Adam Amel Rogers
Adam Amel Rogers is a Project Specialist at the Lear Center

For what seems like a lifetime, those who follow gay issues in sports have been addressing the same tiresome series of questions: "Is America ready for an openly gay athlete in one of the four major team sports?" "When will a current player finally come out?" "How will it impact the locker room?"

The list goes on.

While we wait patiently for a major athlete to come out and put these questions to rest, at least we can see our dreams (and at times, nightmares) play out in Hollywood.

Last week, Necessary Roughness (USA Network) became the latest in a long line of TV shows to imagine an athlete's coming out process. The depiction of quarterback Rex Evans making the decision to come out as a gay man has largely been treated with care, compassion and complexity.

The storyline reflects evolving attitudes toward LGBT equality in American culture and it differs from previous coming out plots in that Rex isn't fired or forced onto injured reserve. But there is one trait that Rex Evans shares with most of his fictional gay athlete predecessors:

He's white.

I am currently researching the history of LGBT athletes on television for a study that is due out this fall, but one doesn't need a content analysis to see that an overwhelming majority of gay athletes depicted in entertainment media are white.

The gay quarterback from Showtime's Queer As Folk? White. The gay tight end from ESPN's Playmakers? White. Eric Dane as a gay quarterback on the movie Valentine's Day, the gay

You can also check out this blog at The Huffington Post.

Johanna Blakley

Monday is sort of a ramp-up day at TED, but this year the highlight for me was Inside TED, a glimpse into the machinations of a unique organization that's trying to figure out how to spread ideas that are stalled or stuck in some way - perhaps they're trapped in impenetrable jargon; maybe they're stuck in a disciplinary silo . . . or a Nairobi slum. Regardless of the impediments, or perhaps due to them, TED aspires to create a media platform for awesome and sexy ideas to propagate.

Despite this expansive mission - based primarily on the notion that exposure and transparency are tools for solving the world's problems - I think most TEDsters feel like there's a tantalizing shroud of secrecy and sanctity enveloping the TED organization: exactly how many people work there? And how much money do they make from these hyper-expensive conferences (7,500 bucks a pop)? Who decides which videos are posted and featured?

Well, Inside TED was Chris Anderson's way of opening up the ledgers and introducing the TED community to the brave (and wacky) souls who make this crazy ship run.

Some highlights:

• Revenues? About $45 million last year, with $27 million coming from TED, TED Global, and TED Active. Anderson estimates that there are about 500 core attendees who have spent around $30,000 supporting TED over the years.


• There are 1,400 talks on TED.com, with more than 50 million views per month. Only 200 are from TEDx events (and, so for, there have been 5,000 TEDx events with 8-10 more taking place per day.)


• 25% of their traffic is mobile, and they also distribute their talks through radio and TV channels (they've even put TED talks in taxis in Mumbai). Anderson suggested that TED speakers simply multiply their TED.com views by two in order to figure out about how many times their videos have been seen (that puts my two TED.com talks at 2.2 million views. Yowza.)


• Their brilliant open translation project involves 11,000 translators and 35,000 translations in 97 languages. (I was thrilled to hear that the Gates Foundation was a key funder for this. Go Bill!)

When someone asked Anderson about his favorite failure (and he had earlier admitted that the Bono TED Prize challenge to wire Ethiopia was a dire misfire) he ended up talking about their struggle to balance accessibility with substance. In order to get those great, inspiring ideas "unstuck" it's essential to find a way to translate them to a larger diverse audience. The accusations, from several quarters, that TED "dumbs down" complex ideas were obviously deeply troubling to Anderson. His assertion that substance must always trump style is a challenging standard to be held to, especially for a slick global media platform like TED. And, honestly, to the rest of us bloggers and professors and public intellectuals who must find that precarious balance between accuracy and rigor and the ethical imperative to share important ideas with people who never thought they'd be interested.

If you're at TED this week, look me up on TED Connect!

Johanna Blakley

Not only do I get to go to TED this year (hooray!) but I also had the great pleasure of participating in a truly brain-tingling workshop whose goal was to help TED figure out how to better facilitate the spread of breakthrough ideas.

Of course everybody (and their mother) is obsessed with web analytics these days: how many hits did I get? How many likes? But media engagement pros (and the workshop was chock full of them) realize that counting clicks doesn't really begin to tell the full story. Who's clicking and why? Did they talk to their dad about that TED talk over breakfast? Did they laugh or cry? Did they feel empowered to do something? Did they make a donation? It can be really difficult to accurately measure the impact of any piece of media (including a TED video) without finding a way to bridge that daunting divide between online click trails and offline actions. One way to do it? Surveys!
I'm a big believer in supplementing rigorous web and social media analytics with survey research. And I'm an even bigger fan now that my team at the Lear Center has developed some innovative new methods for taking into account self-selection bias in media consumption (i.e., only certain people decide to see certain TED videos - there's nothing random about it - which makes it tough to accurately measure impact).

So, imagine my delight when I heard that the Knight Foundation is partnering with TED to work on amplifying and measuring the impact of their content as it "ripples through society, producing technology tools and best practices for connected action."

One key theme that emerged at the workshop this weekend was the importance of sharing the discoveries that TED will make when they develop their cool new website and state of the art dashboards for tracking engagement. Information is power and nothing is more empowering to an engaged audience than access to information about how their beloved TED talks, along with all the content and actions that they themselves have generated, are moving the needle.

I'm looking forward to what comes of this . . . stay tuned!

If you're at TED2013, be sure to check out the Knight-sponsored pavilion centered on Tech for Engagement.