Planet Forward: Using Citizen Journalism To Engage Experts And The Public Across Television And Social Media

Planet Forward: Using Citizen Journalism To Engage Experts And The Public Across Television And Social Media

By Scott Bittle

So far, television and social media have tended to live in separate worlds, touching and collaborating at certain points, but operating on fundamentally different premises. The Planet Forward project is a unique experiment in trying to bring those worlds together, using citizen journalism to create a seamless, multipartisan national conversation flowing from Web to TV and back to the Web.

Planet Forward, a web site and pilot program for PBS, is an experiment in citizen media and public engagement, pioneering the idea of user-generated television. Instead of using interactive media as an adjunct to the television program, the Planet Forward discussion starts online. Participants create their own videos on the project topic – America's energy future. Site visitors were able to shape the show by submitting content, and by rating other submissions. The best contributions were featured on a PBS television special, which aired nationally beginning on April 15, 2009. The discussion then flowed back to the web site, where participants could discuss what they had seen and submit new videos for a web sequel.

The goal was to create public engagement and citizen journalism that would place average citizens on the same footing as prominent experts and political leaders. In the process, we learned that this basic concept works, but unique challenges remain.

Planet Forward is a co-production of the Public Affairs Project at The George Washington University and Nebraska Educational Telecommunications in collaboration with Public Agenda and Sunburst Creative Productions. Funding for the pilot was provided by the Knight Foundation, Tawani Foundation, Noblis, the Lilly Family Foundation, the 11th Hour Project and Phoebe and Rick Peterson.

Two Mediums, Merged

It's hard to rival television as a force in our society. For more than a half-century, it has defined American culture, providing common reference points and collective experiences. From the Kennedy assassination to 9/11 and beyond, television has provided Americans with communal experiences that shape and define our culture.

Yet while television shapes our society, it's almost the complete opposite of social media: Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and their various cousins. Television is the classic example of "one-to-many" communications. With television, you have an audience; with social media, you have participants. And as a tool for public engagement, television has proven to have serious limitations. Certainly it can provide a shared experience, but TV doesn't provide a way to work together, except perhaps among those sitting in the living room with you.

One of the most significant and persistent problems in public engagement is that experts and the public talk past each other. Too often, there's a significant gap between how leaders and experts define an issue and how the public views the problem. The political debates that result often leave the public feeling left out because their views aren't heard, while policymakers are frustrated because they're unable to cope with public resistance.

Television, particularly television news and public affairs programming, is largely an "expert medium." In other words, it's largely produced by professional journalists, and most of the people appearing on television public affairs programs are, in fact, experts in some way: political leaders, pundits, scientists, economists, and so on. Public affairs television is a tool for informing the public, and it can do that job brilliantly. But TV, in its traditional format, is not set up for the public to actually participate in discussion.

"Many To Many" Communication

By contrast, social media represents "many to many" communication, so collaboration and discussion are at the core of what it does. Social media has also proved to be a potent tool for creative work. Wikipedia and "open-source" software are the most famous examples of "crowdsourcing," online collaboration to solve problems or meet other specific goals, but there are many more.

Yet most social media work is among relatively small groups. Facebook, Twitter and other social media can be extremely effective, but it's mostly about reaching niche audiences, and the numbers of most such efforts don't add up to the ratings of even a relatively obscure television show. In addition, social media still tends to bind together like-minded people. The connections people make via social media are much like the ones they make in the "real world": voluntary, and limited to people who have something in common. That's what makes social media such a vibrant tool for advocacy, and yet a more problematic one for real dialogue across different groups.

This is also a major challenge in the burgeoning field of "citizen journalism." Now anyone has access to powerful publishing tools and can, in theory, compete with major media outlets, at least in terms of creating content. But merely creating content doesn't guarantee any kind of an audience.

And while citizen journalism opens up the field to new voices, it also doesn't guarantee that the "old media" principles of balance and accuracy will carry over. So-called "mainstream media" can and should be criticized for its failings. Major media organizations do have elaborate processes for reviewing what they publish before they publish it. "Unfiltered" media like blogs don't have this, and there's a fundamental tradeoff here between openness and process.

So both of these media bring assets and problems: how can television become more open to citizens, and how can social media maintain balance and accuracy, while linking together people who don't already agree?

Web To TV To Web

Planet Forward's concept was simple to describe but complex to implement. Citizens, both experts and members of the public, would submit opinion pieces in a wide range of formats, working off the project theme, namely "Can we get off fossil fuels? Should we?" The model was that of the classic newspaper op-ed, which is to say, opinions backed up by facts. The motto was "Make your case!" and the goal was not to encourage mere sounding off, but to create a space for logical, constructive argument – the kind of opinion that can move dialogue forward.

