Three Things Datebook for the week of 11/29/2021

The datebook suggests checking out what the CPB board is up to with its meeting this week. Also, the Journalism AI Festival plus a webinar on how to improve performance reviews.

It’s back to a full week after the extended Thanksgiving weekend, and plenty is happening this week of interest to folks in public media.

THING ONE: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board of Directors Meeting

On Wednesday, December 1, from 3:00 - 5:00 pm (Eastern), and on Thursday, December 2, from 3:00 - 4:15 pm (Eastern), the CPB Board of Directors will be meeting virtually. The agenda, which you can see here, is worth paying attention to, given the potential of policy changes or initiatives that may impact stations.

The board will be meeting in closed session on Wednesday in a follow-up discussion on the FY 2023 Budget Request to the OMB.

This is most likely related to efforts taking place over the past several months that would shift how public television’s interconnection operational costs are addressed¹. Back in July, CPB President Pat Harrison shared with stations a proposal to shift these costs from the “system support” portion of CPB’s base appropriation² to an existing, stand-alone “interconnection and infrastructure fund,” also administered by CPB.

This would free up around $4 million a year in CPB’s system support fund for a number of important and potentially transformational initiatives.

The “interconnection and infrastructure fund” is the $20 million in the federal appropriation for interconnection and other infrastructure costs Congress has allocated over the past four years. This is an annual appropriation that is not forward funded as the general CPB funding is by Congress. The other big item in the “interconnection and infrastructure fund” is the critical work of the Digital Infrastructure Group.

The CPB board will also receive an Update on NPR Interconnection in the executive session on Wednesday.

The other item of interest is the Digital Transformation Update that’s scheduled for discussion on Thursday. The board will most likely hear about the CPB Digital Transformation Project that begins early next year that we discussed back in October.

With the exception of the executive session, the public may listen to the meeting. If you’re interested, please get in touch with CPB at ocsec@cpb.org or 202-879-9710 for instructions.

THING TWO: It’s All Things Artificial Intelligence and Journalism This Week

A week-long virtual conference focusing on the colliding worlds of artificial intelligence on journalism is taking place that’s free to a worldwide audience this week.

The Journalism AI Festival 2021 is hosted by Polis (the journalism think-tank at the London School of Economics and Political Science) in collaboration with the Google News Initiative.

JournalismAI is an effort that seeks to inform media organizations about the potential offered by AI-powered technologies and to foster debate about the ethical, editorial, and social impact of AI on journalism.

Over the course of this week, each day will feature up to four sessions that will showcase projects developed during the year by teams that have brought together media organizations to explore innovative solutions that improve journalism via the use of AI technologies.

In addition, the Festival will showcase some of the most innovative use cases of AI in journalism from across the world and offer conversations featuring high-profile guests working at the intersection of journalism and AI.

The line-up includes some of the smartest people in this space, including:

• Tess Jeffers, Director of Data Science with The Wall Street Journal

• Shreya Vaidyanathan, AI Product Manager, News + Data Science with Bloomberg

• Megan Chan, News Ecosystem Lead with the Google News Initiative

• David Caswell, the BBC News Labs Executive Product Manager

• Aimee Rinehart, Program Manager for AI & Local News with the Associated Press

• Adriana Stephan, the Program Lead for the Partnership on AI’s AI and Media Integrity Program; and

• Mattia Peretti, JournalismAI Manager at Polis

Here’s a couple of the sessions that might be of interest:

• Lightning Talks: Insights from the JournalismAI Community³ | Monday, November 29, 2021, from 4:15 - 5:00 pm (GMT)

• Automating the Analysis of Documents, Images and Language: AI in Service of Investigative Journalism | Tuesday, November 30, 2021, from 2:30 - 3:15 pm (GMT)

• Kickstarting the AI Journey as a Small Newsroom | Wednesday, December 1, 2021, from 10:30 - 11:15 am (GMT)

• How Might We Use AI and Audience Insights to Design more Relevant and Interactive News Narratives? | Thursday, December 2, 2021, from 10:30 - 11:15 am (GMT)

Since many of these sessions occur very early in the morning for American audiences, you can always watch these conversations at your leisure. This conference is a terrific way to begin your journey in how AI and Journalism can work together or go deeper into ways that can advance your organization's work.

There is no registration needed for the Festival. All you have to do is visit the Journalism AI YouTube page to watch the sessions.

THING THREE: Rethinking Performance Reviews

I wrote earlier this month about how much I appreciate the work of Claire Lew with Know Your Team in providing some great counsel on making the workplace a more people-friendly environment.

One of the areas that Claire has been writing about is the concept of performance reviews, an area that few love and most dread.

This is backed up by research.

A 2019 study by Mercer found that only 2% of companies believe feel their performance process delivers exceptional value. In fact, Gallup shared how “traditional performance reviews and approaches to feedback are often so bad that they actually make performance worse about one-third of the time.” They further discovered that “only 14% of employees strongly agree their performance reviews inspire them to improve.”

On Wednesday, December 1 at 1:00 pm (Eastern), Claire Lew will be addressing this ritual by sharing the Know Your Team framework on how to approach performance reviews – based on a methodology developed over the past seven years working with more than 30,000 people.

This is a free one-hour interactive workshop that you can register at this link.

And of course, tomorrow is Giving Tuesday. Best of luck in kicking off this critical fundraising period for public media and all of the non-profit sector.

Thanks for reading.

1. The annual interconnection costs differ between public radio and public television. Public television uses around $4 million from the system support fund to distribute to public television stations that are then sent to PBS. Public radio does not receive direct annual operational support from CPB for interconnection.

2. The “system support” funds make up 6% of the annual CPB appropriation. For FY 2023, that would be around $28.5 million.

3. This session features Anita Zielina, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism; Megan Chan, News Ecosystem Lead with the Google News Initiative; and Jakub Parusinski, Co-Founder & Editor at The Fix Media.