Into the gig economy

Let’s not dream about bigger staffs
and more taxpayer funding

The author is president of Western Reserve Public Media (WNEO/ WEAO), which serves Akron, Youngstown and Kent in northeast Ohio.

Published in Current, Jan. 10, 2011
Commentary by Trina Cutter

The world is going through a major economic transformation. If public media is going to survive, much less thrive, it needs to break out of its 20th-century mode of operation and figure out how to operate in what Daily Beast editor Tina Brown calls  “the gig economy.”

…no matter how our governance is structured, no matter how we direct our resources, no matter how much diversity we embrace and what we call ourselves, at the end of the day we are a business that operates in a market economy.

…public media should take a cue from Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams’ book, Wikinomics, or Stanley M. Davis and Christopher Meyer’s book, Future Wealth, and develop an operating model around Brown’s “gig economy” — piecework contracted project by project. It’s a major economic shift away from institutional employees to Form 1099 contract employees. Staffs contract and expand to meet the production needs of an organization.

Public television stations that put together and then disband a team for a grant-funded project already know how to operate in a gig economy. How we buy programs from syndicators is gig economics. If we hire outside freelancers to create our websites, stream our video, manage interactivity or process our web transactions, we are using the gig model. Independent producers have always operated gig by gig. It allows the coordinator to bring together the right people and resources to put a program together without having the mess and fuss of ongoing human resource expenses.

A gig model allows for more diversity, the worker’s expertise tends to be much greater, and output is significantly increased. Case in point, Western Reserve Public Media is a $5 million operation with 17 full-time staff members. We engage a pool of 20 to 25 seasoned “flex employees” to work on a per-project basis.

Western Reserve PBS’s broadcasts spans the northeast Ohio region — Cleveland, Akron, Canton and Youngstown — and we reach more than 1 million viewers a month. We don’t have an endowment. Unlike other arts organizations in our region, we don’t receive $1 million or more a year in county money from “sin taxes” on cigarettes and tobacco. We don’t have a Board of Directors that raises funds for our organization. We don’t have outside marketing firms creating slick campaigns. We are not housed in a multi-million-dollar building. And, aside from the Community Service Grant we receive from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for our Youngstown station, we do not receive special project funding from CPB.

Yet we offer four 24/7 noncommercial public television services: Western Reserve PBS, Fusion, MHz Worldview and V-me — the first two programmed locally and the other two presenting national program ervices that are unique to the market. Between 2007 and 2010, we produced 35 local program and series, including two ongoing weekly series, and we serve as the region’s premier television outlet for local independent producers. In the 2010 academic year, our Educational Services division offered 184 workshops to 1,995 teachers and added two more multimedia projects for use in regional K-12 classrooms to our already long list of multimedia projects.

… Department heads are project managers or facilitators. They put together the right teams and ensure that the teams have the necessary resources to do the job. Department heads don’t mediate constant personnel conflicts and get bogged down in performance evaluations because in a gig world a 1099 “employee” gets the job done right or they are not hired again. Our support staff members are masters at multitasking. Engineers aren’t just doing broadcast engineering, for example — they’re our liaisons with the outsourced IT network manager; they keep master control functioning; they trouble-shoot voice-over-IP issues; and they are the point-people for the transmitter sites.

For those of us accustomed to the functional management model, it’s unnerving to step into a gig economy. The rules of the road haven’t been written for public TV. For one, federal labor laws and Equal Employment Opportunity regulations were enacted for a different economy.