is. >> the api is really a series of technologies that allow us to take the content that's in our digital warehouse and make that part of our station site. so if anything to the kqed home page or the wbur home page or other stations that are tapping into this api, they can make our journalism part of their journalism online. there's a means that we can take their journalism and redistribute it to other stations and use it ourselves. and through a cpb-funded venture

called the media platform we have ways to take a system like that and maybe apply it more broadly across the entire public media universe and we'll see where that leads. but the initial phase of that project is over. and there's some recommendations behind it. and now we'll see where that could take us. the interesting thing about that -- someone earlier talked about the possibility of, why don't you all get together and just -- why are there all these different public media outlets? well, this -- public media platform like the one that we've been talking about with our partners in crime is a means of doing that without losing what's unique and distinctive about each of the public media ventures as well as each of the stations that are in our system. and allows us to get the most use out of each other's work while also standing out and standing alone when we need to and want to. >> okay. thank you, mark.

[applause] >> i'm going to ask the people who are helping us with the microphones to take two of the microphones away. and we will now turn to you for your questions. so just raise your hand and someone will bring a microphone to you. there's a question right here. >> thank you. am i on? i'm sue goodwin and i work in national public radio and i produce "talk of the nation." i want to thank the missouri school of journalism. this has been really enjoyable. i got a bunch of ideas in my head. but what i want to ask the panelist is two questions. because when you talk about public radio, you think npr, pri, apm. when you talk public tv, you think pbs. but when you think -- when you say public media, digital, what

are the salient qualities that make that work? 'cause i think dick and joyce and paula and karen and bill and jim have all been wonderful at expressing what that means in the radio and tv format. but what makes public digital media public? and then i also want to expand on what mark brought up because how do you not get lost in the sea? and i don't want to put jacqui too much on the spot but i know you have been a lot of thought about creating just as npr and pbs came into existence. what is the vision of something that brings public media together so that it's branded in the way the public knows what it means. >> let's take the question about what -- what do we mean by public media as opposed to public broadcasting. and, you know, there's some people who think that the nonprofit websites like

propublica should be eligible for the money that goes to cpb. there are some people who think cpb should be cpm, corporate public media jessica, it would be great if you take that. >> part of the history of public broadcasting it wasn't always a coherent entity. it was started with a lot of small educational stations that were massed up into this thing that we're now all discussing. [laughter] >> and so part of what we've been trying to think about is what -- what's out there in the digital space that meets the criteria? and what is that criteria? and there's a ton of debate on this the way to define the center of social media. it's media for public action and mobilize people in their role as private citizens. it fills the market gap. this is not saying that only public media can do this but public media projects meet these goals of addressing people as citizens first, not consumers