Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 4 | ideastream: The New Public Media

A short walk from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and not far from “The Jake,” home of the Cleveland Indians, there’s a curious 95-year-old seven-story building—originally a fashionable furniture showroom—which, recently renovated, is the home of ideastream, a re-invention of public broadcasting that is generating a digital pulse of media excitement in the surrounding communities while, nationally, attracting curiosity and some downright envious stares.

An engagingly open structure, with more than 80 feet of windows on the avenue enticing passersby to peer in on live broadcast operations and dance studio rehearsals, the building is the physical manifestation of an elegantly simple concept. This is the vision of two media veterans who placed the mission ahead of all other interests to create an organization whose work is rippling outward into the education community, rejuvenating real estate development, bringing at least a thousand jobs to downtown, increasing public access to government and the arts, providing a center for performing artists to train and exchange ideas, giving rise to a hip tech neighborhood and convening public debate about American ideals.

And those are just the bonuses, the add-on benefits. Originally, when this all began about 10 years ago, the goal was to define a sustaining purpose for public broadcasting in Cleveland. The underlying concept was to merge the resources of public television and public radio. And then things kept percolating. By most accounts, ideastream has not only succeeded in defining a sustaining purpose for public broadcasting in Cleveland, but also demonstrated enduring potential as a hybrid: public media.

Along the way, ideastream’s founders struck upon what more than a few leaders in the industry see as one of the most robust models for the future: A multiple media public service organization operating on broadband and built on two critical principles: 1) a commitment to the mission of “strengthening our communities,” which is realized by 2) placing the values of partnership ahead of any desire for control.

If this sounds simple, it isn’t. Even if you are deeply versed in the pervasive challenges facing public radio and public television, there is likely to be an “Aha!” moment as you come to understand that Jerry Wareham and Kit Jensen—respectively, the CEO and COO of idea-
stream—have established a raison d’etre for public television and public radio that transcends traditional notions of broadcast and simultaneously offers a model that could, in time, remedy what some have called “the flawed business model” of public broadcasting.

Wareham, formerly CEO of television station WVIZ, acknowledges that his “midwestern modesty” is an essential asset, keeping ideastream’s partnerships free of control issues and, yet, it is also a quality that innately limits his ability to openly tout the accomplishments he has realized in concert with Jensen. He is the genial host and deal maker, she is the firewall and executor of planning.

Jensen, the former CEO at radio station WCPN, is a serious woman who chooses her words carefully and whose frontier, can-do spirit (she spent nearly 20 years in Alaska, building the state’s first National Public Radio station, which for years broadcast the only statewide news content) has been instrumental in shaping ideastream. Jensen recalls arriving in Alaska in 1968 as a period ripe with potential, a time when the federal government was anxious to see Alaska’s social, cultural and economic infrastructure developed in support of the oil pipeline to Prudhoe Bay. But she says it took “intentionality” to make the government’s interests dovetail with the community’s need for honest, broadcast information.

“I had this incredible opportunity to be there and be part of it, so my background is predisposed to possibilities and a little broader view of what broadcast could be and mean to a community,” she says. “It was an exciting, and heady time.”

She speaks similarly of her work with Wareham in creating ideastream and later overseeing the renovations of the building at 1375 Euclid Avenue, now known as the Idea Center. Though Jensen sees the development of idea-stream as mostly the product of “really hard work,” she also says, “I think a lot of it is making your own luck. Seeing things as they might be and asking: Why not? I think it’s a matter of will, willing it to be and using every asset you can find to bring it about.”

Initially, what Wareham and Jensen sought to accomplish, the merger of WVIZ and WCPN, was by itself no small management task. While each organization had outgrown its facilities and recognized the benefits of convergence, both in terms of technology and reducing costs through shared infrastructure and operations, they faced an uphill struggle in making their boards and staffs understand the value of surrendering separate, time-tested identities as traditional programmers and broadcasters to become a single, multiple-media public service organization.

And, as they began to wrap their minds around the challenges inherent in such a merger, the tougher, bedrock issues emerged: lingering 20th century questions facing public broadcasting, made more critical by the digital era’s costly rules of engagement:

Is public television still relevant in an era when 90 percent of American households are wired to receive 500 television channels, which in many cases deliver the type of content formerly available only from the Public Broadcasting System (PBS)?

How are PBS, NPR, their affiliates and sister organizations to produce competitive, quality programming when the business model for financing public broadcasting—dependence upon the whims of federal, corporate and philanthropic sponsors, supplemented by mind-numbing on-air fund drives—is showing signs of new structural defects and losses in audience?

The answer, in Cleveland, was to create a multiple-media center that is not only about more or better-targeted programming but also about becoming a resource for community interaction, providing a variety of traditional broadcast and extraordinary broadband-related services.

David Giovannoni, whose market analysis of public radio over the past 20 years is widely credited with shaping today’s success at NPR, insists that it’s a mistake to lump radio and television together. They are separate entities with their own strengths and failures. “There is no such thing as ‘public broadcasting,’” he says. “There is public radio and there is public television, and then, arguably, there is something you could call public media.”

From the consumer’s perspective the merger is seamless. WCPN is still public radio and WVIZ is still public television. Morning Edition is there when folks awake and All Things Considered brings them home at night; Sesame Street inspires children’s learning and The NewsHour informs adults’ ideas. But when you talk to those who have worked with ideastream, they will tell you, again and again, that together, the two stations are doing much more than they could ever have done separately to serve their communities.

The media and technology here runs the gamut: obviously there is television and radio and, certainly, Internet, but also broadband delivering on-demand, digitally stored lesson plans, live accounts from the state legislature and the state supreme court, hi-tech classrooms to help educators learn cutting-edge software to engage their students and a truly stunning state-of-the-art theater adaptable for live performance and/or broadcast. They have done away with separate TV and radio staffs; there is no “newsroom.” Instead, they have merged into a single “content staff,” charged with finding new ways to embrace and engage various communities—defined with a broad brush as regions, ethnic groups, political interests, technologies, educators, health matters, families, children, religions, and so on—with a digital presence. That’s how you compete and remain relevant in a 500-channel environment.

Think of ideastream as a digital community center or a virtual YMCA, seeking to draw together the resources of “heritage institutions”(museums, theaters, colleges, libraries, medical centers, government agencies, etc.) and make them digitally available on-demand to patrons, clients and students. For these and other services they develop, ideastream and its partners receive grants or are paid an operating fee by school districts, government agencies or philanthropies. This is still a not-for-profit organization, but one financed, sometimes directly, by the communities it serves. They call it a “sustainable service model.” Skeptics have called
it “pay to play.”

Ideastream is certainly not the only PBS or NPR affiliate attempting these kinds of initiatives. Wareham and Jensen rattle off the call letters of many affiliates in cities large and small that have inspired, influenced and informed ideastream’s efforts. Many of the 355 PBS and 860 NPR stations are examining the benefits of mergers or partnerships, experimenting with new media, working with new ways to produce and distribute content, and becoming more interactive with their communities. Yet ideastream, for now, seems to be ahead of the crowd.

“What Jerry and Kit are doing in Cleveland may well be the model for what other stations should be doing,” says David Liroff, a widely recognized visionary of public media. “And they are not alone in this. They just have focused more clearly as a locus and catalyst and convener of civic discussion. And what is truly radical about them is that they mark such a departure from the traditional expectations of what the traditional public television and public radio model should be.”

Next page: There seems little doubt that the original lofty goals set out for public broadcasting remain deeply woven into the character of the organization and the aspirations of its leaders.

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