At a time marked by post-election divisiveness, a handful of the producers will share stories from these community members as part of a new series, “Finding America,” which will air on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Weekend Edition.” The six-week-long series is aimed at giving the incoming president and citizens a chance to engage with the stories of everyday people in neighborhoods around the U.S.

The series follows widespread criticism of the media’s election coverage — and it offers up a model for how public media can take a more holistic approach to storytelling in 2017.

It’s a joint effort between NPR and the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR) and builds on AIR’s year-long Localore: Finding America initiative, which paired independent producers with public radio and TV stations nationwide to develop new storytelling models.

Sue Schardt, creator and executive producer of Localore: Finding America, said the series was conceived of more than a year ago and was intended to be “a helpful and constructive gesture” for whomever was elected to the presidency. All of the stories are told by community “hosts” who take listeners on a journey to the “far corners” where they live.  

“The nature of a ‘far corner’ implies that it’s not a routine stop along the way,” said Schardt, who is also executive director of AIR. “The only way that we can get there is from someone who knows the back roads, the back alley.”

Distributing stories about these far corners was a natural fit for NPR, according to Mike Oreskes, NPR’s senior vice president of news and editorial director. “The notion of talking to and listening to the entire country this election year has been one our central goals all year,” said Oreskes, who pointed to NPR’s “A Nation Engaged” project as a related example. “We’re constantly looking for different ways ways to listen to and describe what folks in the public are saying and what it’s like in different communities.”

Turning sources into storytellers

Screenshot.

Journalists often approach local storytelling by reporting on a community. The Finding America producers have taken a different approach — by creating stories with and for communities. It’s an important distinction. Instead of wielding power over which stories are told and how they’re told, the producers have brought community members into the decision-making process. As someone who’s helping AIR identify best practices from the producers’ work, I’ve been intrigued by the way they’ve collaborated with communities.

The stories in the Finding America series don’t just feature quotes from community members; they’re told entirely in the community members’ voices. In an act of humility, each of the producers worked behind the scenes, acting as the director and editor of the stories.

“I love how direct non-narrated pieces feel to a listener,” Finding America producer Alex Lewis said. “When they’re done well, I think people really come away feeling like they’ve been introduced to someone in a deeper way than in a reporter was there as an intermediary.” Lewis’ story for the series will feature Randy Jones, a local mechanic who has an encyclopedic knowledge of nearby junkyards, where he finds car parts. Lewis fondly refers to him as “the king of the intersection at 48th and Chester Avenue in West Philadelphia.”

“Listeners will be transported to this intersection in West Philly and given a brief tour of the nearby junkyards,” Lewis said. “Randy will show them what life looks like — one that is full of joy and hard work, but that exists a bit behind the scenes in Philadelphia.” The story is an extension of “Every ZIP,” the community storytelling project that Lewis pursued for WHYY as a Finding America producer.

Another story in the series — by Finding America producer Mona Yeh — will feature a conversation between blogger Carla Saulter and hip-hop artist Gabriel Teodros as they ride the bus together through the Central District of Seattle.

“They have both felt change as the city has transformed through the tech boom,” said Yeh, whose Finding America project “What’s the Flux?” focused on public transportation in Seattle and aired on KBCS in Bellevue, Washington. “Like many of the previous stories I produced for Finding America, this is meant to feel like you are riding the bus next to these people and listening to their conversation about what they see out the window.”

Finding the right people to narrate stories is key, Lewis and Yeh said. They each thought carefully about who their community host should be and did a lot of front-end work to make the storytelling and editing process easier. “I tried as best I could to tell people upfront what style I was going for, and would push for descriptors and narrated explanations of what was going on,” Yeh said. “There were plenty of times throughout the project where, in hindsight, I’d be kicking myself for not asking someone to better describe or contextualize something.”

In addition to Lewis and Yeh, five other Finding America producers are taking part in the series: Jess Mador (who was paired with WUOT in Knoxville, Tennessee, during the production period); Sophia Paliza-Carre (AZPM in Tucson Arizona); Meredith Turk (NCPR in Watertown, New York); Allison Herrera (KOSU in Tulsa, Oklahoma); and Kelly Libby (WVTF in Richmond).

Moving beyond narrow-minded narratives

Screenshot.

Many of the Finding America producers I spoke with said the people they met in these communities had never tuned into, let alone heard of, their local NPR and PBS stations. This raises questions about their news consumption, sure, but it also raises concerns about whether public media is serving them in the ways that it could and should.

The series is part of Finding America’s ongoing efforts to create public media that does a better job serving people in all parts of the country, from all walks of life. The stories in the series offer up different perspectives on communities that are often defined by single narratives.