Site users were then given the opportunity to vote for their favorite submissions to be included in the television show. Those votes were considered in the show production process. The best contributions were featured on-air, and selected participants were invited onstage where they met on camera with key leaders and experts on energy issues. The experts commented on the user submissions, and the citizen contributors were able to pose questions to them in turn.

Planet Forward had several major assets, one of which was "common carriage" on PBS, meaning that the show was given a prime time slot on the network feed to local stations. This is a major commitment for a television pilot, and provided a strong basis for outreach efforts.

The project also faced several challenges, not least of which was a rapid timeline. That meant the project had to essentially "build the airplane as it was flying," by creating a web site and television program at the same time it was conducting outreach to gain contributors. Since the Planet Forward concept was brand new, development of the web platform, legal rules, and outreach all had to proceed on parallel tracks. The legal challenges, for example, proved to be considerable, since the permissions structure for submissions had to conform to both television and web standards.

As a result, the pilot project was on a very compressed timeframe. Each Planet Forward production partner had distinct responsibilities. Central organization and management came from the Public Affairs Project George Washington University led by veteran television journalist Frank Senso. Public Agenda built the Planet Forward web site and ran the associated social media efforts. Sunburst Creative Productions produced the television program. And Nebraska Educational Telecommunications, as the PBS presenting station, worked on outreach and promotion.

The project had several distinct stages:

Outreach

Gathering the audience is critical for any media project, particularly for one calling for user-generated content. Since Planet Forward was starting from scratch, with no built-in audience, and is dependent on citizen submissions to work, outreach was particularly critical. In particular, this was important if the project were to successfully bridge gaps between leaders and the experts. Ideological balance and diversity was also highly important, not just in terms of building a credible discussion but also for meeting PBS and Public Agenda standards on balance and accuracy.

Several strategies were used. One involved outreach to colleges. For example, professors at at George Washington University, Roger Williams University and Middlebury College adopted Planet Forward as a class project, and students in their classes created submissions. These included some submissions very much in the style of classic television journalism, while others featured poetry or rap.

A second, key strategy was to enlist local PBS stations to promote the project and gain submissions. Nebraska Educational Telecommunications, the presenting station, worked with the National Center for Media Engagement and partner stations in San Francisco, Houston, Juneau, Alaska and Rochester, N.Y., to promote the project to their audiences and solicit submissions on their web sites.

The social media strategy has included presences on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, reaching out to other groups interested in the topic (for example, several of the colleges and PBS partners had their own Facebook presences). While the timeframe was short, there was considerable success with this effort, and the project gained over 900 fans on Facebook and more than 4,600 followers on Twitter.

Finally, there was specific outreach to organizations and individuals who had strong views and a track record on this topic. This resulted in submissions from organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the American Petroleum Institute; political leaders like Newt Gingrich and Christine Todd Whitman; and activists like billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen; environmentalists like Middlebury scholar-in-residence Bill McKibben and actor Ted Danson, a longtime activist against offshore drilling.

Web launch

While there was a promotional Web page available in January, the actual web site, PlanetForward.org, launched and began accepting submissions on March 10, 2009. To make the development timeframe, the site was built using Drupal, an open-source content management platform, and Twistage, a video platform built for user-generated content.

Planet Forward was set up to accept a wide range of submissions, with categories ranging from video, audio, essay, poems, songs and photo essays. Nonetheless, almost all the entries were video or essays.

The site provided two levels of access: a basic registered user level, allowing visitors to post comments and rate submissions, and a contributor level, for those who wanted to submit content for consideration. While relatively little information was required from registered users, contributors were required to provide full profile information, including accurate contact information (although not all of this appeared on the site).

The reasons for this were twofold. First, to ensure transparency in contributions and prevent "sock-puppeting," a very real possibility given the controversial nature of the topic. And secondly, this helps meet well-established legal rules for the use of video content on television. While anonymity is often prized in online discussions, television requires specific permissions and any contributor who did not provide real-world contact information could not be considered for the show.

Registered users could rate and post comments without moderation, although offensive posts could be removed (fortunately, this was not much of a problem). Actual contributions underwent two levels of review: first by Public Agenda web staff, and then by the project executive editor at George Washington University. In addition to meeting general standards of acceptability, the submission also had to be on-topic, and fall in line with PBS standards on the use of logos and other promotional and legal issues.

