All of us in public service fields, like public broadcasting, are having to learn a new vocabulary. No longer is it enough to merely produce and broadcast programs. Not enough even to broadcast and engage in active social media and interaction with our audiences. All of these are only means to an end, and the end is to have impact. This is so because increasingly, funders want to determine if their grants are being used to good purpose. One participant in the field put it simply: “If we can’t measure our work, we’re not sure we’re putting resources in the right direction.”

Eric Newton, Advisor to the President of The Knight Foundation puts it this way: “In general, too many media people say they created impact because they did a story that in theory was seen by an audience of XXX size. That’s not impact, that’s distribution.”

For more, check out Impact.