“The places we’re going are the places that are most often depicted and subjected to headline-driven journalism about poverty, violence, and injustice,” AIR’s Schardt said. “Where does today’s news journalism leave us? Most often, if we’re honest with each other, it leaves us in a place of despair and hopelessness.”

It’s easy for the media to perpetuate single narratives about a community. It takes courage to go a step further by bringing community members into the storytelling process and allowing new narratives to emerge. Ultimately, these narratives of determination. faith, perseverance and joy have the potential to mobilize and energize people in ways that traditional “doom and gloom” stories can’t.

By illuminating these narratives, AIR and NPR hope the Finding America series will give Trump and citizens a more intimate look at the rich complexity of the communities that make up America.

“I hope that it gives us a feeling of actually being in these various communities — what life is like and what the concerns and desires are in these communities — and that it fits into the larger reporting tapestry that we’re offering people on life in America right now,” Oreskes said. “It’s important for the president and his administration to hear voices from all around the country.”

Mallary Tenore is a freelance writer and the Executive Director of Images & Voices of Hope (ivoh), a media nonprofit. Previously, she was the editor of Poynter.org. You can follow her on Twitter @MallaryTenore.

Editor’s note: AIR’s Localore: Finding America is a national initiative supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Wyncote Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Tenore is helping AIR identify best practices and lessons learned from the projects that came out of this initiative.

The post NPR & AIR Team Up on Post-Election Coverage To Take Public Media Deep Into Local appeared first on MediaShift.

But the radio show “This American Life” has created a new web app that it hopes will help. Shortcut, available both on desktop and smartphone, lets you snip your favorite podcast clips into animated and transcribed videos that can then be shared on Facebook or Twitter. The developers were careful to build the app in a way that makes audio visual and shareable and that is also helping the program better understand what’s resonating with its audience.

It’s something Stephanie Foo, producer at “This American Life” and project lead of Shortcut, has wanted for a long time.

“When I started thinking about this — how do I make things easy to share — and I started thinking about GIFS,” Foo said. “If you search for ‘This American Life’ on Giphy though you just get a video of Ira dancing. It’s not representative of our show.”

She recently discussed the inspiration and development process of the app to a packed room at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism (full disclosure: I’m a student at the J-School). Foo was joined by the rest of the Shortcut team: Jason Sigal, developer; Jane Friedhoff, UX designer; and Dalit Shalom, UI designer. The tool was initially conceived at TAL’s Audio Hackathon in 2015, and the group developed the prototype over the last the year with support from the Knight Prototype Fund, an initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Right now, Shortcut just lets you cut audio from the “This American Life” podcast; the prototype is based around the archives of the show. But the codebase for Shortcut is open-sourced, which means any podcast creator, whether you produce in the closet of your apartment or in a spacious studio, can set it up for their own archives.

Tapping into the archives

For “This American Life,” all episodes have been transcribed and time-coded, which makes the whole process easier. So far, the average clip length is between 18 and 20 seconds, according to Foo. She also noticed that most listeners pull audio from the first 20 minutes of a TAL episode.

“You can see what stories people are most interested in by how much people are sharing part of it,” she said.

Listeners weren’t just clipping audio from recent episodes, but ones from the beginning, close to 20 years ago. Shortcut, Foo said, has the power to make audio content evergreen. It’s helped her share some really great moments from the TAL archives, like the episode in which Foo’s interview subject called her “China lady.”

“After that happened, I really wanted to show it to all my friends,” she said. At the time, in 2014, she posted the entire episode, “Tarred and Feathered,” to Facebook. Friends may (or may not) have navigated to the page and fast-forwarded to the correct timestamp. Now Foo just needs to do a quick search for “china lady” on the Shortcut episode page, and voilà, she can share just the one scene she wants. The Shortcut video clip also links back to the full episode if her friend wants to hear more.

Creating a Visual and Structural Experience

The two designers, Friedhoff and Shalom, carefully considered the user experience both visually and structurally when creating the tool. Shalom drew inspiration from visualizations of sounds she’s come across over the years, including sing-along tapes and karaoke.

“I was so grateful for them,” she said. “They were a confirmation that I knew the words.”

The classic Disney Sing-Along Songs, for instance, featured the best musical moments from Disney movies, television shows and theme parks, like “Heigh-Ho” or “Colors of the Wind;” the lyrics were displayed on the screen, and a bouncing Mickey Mouse ball would indicate where you were in the song. Shalom used a similar concept with the Shortcut tool. Instead of a bouncing ball, she used a highlighter functionality to show the listener where they were in the audio clip. She compared it to an enhanced karaoke screen where color travels through the words.

