In a strange rush of the the last twenty-four hours I have heard about or read about three sublime, elegant, beautiful failures. The honest admission of coming-up-short. And the great thing is that people are owning it and determined that you or anybody else doesn’t repeat the same mistake(s).

via publicpurposemedia.blogspot.com

This reminded me of an example recently where I suggested an industry conference include a session picking out the lessons from Vocalo, the radio project in Chicago.

Parent company, WBEZ, recently conceded that many of their expectations have not been realized with the project (specifically it isn’t garnering audience or revenues). See the Current Article from January 2010.

A failure of this sort — when it involves reaching out to new communities and ceding media control to youth and volunteers and non-traditional messengers — would seem ripe for review, with an eye toward lessons learned.

Maybe some arguments against its inclusion in the conference were legit, but I got the distinct sense that such failures are not the kind of thing we want to bring up in public.
— MVM