Hi, I'm Chris Rowan. You may have seen me before if you haven't. I'm Chris Rowan. Okay, I'm Richard Clement. So I look after Digital for a company called Aspen Pharmacare. We're actually one of the great success stories coming out of South Africa in the last few years. We based there, obviously, our biggest country that we were in first was Australia. And at our peak we were turning over here about a billion dollars. That's dropped back significantly as we've moved around our product portfolio. But we are quite significant and we're now growing internationally very, very quickly. And I've got the job, unfortunately, of having to try and keep all the countries going with their digital efforts with very, very little money and very, very quickly. And WordPress lends itself quite nicely to that. So I've actually been working with WordPress for quite some time. This was just a little personal project that I had in 2006. That was my first exposure to WordPress. Some time ago I got a bit herbal and got quite into the peak oil and sustainability and things like that. And as I said, I wasn't really interested at that point in what you could do with WordPress. It was just very much for me a blog engine. But we've moved considerably past that since. So the pharma industry is an interesting industry. We actually sell products to people who don't use our products and who don't pay for our products. So if you think about it, we actually go and sell to doctors in terms of recommending them to write prescriptions for our products. But we actually sell our products into wholesalers who then sell the product onto pharmacy. None of these people actually pay for them at the end of the day. The government mostly pays for the product with a copayment by the end user. The industry's changed a lot over the last few years. You know, many, many years ago that you've all heard the stories and may well hold the opinion that pharma companies are all evil, horrible people. And to be honest, that was a fair assessment some years ago. Some of the big innovative pharma companies that really had the monopoly on some of the products were really charging like a wounded bull for some of these things. But the industry has changed. A lot of those blockbuster products now have come off of patent and are available as generics. And so we do find that there's constant downward pressure on pricing. The government tell us every year, I think this year will give you 10% less than we did last year for that product. So we're really constantly facing these sorts of issues. And the industry is becoming one of high volume, low margin. We sell lots and lots of product, but we don't actually make lots of money for it. On top of that, globally we're facing increasing compliance demands. So I've had to spend the last few months, as I'm sure many of you have here, dealing with the fallout from GDPR. But on top of that, we have an increasing layer of compliance requirement from the European Medicines Agency. So we're really copying it every which way we turn. And so much time is wasted on these sorts of things. We also have now a new generation of healthcare professionals coming through. They're younger, they're more digitally savvy. They expect us to communicate with them using new digital tools. Also corporate healthcare is growing. So I don't know if you guys are familiar with primary health. So these are the concept of the big medical centers owned by the corporation. Doctors' private practices are bought out. They go and work for that corporation for a period of time. And really everything is regimented and controlled by the corporate entity. So we used to be able to send physical mailings out to doctors to talk about the products that we had, emails, etc. These things are harder and harder to get to the doctor.  So we're looking at new technologies, particularly using mobile to get to them where they are. And of course everything is moving so quickly. Digital healthcare is such a massively growing space. We really have to be agile and nimble just to keep up. And we don't have a huge amount of money to invest in these things. So internally what we do, we tend to talk about, this is actually a slide from a presentation I gave to the board of directors a few weeks ago. And these guys tend not to really understand digital. They are of a certain vintage where what is digital? They don't really get it at all. So we talked about what digital can offer both internally and externally by reducing the timelines for developing, for example, marketing materials. We improve the agility of the business. We reduce the required resources of us to deliver marketing materials to someone digitally. It's going to be a lot less than producing printed materials. So it's reproducible. It's also compliant. So as long as you channel your marketing effort properly, it's much easier to make sure that every country is delivering the same message in a consistent way. So it does help with that compliance and it does reduce costs. We also use the tools and again, basically WordPress for me is my Swiss Army knife. Whenever somebody comes to me and says I want to solve this problem, the first thing I do is think about how we might use WordPress to do that. And so we improve collaboration internally and we actually drive all of Aspen's digital communications needs through the business using WordPress in one form or another. And we communicate with our millennial customers in the manner that they would expect. And what I say customers, I do mean internally and externally. So it's not just the doctors, the healthcare professionals, the nurses. It's also our staff internally who want these tools. And that helps us. All of these things help us to deliver the top and the bottom line profitability and turnover because we are reducing costs all the time. So I just want to introduce you to what we've done in Australia because this is where it all started with the Aspen story digitally. We immediately were cost positive or return on investment positive. We started the website in Australia 13 years ago. And the first thing we did, we used to send out mailings, physical mailings to doctors and offer them something like pens or post-it notes. You know the story, some kind of gift for answering some questions and sending back a business reply paid card. So there's obviously quite a high cost in that and it also takes a lot of time. Because typically the BRP card would go back to the mailing house and then the mailing house would collect the data for you. And then weeks later, eventually the cards would go back to the rep for them to deliver whatever the good he was. We eliminated that overnight 13 years ago by putting all of our fulfillment through the website. And since then, we've actually had over half a million requests for items through the website from 20,000 healthcare professionals in Australia. So each of those represents a call opportunity for the rep. Each of those gives the rep a chance to go and sit down with the doctor even if it's for a couple of minutes and talk about our products. So we managed to position the business in this country because we were engaging so frequently with the doctors in one way or another as a tried and trusted brand. And it's difficult in Australia because it is a difficult geography. You can't put reps everywhere. And I do remember once getting a really nice email from a healthcare professional working on an Aboriginal station. And he said, it's fantastic. I can get the same sort of information from your website that I do from a rep and I can order samples and I'm seven hours drive from anywhere. But I can still engage with you and get that. And this is 13 years ago.  We used to these sorts of tools then. And we actually came up with a little cartoon character, which we called Eric the E rep because we needed a way for our older sales reps to engage with our older doctors and try and give them some idea of what we were trying to do with this website. So we really have been by using a more mature sales force, experienced people, early adopters of this technology in Australia and we proved to be quite an effective test bed. So this is the first version. This is from 2006. And I built that myself in-house using ASP. The shopping cart was coded so that we only had one sales team at the time. It was really easy that the post codes were mapped to the rep and the doctor would place an order for a sample or whatever it might be. And then in the back end, the system would work out which rep to send the order to. So nice and simple. In 2011, we actually bought Sigma's pharmaceutical business and suddenly we went from, you know, a company of 35 people to a company of 1,000 people, multiple sales teams, lots and lots of products. And so we actually rebuilt the website with various other tools into Zend framework. And what we're doing now, I'll just go forward a slide, is this is where we've now rebuilt the entire corporate website for the world now into WordPress. And this is, I'll come back to this in just a moment. This is the look and the feel that we're just building for Australia. But I just wanted to flip back to this one because we do also monthly provide key opinion leader talks to GPs. So this is, again, it's all driven off of WordPress. It's a very, very simple. We don't do anything complicated with this, but we do do all the video production in-house and then use this to drive that content out to doctors. So in 2017, we did make the decision or I made the decision after being beaten to death by a lot of agencies that we really wanted to make WordPress our corporate standard for web development. And I say beaten to death. I had over the years such poor experiences with a lot of agencies telling me that WordPress just wasn't up to it. It's a blog tool. It's just not right. You need to use something like Drupal or something more robust or, look, we can custom code that. Or my favorite, we've got a custom CMS for you. And I've been down that path and really don't like it. So we settled on WordPress. And the other thing that we did with the corporate site especially is we built the thing with Beaver Builder. And I'm