The companies have been chosen for the accelerator program that’s looking to build the future of public media and information. From the start, CEO Corey Ford said he was committed to finding companies to do the things that matter, and these six are the accelerator’s first bet.

“We have a similar mission to public media and good journalism outlets, but this isn’t just about saving public media or saving journalism. It’s about building a place for entrepreneurs to build something that makes people more informed and empowered,” Ford said in an interview when Matter launched in December.

(The accelerator is not linked to former GigaOM writer Bobbie Johnson’s science and tech publication also called Matter.)

The six companies play at the intersection of content and tech, providing services like analytics for video, publishing platforms, or outlets for digital expression. But Ford emphasized that while the companies all have basic plans in mind, the final products could change significantly before the accelerator’s demo day on June 13.

These are the six companies that will debut in June:

• ChannelMeter – A video analytics platform aimed that lets publishers measure online engagement with videos on sites such as YouTube.
• InkFold – A mobile product that allows consumers to read and interact with the news.
• OpenWatch - An investigative network and citizen media project that aims to let users document abuses of power.
• SpokenLayer – A company that transforms text on the web into audio.
• Station Creator - A television platform allowing users to distribute their own broadcasts online from the cloud.
• Zeega – A company that’s re-thinking publishing and storytelling by allowing users to mix content from across the web.

“It’s really about execution. When you launch something like this, you’re wondering who is out there, and who will be part of this. And the awesome thing is that I can now answer, emphatically, there are talented invidudals out there,” Ford said. “We’re going from an abstract vision of who we’re serving to now we have our actual customers.”

A recent bootcamp for Matter accelerator companies.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• The 2013 task management tools market

“We have a similar mission to public media and good journalism outlets, but this isn’t just about saving public media or saving journalism. It’s about building a place for entrepreneurs to build something that makes people more informed and empowered,” Ford said in an interview Monday.

In other words, Ford is taking the spirit of innovation so ingrained in Silicon Valley and applying that to public information values often associated with outlets like The New York Times or Frontline, and the “future of journalism” conversation so often heard on the East Coast amid its glut of media companies.

Your startup might not have much to do with public radio or publishing, but you might still be a fit for Matter, which launched in San Francisco Monday. In other words, Ford wants to find the next Evan Williams and Biz Stone back when they were hanging out and coming up with an idea that would change the media world forever, when their idea for Twitter was brand new. Or David Karp and Tumblr. Or Perry Chen and Kickstarter. Or whatever else will change how people think about and share information.

Ford, who was an award-winning journalist with Frontline before teaching entrepreneurship at Stanford’s design school and starting Runway at Innovation Endeavors, isn’t going at it alone. While Matter (no relation to our former colleague Bobbie Johnson’s Matter startup) is structured like a typical accelerator, incubating companies for four months and giving them $50,000 in funding, it has backing from KQED, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Public Radio Exchange (PRX). KQED and the Knight Foundation have each put $1.25 million into the initial $2.5 million fund, and PRX will provide strategic support. Applications for interested companies are due by Jan. 6.

In a town populated by plenty of incubators and accelerators, how does Ford hope his venture will stand out? As much as he hopes applicants won’t feel too constrained by the public media focus, he said he thinks that focus will help the companies achieve more, by bringing in advisors who understand the market and challenges it brings, much as Rock Health does with health companies. Ford also said he thinks that having a very small entrepreneur class — only five companies — and a physical work space (something groups like Y Combinator eschew) will help the teams immensely.

“I fully believe that one of the biggest values that we’re bringing, and I don’t see it talked about much in other accelerators, is the culture and community that you build around your startup,” he said. “Money is important because it equates to time and runway. But it’s really about having a place where you can show up, and be better. And be much better rather than doing it alone. Because entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey.”

Ford said they picked the name of the accelerator, Matter, to signify what they are looking for in companies, and also where journalism should go.

