📺 📻 What Does Public Media Look Like on the Internet?
We interviewed Erik Nikolaus Martin of Day One Project on the future of public service broadcasting.
It’s refreshing to meet a World of Warcraft enthusiast who is also a young digital citizen deeply committed to changing the future of public media. New_ Public was excited to speak with Erik Nikolaus Martin for this week’s newsletter about his intensive research of public media around the world. Just as the Public Broadcasting Service gave us the colorful world of Sesame Street, we can imagine public media developing new forms of content in our digital futures.
In a new report, Martin, a tech policy advisor under President Obama, surveys how public media is adapting to an era where “tech companies own many of the railways on which the rest of the media runs.”
Half century ago in the United States, public broadcasting was created “to serve the public interest…have a soul and a conscience, a burning desire to excel, as well as to sell; the urge to build the character, citizenship, and intellectual stature of people.” That mission remains as relevant as ever, but the shape of media has changed — and in the U.S., public radio and TV networks face regulatory barriers that slow adaptation. Meanwhile, Martin’s report, “Can public service broadcasting survive Silicon Valley?” finds that there is some innovation happening outside of the U.S., in countries like Canada and Sweden, where there is more government funding for public media.
Martin’s interest in what a pro social, digital world could look and feel like started in high school and college. Martin says playing World of Warcraft, a multiplayer online role-playing game, was a transformative, positive experience. He first came out as gay to friends he met in the platform, and then built a community in that platform that he still stays in touch with. As an adult working as a policy advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy with the Obama administration, he felt a real call to action when listening to the podcast The Pub by Adam Ragusea, highlighting public media’s most important thinkers. As Trump was elected, Martin was moved to start investigating a set of solutions to create a better public media world.
In Martin’s study published with the support of the Oxford Internet Institute, he found that the information environment and ecosystems that gave rise to the tech giants are not conducive to the long-term survival of public service broadcasters and their founding objectives. Key learnings that keep public service broadcasting in a holding pattern are:
Public service broadcaster uphold values of universality (being of service to many types of people, especially underrepresented communities) despite ethical tensions
A loss of direct audience access and relationships
The organizations are stretched impossibly thin and outspent by big tech by the billions
Public media can and should close these important gaps and we need to think structurally how to change that. Below is an edited and abbreviated version of our interview.
Q&A
New_ Public: Why do you care about public media?
Erik_ Nikolaus Martin: The media sector has entered this age of digital serfdom. There's the viral spread of racial hate, disinformation, abuse, and violence. We've been living with it for a long time and we've gotten used to it. We have these conversations about antitrust, privacy, and Section 230 regulations, but those conversations on their own, won't build the Internet we want. We need better models.
When you look at the tale of devastation, local news collapse, and a decade of flagging efforts to fix that, you can safely conclude that the local news crisis can't be fixed solely through commercial innovation. The problem is the market failure there. You need solutions that aren’t purely commercial.
Local news must be understood as a public good. Public media is the central model that you can look to: Media created for the public by the public with a set of public ethics and values. It represents a system that can be reimagined and extended to address those problems.
How would you describe public media successes and failures in adapting to digital media consumption?
I was encouraged by digital projects at NPR and the BBC. They're investing in public service algorithms and how they could create digital experiences that are not promoting raw user engagement. They don't have that bottom line motivation. They are trying to expose people to ideas that they otherwise wouldn't be exposed to, going against what they would be predicted to go and click on. You can open up NPR One, and it'll oscillate back and forth between national news and local news. It gives you the ability to donate directly to your local news provider.
NPR is trying to create this shared infrastructure where the whole public media system and even local news organizations can benefit from outside of public media. Even though NPR is one of the most well-resourced public media organizations in the U.S., they are not a commercial company. It's hard for them to have the technical talent to build stuff. So the negative is, I think public media system is still risk averse.
What are the big opportunities that you'd love to see public media seize?
In order to get the digital innovation and public service, the conversation around racial equity has to be front and center. If the goal is for public media to help build systems which resist and create an alternative to what we see in the commercial market, then it can't be built by more white guys dreaming up their ideal solutions. It has to be a much more inclusive approach to technology, programming, and leadership.
Tell us about the U.S. approach to public media and how it differs from other countries.