sure there are a whole host of different opinions in this room about the value of page builders. But what we wanted to do was try and create something that was quick to reproduce that we could almost make a Lego kit of modules for. So that when we were rolling out to another country, they could quite easily select which blocks on which modules they wanted to use that were already fairly well pre-populated with content. So if they wanted to use the ticker bar, they can easily just import it in and drag it around to where they wanted it. And that's worked really well for us. We haven't had any issues with Beaver Builder. And anyway, I'll talk a bit more about that later. So we probably don't use it quite the way I originally envisaged because we're now rolling out sites so quickly that what we tend to do is just clone the site. And then I've got a chat that sits in France who's really familiar now with Beaver Builder. And he can pop in and in fact developing the French site once we have the content from the French team. And I now have just signed up for a trial for content snare because I've got to find a better way to get the content out of these people. It's my worst nightmare. But he was able to put that together in two or three days once he had that content. And it's working really nicely for us. Now the next thing we're doing, this goes back to that corporatization of health care issue. In Australia, we've currently built, we're rebuilding the Australian site from Zend into WordPress. It's been a really long slog because we were building, originally we built it headless at the WordPress site because we're now driving from it a native app. And this is taking currently the best components from our website to deliver it to the doctors in their pocket. We've got a lot more we want to do with this. This is very much a first generation. It's literally the minimum viable product. And the idea is to have obviously a new section. The doctors can come in and order the samples and the educational materials that they're used to doing information about our products. They can find who their rep is. They can find information about conferences and all of the Aspen altitude content, the video content, we've got the full library in here. And we've actually got it configured as well as now as a video podcast that they can hook directly up to in their favorite app. So this is all being driven via custom APIs that hook up into our WordPress site. And for the shopping cart component, we've actually used for the site. This is slightly different, but for the site, we're using a hacked version of WooCommerce. So what we've actually done is we're using the front end of WooCommerce and rip the back end off. And we've built on to that a solution that works for us in the same way that the orders. There's no transaction involved. There's no money, but the order just goes to the right rep based upon their postcode and the product. And that's worked beautifully. And then this all hooks up to the same APIs. So it's very rudimentary. As I said, it's a minimum viable product. This is just an example of one of the core brand sites that we have. So we have a product that there might be some mums in the room have heard of S26 baby formula. That's one of our key key brands and they have a very nice website for mums, which is again, it's hooked up via our CRM system, which is unfortunately Microsoft Dynamics. But everything's hooked up together and works really nicely. So this is probably our biggest site in terms of traffic in Australia. And then we've got bunches.  And then internally, now this is very crisp and clean. We had messages coming from our sales management. The reps were getting just too many emails. We don't want the reps getting all these emails from you, brand managers, you marketing people.  Every day they've got these things they've got to deal with. So it's like, well, why don't we, instead of doing that, we use a plugin called MailPoet. And essentially what happens is the brand manager goes in and writes a post in the back end of Aspen antidote. And they tick which sales team, which is just categories. They tick which sales team. They want to receive that piece of content. And then on a Friday night at six o'clock, MailPoet will sweep through and create from those categories a customized newsletter for each sales team. And it works absolutely beautifully. And all we now say is, look, the one thing you have to look at every week is this newsletter. That's going to have all the marketing communications for that week for you. It is very clean. It is just simply to replace an email, although the actual email that they get is a bit more interesting. So the next step was we need an intranet. And Aspen has grown very, very quickly. In fact, this is our 20th year. And we've gone from virtually nothing to now major multinational. So we've grown very quickly. And from an IT perspective, we've grown in a very syndicated manner. Every country's been kind of left to do their own thing. And now they're trying to sort of back fit more of a group approach to this. But what it meant was when the company said we need an intranet, the IT guys, of course, jumped up and said, well, SharePoint, we can do this in SharePoint. And they played with that for a couple of years and decided after they'd spent lots of money that they couldn't actually do it in SharePoint. So we came along and we built it in WordPress. And we've actually done this on the next step, by the way, was, well, can you at least give a single sign on hooked up to the Active Directory? Oh, yes, we can do that. Yes, we can definitely hook it up to the Active Directory right at the end. No, actually, we can't because we don't have consistent Active Directory's around the world. And so there's no single solution. So then we had to go build a membership solution into it as well. So the way we work this is that this is the group site. And then we're rolling out individual sites for the different businesses. It's all a multi-site solution. And basically everybody gets registered based upon their email address. They get access to either everything or to different country sites. And this has worked out really nicely. And built within that, we are using a few plugins to add functionality. So one of the things we're using is, what's it called? Approved.me. I don't know if you're familiar with that. It's a really great way. If you need to get digital signatures done, this product is actually compatible. It's compliant with the EU and the US regulations on digital signatures. And will provide you with compliant documents. So this is really handy where we have staff, for example, that all have to sign off annually on a code of conduct. I have had to fiddle with it a bit because one thing that approved me doesn't do at the moment is batch uploading of users. And it doesn't connect properly to the user database. So I've had this awful pluge of hooking this up through an email passer into Airtable via Zapier. And it goes all around the houses, but it does do the job. And then the other thing that we're using with it is LearnDash. We use LearnDash in combination with a couple of plugins by a company called Uncanny Owl, who've got a nice plugin called TinCanny. And basically what that does is, if any of you are familiar with eLearning, you can use tools like Articulate or iSpring or the Adobe Captivate products to develop SCORM compliant or TinCann API compliant content. And we can upload that into LearnDash and track it all. And basically all this comes up really nicely in the profile of the user. And it presents really well. The only problem I have here again is the IT guys who originally said, well, you know, we're looking at group-wide learning management systems. And I said, well, I can knock something up for under a grand. And their attitude is, well, if it's under a million dollars, it can't be very good. But they do now want to use it to do their own training. So I think I'm getting there with that argument. And that's just another example of one of the things, one of the modules that iSpring produce is a thing called iSpring. I think it's called Flex or Flow. And you can take a PDF file and convert it into a flipbook or a single slide solution. But that's all trackable being that Uncanny Owl TinCanny tool. It'll tell you which pages the users read and whether they've completed it. And again, it's really useful if you've got content that you really need users to be able to read. And that's it from that part of the presentation. So I'll hand over now to Chris. Thank you. Nice, Richard. Thank you for that. I've got a few questions first, and then we'll open the floor to questions. So you mentioned the Australian business and international business. So what percentage of your global business is Australian? So when I started with Aspen in 2005, Australia would have been about 50%, 60% of the business. We were a huge chunk. We were the first country outside of South Africa to go live. And we were a significant chunk of the business. But as we popped up and popped across the world, now it's dropped down to about 14%. But we are still probably definitely the leaders in digital in terms of actually doing some decent marketing. We're definitely the leaders. Okay. And as that changes, what sort of impact has that had on your business? Well, as the other countries have come on board, it's happened so quickly because we tend to acquire other businesses. So we, for example, moved away from, we were originally a generic company and we've now moved into sort of targeted therapeutic areas. And we've done that by buying big chunks of AstraZeneca and big chunks of Glaxo. So, you know, something we've got a big factory over here and these guys now want to do a virtual reality tour of the factory in the Netherlands. We've got this massive Chinese business. Apparently we're quite small but we've got 700 reps. And this is tiny in China. So really, it does lead to the sorts of problems of, you know, how do we scale rapidly when you're dealing with a leadership team who are of a vintage, as I said earlier, where digital really is something a little bit strange