When Mark Fuerst talks, I listen. He has been an early and tireless networker and advocate for public media online. He has done the heavy lifting needed to provide a venue for its ongoing development--the Integrated Media Association. And he has opened up channels of conversation and collaboration between entities as disparate as NPR, PBS, CBC, and BBC. So I read Mark's article in Current of March 22, 2004, "We can compete on the Web--CBC.ca does", with great interest, having attended the iMa-organized conference last fall in Toronto between NPR, PBS, and CBC online staff.

CBC.ca is a great site and well worth a bookmark or two. Living on the border, I have long been a covert fan of CBC, and North Country Public Radio as a border station has many Canadian listeners and members. We use CBC headline modules throughout our site in company with NPR and Public Interactive content. CBC.ca has come a long way in a few years and has earned its ranking as the top online news destination for Canadians.

However, when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of trying to use CBC.ca's success as a model for practice in the United States, the possibilities are less exciting, particularly from the smaller station perspective. Mark notes that the combined resources U.S. pubcasters spend on the Web compares favorably with CBC's investment, suggesting that we should expect similar results: an online news presence that puts us up there with the big boys.

But U.S. public broadcasting is not, and never will be, the centrally administered monolith that the heavily state-supported CBC is. CBC does have regional sites that roughly correspond to U.S. station sites, but only 16 of them nationwide. Taken together, by CBC's figures, they receive a total of only 9 percent of the pages viewed on CBC.ca. Split that fraction up a couple of hundred ways between U.S. station sites and you wind up with the traffic level of an emu-breeding website.

Any U.S. model will still need to accommodate robust and useful station sites. That's where the money is, for starters. Affiliate fees float the network, and member contributions float the affiliates. Without that person-to-person level contract, the U.S. system won't run.

So we can't, as Canada does, focus the bulk of our online resources on a single national site. We need NPR and other large players to maintain and strengthen the local service that builds the relationships that bring in the local dollars. This is not to say that they should not try to emulate CBC's success, just that they cannot expect the stations to toss all their online resources into the pot to get it done.

So online operations will continue to be, as Mark puts it, a "cost center" for local stations, regardless of the national presence of the system. New revenue models have shown less than breathtaking results. But then, I am a fan of the old revenue model myself: we give our best public service efforts away for free, then we beg for public support. Not very entrepreneurial, perhaps, but it has stood the system in good stead so far.

There remains much that can be done to remove some of the cost from the cost center, and at the same time enhance local presence and local control of online operations: cooperative development of open-source content management and syndication tools, community standards for RSS and XML feeds between stations, public broadcasting-wide search tools, and the Public Radio Exchange. All of these self-help efforts and more are being hatched in various corners of the public broadcasting universe, the fruit of investments individual stations and groups of stations have made in online operations.

When effective and affordable toolboxes for doing the work of public broadcasting on the Web come into the hands of stations, then we will really begin to see what the possibilities of the medium are.

Dale Hobson is Web manager for NCPR Online. He lives near the Canadian border in upstate New York. He manages online operations for AIR member station North Country Public Radio. His e-mail address is: dale@ncpr.org.