aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, March 10, 2008

NPR changes: further thoughts

Reading more over the weekend I’ve had some less pessimistic thoughts on the future of NPR in the wake of Ken Stern’s leaving.

Dennis Haarsager, the interim CEO, posted a message on his personal blog yesterday:

I’m not going to comment on the reasons for this change except to say they were multivariate and that much of what’s been speculated about this is dead wrong.  Rather, I’d like to continue on the themes I’ve raised in this blog in the past because I think they inform the future.  I invite the curious reader to visit John Proffitt’s excellent list of articles and posts on the subject of this management change.  This is not a coup by Luddite station CEOs who want to stop or slow down effective responses to very types of disruptive change we’ve been trying to strategically accommodate.  NPR can’t and won’t do that.

Sure there is a diversity of opinion about disruptive change within public broadcasting.  A small number of people feel that spending a dollar on emerging media is taking it away from core functions. Another small number of professionals feel that the legacy media are doomed (see, e.g., Jeff Jarvis’s post). Of most concern, though, is that the largest number of people have no position on this at all because they’re “up to their asses in alligators” just trying to make this year’s budget come out right. There is no organized opposition, especially at the station management level, to investments in emerging media. 

In comments we learn that “Stern chose the time and day when he left the building...no malfeasance or misfeasance should be imputed” and that “Arguably, transparency is an important ideal; his privacy is a right.” The whole post is a calming salve.

Significantly, it includes this graphic to describe the very different world that public media managers now face. As Gordon Borrell says, “The deer now have guns.”

LATER: Must listening - Dennis Haarsager with Stephen Hill, Steve Gillmor (the host), and Doc Searls on this NewsGang podcast.