Doc Searls's Blog, page 6

The Eagle in the Coal Mine

 

Public broadcasting is the strongest form of broadcasting that’s still left. One reason is that it’s the only form of broadcasting for which its consumers are also its customers. Yes, not all those customers pay, but the market is there. If you donate to public radio or television stations, or to podcasts supported by subscriptions, you are paying for goods and services. You are customers in an open marketplace.

But broadcasting itself is an anachronism. For radio, listening is moving from radios to phones* pads, and smart speakers. For television, viewing is moving from antennas and cable to Internet streams. Even the PBS app on your streaming box requires that you first pay your public TV station. (Because PBS wholesales its programs to stations, which in turn retail their programming  to you.)

It’s a matter of time before AM and even FM radio are gone from cars, because every station has a worldwide coverage footprint over the cellular data system, making stations’ over-the-air coverage obsolete. Never mind that there are rural areas not reached by cell. If you want radio in those places, the satellite kind (SiriusXM in the US and Canada) will work, even though there is no local programming.

Also, most stations are now just ways to route programs. Few midmarket and smaller market stations are still programmed locally, or still employ local talent other than in clerical and ad sales positions. Local and regional public radio stations still tend to be staffed, but are still in the business of programming more than distribution. The primary listening devices now are apps on phones, not radios (except in cars, where the AM/FM/satellite radio tuners are increasingly buried behind other functions on dashboards).

There are going to be some big victims. Rural public radio in Alaska (for many locales, the only kind of radio), for example, just got clobbered by the end of CPB funding, which was its major source of income. But listeners can still pay to keep the stations going. That’s why I wrote If you like public broadcasting, be customers, not just consumers. Read it again, if you haven’t already.

And then, if you really care, help develop EmaniPay, which will make it much easier for consumers to become customers.

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*Even in cars, through CarPlay and Android Auto. In Teslas, the equivalent happens without a phone.

From Dates to Tweets

For the past few weeks I've been writing the blog mostly in Wordland, which is awesome. I'll still keep doing that (such as right now). But I'm hitting the pause button on combining a day's postings under title that's a date.

I went with dates-as-headlines because it most closely resembled the way I wrote on my original blog, which is archived here. Note that most of the posts under each date were short, kind of like a tweet. Each also had a short snarky headline that worked as the punchline for the post. (A trick I learned form Esquire's Dubious Achievement Awards, which, alas, are all paywalled).  For example, Further proof of life after birth was the headline of my last post before I turned 60.

I sorta replicated that approach here by putting a boldfaced one-liner at the start of each post under a date headline. That worked for readers (meaning it looked good), but a problem showed up when I looked back through posts in my WordPress dashboard: All I could see were dates. I couldn't see the leading lines (sub-headlines of a sort) of each post under the date headline, because those sub-headlines were buried in text. I needed clues in the form of posts' headlines.

So now I'm leaving the dateline up to WordPress and writing headlines anew for each short post.

Thursday, 17 July 2025

It's Pop's birthday. Were he alive, he'd be 117 years old. Here is the collection of photos from his life (starting with ancestors) that I posted on his 100th birthday.

If you like public broadcasting, be customers, not just consumers

My log of listening to public radio in 2010. This was a project for getting listeners to know exactly what they listened to, and then to distribute payments on a pro rata basis, and do it easily. More about it below.

Public broadcasting has three markets:

Listeners and viewers.Philanthropies (wealthy individuals and foundations).Government agencies (primarily the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB).

I saw the writing on the wall for  #3 in 2010. (Actually much earlier, but that’s the oldest link I could find.) It has been clear for decades that Republicans have no appetite for public broadcasting and would throw up on it as soon as they had the chance. Now here we are.

The good thing for public broadcasting is that it still has #1.

That its consumers are also its customers is a huge advantage over commercial over-the-air broadcasting, which entirely serves the advertising market. (Meaning that’s what pays for it.)  But, there are problems.

