Public Media Venture Group And Distributed Media Lab Partner

Public Media Venture Group (PMVG) and Distributed Media Lab (DML) today announced a new partnership focused on building state and regional news content syndication networks to power audience growth and new revenue for local news organizations and public stations nationwide.

This partnership is building on the recent California launch with KQED, the public media station in San Francisco, which is harnessing the DML platform to build a California news web syndication network to grow audience reach and revenue to benefit local news organizations across the state.

DML and PMVG will work together to identify and engage premier public and private local media companies as well as nonprofit news organizations to lead state and regional syndication networks for distributing news stories of regional interest.

As part of PMVG’s shared services model, DML’s technology will be used to power these syndication networks which will provide new audience channels for participating publishers and new revenue initially planned to harness rapid growth in content marketing.

“New audience engagement and new revenue models are needed more than ever to sustain the journalistic mission of public media and local news,” says Tim Olson, KQED SVP of digital strategic partnerships. “Combining the effort of local media companies and their audiences to share their content more widely is a strategy with immense potential to lift engagement and open up new fundraising opportunities.”

PMVG CEO Marc Hand said: “DML’s technology is uniquely designed to serve media organizations by empowering them to easily create their own syndication networks. This is about giving local news and public media companies the ability to control their own destiny with a truly innovative web technology platform and business model that will bring in expanded audiences and new sources of revenue.”

“We are very excited to work with PMVG given their track record for bringing to market new technology solutions that improve the business of journalism in general and public media in particular,” said David Gehring, DML CEO. “I think the corporate sponsorship and donor revenue models that are traditional for public media can be extended to support local news media more broadly in the emerging web economy, and we’re very excited to support that trend.”