PMI welcomes Dave Williams as CTO, plus a new webinar series coming in early 2027

This message is being sent on behalf of Public Media Infrastructure (PMI).

Dear Station Colleagues,

This week marks my third month on the job as CEO of Public Media Infrastructure, and it’s been a very busy and productive quarter thanks to so many of you!

Since I started in August, I’ve been traveling the country visiting stations, meeting with colleagues at industry conferences, and connecting with many more of you through too many Zooms to count. What I’ve heard consistently is that you want to do more for your communities, you’re stretched to capacity, and you’re open to collaboration and shared services that can create efficiencies and lighten your operational load.

This is exactly what PMI was founded to facilitate and make possible. Our long-term strategic vision for the post-CPB, post-satellite era is a shared, scalable infrastructure that can serve stations of all sizes and operational capabilities. A system where new capabilities in data, distribution, and revenue work together — and relieve individual stations of the burden of solving common problems on their own. A new foundation for public media, built with station needs at the center.

To enable the work ahead, I’m excited to announce a new member of the PMI team: Dave Williams, our Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

With a 20-year track record of driving digital and infrastructure transformation for Fortune 500 companies, federal agencies, and upper-middle-market clients, Dave brings a rare combination of large-scale architectural vision and technical depth, from networking, cloud computing, data services, and AI to the security, data privacy, and regulatory compliance that keep it all safe. In other words, he can take an enterprise view and see the whole system, while still being happy to get under the hood with the engineers who have to make it work.

At PMI, Dave will help lead our efforts to support the digital transformation of public media. His mandate is to understand the technological landscape across the system, identify what’s working and where it can be strengthened, determine where new solutions are needed, and, most importantly, make sure it all works together.

But developing solutions that truly work for stations requires more than technical expertise. It requires ongoing input from the people doing this work every day.

To that end, PMI is launching a new quarterly webinar series on digital and infrastructure issues, kicking off in early 2027 (date and details to come). At our first session, we’ll introduce the team and share more about what we’re learning from you and how PMI can help.

The goal of these webinars is to create a hub for peer exchange and digital community for public media. Going forward, these gatherings will provide opportunities to surface challenges, exchange knowledge, gain insights from guest speakers including station and industry experts, and highlight practical technology recommendations and innovation success stories from across the system. Topics could include developing AI policies that protect our content or getting the most out of existing systems like Dovetail and other industry solutions, but we’ll also be looking to you for ideas. What roadblocks do you keep running into? What’s the problem you can’t quite solve on your own? Above all, we want these sessions to be as useful as possible to you, and to make sure we’re providing a forum for your most urgent and salient concerns.

The webinars are open to public media staff at all levels, so please pass the invitation along to colleagues across your organization, including your digital, engineering, technology, content, revenue, and operations teams. Details and registration to come.

Offline, we’re continuing our station visits to build meaningful in-person connections and see your operations and systems up close. Dave and I are visiting Colorado Public Radio this week followed by a session at the RMCR conference, and we’re heading to DC in December to visit WOWD, WAMU, and WETA. Dave is also planning a set of visits to stations in mountain states near his home in Wyoming, so if you’re in the region, stay tuned! And there will be many more station visits in 2027.

We’ll have much more to share in the coming weeks and months, so expect to hear from us more regularly going forward. I invite you to sign up for PMI alerts and announcements, follow us on LinkedIn, and hope to see you at the webinar early next year!

PMI’s north star is serving public media stations. We’re excited to keep the dialogue going. You can always reach me directly at jericson@publicmedia.tech.

Best wishes,

Jeannie Ericson
CEO, PMI