Public Media Conference February 16, 2009

The sixth Public Media Conference takes place in a period of accelerating media transformation.

* Online video is exploding, although no one has figured out how to "monitize it" effectively. Daily usage of online video rose by 56 percent over the last year. (Frank Magid Associates research report, June 2009). At the same time, Current, the public broadcasting newspaper tells us: "[P]ublic TV ratings have dropped 37 percent in the past decade, from 1.9 in 1998-99 to 1.2 in 2007-08. The biggest factor is a surge in audience fragmentation."

* Newspapers are facing a near perfect storm: loss of readership, loss of critical ad revenue, competition from new media. The Chicago Tribune Company is in bankruptcy. The Detroit Free Press will stop sending subscriptions to homes--and instead offer a virtual facsimile of a newspaper online because online newspaper readership is rising at twice the rate of the general internet audience (according to research by Nielsen//NetRatings for the Newspaper Association of America.)

* While radio listening remained fairly stable--and public radio continues to be remarkably competitive--commercial radio is sagging from a poor ad sales, a lack of creative offers and savage competition from downloads, iPods and other forms of "personal media."

* And, of course, American itself is changing. The Boomers who dominated its culture since the mid-60's are being pushed aside by a variety of cohorts, including a new generation of "digital natives." The election of Barack Obama has been interpreted as symbolic of a change in the self-image of America: This new America is more "multi-medial" and multi-cultural. Meanwhle public broadcasting, to be honest, is struggling to reflect this shift in media use and audience diversity.

Official Website: http://tinyurl.com/pbh8j