Friedhoff swapped Disney Sing-Alongs for video games as she explored the UX side of the Shortcut design. A classically-trained game designer, she understood how play and discovery would enhance the user experience of Shortcut. Audio content isn’t inherently shareable, so there were definitely design challenges, according to Friedhoff. They wanted to support multiple kinds of listening and sharing experiences, as well as making sure it would work for a variety of podcasts.

Meg Dalton (@megdalts) is a freelance reporter and student specializing in audio at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. At Columbia, she’s recorded and edited stories on topics like the problems homeless voters face on Election Day and what it’s like being an undocumented youth in America. Before starting school, she was a business reporter for the Greenwich Time, Stamford Advocate and the Connecticut Post. She was previously the associate editor of Mediashift.org (formerly with PBS) where she covered podcasts, crowdfunding, virtual reality and all things digital media and technology.

The post How the Shortcut App Can Help Make Audio Go Viral appeared first on MediaShift.

A new tool called Shortcut from This American Life allows listeners to share clips from episodes of This American Life. Users can select text from episode transcripts, which the app turns into short videos that can be downloaded or posted to social media.

• Shortcut is a web app that works on desktop and mobile.
• The team refers to the short videos created by the app as “audio gifs.”
• The idea for Shortcut came from a hackathon hosted by This American Life in September 2015. About 80 audio journalists and hackers — comprising 30 percent people of color and 50 percent women — came together to brainstorm solutions of how to make podcasts more shareable and digestible.
• While the primary goal was making audio more shareable, This American Life producer and Shortcut project lead Stephanie Foo says she also hopes it helps attract a bigger and more diverse audience. “We hope that if social media users are inundated with moving, funny or tragic audio snippets from our episodes shared by their friends, they will feel far more compelled to listen to our podcast,” she writes.
• According to the Tow Center for Digital Journalism — who, along with the Knight Foundation, provided funding for Shortcut — there was a set of questions the team had in mind during the design process. Those questions were:
  • How can we reduce the friction of hearing a great podcast moment and sharing it?
  • How can we support multiple kinds of listening and sharing experiences?
  • How can we guide this tool away from being seen as a generator for promotional materials, and towards a tool for users to express their fandom?
  • How can we do this for a variety of podcasts and listening environments?
• Shortcut is currently only available for This American Life episodes, but the team plans to release an open-source version in early 2017.

Rachel Wise is an editor at the Futures Lab at the Reynolds Journalism Institute and co-producer of the weekly Futures Lab video update.

The Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Futures Lab video update features a roundup of fresh ideas, techniques and developments to help spark innovation and change in newsrooms across all media platforms. Visit the RJI website for the full archive of Futures Lab videos, or download the iPad app to watch the show wherever you go. You can also sign up to receive email notification of each new episode.

The post RJI Futures Lab #175: Shortcut from ‘This American Life’ Helps Listeners Share Clips appeared first on MediaShift.

NPR has found creative ways to use the most basic features in Snapchat to connect differently with its audience.

For more information:

The NPR social media team has shared many posts about Snapchat strategies and experiments on its blog. Some of those posts include:

• A brief history and breakdown of how NPR has changed its approach to Snapchat since 2013
• Six ways to engage an audience on Snapchat
• Takeaways from a viewer callout on Snapchat from intern Vesta Partovi
• Two examples of different Snapchat Stories from NPR: one on the Pope’s visit to Washington, D.C., and the other a step-by-step look at how one story came together for All Things Considered

NPR has recently updated its “introduction to Snapchat” digital training guide, which was compiled using work from former social media desk interns.

You can find the social media team’s work on Snapchat under the username npr.

Rachel Wise is an editor at the Futures Lab at the Reynolds Journalism Institute and co-producer of the weekly Futures Lab video update.

The Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Futures Lab video update features a roundup of fresh ideas, techniques and developments to help spark innovation and change in newsrooms across all media platforms. Visit the RJI website for the full archive of Futures Lab videos, or download the receive email notification of each new episode.

Reminder: Upcoming related DigitalEd training: Snapchat and Instagram Stories for Journalists

The post Futures Lab Update #163: NPR’s Approach to Snapchat appeared first on MediaShift.

Anchor is an iOS app that allows users to interact and engage through audio recordings. These audio conversations can viewed in the app itself, or they can be shared on social media or exported to include in other broadcasts.