First, over-the-air broadcasting is in decline, as listening shifts from live radio to podcasts and music streams, while TV shifts from over-the-air and cable (now together called “linear”) to paid on-demand streaming (now increasingly subsidised by advertising as well).

Second, public broadcasting’s alpha brands—NPR and PBS—sell their goods to stations, not to listeners and viewers. This puts them a degree of remove from market demand.

Third, like many on the political left, they don’t understand business.  Yes, they cover it. But if they really got business, they would know that their primary market is their listeners and viewers, who pay for the service. Yes, it’s volunteered payment, but it’s still money-for-goods, meaning business. There are better approaches to getting that business than begging constantly for contributions and calling everybody who contributes a member. (Not that having members is a bad thing. It just shouldn’t be the only thing.) More about this below.

Fourth, there are audience issues. The PBS audience is barbell-shaped: heaviest with the very old and the very young. NPR’s audience is middle-aged and up. It also leans toward the intelligentsia. Joe Colombe made Trader Joe’s a thing by aiming its stores toward what he called “the over-educated and underpaid.” At the heart of that were academic folk: people who worked in education or were just well-educated. This is why NPR is kind of the Trader Joe’s of broadcasting. Betcha most Trader Joe’s customers are Democrats too.

In Parliament of Whores, P.J. O’Roarke says, “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.” And right now they’re proving it by laying waste to everything that Democrats love, such as NPR and PBS. Here’s the White House’s bill of particulars against all three.

Never mind that the administration’s favored media, which I’ve been calling redstream, is as steeply biased as a cliff. But the White house does have a case. But that case isn’t really the one in their list. It’s what Matt Taibbi says in his latest newsletter (half-hidden behind a teasewall):

 The quintessential PBS show was informative and quirky without pulling ideological threads, even if its Masterpiece roster sometimes over-scratched the upscale viewer’s costume-drama itch. From nature shows to comedy to documentaries, PBS was a sound counterweight to the boobs-and-car-chase lineups on commercial TV, providing the most remote communities with quality programming.

It should have run forever. National Public Radio ruined the enterprise, turning the country’s signature public news shows into an endless partisan therapy session, a Nine Perfect Strangers retreat for high-income audiences micro-dosing on Marx and Kendi. Forget conservatives, NPR’s trademark half-whispered stylings linking diets to rape culture or denouncing white teeth as a hangover of colonialism began in recent years to feel like physical punishment to the most apolitical listeners, like having a blind librarian hacksaw your forehead. Even today’s New York Times piece couldn’t argue the bias issue, instead offering a mathematical deflection:

Matt’s paywall appears after that colon, but he’s talking about This Is Why America Needs Public Media, by the editorial board. (Also behind a paywall, but I subscribe, so I can see it.) Here are the money grafs:

The cut would also hasten the decline of America’s once robust media ecosystem. The number of local journalists has declined by 75 percent since 2002, and a third of American counties don’t have a single full-time local journalist, a study last week found. The United States spends less per person on public media than other wealthy countries, but even that limited funding has helped make public radio a resilient part of local news. To abandon it would be to accelerate a dangerous trend straining civic health.

Republicans complain, not always wrongly, that public media reflects left-leaning assumptions and biases. And they can fairly tell NPR and PBS to do a better job of reflecting the citizenry that is subsidizing them. Yet the “national” part of NPR (or National Public Radio, as it used to call itself) that chafes conservatives may well be just fine without federal funds. Only about 2 percent of its budget comes directly from the federal government, and it may have an easier time raising money from its many dedicated listeners if Congress punishes it.

A funding cutoff would damage valuable services that have little to do with ideology. Broadcasting local government meetings, as some public radio stations do, is neither liberal nor conservative. The same is true about public television shows like “Sesame Street” that help teach young children how to read and count. Local affiliates largely cover community and state issues that do not neatly fit national left-right divides, and they would suffer most. That’s one reason a number of conservative Republicans, such as Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, warn of the bill’s impact.

