Thinking About the Future of NPR

Friday’s Digital Think In with NPR was a wonderful experience, a deep dive into the unique opportunities and challenges facing NPR in the swirling media landscape that intersects with social networking, mobile technologies, shifting demographics, globalization, transformative financial realities, and global communications.

As a long-time NPR listener it was a privilege to participate in the day-long workshop and meet the sixty or so luminaries from a multitude of domains that gave up their Fridays to attend. It was a packed day, but everyone kept up a tremendous energy level throughout the whole seven hours of intensive thinking and collaborating. As one of the three floating moderators I was able to get a bit of a peek across several of the breakout groups, each of which was tackling a specific focus area such as social, revenue, and platform, and it was fascinating to see the teams grapple with the ideas. And there was no shortage of ideas -  we could easily have gone another day and still not captured everything.

NPR’s goal at the end was to define some actionable concepts that they could build on and carry forward in the coming years. To this end, throughout the day each team went through cycles of blowing out new ideas, then prioritizing and refining them. The last activity was to take their concepts and turn them into stories that described the changed user experience that came out of their concept.

The presentations at the end, each lasting about five minutes, were fantastic: richly detailed, compelling, and often very funny. NPR CEO and President, Vivian Schiller, suggested that the next time NPR does this they’ll make it an open mic night, so impressive were the enthusiastic presenters.

Check out Chris Heuer’s Flickr stream of the day, and the Digital Think In site itself with ongoing blog commentary.

Can we have an economy without spending?

You are familiar with Zen koans like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”. They are designed to open up consciousness with paradoxical or impossible questions. Well here’s one: Can we have an economy that is not so dependent on rampant consumer spending?

After 9/11, Bush’s solution was to exhort consumers to spend more as the way to propel ourselves out of the downturn. Today we are hearing similar advice.

Problem is, people are saving (or at least not spending, which I don’t think is quite the same thing) rather than spending.

According to a report on today’s radio show Marketplace, this is causing serious problems. On the heels of today’s announcement that Macy’s is laying off thousands of workers:

Chalk the Macy’s announcement up to a number out from the Commerce Department. Consumer spending fell for the sixth straight month in December. See, the financial crisis has convinced Americans to try something a little different — it’s called saving. But now this sudden attack of thrift is having dire economic consequences.

As Marketplace’s Steve Henn tells us, the worst part is that it could be habit forming.

STEVE HENN: It’s good to save some money. But when everyone starts saving at the same time, it can be an economic disaster. Goods pile up on store shelves, companies cut back on production and lay off workers. Then consumers pull back even more.

[…]

Greg McBride at Bankrate.com says the unemployment rate is only 7 percent, however …

GREG MCBRIDE: The other 93 percent think they might be next.

Economically secure consumers should be buying more. But McBride says fear is a powerful thing. It quickly changes economic behavior and might even break America’s shopping habit.

I actually have great faith in the resiliency of the American shopping habit - despite downturns it has continued ever upward. But that’s not necessarily a good thing. The past decade of consumer spending was unsustainable in two ways:

• We were spending beyond our means, on credit and using inflated house prices and equity
• We were (and continue) to buy at a rate unsustainable for the planet. The US is 5% of the world’s population but consumers 25% of its resources. The domino effect is that China and others produce massive quantities of stuff for us in the US, which feeds their economies, their resource usage, their environmental impacts.

Neither of these can be put back in place as we re-tool the economy. We need to figure out a way to have a large economy (nationally and globally) that does not rely on us buying more than we can afford, and making more than the planet can supply.

No answers here. We need to all put our thinking caps on.