Cynthia McCune's Library tagged multimedia →  View Popular

Re: Box.net - They say we can:

“Create hundreds of accounts instantly by importing a list of users from Excel. Assign variable user privileges from ‘view only’ to full editing rights.” (View PDF for info.)

I don’t know about your IT folks there, but I could not get this kind of support or flexibility here.

• The syllabus, including all assignments, is here.
• The students’ Soundslides are here.
• The students’ videos are here.

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.

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.

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.