Audience Measurement as It Relates to PEG Access TV and Its Mission
Introduction
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By now, of course, most of these links are long since broken. And of course, with the rise of the interactive web - blogs and other online social networking tools - there are a ton more research efforts and methodologies which could prove useful for PEG access managers to consider. I've asked ACM members via our listserv to send me links or documents for any audience/impacts research that they've conducted in the last ten years, and we may be able to create a useful compilation based on what we receive. And I just created a forum for discussing this topic on our website: Measuring PEG Access Channel Viewership and Impact. See you there, I hope! |
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Introduction What we ask depends upon what we’re trying to accomplish. In general, it seems audience measurements of PEG access centers are being done (or at least reported) for two purposes. First, measurements are used essentially for marketing purposes – in order to convince policy-makers, funders, and other potential participants of the reach and value of public access. A second major use of audience measurement involves the assessment of the needs of the community of service. These assessments are used pro-actively to help design the structures and shape the services of the access providers themselves. That is, unlike marketing-based audience measurement, which is designed to have its impact primarily on others, a needs-assessment audience measurement is designed to have its impact primarily on the access provider itself. Other purposes for audience measurements involve tracking the effects of specific programs and program streams. These have traditionally been carried out by the more moneyed, relatively speaking -- public and commercial broadcasters, colleges and universities, trade and media research organizations. The annotated list below includes some results and readings that travel the range of these purposes – beginning with public access centers, moving on to public television, then on to media and society researchers. What we ask depends upon what we’re trying to accomplish. |
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In 1998 the City of Austin conducted an assessment of viewer attitudes: Telecomm and Cable Survey 1998. Along with this summary of the results they have posted the survey itself, as well as an interesting collection of comments and suggestions for additional channels and programs. In October 1997 the Maui PEG Access Consortium published its Community Communication Needs Assessment. This document is based upon a day-long conference that was held following nine preparatory focus groups representing various segments of the public sector. Other audience measurements are briefly reported at the web sites of these access centers: Chicago, Elk Grove, Santa Barbara, and the Twin Cities area’s Metro Cable Network. |
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CPB has made available on-line some quick fact sheets, some brief Research Notes and Info Packets, and some lengthier reports on audience needs and behavior. Three useful fact sheets from their FAQ section are:
Do People Value Public Broadcasting? What are Viewers’ Top Choices? A brief Research Note from November 1998: A brief Info Packet from January 1996: A more in-depth look at minority audience needs and behavior: In addition, CPB’s Office of Communications Research has published some useful information in the past, probably out-of-print now, certainly not available on-line. One such was a useful quick tour of various models of audience behavior, "The Psychology of Viewer Program Evaluation," by Joseph Philport of Arbitron. This was included in the March 1980 Proceedings of the CPB Technical Conference on Qualitative Television Ratings. Twenty years of research has happened since then; there certainly must be available somewhere a more current summary of models of audience behavior suitable to public access centers’ needs. Also, in 1979 CPB reported on the research and production design efforts at KCTS-Seattle that went into the development of a news program: "Newsweekly: Audiences, Producers, and Researchers Collaborate to Develop a TV News Service," by Patricia Harris and Mike Kirk. This included the use of the Percy system, a home-based reaction recording device. |
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The Ad Council's web pages include several items related to researching the design and effectiveness of public service announcement campaigns. The most recent is a 40-page report on research conducted by the Ad Council and MTV, and funded by the Pew Charitable Trust: Engaging the Next Generation: How Non-profits Can Reach Young Adults. Other, briefer reports include: Impact of Public Service Advertising Campaigns; Summary of the Advertising Council's Strategic Task Force Research; Opinion Research Polling; and Issues Tracking. |
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These organizations, both affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, have published research on the audience for local TV news. The Project for Excellence in Journalism has a 30-page report available, "Local TV: What Works, What Flops, and Why," written by Tom Rosenstiel, Carl Gottlieb, and Lee Ann Brady. The report is based on results from surveys conducted in March/April, 1999. NewsLab has a number of brief reports available: "The Shrinking Audience for Local TV News", "The Savvy Audience for Local TV News", "How Viewers View the News", "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Storytellers", and "Covering Campaigns and Elections." |
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The Pew Research Center has conducted three surveys in particular that should prove useful for public access managers considering audience measurements: Internet Sapping Broadcast News Audience; a biennial survey of US news consumption patterns (June 2000) The Tough Job of Communicating with Voters (January 2000) In addition, the Pew Research Center has posted an Online Questionnaire to survey those who visit their website. Among its dozen questions is included: "I follow the LOCAL COMMUNITY news very closely ONLY when something important or interesting is happening" versus "I follow the LOCAL COMMUNITY news very closely most of the time." |
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One of the prominent approaches in communications research is the uses and gratifications theory of audience behavior. This research approach was described in "The Uses of Mass Communication," edited by Professors Jay Blumer and Elihu Katz in 1974. Dr. Joohoan Kim, one of Dr. Katz’ former graduate students, went on to study this aspect of communications research as it relates to opinion formation and civic participation. Though I cannot find a current location for him -- in 1998 he was teaching at Boston College -- many of his papers are available on the web. In addition to his Home Page, and his Curriculum Vitae (principle linking source for his many papers), I’ve printed out three items for consideration:
Computer-Mediated Community Networking as a New Road to Democracy: A Theoretical and Ethical Consideration; a brief paper. News, Talk, Opinion, Action: Media, Interpersonal Communication, and Political Participation in the Public Sphere, with Robert Wyatt and Elihu Katz, 1997; a not-so-brief paper. [The link is to the CV; the paper is the second paper listed under "Conference Papers." Clicking on the title downloads an MS Word 7 document] |