The TV show

The show itself was taped on March 31 in front of a live audience at George Washington University and hosted by Frank Senso, an Emmy Award-winning journalist. Web voting was part of the process, but submissions also had to pass muster from the television and project production staff, in terms of video quality and acceptability for broadcast.

Clips from 22 videos made it on to the show (the program and these videos are all available at http://www.planetforward.org/pbs-show-04152009). These contributors ranged from scientists working on "clean coal" technology" to an animated cartoon about a melting iceberg worried about global warming.

The submissions were discussed by a panel of three well-known energy experts: Shai Agassi, CEO of Better Place; James Connaughton, the former chairman of the Bush White House Council on Environmental Quality; and L. Hunter Lovins, President and Founder, Natural Capitalism Solutions.

Later, several of the contributors got to come on stage and pose questions to Carol Browner, President Obama's special advisor on energy and climate change. These included an electric car advocate from California, a municipal official in Rhode Island who put up wind turbines for his town, and a college student who co-created the iceberg cartoon. This format brought experts and the public together on an equal footing.

The Web sequel

The television show included a call for further submissions. Since the pilot was a one-time special, the second round focused on a sequel that was distributed via the Planet Forward web site. The sequel featured Van Jones, President Obama's "green jobs" advisor, and because it appeared on the web only, was much shorter (16 minutes). Jones saw and responded to four different submissions. (You can see the sequel and its videos at: http://www.planetforward.org/planet-forward-new-fuels-new-jobs.)

All told, over the course of the pilot project, an estimated 1 million people engaged in Planet Forward content, as creators, commenters, or consumers, either in on television or via online media. Nearly all PBS stations, some 96 percent, carried the program in prime time. Many also re-broadcast the show over the following week. Television ratings for the show were comparable to other longstanding PBS public affairs programs or for cable networks in that time slot.

Lessons Learned

A pilot is designed to test a television concept, and the biggest lesson from Planet Forward is that the fundamental concept worked. User-generated content can become the basis of a television show, and that content can be used to promote a valuable dialogue between experts and citizens. Five months after the premiere of the TV show, followers of Planet Forward's Twitter feed (@planet_forward), for example, are continuing a dialogue on fossil fuels and many related subjects.

The Balance Of Control

The ethos of user-generated content, whether on blogs, YouTube, Flickr, or anywhere else, is frequently an "anything goes" mentality. There's no advance filter of any kind, and even if the material violates the terms of service, it will probably take time for the moderators to catch up with it.

Television, on the other hand, requires strong editorial control. TV time is valuable, limited, and constrained under both federal and corporate regulations. In this combined web/TV environment, managing user expectations is critical. We chose to review all user submissions prior to posting (135 were posted on the site), and while most contributors accepted this, some users chafed under the lack of instant results found on sites like YouTube.

Staying Focused

The selection of a topic is critical in a citizen media project. If it's too broad, the contributions will scatter all over, and may never be tied together in a coherent theme for the viewers. If it's too narrow, not enough people may be interested in participating, or there may simply not be enough to say. In this respect, citizen journalism has a lot in common with "crowdsourcing," which has had distinctly mixed success.

Even given Planet Forward's fairly broad topic ("Can we get off fossil fuels? Should we") some contributors had a tendency to either go off topic, or to make what can best be described as generous attempts to define their concern in a way that fit under the fossil fuel heading. In the pilot round of Planet Forward, we mostly dealt with this via moderation, asking contributors to redo submissions that wandered too far off topic. Another strategy would have been to rely on the user community rating system to vote up valuable content and vote down poor quality submissions. Given the short time frame of the pilot project, moderation seemed like the best choice, but this is worth additional consideration in the future.

The Nature Of Incentives

One of the qualities user-generated content sites and public engagement work share is that they have to answer every participant's fundamental question: Why am I doing this? How does this make my life better?

Planet Forward provided a two-fold answer to that question: one was the chance to get your opinion in front of a national television audience, and the other was the ability to have those opinions discussed by recognized experts and senior presidential advisors. The "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" quality of the project proved quite powerful.

Over time, however, the project could be tied more strongly to on-the-ground engagement efforts. The connection between citizen media and public engagement is highly promising. If, as Public Agenda has often found to be true, one of the crucial challenges is defining the problem, then citizen media could give the public new ways to both define and solve them.

Lead Time Is Critical

There's a perception that everything in social media happens overnight, and there are just enough examples of overnight success to make that plausible. In most cases, however, it takes time to build an audience and make social connections. The next challenge for Planet Forward will be expanding its participation base.