We spend far less than most liberal democracies on our public media system. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the U.S., its budget is like an order of magnitude smaller than the BBC. And the BBC is still less than more social democratic countries like Sweden and Germany. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has a budget of like 1.2 billion and its population is like 1/10th the size of ours.
The upside is, we do have benefits in a much more decentralized system where public media operates in virtually every local market across the U.S., providing local news services and educational content. Public media is declining and facing even steeper challenges now, especially at the local level. In a way, that's something that makes our system really special compared to other countries, we have this hugely distributed, localized system and it could be tremendously powerful if we treated it well.
How has the mission changed from inception to today?
There's still a lot in the mission that we're still trying to fulfill. You can look to issues on racial equity, for instance, where the original mission for the U.S. Public Broadcasting System was founded half a century ago. Part of the law said to create services that serve underrepresented minorities.
Yet, recently, 140 independent documentary newsmakers sent a letter to PBS, challenging the fact that they're still not doing enough to make sure that Black, Indigenous, people of color are at the helm, in terms of creating content. There’s an aspect of the mission we're still trying to fulfill.
Relatedly, it is a system that was built and imagined for radio and television. Corporate and public broadcasting is actually very restrained in how it can distribute funds. It distributes largely to TV and radio stations and that is not a healthy way to enter the Digital Age. I don't know if that is a change in the mission, but it is a change in the context. Public media is trying to meet that, but isn't there yet.
From past op-eds you have written, you have called for a change in how things are organized and designed, pushing for a Corporation for Public Software. There are some changes we can make culturally that would have major impact.
This speaks to the need for an affirmative vision the public can understand and buy into because if public media is going to have a future, it has to be a future the whole public finds exciting, inspiring, helpful, and valuable. For the digital age, that does require reconceptualizing.
What does public media mean? It may be uncomfortably different to the current institutions. As New_ Public points out, there is a lot of pro social, digital innovation happening. A lot of platforms are filling the gap, that historically public media filled in terms of social needs that the commercial sector doesn't address.
Once upon a time, public media was this incredibly aspirational set of projects: Why not go set up a non-commercial national network of news, education, and cultural media providers? It's a crazy thing to go do! There's a need to change the language. It's pro democracy and pro social. It's the Internet. We want people to buy into an ambitious vision again for what this could be.
What can people do from an individual basis? Are there new habits we create?
Donate to your local public media entity, because resources is a part of all of this.
There are interesting efforts like RadioPublic that was launched as a non-for-profit, public benefit corporation and was founded by some former public media professionals, but did not exist as a formal part of the public media ecosystem. I think more projects where people can claim the public media ethos for themselves, in the technology they are creating or the media they’re creating versus expecting an old institutional system to invent this entirely on its own.
Read Martin’s full report “Can public service broadcasting survive Silicon Valley?” Follow him here on Twitter.
How would you describe your work to your grandmother?
I told my Oma I was working on public policy to make democracy work better. She liked that!
In 10 years time, what will your work look like?
I hope it’s something ridiculous and fun and helpful. Or maybe we’ll have a new public media act by then, that would be good.
What newsletter is worth subscribing to?
Anne Helen Petersen’s “Culture Studies”.
If you were to publish a book on any topic, what would be the title?Somnambulocracy (probably doesn’t sell well).
Is there an online community that felt good to be a part of?
I miss my World of Warcraft guild. Felica Day’s 2007 web series “The Guild” captures the experience and that world around a world like nothing else.
If you could design a digital space, what would it look/feel like?
I wish there was a social network where instead of a “profile page” you could set up your own “secret hideout” page and decorate it and invite your friends to leave notes or little items, or have sub-chats there. I’ve always loved the secret hideouts you could find in games like WoW, especially when you might run into friends or rivals and strike up a conversation in the local chat.
What inspires you about the future of community?
There has been a ton of LGBTQ representation and community growth in gaming. Gaming is such a playful medium, and the LGTBQ community is an extremely fun and playful community. I think there’s tons of magical stuff to come.
Whose work do you find inspiring on building better communities online?
Natalie Wynn / ContraPoints. She does a wonderful job checking people’s assumptions in a thoughtful, low-key, ice-cool way.
Big Bird and PBS’s Far-Reaching Influence
Grateful for Sesame Street,
The New_ Public team
Illustrations by Josh Kramer
Civic Signals is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America.