For more information:

• Anchor is a free app available for iOS devices in the App Store.
• Nir Zicherman, one of Anchor’s co-foudners, told TechCrunch the app was born from the desire to make radio more accessible and interactive. “As popular as this medium is we feel it’s really hard for regular people to contribute to it,” Zicherman said. “Unlike photos and videos and writing, recording and publishing your voice has not been democratized. You can listen … but you can’t talk back to NPR.”
• The playlist of black protest music, which WNYC reporter Arun Venugopal compiled with the help of feedback from Anchor, is on Spotify. The playlist was created as part of a story for WNYC series Micropolis.
• Another WNYC show, The Takeaway, uses Anchor almost daily to collect listener feedback. “People will respond with their voices, about the RNC or the DNC or a piece of breaking news like around any of the numerous terrorist attacks we’ve had to deal with in the last year,” said Delaney Simmons, WNYC director of social  media. “And getting immediate feedback and immediate reactions from listeners around the globe is really adding a nice balance, well-roundedness, to a national program.”

Rachel Wise is an editor at the Futures Lab at the Reynolds Journalism Institute and co-producer of the weekly Futures Lab video update.

 The Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Futures Lab video update features a roundup of fresh ideas, techniques and developments to help spark innovation and change in newsrooms across all media platforms. Visit the RJI website for the full archive of Futures Lab videos, or download the receive email notification of each new episode.

The post Futures Lab Update #162: Making Audio Interactive with Anchor App appeared first on MediaShift.

• Employment is down 10 percent from 2014, the sharpest drop in any year since 2009.
• Average circulation fell for both daily and alternative weekly papers.
• And advertising revenue dipped 8 percent, also the most since 2009.

But it wasn’t all gloom and doom in the annual report. Here are four findings and trends that bode well for the state of the news media in 2016.

Digital Advertising Spending is Growing Fast

Digital advertising spending reached nearly $60 billion in 2015, a 20 percent increase from 2014. This is faster than the growth rate in the previous three years, when digital ad spending grew only 15-17 percent each year.

The caveat is that most new digital ad revenue didn’t go to news publishers last year; it went to technology and social media companies. In 2015, five companies — Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Yahoo — combined to haul in 65 percent of all digital ad revenue, up from 61 percent in 2014.

These numbers reflect the huge role that tech companies now play as curators and distributors of news and media content online. Jesse Holcomb, Pew’s associate director of research and one of the report’s co-authors, says the increasingly symbiotic relationship between social media platforms and news publishers will be an especially important trend to watch in coming years.

“We know news is an integral part of the social media experience, but what happens when the economic underpinnings of the news publishing industry continue to slip?” Holcomb said in a phone interview. “Will we start to see a tipping point in terms of what is populating these feeds? And will these [tech] companies respond in kind?”

Other digital revenue trends outlined in the report include the growth of mobile advertising, especially video ads. In 2015, mobile ad spending reached $31.6 billion — a 65 percent increase that helped it surpass desktop ad spending for the first time.

Broken down by category, banner ads are still the king of digital display advertising, but video ads are closing the gap. In 2015, spending on these ads grew 46 percent, compared to 12 percent growth for banner ads.

A screenshot from the Pew Research Center’s 2016 “State of the News Media” report.

Non-profit and Public Media are Diversifying and Increasing Revenue

While non-profit news organizations still rely heavily on foundation funding, they continued to diversify their revenue in 2015.

According to a Knight Foundation study of 20 local and regional digital news non-profits, 58 percent of total revenue came from foundations in 2013 — down from 63 percent in 2011. These news organizations’ share of earned revenue (including sponsorships, events, advertising, subscriptions, etc.) grew from 18 percent to 23 percent over the same two-year period.

Meanwhile, the size of the overall revenue pie also continued to grow for non-profits, with the median revenue for these 20 organizations increasing 45 percent from 2011 to 2013 and reaching $518,000.

In the public media sector, both underwriting and individual giving for public radio increased in 2014, continuing a 5-year growth trend, according to data from the 125 largest news-oriented public radio licensees. These gains helped push total revenue nearly 25 percent above 2008 levels.

But even as revenue continued to grow, membership for public radio stations leveled off in 2014, following five years of growth.

The Audience for Podcasts is Still Growing

In an Edison Research study conducted earlier this year and cited in the Pew report, 21 percent of U.S. adults said they’d listened to a podcast within the last month, up from 17 percent in 2015 and 9 percent in 2008. In total, about one third of U.S. adults have now listened to a podcast in their lifetime.

Despite this growth, podcasting still represents a small sliver of the overall news media landscape, and an even smaller slice of its revenue picture. In 2015, for example, advertisers spent only $34 million on podcasts.

