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March 8th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Public broadcasting is the latest sector to tap startups for innovative ideas.
Code for America announced a startup accelerator earlier this year aiming to redesign government. RockHealth, a startup incubator launched in 2011, aims to disrupt healthcare. Now, a new accelerator launching next month hopes entrepreneurs will help define the future of public radio and television.
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The accelerator is a collaboration between the non-profit public broadcasting distribution marketplace PRX and the Knight Foundation, which kicked in $2.5 million to fund the effort.
Corey Ford, a former Emmy Award-winning producer for PBS Frontline, will start as the accelerator’s director on April 2.
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Ford is currently the director of a startup incubator at Eric Schmidt’s venture capital firm called the Runway Program, rounding out a combination of experience that PRX CEO Jake Shapiro says makes it “almost like he was made in a laboratory for this job.”
Ford appreciates both the value of public broadcasting and the challenges it faces in a quickly evolving media landscape.
“I left [public media] because I was really worried about its future,” he says. “I loved what we made. I think it had tremendous impact in the world. But it was very apparent the world was changing around us. Media was evolving rapidly, business models were changing, and we weren’t really changing at all.”
One goal of the accelerator is to find new ways for public broadcasting — established in a decades-old media environment and notoriously thinly funded — to continue delivering content audiences find relevant.
“There are a lot of people who are passionate about it,” Shapiro says. “But their entire habits have shifted and there’s a risk for public media to become less relevant to its own audience.”
Public broadcasting has had a tough year. Last February, the House approved a bill that cut all funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the year 2013. (The Senate voted against that version, although a compromise could still be on the table.) But while public broadcast may be struggling to say afloat financially, the sector isn’t experiencing a dirth of innovation or interest. Half of the top 10 podcasts in the iTunes store are public radio shows.
“It’s really about attracting the innovators, the talent who want to redesign, redefine and strengthen what this public media thing is for the next generation,” Ford says. “It’s less about saving anything and more about defining the future of it in a way that is sustainable and viable and will have a big impact.”
Applications for the accelerator will open in early summer 2012.
Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, martinedoucet
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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