to them. And we spend so little but still, you know, we can get their enthusiasm but separating them from a significant chunk of money has been difficult. Yeah, sure. So you mentioned 13 years ago and the changes you made. Was there a lot of resistance to that initially or was it pretty smooth and did it take long if there was a lot of resistance for that to disappear? To WordPress? Yeah. Look, it did take a little while to disappear and I think where I was able to really make significant inroads we started off with a couple of little brand sites and I think the brand managers were able to see how quick and easy it was. I was able to work on the front end and design while they were putting the content in. So where I had enthusiastic brand managers who were a little bit digital savvy they really saw the benefit of it. And then I think over the years, I would say Beaver Builder was a big impact. One of the sites I built, in fact the first site I built with it we had a partnership with Glenella's Family Foundation which places Aboriginal youth into corporate environments to get some work experience. And I built the first iteration of their website using Beaver Builder. It was the first site I did. Never having used the tool before, it took me three hours from start to finish. And then I went to our consumer team who had a lot of older sites built on Zen framework. Little brand sites, they weren't particularly sophisticated but they were starting to whine a bit about, okay, it's about time to make these mobile ready. So I just went through and rebuilt all of this. I just copied what they already had. We didn't change the content. But I rebuilt them all onto WordPress using Beaver Builder and I think it got down to about two hours. Two hours I could knock one of these over because I was so familiar with it by then, you know. And they were fairly consistent. But for me Beaver Builder really changed how fast we could operate and that is to us really important. And it might not be the perfect coding solution but it works and I think it's got quite a lot of developer support. There's a lot of add-ons now available for it to our blocks and modules. And I just found it's made my life so much easier. Okay, interesting. Now you mentioned that the marketing material and the sales staff not getting the reps, not getting too many emails. So you do it once a week on the Friday? Yep. I mean was initially a bit of resistance to that because what about if it's Monday and I want the guys to know today or putting it once a week? Yeah, that's what they actually read it. So, yeah, and of course we can tell who's read it and who hasn't. There was a bit of resistance because people would tend to sort of say, oh, it's Friday night, it's my time now. But look at the end of the day, it's one thing you have to do and it's usually not that heavy. It's a five, ten minute read tops. So it's quickly, you know, you go home at the end of the day, have a quick read of that, just make sure you're familiar with everything. Monday morning you're ready to hit the road, you know. Okay, nice, nice. Now you mentioned multi-site before. Yes. Does that mean all your sites are in multi-site or do you have single sites as well? No, in fact the only site that's in multi-site is the Intranet and that is because we do have that consistent user database and we also do syndicate quite a lot of content between the sites and we use some of the WM, PMU, DEV multi-site plugins to do that. All of our corporate sites are standalone, although I sometimes wish they weren't. But I do fear multi-site a little bit. I do fear the whole sort of put your eggs in one basket thing that if it goes down, it takes everything down with it, you know. And it's tough enough dealing with one site failing on you without having every country manager from around the world going, what's going on? You know, you can't get to fix it because you're fielding all the phone calls. So there are benefits to both, but I do tend to fear multi-site a little bit. Okay, yep, fair enough. And so why did you pick Beaver Builder? Look at the time, well, now we've got Elementor, we've got... I'd had a little Divi, I'd had a bit of a play with the early versions of Divi. I didn't really like them. I just found, I don't know what it was, maybe it just engaged well with the way I think. I don't know why particularly. I've played since with Elementor. I think there's quite a few now that are maturing nicely. I just felt that Beaver Builder offered the most robust solution the most. And the other thing that I have a fear of, I've bought plugins from Envato before. And it's the old... I think somebody said this morning, you go on the Envato market, it's $17 or whatever. And you go back to get it again and it's gone. And you can't even download a version that you've already paid for. And I really don't like that. So I, from a corporate perspective, prefer to invest in plugins that might cost a lot more, but I think have perhaps got a more sustainable business and are likely to be around and giving me support in three, four, five years' time. So that's kind of just another way of thinking of it. Sure, sure, makes sense. And what hosting companies do you use and why? So we use WP Engine and we use Flywheel. Right, okay. Are they sponsors here, aren't they? They are, I believe. They might be here somewhere. Have we got anyone here from WP Engine or from what was that other company? Flywheel. Flywheel, Flywheel. What are you, come down, come down. Come on, come down. Platinum and Gold sponsors. So yes, we use Flywheel and we use WP Engine. And there are reasons I use both. One is, again, not putting all the eggs in one basket. We basically put our consumer brands, tend to sit on WP Engine. They tend to be smaller, less complex sites. And WP Engine's great, but you've got to be in that box. You've got to, you know, it's quite strictly controlled, which is great. It means it's not going to fall over on you. We've got some, also some sites that are a little bit more hinky, a little bit more fiddly that we've, you know, got a need to drill through to the database or drill out to another database that don't fall comfortably within that model. And we put those on Flywheel. So we use both, and I have no real preference for one over the other. It's just that some work well on WP Engine, some work well on Flywheel. And I'm happy with both companies. Okay, great, great. So we've got about five minutes left and some questions from the audience. I couldn't help but notice that you said you moved away from WooCommerce partially from the back end while rendering the same templates from WooCommerce. What was the reason? So we basically have, we have a very specific way that our back end works because there's no money involved. We're not selling anything for sale. We just use a sort of shopping cart concept for doctors to be able to order samples of brand reminders, work under brand reminders and involve educational material, bits and pieces. So we sort of, we've got no shipping component. We've got no transactional component.  We like the way that we can make the shopping cart look nice using the front end of WooCommerce. But that back end we modified so it suits our transactional model, which is that basically a piece of, a starter pack, for example, of a product is assigned to a particular sales team. And then this rep works in this postcode for that sales team. And then the order is split up. So when an individual doctor places an order, the order is split and the relevant sales reps get the parts of the order that are pertinent. But then the doctor can go in and they can look at where their order is and what have you. So that's the reason we do that. We wanted everything, really. So it worked. Hey, Richard, cool talk. And it was great to hear that you build these WordPress sites yourself. I was just wondering what your IT department does. Gets in my way. Spend money, potentially. I used to have, to be fair, I used to have quite a, because I'm very much a sales and marketing person. I'm not an IT person. And usually when I go to talk to another country, the first thing I do is say, I'm not an IT person. I'm a sales and marketing person. And I used to be sort of the shadow IT department a bit, which used to really get up their nose. And they did feel initially that websites should be part of their domain.  And they actually know nothing at all about Linux or servers. Look, I don't know too much. I'll leave it to these guys. But they know how to do Windows, and that's really it. And so we're actually now at a point where they will come to me and say, before we go off and explore some hugely expensive enterprise solution, do you have any ideas on how we might approach this? And sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't. The example I showed you there with the e-signatures, that plug-in was, I think, $600 for a lifetime license, unlimited use on as many domains as you like. That suits me down to the ground. One of my biggest gripes is when you're working in an enterprise and you use a lot of plug-ins, and we have a lot of plug-ins that we use variously, my credit card looks like it's been hit by a shotgun every month with all these damn subscriptions coming up. And I'd really love, automatic or someone like that, to come up with something along the lines of Invato Market, but more professional, that plug-in developers can put all their subscriptions through and you can get one bill every month or every year for all the plug-ins that you've got. So I don't have to have this shrapnel coming through. It's awful. Great presentation. Thank you, Richard. I used to work for the Pharmaceutical Society, an experience with the IT department, similar to yours, I think. But my question really is in your business-to-business websites, you haven't mentioned pharmacists at all. Do you not deal directly with them? We're not selling anything to pharmacists. So we do have a section of our website for pharmacists and actually for hospital pharmacists as well. But that tends to be more focused at things like stock shortages, those sorts of issues. We did put in place once a nice