The report’s authors suggest that poor audience metrics might be holding back advertising revenue growth: “The main way a podcast’s audience is generally measured is through downloads,” the authors wrote. “Download data, however, is limited in that the statistics do not identify if the podcast downloaded was actually listened to, either in part or in its entirety, or how many different people may have listened to the podcast. The limitations of these download statistics have had downstream implications for advertisers, who need audience data to drive buying decisions.”

The good news for podcast producers is that several organizations, including Nielsen, are working to develop richer metrics. This might help explain why the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, Slate, and others have all launched podcasting divisions in recent years, making it likely that podcasts will continue to represent a growing share of news and media consumption.

A screenshot from the Pew Research Center’s 2016 “State of the News Media” report.

Hispanic Weekly and Semiweekly Newspapers Bucked Trend of Declining Circulation

This year’s report revealed almost no positive trends in the print newspaper industry, with one notable exception: Circulation at weekly and semiweekly Hispanic newspapers in the U.S. grew 2 percent in 2015, with roughly half of the newspapers included in the study reporting year-over-year circulation gains.

This finding was a stark outlier in the report, which detailed continued circulation losses for daily and weekly English-language newspapers in the U.S., as well as for Hispanic dailies.

But Holcomb says the circulation growth for Hispanic weekly and semiweekly newspapers is consistent with the relative success of community newspapers compared to their larger, less nimble daily counterparts. “It largely mirror some of the trends we see in the broader media landscape,” he said. “In some cases, these smaller weekly or community newspapers are taking advantage of scarcity. They’re serving very specific populations with information those populations aren’t going to get elsewhere.”

Holcomb cautioned against “reading too much in the tea leaves” based on one year’s results. “There aren’t any straight-forward explanations that are emerging in those data,” he said.

Ben DeJarnette is the associate editor at MediaShift. He is also a freelance contributor for Pacific Standard, InvestigateWest, Men’s Journal, Runner’s World, Oregon Quarterly and others. He’s on Twitter @BenDJduck.

The post 4 Reasons for Optimism in Pew’s ‘State of the News Media’ Report appeared first on MediaShift.

Veteran radio producer Doug Mitchell created NPR’s Next Generation Radio program to look beyond the usual suspects and sources to find and attract great candidates for open jobs and training opportunities. The program has played an important role in helping to build and reinforce the pipeline of young journalists, especially those of color, into public radio, from member stations and national networks to podcasting outlets with a public radio pedigree. (More than a decade ago, when I was a producer on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, I asked Mitchell if I could be a mentor, and I’ve trained students on these projects ever since.)

Let’s pull back the curtain and explain how Next Generation Radio is successfully finding diverse, digital-first college students and early-career journalists through a competitive application process, then putting them in a mobile newsroom to audition in front of us — the talent scouts, producers and hiring managers of public radio.

How Next Generation Radio Works

When Mitchell founded the program in 2000, Next Gen almost exclusively embedded at journalism conferences, like last year’s Minneapolis project at the College Broadcasters, Inc., convention. Today Mitchell has changed the focus to directly building connections at NPR member stations that sit on college campuses with journalism programs. This collaboration is key for project funding: the University of Nevada at Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism sponsors that project, while most of the money for Next Gen at the University of Texas at Austin comes from member station KUT. And the Next Gen mentors, who are public-media journalists from around the U.S., are “donated” to the projects by their employers.

After a Korean percussion class, students pose for KJZZ Next Gen reporter Linda Chen (right). Photo by Jess Naudziunas.

Next Gen has always been digital-first, but nobody really used that term in the early 2000s. It was difficult to get students’ work on the radio, so a website was built for each project, showcasing the radio stories. From the early days, the student reporters seemed to understand that publishing their journalism online, even as far back as 2000, would be essential to growing their careers.

Next Gen followed the students’ lead and now includes social-media components. Students promote all their work via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, from their finished radio pieces to photos of the people and places featured in the stories. The Next Gen website for each project includes story photos and such online extras as participants’ reflections on the project.

X marks the deadline: When a student reporter crosses various tasks off the to-do list, that sometimes inspires friendly competition.

Throughout the week, students and mentors promote the work that’s happening in the newsroom (and all the fun we’re having during and after work hours) on our social-media accounts — using GIFs as well as photos showing the diversity of previous project participants and professionals. It’s vital that if we want to bring people of color into public radio, then Next Gen’s marketing and promotion platforms should present us in all of our diverse glory.

