Innovations in Content Creation: How Ideastream Evolves to Meet Needs

By Mark A. Rosenberger , Chief Content Officer, Ideastream Public Media

When I began my career in public media, at WVIZ TV in Cleveland, Ronald Reagan was president, a gallon of gas cost 57 cents and the Cavs played their home games at the Coliseum in Richfield, Ohio.

When I walked in the door at WVIZ in March of 1988, we had five people making local television content. Back then our most popular shows were high school football games and our annual televised auction fundraiser.

A lot has changed over the past 36 years. Today, at Ideastream Public Media?we have WVIZ (PBS), two radio stations, WKSU (NPR) and WCLV (Classical), and a bevy of digital-first content offerings including JazzNEO - a music streaming service. We also offer podcasts, newsletters and a robust website that provides fresh news and information throughout each day from around the corner and around the world. We operate the Statehouse News Bureau , The Ohio Newsroom and The Ohio Channel from our facilities in Columbus. Today we have more than 70 people making content that is interesting, relevant, authentic, and above all, accurate.?We’ve come a long way.

It’s true what the Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said:

“There is nothing permanent except change.”

Media content creation and consumption have undergone a tremendous amount of change, most of it due to myriad technological innovations and seismic shifts in how you, the consumer, use media.

For example, when I first got to WVIZ we had one room where you could edit videotape to create a TV show. It was quite literally a cold, dark space with lots of flashing lights, small screens and rows of buttons, dials and knobs. When the TV show was done, the only way people could watch it was when we put it on the air. Today, many of our content creators edit video and audio on their mobile phones or laptops. And they don’t do it in a cold, dark room, but at their kitchen table, in the office or at a local coffee shop … virtually anywhere. And you can watch it or listen to it whenever you want on your TV, radio, smartphone, computer, and on any number of different social media platforms.

A good way to understand just how much public media content creation and its consumption has changed over the past three decades is to look at NewsDepth , a weekly interactive series produced by Ideastream Public Media. It breaks down the biggest news stories into teachable lessons for 4th-to-6th-grade students. And get this, we’ve been producing the show for more than 50 years. It is one of the longest running local TV shows still on the air in Northeast Ohio, if not the longest.

When I arrived at WVIZ, NewsDepth was a simple kids show with limited news footage. It was the quintessential talking-head type program. Sure, it was informative, but not terribly interesting to watch. The show was distributed to local elementary schools utilizing a technology called ITFS, Instructional Television Fixed Signal. Schools needed to have an antenna that picked up a special, low-power television signal broadcast from the WVIZ studios which, back then, were on Brookpark Road in Cleveland.

Fast forward to today and NewsDepth goes way beyond rudimentary coverage of current events. It features special segments on science, civics, Ohio history and art that align with state learning standards. It’s full of news footage, it’s fast-paced, highly interactive and a lot of fun to watch. NewsDepth is broadcast on WVIZ and throughout Ohio on other PBS stations and it has its own interactive web page and YouTube channel! During the last school year, the website was visited 583,548 times by 90,958 unique users, and NewsDepth was viewed an additional 198,810 times on YouTube!?Some students watch the entire 30-minute show each week and others just watch the stories that interest them the most. Either way, each story also comes with custom-designed classroom support materials and student activities aligned with Ohio’s learning standards. By design, the show provides cross-curricular and real-world learning opportunities that spark great discussions in the classroom or the living room.

Data is another factor that has changed the creation of content. Not that long ago, the only data we had about our content was provided by Nielsen, a ratings service that keeps track of who and how many people are consuming content. These days we are drowning in data. And increasingly, we are using data analytics to understand your preferences, which helps us tailor content to optimize our engagement with you.

Engagement has become increasingly important in our content creation here at Ideastream Public Media. That’s why we created a team in our newsroom to experiment and evolve a practice known as Engaged Journalism. Historically, journalism has been a largely extractive practice, meaning reporters were given an assignment (and a deadline!) and then they extracted from community members the necessary information needed to file the story. There is nothing wrong with this type of journalism and when done properly it can involve authentic engagement with people. But engaged journalism is different in that it prioritizes the information needs and curiosity of its audience from the outset.

Community members are invited to participate in all aspects of the journalistic process, from story ideation to content creation. The aim is simple - to create and preserve more trusting relationships between journalists and the public. It’s creating journalism with the public and not just about the public. And the boundary between content consumers and content creators has blurred. User-generated content abounds, and we welcome it. In fact, our engaged journalism team is committed to training community members in how to use multiple media to tell their own stories.

While a lot has changed in public media over the past 30-plus years, at least two things have not changed.

First, our reliance on you has never changed. We rely on you to consume our content, which has always been and will always be free for you and your family to use, whenever and however you like. We rely on your feedback and input. Your ideas are an essential ingredient in our content creation. And we rely on you for your support. A major source of revenue has always been our members.

The second thing that hasn’t changed is the very reason we even bother to create content locally. We don’t do it to deliver an audience to advertisers. We don’t create content to gain power or influence. From the very beginning, we create local content to serve you, to “illuminate the world around us,” as our mission statement says. And our content creation is, and has always been, driven by ideals such as substance, credibility, purpose, civility, generosity and a passion for lifelong learning.

That will never change, despite what Heraclitus says.