little self-service tool for pharmacy, where we had... It wasn't even our product, but there was a stock out of some brand from another pharmaceutical company, and we just built this nice little tool that if a pharmacy had more stock than they needed, they could go and register it. And if a pharmacy needed stock, they could go and register their need for it, and we just put them in touch. Very, very simple. So we do have teams selling to pharmacy, talking to pharmacists about our products. But we've moved away a bit from being a generics company. So it's more the generics companies that are out there selling to pharmacists these days. We've got time for just one or two more questions. Hey, Richard, thanks for the talk. It was really interesting. More so because I work for one of your customers. Oh, do you? Yeah. I work in animal health, but we do buy some human drugs, just the nature of the beast. I have a couple of questions about your intranet. Is that hosted on one of the hosts you've mentioned? It is. And what are the challenges and how did you handle SSO? We didn't. Because there's no consistent 80 of us around the world. Had there been, there's a really good plug-in solution from a company called Mini Orange. And we could have used that for South Africa. But what we didn't want to have was like a mixed Cluj solution. So we just said, look, until such time as we can get single sign-on for everybody, we'll just roll our own and run with it. Look, it has caused issues. Because with a lot of the users, they can't quite get it through their heads. Although we've got signing everywhere, this is a different thing. This is not logging into your computer. And still, they say, I've just tried to sign in with the login and password from my PC, and it won't work. So we do get quite a bit of that. And it does cause a bit of support overhead and problems. But by and large, we are kind of getting there. And at the end of the day, I think development costs for that site were about $30,000. We had that built by an agency in South Africa. And now they roll out countries. So we basically can just clone off when we want another country and just restrict access by email address. And that's working really nicely. The users are responsible for their own content. At that level, we have content managers within each business. And to create a clone is about $1,000. So it's very affordable. And it develops a lot less expensive in South Africa, I would say. And even cheaper in Nepal. So we get a lot of our coding done in Nepal where we pay, I think, $15 an hour US. So they build our APIs. They build our custom plug-ins for us. So I think we have time for just one more question, and then we'll wrap things up. Hello. Just back on intranets. In terms of building an intranet on WordPress, how do you deal with the age-old problem of storing corporate documents and collaboration? So the premise of the intranet is that it's a news intranet. So we don't use it for storing highly sensitive documents. And we've made that quite clear with the users. So if it's a highly sensitive document or has a particular workflow around something, then that remains on the local SharePoint service. And then this is used really for disseminating corporate information. Again, because of the speed with which the company grew, it was tremendously difficult for people to feel like they belong to one company. They just see their little bit of the pie and really don't know what's going on in the rest of the world. And that's why we came up with this notion of one aspen online. It was one place that everybody could visit for news and information. And we do put some stuff on there.  But we use the old sort of rule of thumb. Is it pub safe? If the document got out, what damage reputation could it do to the business? So we are quite cautious in that regard. So yes, there's still, we do still, we haven't eliminated SharePoint. This is just something additional. The costs of developing something like that on SharePoint are astronomical and then maintaining it. So. Excellent. Thank you, Richard. And it's now 20 to five. So the closing remarks will be in the other room one. But if we can all say thank you to Richard.


Melody is finishing a two-year appointment at AT&F, the US Digital Services Agency. She spent quite a lot of time working in public media, has done amazing work that if you have not looked at her website, I absolutely recommend checking it out. It is probably amongst the most well-documented work that I've ever seen anybody do. She puts everything on GitHub. It's an amazing, amazing resource. She's going to share just a small piece of that today, but has just like a really, truly amazing set of resources. She's also currently a visiting fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Her work spans so much, so I'm not going to drone on, but I'm going to give it over to Melody and please welcome her with me. Thank you so much. I thought I would start by showing you this website that was designed for my 89-year-old neighbor Betty, who I took to Politics and Pros in DC for a book reading, and all of this is online. All of the links are online. You don't need to take pictures of this stuff because I can send you the links. I took Betty to a reading and I watched her read The New York Times and she kept cooking on ads by mistake. I thought there needs to be a better news website designed for 89-year-old people. I put out a query online. I said I want to design a better news website for my 89-year-old neighbor Betty. This is the result. This is called News for Betty. It's designed specifically for her. These are the news websites that she likes to read. These are the sections that she likes to read. It basically just queries the API and shows her exactly what she needs to get to, and then she can click on the link and she knows to go back. This project demonstrates and what I'm going to be talking about today are ways to include community in the process of building things in newsrooms and specifically in public radio stations. As a little bit of background, I started working at NPR when I was 21 on a fellowship. I left the fellowship early to go to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me where I directed, edited, wrote for and produced the show. I left there to run Digital Strategy at Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Then I went to medical school. Then I dropped out. Then I was a digital strategist and editor at NPR. What that means was I developed products and tools that either made our newsroom more efficient or made us better interact with our audience. I tried to include the audience in everything that we did. I currently work at 18F in the federal government. I'm on a two-year term appointment. I try to make things in the federal government more accessible and transparent. I took the role in part because I wanted to figure out how to work within a well-designed Skunk Works operation that I could one day potentially run or work with for public media. These are the different things that I like to think about. I'm very, very open with my work. I try to build everything out in the open with the audience and for the audience. I think that public media in particular should be doing that with everything that they build. I believe that all of the software and public media should be open source. I believe breaking news and investigative work should be Creative Commons licensed so it gets to the widest audience possible. I think we should be including the audience more in what we do. I'm going to start by showing you this picture of Yellowstone National Park, which was posted again. All of these slides are online. This is Yellowstone National Park and this is me in fourth grade. In February, President Obama announced that every fourth grader in the country is going to receive a free National Park Pass next year. They'll be able to go to the National Parks as will their families. These are my brothers and these are my parents. All of us would get to go to the National Park for a year, which is really cool. People are going to be able to go to the National Park that otherwise wouldn't be able to go and experience the National Park. Let's think about what those fourth graders are going to be doing 30 years from now. Of course, they're going to have a fond memory of visiting the National Park with their family. I think that they'll more strongly identify as supporters of the National Park. They'll feel satisfaction and loyalty towards the National Park and they'll recognize the National Park for a vital public resource. That's essentially what I would like to do for public media. I'm not talking about doing anything new. The things that I'm going to talk about today have already been done by other organizations and institutions and I'd like to bring them to public media. I'm going to pause for a sec because I like making these things interactive and just open this up to the audience and ask you the question, what does it mean to you to be a member of an organization?  Anyone? Yeah, a relation with similar thinking people. Anybody else? A tote bag, okay. So identifying yourself through affiliations, these are all really good answers. Perks that come with the collective group versus individual aggregates. So perks that come with being part of a collective group rather than thinking of yourself as being individual. Yeah, you're contributing to that one.  Access to resources you wouldn't be able to obtain with just your own meeting. Access to resources that you wouldn't be able to obtain otherwise? Seems like a pretty good list at one point. Well, I like to contribute to the organization and push it in the better direction. So contribute to the organization and push it in a better direction. It's a little bit of a change on that same question. What does it mean to you to be a member of a public radio station? For the people watching the webcast, there's complete silence in the room. Also, you should feel free to live tweet like all of this. I don't, yeah. Funding stories that we feel need to be funded? Yeah. I don't have one. A lack of guilt during pledge drives? So this is a question that I've been asking a lot of people over the past few weeks. I started the Neiman Fellowship in early May. I've actually been working on this project since finding out that I got the fellowship last October. And I've been asking people who work in public media and people who think a lot about public media and people who listen to public media and people who don't listen to public media. So out of all of the people that I've interviewed who do not work in public media, no one can quite identify what it means to be a member of a station. People have said, you know, I feel like I should. And then I say, why? And they're not able to articulate that.  