Newsroom Conversations

We mentors spend a lot of time talking to students and each other about the craft of radio and the tenets of journalism. Fundamentally, the Next Gen projects are all about mastering the basics of editorial (What’s your story? Who should care about it? What questions will you ask?) and production (audio, video, photo, online writing, formatting content for distribution). We push the students to become experts of the process, so they’ll have long careers.

Inevitably, the same big-idea questions emerge during each project, all demonstrating the reality that putting substantive journalism on the radio is harder than it looks. Next Gen students must report non-narrated stories, in which interviewees tell their stories in their own words. Both students and mentors have a hard time with this, as they’re used to a more formal reporting style: I am the expert presenting this story, writing and voicing a script to propel the narrative.

Technical advisor Drew Jostad (left) and mentor Odette Yousef (center) work with KJZZ Next Gen reporter Jourdan Bennett-Begaye to mix her radio story. Photo by Doug Mitchell.

With the re-emergence and intimacy of podcasting, this non-narrated style, often grounded in a journalistic or news-minded sensibility, will keep growing (see: Snap Judgment, Radio Diaries, This American Life, et al.). It pushes radio-makers to be flexible in their audio-production skills, learning how to play with audio more creatively; to listen closely during an interview and make sure they’ve recorded all they need; and to go out into the world and talk to people rather than relying on technology (on their phones, at their desks) as the intermediary.

So What’s Next?

The end of a Next Gen project doesn’t mean that the professional development stops. Just ask Ambar Espinoza, environmental reporter for Rhode Island Public Radio, All Things Considered co-host Audie Cornish, Shereen Marisol Meraji from NPR’s Code Switch, Mwende Hahesy, who recently started a new job as production manager for Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting … the brag list goes on.

The KJZZ Next Gen project in February included six former NPR interns (left to right): mentor Odette Yousef, reporter Elizabeth Miller, mentor Ambar Espinoza, reporter Gus Contreras, mentor Jess Naudziunas and reporter Linda Chen.

Nor does it mean that all the big, existential questions have been answered. Mentors and students form a family that remains connected long after the week’s bootcamp. As past participants go through job searches, grad school or fellowships, Next Gen alumni offer guidance on everything from strengthening journalism skills to developing organizational savvy (i.e., dealing with office politics), most frequently through social media, but often over drinks, too.

Next Gen just wrapped up a project at the University of Southern California in March, and we have five more in 2016: back to Reno in May; in Atlanta at Georgia State University in June; at KUT in Austin in August; with Minnesota Public Radio in September; and in collaboration with Capital Public Radio and Sacramento State in October. There are others who have inquired, but we ran out of calendar space.

Next Gen is doing its part in solving the diversity problem: Through these projects, we’re finding young people of color, and especially women of color, who want to work in public media. The first two projects of 2016 at KJZZ attracted a total of 156 applicants; of those, 72% were women and 61% were people of color.

We’d bet money there are a ton of companies that would love to have that kind of applicant pool.

For 14 years, Elaine Heinzman has worked as a radio and podcast producer, from NPR weekend newsmagazines to cultural programs at WNYC, including being part of the 2002 launch team for the daily music show Soundcheck. Since 2004 she has mentored and trained young journalists through Next Generation Radio. She’s @elenatherican on Twitter.

The post Radio Head Hunters: Finding and Training Journalism’s Next Generation appeared first on MediaShift.

Don’t have a lot of time to spare but still to get a roundup of the week’s top news? Then check out our Digital Media Brief below!

MediaShift Podcast

Digital Media Brief

Listen to the MediaShift podcast and follow us on SoundCloud! Thanks to SoundCloud for providing audio support.

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Listen to the podcast via our Stitcher page or with the Stitcher app.

Host Bio

Mark Glaser is executive editor and publisher of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He is an award-winning writer and accidental entrepreneur, who has taken MediaShift from a one-person blog to a growing media company with events such as Collab/Space workshops and weekend hackathons; the weekly MediaShift podcast; and digital training, DigitalEd, in partnership with top journalism schools. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

SPECIAL GUEST

Chuck Zoeller/AP

Michael Oreskes is NPR’s Senior Vice President of News and Editorial Director. Oreskes has 40 years of professional journalism experience, ranging from reporter to senior managing editor, and expertise in shepherding the transition of traditional media to multi-media enterprises. He joined NPR in 2015 following seven years with The Associated Press.

Music on this episode:

Can’t Hate The Hater by 3 Feet Up
Sinking Feeling by Jessie Spillane
DJ by Jahzzar
I Never Wanted To Say by Lorenzo’s Music
Love is Chemical by Steve Combs

Jefferson Yen is the producer for the Mediatwits Podcast. His work has been on KPCC Southern California Public Radio and KRTS Marfa Public Radio. You can follow him @jeffersontyen.