What they don’t mention is that small-market radio gets clobbered most, because they get much or most of their funding from the CPB. Links:

How Trump public broadcasting cuts could hit rural America — BBCIs Congress About to Kill This Local Radio Station? Cuts to public media could have the deepest impact in red, rural and Republican America. — The Daily, by the NY Times.Prairie Public expects ‘significant hit’ from federal cuts to PBS, NPR — Alaska Beacon
Opinion: For rural Alaska, public media isn’t a luxury — it’s a lifeline — Anchorage Daily News‘People will be less safe’: How public media funding cuts could hurt Kentucky — Louisville Courier JournalHow public broadcasting funding cuts would impact one rural Indiana station — NPR, via KNPR

So. What to do?

Well, philantropies and wealthy Democrats will probably take up some of the slack. But how about listeners? I think they can. Here’s why.

Back in public radio’s heyday, before the Age of Podcasts, when I would speak to a room full of people in a college town such as Cambridge or Santa Barbara, I would sometimes ask the room, “How many here listen to public radio?” Nearly every hand would go up. Then I’d ask, “How many of you pay for it?” About 10% stayed up. Then I’d ask, “How many of you would pay for it if paying was easy? The number would double, to about 20%. Then I’d ask, “How many of you would give more if they didn’t turn off programming twice a year to beg for funding?” Even more hands would go up.

So there’s a larger market here. This is one reason why, back in 2006, when I started as a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center, I launched ProjectVRM, I saw public radio as a vendor with which listeners could better relate as customers. Toward that goal, my first move was convening a bunch of public radio folk in a conference room at Harvard to talk about better approaches to funding than the usual. One of the attendees was Keith Hopper, who worked at the time for one of the organizations serving public radio. Together, Keith and I came up with the idea later branded EmanciPay, which last year I called An Approach to Paying for Everything That’s Free. I lay out the case for it there.

I should add that we had a trial run with a software project called ListenLog, which was a feature added to a phone app from PRX called the Public Radio Player. The idea was to show listeners what they actually listened to, and to provide an easy way for listeners to pay for the goods on a pro rata basis. At the top of this post is my log of listening while the project was active and funded, in 2010. It was waaay ahead of its time.

One problem back then, and still today, was that stations were all friendly with each other but not cooperative. Would they be willing to split a pie twice the size of the one they had? Not really. Or not yet.

It won’t be hard, however, to build a system today that does the same for all the media we consume, to do it privately, and to get EmanciPay on the road. Anyone wanna fund it?

Bonus link.

Wednesday, 16 July 2025

Want a weather show? Look at this:

A view of a weather front moving across Indiana, from Windy, which for me is currently the best weather app + website.I’m at the blue dot in a circle.

Bet it’s about liability and arbitration. T-Mobile just texted me this: T-Mobile: We’ve updated our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Notices. Get the details and learn about your options in the Privacy Dashboard at secure.t-mobile.com/terms I can’t log on, and doing the password reset thing is a PITA, so I won’t bother.

Maybe I’ll remember to take it later. My brain will be 78 in a few weeks, so this story is interesting and scary. While I think I’m doing pretty well for my age (or hell, any age), the MindCrowd memory test mentioned in that piece looks scary.

Anyone else getting these? Just got this text from a number in the Phillipines (+63) : “Your Coinbase withdrawal code is: [six digits]. Please do not share this code with anyone. If you have not requested this, please call: [a (216) number] REF: [five digit code].” I hold no cryptocurrency and am not a Coinbase customer. But if I was, I’d be easier to scam. (Though that originating number is a giveaway.)

Tuesday, 15 July 2025

When companies take delivery, the results will be huge. The Cluetrain Will Run from Customers to Companies is about making The Cluetrain Manifesto come true 26 years after it was posted.

Redraw your own conclusions. Just one air travel adventure.

