Back in April, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Kinsey Wilson and Jennifer Dunworth from the NPR Foundation to discuss the role that digital media plays at NPR. They were on the west coast for an annual NPR retreat that I’d participated in the previous year. I was especially interested in reconnecting with the NPR team because there had been some significant leadership changes in the last year including the addition of Kinsey as the VP of Digital Media and Vivian Schiller as CEO.

To be completely candid, I found the vision for digital media that I’d been presented with a year earlier to be somewhat lackluster. So, when I spoke with Kinsey I was excited to hear a fresh approach, which I’ll outline below. My issue with the previous vision was that it didn’t seem to start with NPR listeners. The broad stokes suggested that NPR had to compete directly with CNN and required the production multi-media content on that scale. The vision was so big that it was hard to connect with an actual strategy. Plus, the innovation I was seeing on the small scale didn’t connect either. For example, NPR’s early mobile distribution foray included setting up phone numbers with dialing menus that mobile users could use to access content. It offered a poor user experience, inconsistent with the use case (try to use it while driving!), and costly (my minutes!). At the end of the day though, my real concern was that such a vision would take NPR away from it’s core competence, producing great audio content, rather than building on it and extending it.

The new team’s approach is completely different and starts from the understanding that NPR needs to not only listen to it’s community for cues about how and where to innovate, but also to the thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology. It just so happens that the latter are concentrated in the Bay Area, so I suggested creating an event at which we could explore NPR’s digital future with this community. This was the beginning of the NPR Digital Think In, which is now scheduled to take place at frog design in San Francisco on October 9th.

NPR is a unique news organization that really doesn’t have many direct comps in the marketplace. And, even if there were comps, they wouldn’t have the kind of listenership that NPR offers. Just to put things in perspective, consider that Morning Edition has more listeners than most of the leading commercial options in that slot. So, NPR has LOTS of listeners and is a mass market service provide. Part of what makes NPR unique, however, is their organizational structure, which includes the NPR Foundation and member stations. The way it works is that stations raise money with on air fundraisers and use some of that revenue to pay for NPR membership station status. The NPR Foundation uses that income to coordinate the stations and syndicate content across the network. The board of the foundation includes people from the member stations, which means that any innovation that the foundation supports cannot come into conflict with the memnber stations’ revenue source. Herein lies one of the key barriers to innovation. And, here’ an overview of the event:

Historic changes in technology and the rapid growth in digital media have had a profoundly disruptive effect on journalism, calling into question the news media’s ability to fulfill its time-honored function as civic watchdog. Hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear of yet another major news organization cutting staff, curtailing coverage or closing its doors. As traditional news organizations struggle to adapt, new, non-traditional outlets are beginning to take their place.

As a not-for-profit with a distinct business model, National Public Radio has benefited from the disruption and seen its audience grow. Americans now spend more time with NPR than any other news source. But it’s hardly immune from the technological challenges of the era. And it’s clear that the rise of digital media will ultimately disrupt NPR’s business model as well. NPR has responded by recruiting digital leaders to serve the top of the organization, embarking on an unprecedented staff training program and overhauling its digital media strategy. It is poised to take further steps to ensure it remains a vital source of news on every platform.

With the Digital Think In, NPR is inviting thought leaders across a variety of disciplines to help public media envision the next stage of a digital media strategy. Hosted and facilitated by frog design, this one-day interactive workshop will explore alternative business models, news gathering opportunities and distribution outlets, as well as develop scenarios for NPR’s digital future.

If you’re interested in learning more about the event feel free to visit the social network for the event online. On the day of the event, this network will be abuzz with ideas and we’ll be watching closely for your input. You can also create an account right now and start the conversation!

A few days ago, I tweeted the following thought:

We went from mainframes to PCs and back through the cloud. Meanwhile, we’ve gone from local to global. How can we get back to local?

This tweet resulted in more direct responses than usual. Perhaps this is because it was a notably different than my usual stream of marketing 2.0 related links. That said, the question is very much about marketing 2.0. I see contemporary marketing orienting towards narrow casting more than broadcasting, and narrow casting can mean local casting in many circumstances. Obviously, it does not always mean local, but I’m particularly interested in the cases where it does because I believe this is the direction in which the pendulum is swinging.

In the context of computing, going back to the cloud doesn’t mean that we’ll go back to using dumb terminal devices, but it does mean that computing will be balanced between the cloud and our devices more evenly. Similarly, going back to local doesn’t mean that we won’t benefit from globalization, but it does mean that we need to develop a sustainable balance between global and local. Perhaps this re-balancing is foreshadowed in the search space where the top three search engines have been reporting an increasing amount of local search for the last several years. At this point local search accounts for upwards of 70% of all search.

Search has provided local businesses with an inexpensive means of getting in front of local customers in a way that allows them to compete with national and international brands. I tend to think about this trend in terms of food production because of my work with the beverage company Adina, where I was part of the startup team. I often struggled to reconcile the fair trade, sustainable, and organic product and positioning with the fact that our ingredients came from the around world and were ultimately shipped back around the world in liquid form.

Which brings us back to balance, because I feel its fine to enjoy wonderful food treats from around the world in moderation, if  they can be made in a sustainable way and sold at a premium price. On the other hand, I’d prefer to buy the majority of my food from local growers. And, I’m passionate about showing small and medium sized businesses how to use new technologies to connect with local customers. That said, and without getting into a long conversation about global versus local economics that I am not qualified to write, I’d just like to reiterate my tweet question, how do we get back to local and what role do marketers play in the process?