The post MediaShift Podcast #187: Google as the White Knight; NPR’s Michael Oreskes on Local Renaissance appeared first on MediaShift.

Photo by Renée Johnson on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

We caught up with Vanessa to discuss the report, the reactions to it, and the lessons that aspiring podcasters and producers should take away when figuring out how to make their mark on the podcasting map. Below is an edited Q&A from our conversation.

Q&A

From my understanding, the report’s basic aim was to argue and explain why podcasts matter to digital journalism. Was that a hard argument to make?

Vanessa Quirk: Not really. Once I started seeing the data and the fact that a podcast is a mobile-first medium, it became pretty self-explanatory, considering that most digital journalism is moving to mobile, and there are some very specific attributes to podcasting that made it kind of really suited to mobile consumption. And so I think because of that — the type of media that it is and the type of engagement that it tends to engender in listeners, I think it was fairly easy to make the case that it is an interesting type of media for digital journalism.

I’m curious about reactions to your report. Personally, I feel like much of what was written reinforced other research I’ve seen. But given the different interviews you conducted for this project as well as the data you collected, how much of this do you think was “new” news to different people within the industry, versus a collective wisdom that was already being amassed?

Quirk: A lot of it is definitely collective wisdom, but I think what happened is that most people didn’t have an awareness of what was happening in different pockets. There is a little bit of a blindness — like, “What is this company doing versus that company?” And so they might be aware of general themes or general major issues facing podcasting. But the specifics, and how different companies are tackling these issues, that wasn’t very well known.

You go into what you call the “Serial” effect fairly early on in the report, and you discuss how few articles have been able to truly justify what is called the “audio renaissance.” Can you go into that a little bit? 

Photo by Casey Fiesler on Flickr and reused here with Creative Commons license.

Quirk: Sure. I call that section the “so-called Serial effect.” What happened is that as media outlets started covering podcasting again after the success of Serial, there was kind of an oversimplification — like, “Podcasting is back,” “We’re in a renaissance.” But there wasn’t really substantive support for that claim.

As I was looking at the actual facts and figures, it wasn’t so much that Serial had created this boom and all of the sudden, people were downloading in droves…It was that people who were already listening were listening more. And I think there was an increased awareness of the concept — because that’s been one of the consistent barriers to podcasting’s growth, the understanding of what is a podcast and how to get one. For some people, the awareness of Serial made them more aware of how to get podcasts and what they are. And I think it just had a lot of media attention… And there has been an increase in media outlets entering the space. So those were actual effects related to Serial, but not because of Serial.

Yes, and you talk about the improvement in technology and a lot more awareness among consumers. I was wondering, based on your research and the fallout of Serial, do you feel like a certain kind of fetishization of podcasting has arrived? Or would that confuse the fact that right now we’re just in the right time and place, and people ought to jump into the podcasting bandwagon?

Quirk: I think it’s tricky. There is this sense that maybe a lot of media outlets that weren’t into podcasting before are thinking, “Oh are we missing out? Should we jump into podcasting too?” And the nice thing about podcasting is that the barrier to entry isn’t huge. It’s not as difficult, for example, as video, to get into.

On the other hand — especially if you’re an individual or a smaller media outlet — most of the time, it’s going to be too challenging to actually profit from it, and to make good-quality podcasts…Unless you have a strategic plan going into it and an awareness of the medium and good editors on your team, you aren’t necessarily going to have a good podcast.

I think there is going to be a bit of a shakeout, probably, in the future, where people decide to invest in it, and others who probably haven’t put in the time and the research in the first place will probably let podcasting go. Because it’s not so easy to make profit from it. You have to go into it and strategize. And part of the report discusses the different things that podcasting can do for you, which isn’t necessarily profit-oriented directly. But it could do things for you that would generate profit in an indirect way.

Are you referring to loyalty and engagement?

Quirk: Exactly. I outlined three things that podcasts can do for you, or three approaches that people take when they produce podcasts. I call them “operating philosophies.” So, for example, the premium philosophy is that podcasting offers something extra to your readers. There is a connection with the host, a sense of human contact because you are listening to a voice and you come to know the host. So oftentimes, leveraging the relationship and leveraging the contact inspires consumers to perhaps pay extra, or pay for a subscription — that kind of a thing.

