APM Aims For Digital Local News Lead

That’s the view held by David Kansas, the chief operating officer and senior VP of the St. Paul, Minnesota-based nonprofit American Public Media. APM, the parent organization of Minnesota Public Radio, Southern California Public Radio and Classical South Florida, is perhaps best known as the producer of a number of nationally distributed programs, most notably Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, Marketplace and The Splendid Table. But recently, APM has been making more aggressive moves to position itself as a national resource hub for journalists and a more influential presence in local markets.

One of its moves was founding the Public Insight Network (PIN), a national network of story sources and field experts that aims to dive deeper than the pundits and public relations figures that heavily populate news stories. Just last week, APM acquired Spot.us, a nonprofit site that uses a “crowdfunding” model to connect journalists with funding streams for their projects, which they pitch to potential donors in a fashion not unlike kickstarter.com’s popular model.

Kansas said that these are the first of a number of steps towards building a stronger public radio news presence at the local level. In an interview with NetNewsCheck, he said Spot.us will play an important role within PIN, and that APM sees a particularly rich future in the convergence of automobiles with digital media technology.

An edited transcript:

If commercial journalism is in trouble, do public radio and its digital presence have a growth opportunity in this space? How can public radio be a leader in the digital revolutionary period that we’re in right now?

I believe so, and I believe that we’re already doing a great deal to play a leadership role in the digital space. There’s a lot of experimentation, a lot of testing and a lot of effort to try to figure out new ways to provide news and information to our listeners and to our readers in the digital sphere. I think public media can play a very important role in trying to come up with new models and new ways to get crucial information to citizens.

What was the impetus for the Public Insight Network and how does it function? Can anyone in local news access it? How, if at all, does it work on a local level as a media resource for local outlets?

The idea was how could we give journalists broader access to a wide range of sources within their community, experts that they may not readily know about. [We wanted] to build a network, a platform, that would engage a lot of folks and organize them in a way so journalists could more easily access a wider breadth of potential sources for stories and for testing of ideas, for trying to do great journalism in a way that would be more effective than the old fashioned way of picking up a phone and rolodex. It’s just trying to augment the traditional journalistic practice.

We really aggressively built out that network; we have more than 130,000 sources in it now. We partnered with more than 60 newsrooms ranging from The Washington Post to public radio stations. We think it has been an effective way to strengthen the sourcing practice among journalists, and we’ve found it to be very popular with our journalism partners.

So can anyone in local news access it?

They have to partner with the PIN. They have to set up an arrangement so that we have the proper technology relationship and we get some income from the folks who partner with us. So it’s not a complete free for all, but we’re in the nonprofit service space, so it’s not like we’re selling Bloomberg terminals.

So what is the fee to be involved?

It ranges depending on the size of the news organization and the way in which they want to exploit it. It’s a scaled system, and so for instance a large organization will pay more than a very small organization.

So if one wants to access PIN at a local level, how does it actually work?

You work with the PIN analysts, most of whom are in the Twin Cities, and they have training sessions where we bring people up to speed with how to use the platform. Sometimes our analysts work in conjunction with journalists to help them access the platform and exploit it, so it’s a collaborative effort.

Why did you acquire Spot.us?

We’re always thinking of different ways that we can try to drive the journalism process. The standard model — commercial or even the public model that existed for a long time — is going through a lot of different experimentation and we really liked what Spot.us was doing in terms of trying to connect freelancers with publishers, freelancers with the community, the community with journalism — trying to create more transparency around the process and at the same time trying to come up with different ways that we might be able to fund journalism.