Public Broadcasting & Paid Membership: A Pilot Study to Assess the WNED Buffalo-Toronto Dilemma
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using mutually-reinforcing components, this pilot study seeks to identify the barriers that are preventing viewers of WNED Buffalo-Toronto, a public broadcaster, from becoming paid members. A review of literature considers the changing nature of membership, the success of televangelism, and PBS’s own experience with paid membership. Drawing on organizational commitment theory, and the notional categories of membership developed by Gruen, Summers & Acito (2000), this study analyzes both the external communications documents produced by WNED and feedback from Canadian viewers, both members and non-members. From these results, the study makes three preliminary recommendations. It suggests that WNED take steps to increase the amount of coproduction implied in membership, that it begin investing in Web 2.0 to better leverage its content and foster brand communities, and that it augment membership with crowdfunding initiatives. The study concludes with the suggestion that membership is changing and that more relational models may be more attractive to viewers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".