And they're not able to say anything more than that. And then I interviewed people who do work in public media. And somebody said, are you talking about tote bags? And I said, no, I'm not talking about tote bags. Forget the tote bag. What does it mean to be a member of your station? And they said, I'm not sure that we articulate that very well. And somebody else said to me, well, members get an E newsletter. So I said, you send a newsletter out to members that you do not send to the rest of the people about events that people would pay for at your station. And they said, yes. So membership isn't idea that is tricky in public media. Why am I telling you all of this? I worked in public media for more than a decade. I plan to go back to public media. I really value and love public media. I think it's something that should exist in the United States. And I'm really increasingly worried about its future. Here's another question that I'll just pose to the group. Where's the public in public media? This is something that somebody wrote in 1980. I'll read it for you in case you would like that. The uncomfortable fact is that most public radio stations do not serve significant portions of their community. This is true even though we support a goal of making our services available through the most efficient, equitable, and appropriate means. But radio stations with small audiences are not inherently efficient or appropriate. So this is something that was written in 1980. But I've heard people say this as recently as a month ago. So this is something that's been ongoing for the past 35 years. How do we include the public in what we do? One last question for the group. Are there ways to think about expanding what it means to be a member? Currently in public media, membership is based on a financial relationship.  But operating under the assumption that it doesn't have to be a financial relationship for something meaningful to take place. So I'm creating something that I call media public. I'm calling it that because it takes public media and turns it on its head. It's also a way of putting the public first. And it's saying, what would happen if we expanded the definition of what membership is? And I'm looking at other organizations who have already thought about this. So I'm talking to things like food co-ops and libraries and Code for America brigades. And thinking about how, in Code for America, the brigades work with cities and get technologists in those cities to think in different ways about the city in which they live. And food co-ops ask members to donate time or help with projects and have people feel more invested in their organization. Or public libraries. I live in Washington, DC. My public library has created a maker space and activities for people who might never check out a book to come into the public library, use its space, and then advocate for the existence of the public library. And that's kind of what I think public radio stations need to do. So I'm operating from this mindset. What if we expand the ways in which somebody could become a member? And what might that look like? This is just a list of things that I've thought of. I'm sure there are other meaningful ways to contribute to a station, but I'm starting with the list that I put together. What if you could donate code or participate in a hackathon? There are many reporters around the country who would like to do deep data dives and don't have developers on staff. What if we could partner them with a developer in their community who wanted to enhance his or her portfolio? Is there a way that somebody could tag or digitize an archive and become a member? Is there a way that somebody could do user testing for a new iteration of a public media website and become a member? Why are we solely basing membership on this financial transaction? So there are 835 physical spaces across the United States where public media stations operate. And this is the experiment that I'll be running over the next year. I've identified 10 stations that are doing a pilot project with me. And they've each identified a cohort of people that they're going to make members of their station for a year for contributing in non-financial ways. One of the stations is making people who conduct oral histories of people in their community. They're making the people who do those oral histories members. One station has seventh and eighth graders put together a PBS documentary every year. Those seventh and eighth graders are going to be made members. In three cities, stations are going to partner with their local Code for America Brigade. And those people are going to work on mapping projects for the station that will enhance their ability to transmit information online. Then we're looking at what is automated in terms of emails that go out to those people. So if you become a member of a public radio station about eight months later, you get an email that says, are you ready to donate again? Do you want to pledge? You get a series of emails. If people are donating in this way, those emails need to be changed or stopped. So we're changing and stopping that stuff. And then I'm interviewing the people who are in these cohorts and thinking about how they view public media now, how they're going to view it a year from now, and how that changes their relationship with the station. This is something that's already going on in different markets across the country on a very small scale. Last November, the Code for DC Brigade made the election website for WAMU. So people who worked at Code for DC coded this map that WAMU put on their website for election night. And in Rochester, New York, the station worked with the local Hacks Hackers Brigade to make this app, which allows the station to ask questions and receive answers from their community. So it's partnering already existing organizations that could benefit from each other together. Everything that I'm doing as part of this project is public, so you can follow along. I'm treating the Nieman Fellowship as a series of sprints. I've divided it into four cycles. Everything that I do during the sprint, I'm making public. So I'm saying, what would I like to accomplish over the next two weeks? And then I'm articulating whether or not I've accomplished that. And I'm thinking a lot about the words that are currently used in public media to think if we can turn them on its head. So currently, Pledge is associated with giving money, but what if by belonging to a public radio station, you're actually saying, I'm going to be a more engaged member of my local community, or I'm becoming more informed about a topic, or I'm teaching somebody in my community something that they should know about? How do we think about how people actively and constructively participate? And I'm using that phrase, in particular, because it's part of NPR's original mission statement, which was written by my friend Bill, who said, national public radio will serve the individual. It will promote personal growth. It will encourage a sense of active, constructive participation. And the way that I think a lot of public radio stations operate currently is as a distributor, rather than a facilitator. And I'm thinking of ways to create more facilitation. So what if instead of membership being a financial transaction, it meant you belonged more to a community? So what if a public radio station as a physical space meant a place where you could learn all of these different things? What is public media? I had somebody ask me last week, well, what is even the point of a local station? I get all of my news through the national network. And that really frightened me, because the person who asked me that question was extremely smart. And I thought, oh, geez, maybe I need to take a step back and explain the importance of local. There are local stations all over the country that have very, very small staffs that are doing extremely good jobs of civic reporting projects or reporting on local government or reporting on things that don't necessarily make money but need to be reported on. And I strongly value that and think that it's a model that needs to survive. So I'm really glad you're all here today. It was very nice of you to come out. These are the questions that I have for you. I'm at the very start of this project. I plan to go back to work in July but continue to work on this project. I have people across the country who are developers and designers and UX people and just really good thinkers who are helping me with this project. I would love it if you joined that team. I have a GitHub. I can add you to it. I have a listserv. Like I will just add you to anything that you want to be added to. The more the merrier with this and these are all the ways that you can get in touch with me if you'd like. Thanks. And I'll go back to that slide so we can begin to open it up. And there's some microphones that are going to run around. So just raise your hand and that mic will come to you. And this was like the 20 minute version of the speech. I've given an Ignite talk, which was the five minute version and an hour long version. So if you'd like to hear this again, much longer, happy to do that as well. Should I introduce myself? Yeah. My name is Ann Bennett. I'm a fellow at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. But I work in public service broadcasting in Africa. So I'm thinking of it from that perspective. We're always looking for engagement as well for a number of reasons, not just for