“We said, what we needed badly was a brand that talked about what we care about, that preservers the value of public media, that we look back and say, that matters. That stands out in the signals and the noise,” he said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How to navigate the new world of digital advertising
• 10 ways big data changes everything
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

To put things in perspective, the British Broadcasting Corp. isn’t just a government-financed news outlet. It also happens to be one of the largest broadcasters and news agencies in the world, with almost 25,000 employees, and an annual budget — financed primarily by the “TV tax” that the British government levies on every television set owning household in the country — of more than $5 billion. Do we really need that kind of state-financed news entity in an age when journalism is everywhere? Couldn’t that amount of money be used in better ways, either to fund independent news entities or for some other purpose?

Dear everybody hating on the BBC. I have three words for you. American cable TV. Choose carefully :)

—
umair haque (@umairh) November 10, 2012

Does the BBC need to be restructured or dismantled?

The first bombshell to hit what Brits call “The Beeb” came when Jimmy Savile, host of a long-running entertainment show, was accused of having engaged in sexual abuse of children over a span of several decades. The state broadcaster’s show Newsnight had a piece prepared that detailed these allegations, but someone at the organization spiked the story. The director-general of the agency, Mark Thompson — who just became the new CEO of the New York Times Co. — has said he had no knowledge of the incident, but the decision has sparked a loss of confidence in the BBC’s ability to monitor itself.

Just weeks after this crisis, the broadcaster aired a Newsnight documentary about a separate case of sexual-abuse allegations, and identified a prominent MP Conservative, Lord McAlpine, as the perpetrator. Unfortunately for the BBC and everyone involved in the program, the victim later said that his attacker was not Lord McAlpine — and it turned out that the broadcaster had not actually confirmed that McAlpine was involved, nor had it approached the MP about the allegations. The BBC’s new director-general has stepped down after just 2 months in the job, and the agency’s director of news and the deputy director for news have also stepped aside. (Update: As a number of readers have pointed out, the program didn’t name Lord McAlpine but referred to a senior Conservative from the Thatcher era. At least one of the journalists who worked on the documentary identified the subject as McAlpine, however, and that information then spread through Twitter).

Much of the response to these events has focused on how the BBC needs to be restructured in some way: how the head of the news or editorial division should be separate from the head of the business side or the director-general’s office, etc. Former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell, now at Columbia University running the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, does a good job of retracing the steps that may have led to the BBC’s recent journalistic failures. And almost everyone notes that the Beeb is still trusted and in some cases even revered by the British people — but there are those who suggest otherwise:

When I first joined, the BBC was a community of passionate programme makers. Now a labyrinthine, largely unaccountable, bureaucracy. Tragic

—
Martin Hughes-Games (@MartinHGames) November 12, 2012

Do we need a single state-funded source of journalism?

But while the BBC’s decisions in both of these cases deserve all the investigation they are getting both from within the agency and from outside it, it’s worth asking whether the British government — and by extension the British populace — need to be financing a $5-billion organization to produce journalism. And if they do, what should that entity’s purpose be? A similar question could be asked in Australia and Canada, both of which have their own national versions of the BBC (the U.S. also helps subsidize National Public Radio and other public entities, although the majority of their revenue comes from donations).

As even a former chairman of the British broadcaster has pointed out, one of the biggest criticisms that can be made of a state-funded news outlet like the BBC is that it is being paid to compete with private broadcasters and news companies, many of which can barely afford to continue doing business at all, let alone match the vast revenue and resources of the Beeb. Along with its counterparts in Australia and Canada, the BBC has become a powerful force in online news, ranking just below outlets like the New York Times and CNN when it comes to overall audience.

Supporters argue that there is a place for an (allegedly) impartial source of journalism, one that will undertake the kinds of investigative projects that other outlets do not — and that would be a great rationale for the existence of a state-funded news entity, if that’s all the BBC and its counterparts did. But the reality is that they also produce a vast quantity of regular news and entertainment as well. Is that really something that residents of Britain need to subsidize with their taxes?

If governments want to fund the creation of news and journalism, maybe they would be better off finding some way to do that by financing independent entities, the way the Knight Foundation and other non-profit trusts do, instead of propping up anachronistic players like the BBC.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users zawtowers and R/DV/RS

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

Blank on Blank successfully raised more than $11,000 on Kickstarter. But getting there wasn’t easy: “It’s a long 30 days,” said the show’s producer David Gerlach.

