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09 Feb 09

Newsweek Plans Makeover to Fit a Smaller Audience - NYTimes.com

going for the niche

www.nytimes.com/...09newsweek.html - Preview

newsweeklies Newsweek makeover future of news

30 Sep 08

The Transformation of NPR | American Journalism Review

NPR's planned multimedia makeover

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npr multimedia makeover restructure aggregator

"Tell Me More" Associate Producer and blogger Lee R. Hill wanted to do more than tell listeners the story; he wanted to show them the neighborhoods that organizers sought to empower.
they created an audio slide show that appeared only on NPR's Web site, NPR.org.
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- Six months ago, Hill says, he wouldn't have even considered approaching the story this way. "I think I would have thought about the story visually, but I would not have incorporated it into my work. Nor would I have thought that I would have had the license to do that here," he says.
  That changed in the spring, when NPR put Hill through an intense, seven-week training course in multimedia journalism that encouraged him to expand his repertoire of reporting and storytelling skills.
- "Pictures," he says, "can sometimes say what we can't say."
- This year and next, NPR is tackling an ambitious and comprehensive plan to transform itself into a multimedia force: The organization is asking all of its journalists to rethink their storytelling and audience interaction the way Hill has. Most news organizations are at least paying lip service to this multiplatform goal, but NPR is putting its money (and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's) where its mouth is: The foundation gave NPR $1.5 million to train its 450 editorial employees in digital storytelling skills and to pay for substitutes to fill in for them while they learn. NPR is putting an additional $1 million into the training.
  What's more, NPR News has nearly doubled its digital staffers to 30 in the past year. The hires include two videographers. NPR aims to overhaul its Web site by early next year; it is expanding the offerings on its year-old mobile site; and in the last three months, it launched a suite of social media tools and an open application programming interface that allows independent Web publishers to use NPR content on their own sites.
  Says NPR Vice President for News Ellen Weiss, "We're going to get our stories and our storytelling and our journalism out to people wherever they are and in whatever form they want to experience it."
  
  To put NPR's journalism in front of its audience - whether they're listening to the radio or a podcast, surfing the Web or scanning the screen of a mobile phone - requires not just new training but also a fundamental cultural shift, says Dick Meyer, NPR Digital Media's editorial director.
  "What we really want to do first is to build a culture that is respectful of the modern news consumer, knowing that the modern news consumer wants news on demand, wants it to be timely, wants it to be authentic and wants it to be noncommercial from us," Meyer says.
- That has NPR rethinking how it operates. "NPR has essentially one partner when it comes to radio: our public radio stations," Weiss says. "The Web is about multiple partnerships. It's a very different business model. It's about a direct relationship with the customer, and that presents all sorts of new models for our relationships with our member stations."
- NPR must also think through its partnerships with its acquired programs, such as "Fresh Air" and "Car Talk," which it distributes under its brand but doesn't produce.
- The site should also be a better home for multimedia work, created by both the Web site staff and the organization's radio journalists,
- "I hope it will show that our primary focus is not just being a radio companion, not just being an aggregator of what you hear on the air, but taking the best of what NPR has to offer across the spectrum: news, features, music, and designing it for a Web audience and having a visual component as part of that."
- In redesigning the site and in adding more multimedia elements, NPR is focusing on how to translate its signature sound into the visual.
- NPR's mobile site, launched last year, is growing quickly, and included partnerships with 44 stations as of August. Each local site offers a blend of local news from member stations and national content from NPR.
  About half of NPR's mobile visitors (about 700,000 to 800,000 per month) use iPhones, the major driver of the site's growth. The presentation on many other handsets is "clunky, text-heavy, so you're encouraged not to present lots of good stuff or much content. In the iPhone experience, there's a whole lot more you can do,"
- They're distributing their content in another ambitious way: This summer, NPR launched an open application program interface (API), a set of programming tools that lets Web sites more easily interact and share content. The API will also let member stations choose NPR content focused on their regions and display it alongside their own local reporting. In the future, stations will be able to make their own content available to other sites using the API.
  Web developers have already used the API to create widgets that showcase NPR content, including an NPR podcast player on Facebook
  and an interactive world map that links to NPR stories.
- "Really, the trend is about disaggregation," Mauro says. "We've already begun to see people generate very interesting applications, things that are generated from our content, but that we didn't put in the work to develop. The users did it because they're passionate about NPR content. That's really exciting to see because it goes beyond what we can do ourselves, and it opens up an entire new area of creativity."
- "We want to create an environment where NPRistas can comment on stories, can share stories with each other easily, where they can ask questions of the reporters and producers who work on the story, where they can talk and have an honest conversation with those people and where they can talk amongst themselves,"
- her multimedia training helps her set priorities, to consider "which stories are worth a lot of energy. Not every story I do is going to get the full extravaganza online. Some stories are worthy and some aren't, and it's partly about learning how to conserve resources." When reporting for the Web, she's learned to devote more energy to stories with strong visual components.