Pubmedia chat tries Twitter next week
Public media advocates are experimenting with a new kind of forum: holding a live simultaneous chat using Twitter, the microblogging social network. The first chat is scheduled for Monday, Feb. 15, 2010, at 8 p.m. Eastern.
To prepare, organizers are soliciting ideas for discussion via Twitter. Interested people can tweet their suggestions using the hashtag #pubmedia (and read others’ ideas by searching for #pubmedia). To participate, follow @pubmedia for regular updates and to join the Feb. 15 chat.
For the Twitter-averse, there are alternative channels: the blog PubMediaChat.org has a feed of the Twitter posts, takes comments and lets users subscribe to updates via e-mail or an RSS feed.
The idea of a live discussion via Twitter was inspired by a forum for journalists, bloggers and public relations professionals (#journchat) that launched in December. Participants will reply to the questions posed by moderators, who will “retweet” the best responses, according to John Proffitt, an Alaska-based public media blogger and pubcasting consultant, one of five hosts.
The others are Jessica Clark of American University’s Center for Social Media, PBS’s Jonathan Coffman, Katie Kemple of Public Media’s Economy Story, and Adam Schweigert of WFIU-FM/TV, Bloomington, Ind.
“Personally, I want to see the formation of a community that promotes and supports the great work being done by a tiny portion of the public media community,” wrote Proffitt, who was appointed director of digital engagement at KETC in St. Louis earlier this week. Proffitt cited a recent presentation in which PRX Executive Director Jake Shapiro noted that about 18,000 people work in public broadcasting, but only about 100 are programmers of any notable skill level. “If we think the future is significantly online in nature, why would we expect far less than 1 percent of our workforce (and even less of our funding) to get the job done?” he wrote.
Correction
An estimate of total employment in public media cited in Current Feb. 8 may have been high. In an advance article about an upcoming live PubMediaChat, one of the organizers, John Proffitt said the number is roughly 40,000, but he later told Current he was “way wrong.” (The figure is corrected above.) Proffitt found his source, PRX chief Jake Shapiro had cited a figure of 18,000 in a presentation last fall.
Proffitt apologizes for “a major slip” on the numbers but believes his point was still valid: Whether the workforce is 40,000 or 18,000, the field employs only about 100 hard-core computer programmers — also an estimate from Shapiro. That’s still only about half of 1 percent — “a dramatic underfunding of the next generation of public media.” Proffitt says. “That can't be good if you believe broadband technologies are important to public media's future.”
Web page posted Feb. 12, 2010
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