the financial side, but also to improve the way that we serve our communities and our audience. But one of the things that we encounter over and over is on the editorial side, some pushback in this fear of relinquishing any kind of editorial control to the audience that's out there. This idea that as journalists and editors, we're professionals, and we know better than our audience. Have you encountered that? And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as well. Yeah, I was going to point out this project to you, which was created by my friend Jen, who worked at WBEZ at the time. It's a project called Curious City, and it allowed people from the city of Chicago to post questions they had about the city of Chicago. And then the person who asked the question and the reporter would go out and work on the story together. And the person who posed the question asked different questions, asked in a lot of cases better questions, and was considered to be an equivalent reporter on the project. And it just shaped different kinds of stories that WBEZ began to tell. I think if we're not including our audience in the process, we're missing out. We become this broadcaster and not thinking about how we can horizontally build everybody up. I have encountered pushback from editorial on these things. I'm thinking long-term survival. If we don't, the NPR aesthetic and the public radio aesthetic has been replicated by the for-profit sector. There are many podcasts that spring up now that sound like NPR that are virtually indistinguishable aesthetically from the NPR sense. So how do we differentiate ourselves? We say we're including the audience in the process, we're a trusted news source, we're talking about things that we otherwise wouldn't talk about. And how are there ways to include the audience in the process that we might not have thought of? I'm just gonna show you one more site. ProPublica has a page called Get Involved, where every single story that they post has a way for the audience to get involved. And it's sometimes as simple as asking the audience to share their story, which is a better way of saying leave a comment. It's essentially just asking people to leave a comment. I'm not sure why that's not loading. Let me try to bring that up for you. Yeah, here we go. Ways to get involved. So join the discussion, ask a question, take a quiz, share your story. It's ways of including the audience, but maybe not from day one, but maybe from day three. And in thinking about including the audience, I think that if folks have responses to other people's questions as well, please feel free to jump in and just bang them in there. Hi, I'm Rebecca Wechsler. I'm a visiting scholar with the History of Science Department. And I am wondering if you could give us your definition of the public. Like people? Well, I don't know. If that's your definition, that'd be great. I'm just wondering. So you're talking a lot about public media or media public, turning those things on its head. And so is it, I have... I think I would just say it's everybody who lives in an existing community. Like how do we include voices from people who we're not currently reaching out to or not, I'll show you something that might. I ran this project called 64 Ways to Think About a Homepage where I put really smart people in a room and said, come up with a homepage that people in news haven't thought of yet. And one of the things that we talked about was how do we get news to people who might be in public spaces? So how do we think of disseminating information to people who might be standing at a public transportation stop or might be standing in public? How do we not think of ourselves as being in a building and broadcasting on the radio but talking to people on the street, including them? I would say the public is just people who live in a community or people who care about a certain topic. Or people, just people. Does anybody else have either thought or comment on either of the questions that have been posed so far? I wanted to quickly ask how much the platform plays into making it easier for audiences to participate. So if you see something like CNN Eye Report, it's really simple. It's an Instagram, you take a video and post it and they sort of retweet it in a way. But then there are other systems that are very difficult for an audience to use and not as, you know, they're not willing to put in the effort to learn about the system. So I wanted to know what you thought. The platforms that I'm thinking of developing, one already exists and was created by the group that I work with in the federal government. It's called Mitus. It allows anyone in the federal government to post something that they need help with and for people to sign up to help with that project. So it's really easy because we needed people who worked all across the federal government to be able to use it. This already exists. It's an open source GitHub project. And then I'm developing this website which would have all of this information in one place allow people to share. Connect people across public media who think like this with each other. Public media is very siloed. There's five Facebook groups. There's three Slack channels. There's like seven listservs that I'm on. People are not really talking to one another within the system. People are not sharing code with each other within the system. The public certainly isn't invited into all of the processes going on. There's no space for that right now. So I think the best use of my time and energy is developing the central location for that. I'm not a developer or designer. So if anybody has those skills and would like to work on this project or can connect me with people who can work on this project, this is a GitHub that I'm working on with several people. Hi. Hi, I'm Sol Tannenbaum, a local blogger. And I apologize for the tote bags, dark. I wanted to follow up on the first question and sort of unpack something you said early on. I mean, you said you were looking at co-ops as a model and of people contributing time. But co-ops are really ownership and governance structure.  I mean, you're not in tech. I mean, you're working for the collective. You haven't really, I mean, the first question sort of pulled at the, no, this is ours. We don't want the unwashed masses trying to tell us how to, you know, do our jobs.  This is a news co-op called The Banyan Project. It's a local website for the community of Haverhill or Havermill, Massachusetts. Haverhill. Haverhill. So people are playing around with this model. I think especially at the local level for local to survive, there has to be a model that's not based on strict local advertising. They've gone national. Yelp, Facebook, and Google are all based in California. People are sending their advertising dollars there because it makes more sense. How do you show value and get people to, you know, it's thinking about different news models. I don't think that there's a one-size-fits-all solution. I see folks from WBUR here. What works from WBUR doesn't work for Arkansas public media. But I do think that we need to be playing around with different models and trying different models to see what sticks and what could work in a small market, a medium-sized market, a large market. I'm not worried about the top five to 10 markets in public media. I think they're structured differently. They have different staffing models. But for mid-sized to smaller markets, I really think that they need to think beyond underwriting both digitally and on air. John? John David Al from WBUR. I figure if I'm going to get called out, say I'm here. There's a number of us here, I think. BUR, raise your hands. Actually, maybe I'm going to. I think they all went over. I think we have various cohorts here. We have community who is contributing to the well-being of BUR who's here. I think you're really smart to not look at things as monolithic and sort of generalize across the system. I think there are larger stations. There are medium and small stations. They all have different needs and different resources. One of the questions that I'm, even BUR, we do a lot of outreach. We want to do more outreach. We try to get a confederacy of the willing as much as possible. And we are looking always to partner with people who have great ideas and it comes down to even a station the size of ours to bandwidth. We only have so many resources to dedicate to this and I think how to organize that and create a structure which I think you're working towards and sort of a templated approach which I think would be extremely helpful. What I'm wondering about and we all want public ready to survive and we all are not biggest fans of the pledge drives or other ways that we bring in revenue. Are there thoughts about taking sort of this coalition of the willing that you are bringing in to be part of and engaging the community of using them as either ambassadors, cultivators of donations, identifying those people as donation possibilities using them as sort of the classic fund funnel of engagement where people can actually provide us money so we can support the great work and reporting that we're doing. So I was talking to somebody at a different station who pointed me to this website which allows people to say I don't want birthday gifts this year I want people to donate for this organization on behalf of my birthday. I think that you can treat people as ambassadors but you have to show them why they should be ambassadors first. And I think that people who care about different things in their community are willing to donate money but it might not be the first thing you ask for. So you can say to somebody help us with this project or help you know come in and be a user tester help WBUR figure out this thing and then a year from now you send them a postcard in the mail that says how would you like to become a member this year? Do you want to give 20 bucks or do you want to donate 15 hours of your time again? So you give, yeah. I'm sorry, is that part of your overall project? Oh yeah. Is that an outcome that you're, as part of your project I want to increase financial support. This is based on