Can the nascent entrepreneurial ideas bouncing around Silicon Valley help reinvent public media?
Matter Ventures, a start-up accelerator that will provide four months of financial and logistical support for budding media entrepreneurs, will be unveiled Monday by its partners: KQED, a public television and radio station operator; the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; and the Public Radio Exchange, known as PRX.
KQED, based in San Francisco, and the Knight Foundation are each investing $1.25 million in the initial $2.5 million fund and will have an equity stake in any projects that become viable businesses. PRX, based in Cambridge, Mass., is contributing strategic and management support. The project was announced a year ago as a PRX endeavor to be financed by Knight, before KQED became an investor.
While the partners would love to find the next Google, KQED, which just had two years of record-setting revenue, does not expect to get rich from the venture, John Boland, KQED’s president, said in a telephone interview.
Instead, Mr. Boland said, he is looking for ideas, whether new ways to distribute and share content, raise money or allow KQED’s audience to “engage more deeply with the content and with others.”
The goal is to help KQED reinvent itself in an era where its television ratings have been steadily declining and its radio audience is flat, he said. Broadcast audiences have stagnated even as KQED’s online and mobile audiences have boomed. Demand for its increased offering of local and regional news has been strong as commercial newspapers and television stations have cut back.
Being in the Silicon Valley area, KQED should be “tapping into the innovation ecosystem” outside its doors, Mr. Boland said. He said the accelerator was “specifically designed to attract creative people, entrepreneurs, who have ideas that relate to what we’re calling ‘media for good.’ ”
Mark Perry, a KQED board member who is a general partner in the venture capital firm NEA, called the accelerator “a tremendous opportunity.”
“As this new media world evolves we’re going to need more innovation around — not the content development, because that we know how to do — but how these productions can be distributed in the most effective way across these multiple platforms,” Mr. Perry said by telephone.
“It’s as much to stimulate the innovative side of our entire organization as it is to come up with any particular technique, particular technology or particular insight that may come out,” he said. But entrepreneurs are likely to be attracted to the model because KQED is a potential customer for any project that does work, he said.
Michael Maness, Knight Foundation’s vice president for journalism and media innovation, in a telephone interview said the accelerator also has the potential to speed the learning process for entrepreneurs in the news business. The foundation will also be able to publicly share insights gained from the projects, unlike those generated by private equity accelerators, he added.
The accelerator will be led by Corey Ford, a former producer for the PBS program “Frontline.” Mr. Ford most recently built Runway, an accelerator for the Google chairman Eric E. Schmidt’s early stage venture capital firm, Innovation Endeavors.
Matter Ventures will finance four rounds of five teams each over two years. Each of the 20 teams selected will get $50,000, mentoring from the KQED staff, and educational workshops, as well as work space in the Matter Ventures’ headquarters in the South Park section of San Francisco, just blocks from KQED.
“A big part of this is about the culture and the community that you create,” Mr. Ford said. Each round will end with a day of presentations to potential investors.
Applications for the first class, which will begin work in late February, are being accepted through Jan. 6 at www.matter.vc.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/business/media/partnership-offers-support-for-public-media-ventures.html?partner=rss&emc=rss