Public Media InnovationInvesting in the future of public broadcasting online

Welcome to the Public Media Innovation Project

The Public Media Innovation (PMI) fund is about experiments, learning, and change. 

PMI is a small risk-capital fund established by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to support station-based online service experiments.  As the projects unfolds, the PMI staff monitor the investments and work with stations to identify progress, problems and lessons learned.  Ultimately, the PMI fund is intended to accelerate the use of new media as part of the changing world of public media.   


Need help? See our F.A.Q. page.

Want to know which projects received grants? Check out Funded Projects.

Don't know what PMI is all about? Visit the About the Program page.

PMI Program Updates

Tuesday, Oct. 20th, 2009

KAXE embarked on one of the most ambitious—and, to our eye, visionary— efforts in the PMI series.  Stimulated by discussions taking place within the "new journalism" group, Media Giraffe, they began to imagine the future of community media as "a web operation that owned a radio station."  

To test that vision, they began the development of Northern Community Internet, which would provide hyper-local news content to more than a dozen community in northern Minnesota.  The Internet service was supported by administration and production at KAXE, but in many ways it was branded as an independent media operation, providing basic local services including news, blogs, classifieds and display ads. 

The sales staff at KAXE was asked to support the project by multi-media packages that would include radio and web; the organizers also aimed at develop a type of user gift/membership program that was specifically tied to the development of local story ideas.
After a year of work, they have made modest progress, below their expectations, especially in terms of financial gains.
Nonetheless, they ended the initial phase of the project determined to continue.  Here are the Conclusions and Lessons Learned and Next Steps:

Conclusions

  •  A full test would require a much larger investment over a longer period of time.   Six month time frame of this test was not long enough to build the audience and credibility needed to attract large amounts of financial support.

  • The results were sufficiently encouraging.   We believe that this model could be self-sustaining.   We may need to choose a different strategy—focusing on fewer communities.

  • There is interest on the part of the journalists in keeping the project going, but we don't have resources to maintain the relationships. 

Lessons Learned

  •  You have to design the site to display on fresh content. Its not enough to have fresh content, you have to design the site to reflect that.

  • Journalism is one element of a community site.  You need other content and activity. Note: 10% of the visitors went deeper into the community supported journalism section.

  • It takes more than six months to establish a readership/reputation for a community web site.  We never found “the story” to establish a site as a go-to news and information destination.

  • "Support Us” links did not generate contributors.  Actual donors had some other, more personal connection/pitch.  We tried both large display buttons and included specific appeal at the end of each story.  

  • Include underwriting staff in the planning. Why? When underwriting staff  joined the process, it was apparent that we  couldn't pitch just the “idea” of the web site. 

  • Social media promotion is important.  Stories that got the most readers were the ones that went “viral” in a small way with links on Facebook and passed on through links in email.

  • Many professional writers are not used to writing for the web.  In particular: If you want to include links to relevant resources in stories, you need to explicitly require, plan for it or train the writers to include it.

  • We had difficulty in translating some of the print stories to interesting radio.  Most of the radio stories were interviews with the editor about the stories on the website.  

 Follow-up

  •   We are considering creating a local news bureau that would share coverage of local stories with a variety of media.

  •  We have started producing grants that could support this effort, including the community journalism effort.

 

 

SLIDES FROM MARY'S WEBINAR:  Slides from Northern Community Interent ppt 

 

 


Tuesday, Oct. 20th, 2009

Round Four of the PMI Fund focused on funding educationally-oriented projects that support public broadcasting's role to increase economic and financial literacy. Investments were placed in new media educational tools, applications and content aimed at helping students — both adults and children — , teachers and parents understand and cope with the current economic crisis.

 

The total funds available for this round was $205,000.

 

Funded projects are:

 

* KQED/San Francisco - "Financial Literacy in the ESL Classroom"

* WPSU/University Park PA - "Responding to the Job Crisis"

* Maryland Public Television (MPT) - "SCOPE (Students Create Original Projects to Educate"

* KNBA/Anchorage - "What's Going on in Alaska?"

* Wisconsin Education Communications Board - "Financial Literacy: PARENT IT"

* KUEN/Salt Lake City - "Financial Media for Utah Teachers"

* North Country Public Radio/Canton NY - "Common Wealth, Common Wisdom" 

 

 Grantee  Project  On-line Information  Report
 KQED Financial Literacy in the ESL Classroom will create a media-rich on-line financial literacy curriculum for ESL (English as a second language) educators and their adult students via repurposing existing tools, content, etc. from the public media system and enhancing these with structured lesson plans.  http://www.kqed.org/  
 WPSU Responding to the Job Crisis will develop a web-centric, map-driven educational resource to help users in central Pennsylvaniaq understand and respond to the job crisis in their communities.   http://www.wpsu.org/  
 MPT SCOPE (Students Create Original Projects to Educate) will help local school districts enhance and support the existing financial literacy curriculum by having high school students create on-line games and other digital media that will be used to teach younger students about key financial concepts.     
 KNBA What's Going on in Alaska? will create, publicize and deliver a radio and web series on the current economic crisis, its efects in Alaska and basic economic and financial concepts to help build economic and financial literacy in the south-central Alaska community with emphasis on Alaska's native American population.    
 Wisc ECB Financial Literacy: PARENT IT will add a parent component to ECB's current teacher development personal financial literacy project by providing a wide range of on-line support materials and short videos that use model parent-child conversations to show parents how to talk to kids about key financial issues.    
 KUEN Financial Media for Utah Teachers will create a multi-media K-12 financial education web-site, a week long series of financial and economic broadcast programs and a web-based teacher development program to help meet the state's newly mandated financial education standards.    
 NCPR Common Wealth, Common Wisdom will enable a group of local teenagers to work with community "elders" who lived through the Great Depression to capture their key experiences and lessons learned from that era. The project will share these experiences/learnings via a wide variety of multi-media and face-to-face presentations to build a "social space" where financial survival and entrepreneurial skills and stories can be shared across generations and economic strata.    

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