thinking the ways that people, listening habits are going to change as internet becomes more available in cars. So the defaults for high quality audio in cars will not necessarily be public media. Donation habits for people under a certain age are radically different than their parents. And my concern is that stations think people will graduate into the listening and donation habits of their parents and that's not true. And if we don't start to engage with people now who are donating and listening differently, then we've lost them. And if the average age of a person donating I think to a new station is in their late 50s, the average age of a person donating to PBS or a classical station is in their early 70s I think. If we think that people under those ages are going to graduate into those habits, we're thinking that the world has not changed in terms of the internet in the past 15 to 20 years. I'm thinking how do we get people, I hate to use the word funnel, I don't like to talk about this in marketing terms. I think that I prefer more community oriented language. But the idea is to funnel a certain percentage of people who take this action will eventually be into this cohort. And we need to run those experiments now and I'm talking about what are the experiments that we can run as a system to figure out what to do next. I'm not saying this is, I got a lot of pushback when I first announced this idea from a lot of people at stations who said she's, she's messing up our entire business model. Like what is she thinking? No, like people who, my parents are always going to donate to W-H-Y-Y financially. That's what they're used to and that's what they like doing. People my age have no connection to W-H-Y-Y in the way that my parents do and might not graduate into that. So it's thinking how do you create a model so that they graduate into financial donorship that isn't based on what we're currently doing? Yeah, and I, right. And I should also say that I don't think of myself as like standing on a little soap box and like shouting this stuff and having people go through me. This needs to, I want every station to be like playing around with the stuff and not think like, oh, I have to go through Melody Kramer or oh, I have to wait for Melody Kramer. No, like if you have an idea and you wanna run with this like run with it. It's an idea to help the system. It's not like it doesn't need to start with me or end with me. Yeah. Andromeda Elton. I do a lot of things involving code and libraries and making trouble. So along those lines, my consumption of public media is exclusively podcast oriented. And I find that I feel a strong sense of affiliation with a lot of the things I listen to, but they're produced by a variety of stations and non-station entities. And all of the mechanisms I have for donating or getting involved are station based. So is there a bridge somewhere between those two in this? I think if stations can articulate other ways you can get involved that also involve getting involved with a podcast. I'm going to ask stations to post different ways that people can get involved. So let's just pick a random podcast. There's a podcast called the Urban Amish that's produced by a station, I think in South Dakota. Let's say you really wanted to help the Urban Amish podcast. The station from South Dakota could list that on their page on the site. Ways to help, that would help that station because that station is producing that podcast. You know, WMIC has something interesting on their page. On their ways to donate page, they actually say you can help us by coding for us. What they haven't yet done is extending that to membership. So they haven't said if you code for us and code well for us, we'll make you a member. I'm working with a guy who works at Code for America to make this website, which isn't complete yet. So I'm showing you something that might not even load, but the idea is that if stations have Githubs, you can see what issues are open so that you can help with those issues that are open. But right now I'm starting with stations. There's no reason not to extend this to podcasts. So this is a map of the United States. This allows you to click on any station with a Github project to see what currently is up on Github. Github, for those of you who don't know, is version control software that allows people to work on software projects together. So if we think of Github as creating a recipe together, I write ingredients, you write ingredients. I say your ingredients should be added to my ingredient list, capiche. It's just doing that for code. So this is going to put all of the Github projects that stations use in one place. What this also does is say to station, hey, no need to create that from scratch. Another station has already made that. Like we don't need to reinvent the wheel 450 times. Yeah. Oh, wait, wait for the mic. So I'm an intern at the Berkman Center. What's your name? Jenny. And I was wondering what you kind of expect when you interview people who participate in public media that's like a non-financial participation. What you expect slash hope, they'll gain kind of both in kind of like a substantive way, but also just in how they kind of perceive and conceive of participation. And also if you have any insight into how that might compare with people who pledge financial contributions. So I scraped OK Cupid, which is a dating website. And I looked at people who had said that they have an interest in public media related terms. And it's really high. There's like thousands of people who list either NPR or Terry Gross in their OK Cupid profile. Because public media says something about you. Like if you listen to public radio, it says that you're like knowing about the world, that you're interested in the news, like you want to date other people who are like you. I've been running into a lot of people who graduate college or in their 20s and 30s and want to meet other people like them offline and not in bars. And there aren't many mechanisms to do that. Like there aren't places that you can go to meet other people like you, work on something meaningful together, make new friends, date. It's hard to find that if you're not religious and you're not into the bar scene, which a lot of people fall into that cohort, myself included. And so if stations could be more of like a public space, which attracts people who might want to meet one another, if stations could also operate more like a library where, you know, the library is open to everybody. And the library benefits from being open to anybody. I talked to a community station in Utah.  That's amazing. Like they get content that they wouldn't otherwise get from a community that they might not otherwise be attracting or speaking with or thinking about. And you know, if you think about what public media is or what public media currently sounds like, it's very white. It's very male. It's very Northeast. It's very professor think tank, journalist driven if you listen to certain interviews. I can listen to an hour of an unnamed show and hear professor, professor, male, male, male, white, male, white male. I'm not hearing other people. How can stations be the spot where that opens up to a community that is not, it doesn't hear itself on public radio. So it doesn't want to contribute to public media in any meaningful way. So I realize that that's very idealistic and not something that can happen overnight. But I think by opening up these spaces and creating these spaces where people can, you know, meet each other, that there will be very real associations with public media and positive things. My friend Alex told me to think of it as like a cruise ship director points people to activities and then extracts herself from the process. So like you want to go to gambling. I don't know what people do on a cruise ship, but like let's think of cruise ship related activities points people in different directions. You find a cohort of people in that activity and then you associate that activity with the cruise ship. So what could public radio be associated with that it's not currently associated with? I also think that in comparison to how people typically donate now, which is pledge financial, people feel like he said there's like a guilt complex involved. That's kind of what I've been hearing over and over again. I feel guilty. I listen or I'm not sure what I'm getting out of this, but feel like I should. And I think that there's a better relationship that people should have with their stations rather than guilt. I'm gonna jump in because I don't take the mic already. My name's Adrienne. The community manager at Harvard Business Schools Digital Initiative and then previously the Boston Globe, Boston.com. But I wanted to build on your idea of like this new model for community in public media because I think, I think though you don't wanna go into the kind of revenue potential, like I'm gonna go there because there is a significant portion. And I think sometimes when you're trying to convince people who are revenue minded, like by not bringing it into the conversation, they inherently assume that there's no potential there. But if you think about churches and religious organizations as a case study, they're obviously like, many of them are very well funded because when you're part of a religious community, you spend a lot of time there, you want it to continue to exist. And so you give them money. You also give them money maybe because you don't wanna go to hell, but like, you know. Maybe we can work that in. Like, hypothetically, you know, you also give them money because you want that church to still be there because it's part of your community. And especially in these like small towns where you see small and mid-level stations, the more personal connection that younger audiences can have with these stations, the more likely they are to go to bat for them when it kind of comes down to town to the tax of it.  