Planting a flag for
pubradio news on the Web
NPR.org aims to be ‘top of mind’ for news
With the launch of its redesigned website July 27, National Public Radio announced its intention to become a contender as a provider of online news.
Not that NPR execs haven’t been talking up their ambitions to strengthen the network’s online news service for months, but their revamp of NPR.org firmly plants the flag in the online news landscape.
Recent web redesigns for NPR.org and two big stations — Boston’s WBUR and Minnesota Public Radio — point the way for news stations to create sites that are much more than companions or publicists for radio broadcasts.
The streamlined NPR.org puts the emphasis on news with headlines, short blurbs and photos. For some stories, visitors can click on the headline for NPR’s story in text, a speaker icon for the audio version and a bulleted blurb for the AP story in text.
For visitors seeking text, transcripts of programs and stories are available without charge; NPR opted to discontinue fees for transcripts of material since May 2005.
In the home page banner — next to the NPR logo — online users can designate a favorite station to be featured whenever they visit the site. The “localized” home page displays the station logo to the right of NPR’s. A “drawer” of the station’s local offerings — links to its homepage, webstream, podcasts and online donation site—opens below the station logo with the click of a button.
NPR.org, built for the wider screens of today’s computer monitors, looks much like the websites of major daily newspapers, though less cluttered. As in any graphic display, captivating visual elements — photography, slideshows and interactive graphics — have greater initial impact than NPR’s radio reportage, muted unless a visitor clicks for it. At the top right of the home page, however, NPR gives audio a special place: an audio player that offers to stream a short clip from the day’s radio coverage.
NPR’s designers sought to improve the users’ experience, so “people will come back on a daily basis and treat us as a top-of-mind news source,” said Kinsey Wilson, senior v.p. of NPR Digital. Publishing tools adopted for the revamp make it easier for NPR staffers to update and change the site throughout the day.
When Wilson joined the network last October from USA Today, NPR’s web team had already laid foundations for the redesign. Wilson put the work on hold to “evaluate what we had and the overall strategic objectives,” he said. Early this year, an in-house team began building the site with the help of outside contractors.
“I look at this as a culmination of an effort we began a year ago,” Wilson said of the new NPR.org. “The news organization is in a far stronger position today to produce compelling text and visual content for the Web, and the site does a better job of showcasing what we’re able to do.”
NPR doesn’t aim to compete head-to-head with online news powerhouses such as CNN.com or NYTimes.com, Wilson said. “We are not going at them directly and trying to steal share from them.” Because NPR is admittedly late to the game of online news, it can take advantage of the ways that the Web has evolved. “We need to compete on key stories of the day, so that people will come to our site and there will be news for them,” he said.
“We will not cover in real time as many different topics as they do, but we’ll offer our own particular stories, or things that we have expertise on, such as books, science or health,” Wilson said.
The site consolidates topics into three broad areas—news, arts & life, and music — and features streams of NPR’s radio programs, hourly newscasts and podcasts at the top of the home page.
“I think it’s a tremendous improvement,” said Paul Stankavich, g.m. of KPLU in Seattle. As president of Western States Public Radio, Stankavich has advocated greater integration of NPR and station web services. “I love the clean look of it and the improved search capability. I’m easily able to add my station to the banner.”
NPR is not the only pubradio news provider to recast its web service for news audiences this summer.
Boston’s WBUR launched its new website on the same day as NPR. The timing was a coincidence, but its site powerfully demonstrates how a station can integrate its online content with NPR’s. Like NPR.org, the WBUR site uses NPR’s Open API (Application Programming Interface) to route categorized information throughout its templates and offer a comprehensive news display.
In revamping the site, WBUR sought to present the same mix of local and national content that it does on its air, said Sam Fleming, managing director of news and programming, and the Open API makes this possible. “Without NPR, it would have been very difficult for us to do this effectively.”
Minnesota Public Radio launched MPR NewsQ in June, dedicating a new sub-site to statewide news coverage. Two weeks later, the network followed up with online redesigns of sub-sites for MPR Classical and The Current, its contemporary music station.
Now the three realms of content don’t have to compete for space on the home page against material promoting the whole variety of MPR services to the general audience.
The decision to give each of MPR’s radio services its own dedicated sub-site responds to the different online usage habits of MPR’s news and music audiences, said Tim Roesler, MPR senior v.p. and general manager.
The site restructuring also advances MPR’s larger strategy of positioning itself as a leading provider of online news for Minnesota. “Other types of media are pulling back, and we saw this as an opportunity,” he said.
Help for stations’ sites
NPR also is moving to help fill the need for journalism where newspapers are shrinking. Wilson and NPR President Vivian Schiller have described plans to bolster pubradio web services by integrating national and local content, as WBUR has done and in ways yet to be dreamed up.
With the relaunch of NPR.org, which offers visitors powerful tools to directly access and interact with NPR programming, NPR execs look now to help member stations scale up their local newsgathering and online operations.
NPR is working on two major fronts to accomplish this. The Argo Project, a pilot proposed by Wilson this spring, encourages stations to bring their expertise on specialized news topics to content vertical websites. About a dozen stations have submitted proposals to join the project, and they’re now going through a peer review with other participants. “The extra screening will hopefully raise the level of the proposals,” Wilson told the NPR Board’s membership committee last month.
“I have reason to be fairly optimistic about our prospects of getting funding,” possibly by September, Wilson said. NPR and CPB are discussing collaboration between the Argo Project and CPB’s grant program backing local journalism centers (Current, June 10).
Meanwhile, another branch of NPR is likely to help stations put more national and local material on their sites. Public Interactive, the Boston-based developer of station web systems that NPR bought last year, is planning to update and upgrade the online tools and services it offers to stations.
Although its plans aren’t complete, PI expects to establish a centralized backend that will ease the time-consuming and duplicative work of uploading station content, said Debra May Hughes, president. It also looks to upgrade its legacy web publishing service for pubcasters by creating new tools and templates for client stations.
The presentation tools will give stations flexibility in using NPR’s Open API to add national and local material to their own websites. “While the API is a fantastic innovation and such a huge step for the industry, the number of stations that can interact with it and do meaningful things is limited,” Hughes said. A station using the API to create a distinctive website would need to employ a programmer with both technical expertise and an editorial sensibility, she said.
“I see an even stronger role for PI in the future in helping to serve the turnkey problem and making sure there’s a platform on which content creators can innovate,” Hughes said. She also sees a role for PI to promote best practices in web publishing, both among pubcasters and the wider world of Web 2.0 innovation.
NPR and PBS meanwhile are planning a national PublicMediaCamp in October for brainstorming by station and other public-media webheads.
Outside of NPR, a Knight Foundation-backed project, Radio Engage, is putting the finishing touches on a content management system tailored to the needs of public radio stations. This week, the project led by Quiddities Dev Inc. and KUSP in Santa Cruz, Calif., goes public with a new KUSP website based on the Drupal open-source CMS. A variation on the system will be used to launch a new website for Crosscurrents, the nightly news program from San Francisco’s KALW, by Labor Day, according to Margaret Rosas, chief strategist for Quiddities.
“We’re offering a portal that allows a local station to provide content from other sources,” Rosas said. KUSP, for example, presents non-NPR fare such as Democracy Now! and wants to create a user-experience that reflects the full range of its programming, as well as uniquely Santa Cruz perspectives on national issues.
The code for Radio Engage’s portal will be offered free to pubradio stations, but Rosas is still working out how to help stations that lack technical expertise and want to adopt it. “It is not trivial to implement this,” she said. “Funding is a big question for me.”
Web page posted Aug. 18, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC
