From de-Bundling to re-Bundling: KQED and DML’s vision for digital media collaboration

Tom Davidson

In the good old days (the 1980s and 1990s for you youngins), news products were bundled. Your local newspaper had local news, of course, but it also had national and international reports, sports, obituaries and community calendars, “Dear Abby,” “Doonesbury” and “Garfield.”

The 6 o’clock news had news, weather, sports and tiresome yuck-it-up banter between the anchors. Rare were the audience members who wanted all of those things, but most of the audience wanted some of them.

Distribution was in the hands of a chosen few. Newspaper infrastructure was horrifically expensive, and God and the FCC only granted so many broadcast licenses. Bundled products were how those distributors could deliver most things to most people.

If there’s one thing digital technology is good at, though, it’s destroying distribution monopolies.

ESPN and The Weather Channel in the late 1980s and 1990s, news websites in the 2000s or streaming apps today — well, they’ve blown those distribution oligopolies on which our media businesses were built to smithereens. But like any trend, de-bundling has probably gone too far. Who can keep track of the plethora of media apps, subscriptions, newsletters and favorite websites we’ve amassed?

Maybe there’s a chance to rebuild some of the bundles of the past.

The DML technology platform seeks to help media organizations aggregate and syndicate their content in ways that improve audience discovery and support the changing economics of content. DML’s tech powers a widget of curated content that appears on a couple dozen California news sites. KQED edits the widget with contributions from its own newsroom, The Guardian, CalMatters and a handful of other high-quality publishers. The idea is to give visitors to news sites more content than the host site can create, exposing them to other great content easily for all concerned.

That’s the notion behind an interesting experiment fostered by KQED and the Distributed Media Lab (DML). This technology platform seeks to help media organizations aggregate and syndicate their content in ways that improve audience discovery and support the changing economics of content.

DML’s tech powers a widget of curated content that appears on a couple dozen California news sites. KQED edits the widget with contributions from its own newsroom, The Guardian, CalMatters and a handful of other high-quality publishers.

The idea is to give visitors to news sites more content than the host site can create, exposing them to other great content easily for all concerned.

“The web was designed to propagate info across the nodes. It was never intended to aggregate audience to individual domains,” said DML’s Founder and CEO Dave Gehring. “But the traditional media business model ... is trying to aggregate audience to individual domains.”

For years, media organizations have sought to amass audiences via social platforms. “The national brands or vertical brands like The Guardian, The Washington Post, Vice or Buzzfeed — their whole relevance is not localized,” Gehring noted. “So, the only option they have is to try to get the web to work in a way that is opposite of its inherent nature” and to build scale via the platforms. But if Facebook giveth, Facebook (and Google search) can also take away — and it essentially has. “Those (scale-driven) brands are screwed,” Gehring said. “Meanwhile, local media companies covering local issues for local communities have an editorial justification for local audiences to navigate directly to those websites.”

Enter DML’s widget.

The host site wins by keeping its audience around longer; the publishers who contribute their content to the widget gain exposure through trusted partners whose interests are better aligned than the social platforms. That’s what appealed to DML’s public media partner, KQED.

Tim Olson, its senior vice president of strategic digital partnerships, was intrigued by the tech, got buy-in from his organization to serve as the curator of the content and helped round up grant funding (from the Google News Initiative) to launch the California news-sharing initiative.

“In a cool way, this came out of our revenue and audience development side of the house,” Olson said. “It’s a pairing of that group with the editorial side.” Tim Olson is one of the brightest minds in public media. He and Alexis Rapo at WBGH were the intellectual heft behind PBS Passport, the most successful fundraising tool for public television in the past generation. Tim also convinced his bosses at KQED to co-found Matter, a technology accelerator and venture capital firm specializing in media investments that serve the public good. When Tim Olson says, “This is interesting,” pay attention.

Here's how it works. An editor at KQED chooses stories from the half-dozen participating publishers (national publishers, like The Guardian, and California-centric ones, like CalMatters, EdSource and LAist). DML’s tech automatically places those stories in a widget on participating publishers’ sites with minimal involvement from those publishers.

The two dozen participating sites get more content, at no cost, from trusted sources. “Quality that they can trust,” Olson said.

So far, Olson reports that the initiative is driving traffic and audience response. The next step is to monetize that traffic in ways that benefit everyone — the sites contributing content and the sites carrying it.

Those experiments are still in the early stages. They might involve sponsored content (clearly labeled) or centrally sold sponsorships or underwriting. “We’re getting into that part now,” Olson said.

It’s early; the project only launched in January. And, like any experiment, it might not work. However, one can easily imagine this tech as the backbone of regional collaborations or a group of stations and sites covering topics like the environment, climate change or regional businesses.

The Public Media Venture Group and the Local Media Association certainly agree. Each has signed deals with DML to offer the tool to its members and partners.

Moreover, the spirit of this project has me rooting for it. It envisions a future that puts digital audiences and great content first rather than trying to find ways to coax those audiences back to our terrestrial signals. It does so by doing what public media has always done — identify and distribute high-quality content (without necessarily creating it all ourselves) in ways that respect and serve our audiences … and contribute to stations’ financial sustainability.

Tom Davidson is a professor of the practice in media entrepreneurship at the Bellisario School of Communications, Penn State University. He previously was a reporter, general manager and product leader at Tribune, PBS and Gannett. He can be contacted at tgd@tgdavidson.com.