You know, and I should say, you saying that made me think of something. I have no business background. I was an English major in college. Like, if anybody can help me with the revenue part of this, like, that would be really helpful. Thanks. I agree with you. I think that anything that stations can do to situate themselves in people's minds is more than just a broadcaster. I wrote this piece on my website called If I Ran a Public Radio Station, What I Would Do, and I just, it's called If I Ran a Station. And it was just different things people could do, like in a station to make themselves more community-oriented. And then I tossed it back out to the audience and said, what would you do? And people came up with all of these ideas for what, like, an ideal station would look like. This is not going to happen. Like, these 19 things are, but if a station runs with one of them and says, like, this is what we could do, like, it gets people thinking in different ways. And there's also revenue for stations in this. Like, I think that they could set up storytelling as a service. You know, how do you, the Moth runs workshops for organizations that, to tell Moth-like stories that help fund the Moth. So are there models that stations could see themselves as, people who tell audio stories are so good at conveying information? Are there classes, workshops, things that they could run in their community that help people or communities tell their own stories or to help local organizations tell their own stories? I think there is revenue potential there. Yeah. I mentioned that it's important to hear people with completely different opinions. However, I was a little bit surprised when you called on John and he said, we all, I've learned at a very young age that we all never applies to everybody. All doesn't even go to the bathroom. Some people pee in a bed. But I can't get out of my mind when you said it's virtually indistinguishable. Do you remember your very first answer? You said it's virtually indistinguishable. I'm sorry, I'm nervous. It's okay. You were talking about the podcasts. Okay. Oh, virtually indistinguishable from the aesthetic. So I wanna address that for a second. If it's virtually indistinguishable and obviously majority of young people choosing not to donate to classical station unless they're in their 70s, do they really need it? And if it's virtually indistinguishable, why do we need to have it public? I mean, if we're getting a government support, tax money, then we're competing with private businesses. And that's not a role of the government. In fact, it's illegal by constitution to compete with the government subsidizing to compete with private businesses. John? Adrienne? So I think that like with the rise of the internet, we're seeing this rise of privately owned public spaces like Facebook, right? We use Facebook, but we don't own Facebook. We have no control over what Facebook does because it's a private company. The difference, sure, in very large aggregate, we can have some control over Facebook, but I think it's been proven multiple times that you as a person or you as a small group or community of people have very little control over what Facebook does. You log on sometimes and Facebook's totally different. But the difference is, all right, well, getting away from one specific case study, there are many examples of privately owned public spaces. If you wanna look at physical spaces, there are many of the public, like the public spaces in New York City are actually privately owned pieces of land that the company allows people to use. Zuccotti Park is one of them. And but the problem becomes when you wanna use that space for something other than what that private company wants you to do with it. And they have the power to say, no way. The differences with actual public spaces that are owned in aggregate by a community is that you have more control over what is or isn't done to that space. So it's like Wikipedia versus, or like an open sort, like kind of a nonprofit Wikipedia versus like a Britannica.com, right? I think if the conversation becomes, should public media exist, we've gone in a different direction and I'd prefer to just keep it on membership and then address that afterwards. Cause I wanna hear from people who can help this specific project and the question of whether public media should exist is not the point of this. Anyone else? Joel Abrams, I used to work at the Boston Globe on Stigial Properties. And there I spent a lot of time thinking, well, how does journalism pay for itself and that business model? And public media I think has a great advantage over that of while if you, the globe is asking you to do something, you're benefiting a billionaire who owns it, loses a lot of money on it, but still. Whereas when your public radio station asks you, you are doing something for the common good. And so that provides an altruistic motive. It's not just guilt, but it's that flip side of it that why people support the organizations that they feel part of is because, oh, I'm helping to do good, I'm advancing a cause that I feel is important. And as Adrian said, it's important to have that public space and that different voices being heard. Yeah, I mean, I think of this as like public libraries, public parks, I'm lumping in a whole bunch of public facilities together. And I think public libraries and public parks have tackled this really well. The National Park Service, people love it. People would advocate for the existence of the National Park Service because they get something out of it. And I love what they're doing with the fourth graders. I think that that is just so smart on so many levels to think we're providing this ability to utilize this public space and what they're giving them is the ability to park. So you can go to any public park, but there's a small parking fee and that does affect people's ability to go. But if you say to fourth graders, you get to go, your families get to go, you get to experience this. You know, that person's relationship with that public space will change over time. Yeah. Hi, my name is Marielle. I'm an activist based in Mexico. And I think that, I mean, I don't know if it's my oversimplification of this, but I think that what we're trying to do is to get people to see that there's a tangible value in being members and that the challenge is how to make it tangible for certain audiences. And the one thing that got me to donate as a person under 30 in Mexico to a medium was being able to decide what stories got funded. So the Southlet in Mexico started doing scholarships for investigative journalists. They fund stories for a month. I mean, that's not how they use all their funding, but they said some of the funding that we get from people will go to pay for certain stories. And because of the context right now, they picked stories that would be banned by the government. So like pedophilia ring stories or disappearance stories, like stories that would get journalists in trouble with their government ads if they were pursuing them. And so being able to have a say in what stories would get funded and they had like this transparent voting system where I don't know how many submissions they had, but then they picked like the top 10 and then they said how many votes each story got. I feel like it maybe doesn't solve the problem of how to get more members, like volume donations, but how to get those members to donate more, those who are your members already, like bidding on the depth of the donation. And so I think that, I mean, that's personally what had me donate a large sum of money to this organization. Even without money, like running something like the curious city project allows people to have a say in something that is covered on the air that might be meaningful to a large group of people that a reporter in the station wouldn't have thought about. Extending this to what it would look like for an investigative journalist would be really interesting. Yeah, do you have a mic? So my name is Liz and I am also a Berkman intern. My question is kind of, so with the old model, when people pledged money to a radio station, they become a member of that station and with a lot of these newer projects we're talking about, it's like this one project, your crowdfunding for one project, or I was thinking of some like science, I think Radio Lab did this once, and something else that the New York Exodus and Science thing, like the pokey, the... Like the Planet Money makes a t-shirt, like it was one project. Exactly, it's one project. So when you have something like that and people are becoming members because they're giving their time, they're putting effort into one project, how do you say, okay, now you're a member of WNYC, now you're a member, you're also a member of the station? I mean, do you have any, is there any disconnect there with that? I would say that when I worked with a lot of reporters at NPR, I would say if you think your story telling stops when the story is published, like the story doesn't stop at the publication point and you move on to the next story, it then becomes how do you say what happened so that people realize the value of your reporting and then that becomes the story of the station? So let's say, I'll give you an example, Howard Berkus is a reporter at NPR, he does a lot of work in mining, which I have to tell you is not something that's reported by a lot of publications because mining stories on the NPR website do not get a lot of traffic. But Howard has changed laws in West Virginia and that's a story that NPR should be telling, how Howard's reporting helped change laws in West Virginia. That's showing impact, that's not page views, that's not showing, but that had meaningful change in the state of West Virginia based on Howard's reporting. I almost think you need a unit internally to tell the story of the stories that are being told, that sounds very meta, but if you're doing this kind of public impact reporting, how do you tell the story of that to say based on your donation, we were able to do this, we were able to tell these stories, these people were able to achieve this and now we'd like to do this. And I'm happy to stay afterwards to talk one-on-one. I have nothing else planned for today. Is there one last question before you wrap up? Unless, thank you to Melanie. Thank you. Thank you.