Some radio producers have already begun to turn to Kickstarter, Indiegogo and similar sites to raise funds for their shows. This week Blank on Blank successfully closed a Kickstarter campaign, raising a modest $11,337 in the process. The show, which resurfaces “lost interviews” with celebrities like Bono, Martin Scorsese and Tim Gunn, wants to use that money to both produce 30 new radio show episodes as well as turn them into animated YouTube videos.

Blank on Blank producer David Gerlach told me during a phone call on Tuesday that a big goal was to reach new audiences through the Kickstarter campaign, which indeed led to tons of media coverage. “It was beyond successful,” he told me.

Changing public media forever

Design show 99% Invisible is another Kickstarter success story in the making: It was able to achieve its $42,000 funding goal within 24 hours. Listeners since have pledged more than $74,000 at the time of writing, with 24 days to go. Producer Roman Mars now wants to raise money from a total of 5,000 backers.

“If we do this, I guarantee that independent public media will never be the same,” he wrote on Kickstarter, adding:

“I want the stations, producers and networks to know that if they each take the leap and invest in making something driven by passion and vision, . . . there are people out there that will help in any way they can: at least 5000 people.”

Bootstrapping new voices

99% Invisible raised more than $42,000 in 24 hours to finance its third season. “It was unbelievable watching that happen,” said fellow radio maker and Blank on Blank producer David Gerlach.

The potential Kickstarter has for shows like 99% Invisible and Blank on Blank is indeed exciting, because it gives the audience a new way to support them at a much earlier stage. Previously it took years to establish a new show on public radio, and the process involved grant writing and lots of politics. Now radio stations and producers themselves can turn to Kickstarter and show there’s an audience that values their ideas. “It’s a new way to bootstrap new programs, new voices,” explained Public Radio Exchange (PRX) CEO Jake Shapiro during a phone conversation on Tuesday.

PRX is distributing both Blank on Blank and 99% Invisible, and it helped both programs with their Kickstarter campaigns. Shapiro told me he sees crowd financing through platforms like Kickstarter as a kind of continuation of the idea of publicly financed media, which has been at the core of public radio for decades. Adding a new way for people to contribute could be hugely beneficial, he argued, especially if you reach new audiences that haven’t given in the past. “My hope is that it expands the total pie of giving,” said Shapiro.

Cutting out the affiliate

Of course, it could also play out in another way. Radio producers that directly connect with their audience online are circumventing a key piece of the public radio puzzle: the local affiliate. Over decades these affiliates have been licensing shows and paying for them through their pledge drives. Changing listening habits have slowly been eroding this relationship, with audiences increasingly tuning in through podcasts and mobile apps as opposed to the local broadcast signal.

Audiences are already listening differently. What if they also started giving differently?

Now crowdfunding threatens to further circumvent the local affiliates and their pledge drives — and the effect could be dramatic. What if listeners stopped giving to their local stations and instead just spent all their money to directly fund producers via Kickstarter? “That is a shift that entails some disruption,” admitted Shapiro. Local broadcasters are still huge, he argued, but they’re not immune to change. Some of them have already started to embrace this change and put more energy into content production, but others could face a rude awakening. “They have to rethink their relationship with their audiences,” said Shapiro.

Not just another pledge drive

All of these developments are happening while one of the oldest debates in public radio has bubbled up once again: How much time and money should stations spend on popular programming, as opposed to new and emerging producers? Last month This American Life’s Ira Glass publicly challenged stations to drop Car Talk reruns once the popular show retires in October and instead give new voices a chance.

Crowd financing could help these new voices get some momentum. And chances are that people will look to shows like 99% Invisible and Blank on Blank to study how to tap into this new revenue stream. Asked what others can learn from his experience, Gerlach told me running the campaign was harder than it might seem. “It’s a long 30 days,” he told me.

And he cautioned that Kickstarter may only work if you can really offer your audience something new. “You can’t keep coming back to them,” just because it’s time to pay the bills, he argued. Otherwise, it would simply turn into yet another dreadful pledge drive.

Radio image courtesy of Flickr user C.P.Storm

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• Analyzing the wearable computing market