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In 1995 Robert Putnam wrote a seminal article for the Journal of Democracy, "Bowling Alone: The Decline of Social Capital in America," in which he reports on this century’s downward trend in engaged behavior as revealed in various collections of longitudinal data. In a follow-up article published in The American Prospect, "The Strange Disappearance of Civic America," after controlling for various factors, Putnam edges towards suspecting television to be the main culprit in this sad state of affairs. He has now just published a book on the subject, "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community," in which he accounts for some of the deficiencies in his earlier research, now including additional results from other longitudinal studies. Putnam has also been conducting a series of related discussions organized at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government -- The Saguaro Seminars: Civic Engagement in America. On July 1, C-SPAN 2 showed a 2-hour presentation on this topic, taped June 7 at New York’s New School for Social Research. The program included a speech by Dr. Putnam with responding comments by Dennis Walcott, President/CEO of New York’s Urban League, and Julie Sandorf, Founder, Coalition for Supportive Housing. Looking ahead at what’s to be done, Putnam calls for the flowering of new forms of community engagements and connections, such as took place at the end of the last century, following what he describes as a remarkably similar pattern of civic disengagement. Towards the end of the program, one of the audience members asked the panelists to consider the important tools for engagement provided by public access television centers. |
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In 1971 the FCC required a community "ascertainment" process to ensure that its television licensees operated to serve their communities' "interests, convenience and necessity" -- that hallowed phrase from the Radio Act of 1927. This mandate, abandoned by the FCC during the Reagan era, required station management to: 1) conduct on-going surveys of community leaders and residents, 2) develop a "community problems list" and programs designed to address those problems, and 3) maintain records of these efforts in the station’s Public Inspection File. CPB’s Office of Communication Research published two useful documents on this: Six Experiments in Ascertainment Methodology (1977), from which I’ve distributed Tom Turner’s article, "How to Conduct a Cooperative Market-Wide Community Leaders Survey". These documents are potentially so useful I will try to find a way to get them posted on-line. In December 1999 the FCC issued a Notice of Inquiry regarding the public interest potential of digital broadcasting technology (MM Docket No. 99-360). Some of these public interest potentials were addressed in a series of on-line articles from the Benton Foundation. For example, in their January 2000 issue of The Digital Beat, "Deciding the Future of Television", the Benton Foundation encourages, among other things, the adoption of a "Viewers Bill of Rights," which includes a commitment to localism and a concern for the needs of democracy. And in The Digital Beat’s February 2000 issue, "Community and Broadcasting", Kevin Taglang says this:
Never mind for the moment the stakes involved regarding this specific Notice of Inquiry (comment period closed in March/April, I believe), and the interest many of us will have in its outcome. There is, I think, a compelling set of reasons why access managers might want to consider voluntarily adopting such an ascertainment process for themselves. The primary reason is that ascertainment is a set of tools that enables a station to quantify progress towards its community service goals. In addition, rather than a series of one-time, ad hoc expenditures of marketing or research dollars on outside expertise (perhaps resulting in having to reinvent the task each time), the ascertainment process develops the expertise for understanding audience needs in-house. For the FCC conceived of this as an on-going in-house activity for stations – half of the community leaders surveys, for example, had to be conducted by the senior management responsible for program development and station operations. Finally, many public access centers have had a checkered history - specifically concerning the on-going questions about which kinds of board compositions and selection procedures are most conducive for maintaining accountability as well as independence. A process like ascertainment would seem to be an effective approach for reducing or preventing errors on either side of that dynamic. Is it right to consider adopting such an instrument from broadcast television for use by public access centers? After all, ascertainment was developed so that the licensor could ensure, at a remove, and without dictating program content, that the licensees were meeting their community service obligations. Certainly public access centers have different obligations, right? Are we similarly expected to serve the public’s "interest, convenience, and necessity?" Indeed. I would say that we have not only these obligations, but significant additional ones, as well. What are they? They are spelled out in our individual mission statements and founding charters. Enabling a voice for the voiceless in our communities? Creating a common place for local discourse and celebration? Joining in the multilateral effort to foster an engaged citizenry, actively creating and sharing content, rather than merely passively receiving it? I believe, with only slight re-tooling, the ascertainment process could provide effective measurements of the progress we make towards meeting those obligations, as well. A good start at developing the acertainment's prescribed "problems list" can be found by reviewing the Pew Center for Civic Journalism's research report, "Straight Talk from Americans - 2000." Pew describes their survey this way:
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If public access television's mission were merely to provide another source of television programming for viewers, it might be enough for us to acquaint ourselves with our communities' problems, needs, and interests, strive to deliver programming that meets those needs and interests, and measure our progress in doing so. However, we do have these other obligations. And while audience assessments and measurements are absolutely necessary, they are not at all sufficient to ensure our successful acccomplishment of these other obligations. For example, one additional question we should be asking goes something like this: which voices, currently being raised in the community, are not being heard due to lack of access to the media? In other words, "viewers' interest and satisfaction" is not the only salient measure of our efforts. When the City of Seattle recently considered transferring public access management from the cable operator to a regional non-profit organization, they retained River Oaks Communications to conduct a multi-level set of assessments. In addition to surveying Seattle's current public access users, River Oaks analyzed public access providers in four comparable metropolitan areas: Chicago, Portland, Montgomery County, Maryland, and Multnomah County, Oregon. The results of that analysis are reported in their report's Section 7, Access Center Review and Comparison. That section ends with the following list of common components for a successful public access provider. Measuring components such as these should be no less important a part of public access management than measuring viewers' needs and satisfactions. Components of An "Ideal" Access Center
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