Cable is toast. And free TV from an antenna is crumbs. Nearly half of all TV watching is to streams. And Netflix counts for 42% of the gains. “Ginny & Georgia” led the way.

And how will you dispute it if the AI is wrong? Ding your rental car from Hertz and an AI thing will notice.

It’s okay if you fail. A short course on what happened to over-the-air TV channels over time.

It’s one of 23 others I’ve put up so far. My shot of the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant by the shores of Los Angeles, now has four faves. Took it outbound from LAX.

Your new help desk. This morning on a podcast, I heard an otherwise smart guy say that AI is overrated, adding something like “Okay, maybe it’s good for helping you write code.” This ignores all the practical things an LLM can do for Muggles as well. For example, today I used ChatGPT to diagnose and suggest a fix to a Finder problem in macOS (specifically, the Desktop folder kept disappearing from the Favorites collection in the Finder sidebar). For a second opinion, I asked Gemini the same question. Both gave great help. A few days ago, ChatGPT performed a similar service, which I described in Education 3.0. The answer, btw, was to throw away com.apple.finder.plist from ~/Library/Preferences/, and then to restart the Finder.

Monday 14 July 2025

Nor did I. And mine is #5. Did you know there were 20 top identity podcasts?

Anyone listening? Q: How far has our first radio broadcast spread into space? A: Eighty-nine light years.

Saturday, 12 July 2025

I just bought two. The Intention Economy, which lists at $27 and has been sold at that price or close to it by Amazon since the book came out, is now just $13.93 for the hardcover. That's cheaper than the Kindle edition (also discounted) and the audio version (with my own voice, btw).

Coerced Consent. The Dishonesty of Our 'Informed Consent' Rituals, by Matt Bivins, M.D., unpacks one more shitty thing we'll need to unfuck after the Great Insanity abates.

And now roosting on the roof of Netflix. We need to stop believing that companies that service and spy on us—even those  to which we give conscious permission to observe everything we do—"know us better than we know ourselves." They don't. None of us are that simple or predictable. Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then. I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes.
I bring this up because we got off Netflix a few years ago because it assumed I was Spanish, and the staff there couldn't correct the error, even after a long conversation with their tech support team. Seriously. They were that f'd up. But then we got back on a few months ago, paying the full $25+ per month to avoid the ads. Before we could begin watching, the preference engine that greets new customers "helped"  by forcing me to select three movies that I liked from a long table of movie names and poster thumbnails. While I have seen a zillion movies in my life, I hadn't seen any of these. So I picked three anyway because I had to. Since then we've watched a bunch of movies, and ALL the movies Netflix recommends are ones we probably won't bother to see.

I bring all this up because this morning Netflix sent me an email promoting Live Event. Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano 3. I never watch fights. They turn me off. Maybe it's sexist of me to especially dislike fights between women, but I do. Color me old. Whitman again:
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me.
He complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Friday, 11 July 2025

And the republic is still lost. Sad to learn that David Gergen has passed. I met him briefly when he came to Harvard Law School for a conversation in Austin Hall's Ames Courtroom with Larry Lessig on the topic of Larry's new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It. Gergen was an insightful, funny, and gracious dude. Also a lot taller than I had expected. Here is an album of photos I shot at the event.

Thursday, 10 July, 2025

Re-see what you think. Formal education has been stuck inside an industrial paradigm ever since industry won the industrial revolution. Let's call that Education 2.0. The pre-industrial model was Education 1.0. Digital tech, especially with AI, will bring on Education 3.0. That's the title of my post yesterday, which is getting more than the normal number of visits. I think the topic could hardly be more important, so I'm urging folks to check it out. In brief, my argument is that Education 3.0 will retrieve much of what made Education 1.0 work, and that will beat the shit out of what we got from Education 2.0, which more obsolesced than ever in a world where learning and teaching are both becoming ever more reliant on AI.