In its punk moment, public media must choose between the status quo and total reinvention

Our values could (should) make us punk, but our system-level, status-quo strategy undermines that. ... We are missing the window of opportunity to evolve in a way that maintains our values while building a 21st century public media.”

Chad Davis, chief innovation officer, Nebraska Public Media

It’s now been just over a year since public media was federally defunded (but not defeated). The defiance that materialized following that independence day was immediate, creative and lucrative. It also inspired reflection.

At the time, the phrase “PBS is Punk” cut through a cluttered zeitgeist and had a moment. One year later, PBS is punk in the way Ben & Jerry are hippies — well-intentioned, but compromised. Tony Moon’s inspired 1977 illustration in the ‘zine “Sideburns” (“This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band”) has yet to be met with a public media equivalent.

Our values could (should) make us punk, but our system-level, status-quo strategy undermines that. In the wake of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s (CPB) demise, the overwhelming financial support we received from our communities has largely been interpreted as a validation of that status quo. We are missing the window of opportunity to evolve in a way that maintains our values while building a 21st century public media. Outside of traditional “towers-and-transmitters” public media, the demise of CPB was a clarion call.

In the worlds of nonprofit media, journalism, academia and the arts, public media stakeholders are not turning a blind eye nor deaf ear to that call. Multiple times this year I’ve sat in on focus groups, webinars or conference breakout sessions where the topic of discussion was the future of public media. These opportunities for reflection, brainstorming and organizing are being created, supported and largely attended by external stakeholders. These are people who care very deeply about the existence of public media and what it means for the realities of their specific community. They are pointing their DIY (punk) energy at exploring what could (should) come next. These discussions have everything to do with architecting the future of public media, but traditional public media is poorly represented in these rooms, when it is represented at all.

The optimistic, DIY energy of punk infuses these gatherings. The discussions range from organizing better political representation, to building better infrastructure, to creating content that better reflects communities, to rethinking the entire purpose and direction of public media in a 21st century media landscape. Whether it’s indie journalists (LION, INN), indie filmmakers (Future Film Coalition), indie game studios (Field Day Lab) or community-focused media (NFCB), those punks respect our legacy, but that isn’t stopping them from imagining a future without us.

The definition of public media is expanding beyond PBS and NPR. Too often, our institutions have treated these organizations as occasional partners rather than as fellow architects of public media’s future, and we could do worse than work with non-traditional stakeholders to expand what public media can be in the 21st century. That means not only collaborating more broadly with nonprofit organizations whose values align with public media but also embracing our ability to be both a public media center and a community hub. It also means exploring new forms of public media (like games) to turn data into information and information into experience.

A new generation of leadership is ascending within public media. My hope is that those leaders can reach past the status quo and form tighter alliances with the punks, leverage the privilege and momentum of our legacy, put our reach and resources at their disposal, and align our institutional mission with that punk spirit — before the second act starts without us.

Chad Davis is the chief innovation strategist at Nebraska Public Media, where is he the founder of the Public Media Futures Lab and co-founder of the Public Media Innovators Peer Learning Community. Prior to that he was the inaugural head of Nebraska Public Media Labs, and led teams responsible for published experiments with AI, video games, virtual reality, 360-video and podcasting. He speaks regularly about the intersection of public media and emerging media and publishes a semi-regular newsletter under the Public Media Innovators banner.