Another philosophy is “value added.” It’s basically just improving brand recognition and brand marketing, I guess. For example, BuzzFeed. Their hosts have a very loyal following, and so then their relationship with BuzzFeed is going to potentially be positively impacted — because you’re looking to the podcast, and you have a different way of engaging with them too. And for example, they do a lot of live events now. So you can kind of make profit from that.

Photo by jeshoots.com and used with Creative Commons.

So you discuss how podcasting should be considered a mobile-first medium. Would you say this is true for all kinds of reporting or storytelling on the radio now, given how we’re consuming the audio? 

Quirk: I don’t think yet. Radio isn’t yet a mobile-first medium.

And so when you say radio, just to clarify, you mean…

Quirk: Just terrestrial radio, anything that’s aired over the airwaves. And most radio listening happens in cars. And yes, probably in the next ten years, most people are going to have connected cars, and so most people are probably going to switch from listening on the radio and more on podcasts via their smartphones, in their cars. So that’s going to be a major shift.

Now, the host’s credibility is a huge thing for listeners and a huge thing for the podcasting community when it comes to advertising. On the plus side, these ads end up being “stickier” because you trust the host. But on the other hand, do you ever see this becoming an issue down the line of journalistic ethics?

Quirk: Yeah, and that’s already very much in conversation. I think the easiest or best example of a journalistic outlet grappling with this is Gimlet Media. They have a couple of episodes in their podcast StartUp where they tackle this question. And I think because podcasting is still kind of in its infancy, and the business models for podcasting are still kind of in its infancy, I think people are still working out the lines and the ethics. So there is already a discussion about that, and that’s going to continue being a discussion, especially as branded content and sponsored content become more common. But that’s a very similar conversation to what’s happening in the rest of digital journalism.

In some circles, it seems like there is an identity crisis when discussing audio now. Like, it’s about producers versus distributors, or news-driven radio versus storytelling podcasts. What do you think might have to change in order for podcasting and radio to peacefully co-exist, or to not really have this identity crisis anymore?

Quirk: Well, as you were saying, a big part of the identity crisis is the role of the distributor. Do you need someone like NPR nowadays? Do you need them to have a successful podcast? I mean, yes and no. They still have a huge audience, and they still reach a lot of people. But you don’t necessarily need them … and that’s a big part of the identity crisis. Why do you need radio, why do you need a podcast, can radio be a podcast all the time? And content-wise, is it exactly the same?

I think people are realizing that it is similar, but they’re actually quite different, and the way people listen to radio is actually quite different from podcasting. What’s very interesting is that a lot of radio stations are creating podcasting divisions, or are starting to realize that they need to put more emphasis on podcasting. And sometimes it’s literally just a radio show that they’ve put into digital form. But I think there are also some resources going into making podcast-first content.

There is definitely the relationship between radio and podcasting. Good radio producers are generally on the ground running when it comes to making podcasts. But there is definitely room for them to be different, and I think that it what is really interesting to podcasting producers. Considering what is going to be the future of the content, and how can we break away from some of the mental limitations that radio has put on it, and perhaps allow the form to become it’s own thing.

What kind of mental limitations are you alluding to?

Quirk: If you are brought up in public radio, you have certain things that you are taught from the beginning that then becomes second nature. Like, maybe you put on your public radio voice, and the way you structure it is a certain way, and the way you write it is a certain way. Most radio people are very very good at writing clearly and concisely, because they know that when people are listening to the radio, you have to grab their attention all the time, because they might easily drift out.

Photo by
James Cridland and used here with Creative Commons license.

So there is a kind of style to radio and a structure to radio writing that a lot of people have already when it comes to podcasting. Because a lot of stuff in podcasting comes from public radio. And storytelling structures as well are kind of already innate because they’re learned it over time. I think what’s interesting to people is what’s going to happen when people with no radio experience start making podcasts. How will the podcasts be different, how will they be the same, how can they break out of the mold that we didn’t even realize we were placing on the medium?

To sum up, what do you think are the biggest barriers to podcasting’s growth right now? And can we guess that certain shakeups might happen, or is there a certain kind of wait-and-see mentality?

Quirk: I definitely think that some people are wait and see. Obviously, some people are placing their bets in this space and assuming that it’s going to take off. Now, I do think having enough resources to have a successful podcast and kind of taking the risk that it will pay off — that’s still a big barrier. Right now advertising is doing really well with podcasting. So it’s not a huge risk if you have numbers that are big enough and can easily get advertising sponsorship. But for smaller outlets, a big barrier is that it’s just harder to grow an audience from zero, especially if the space has a lot more competition than it used to have.

And there are also technological aspects. Google just announced that it will make it easier for Android users to access podcasts via Google play, and that was a huge problem because Android users didn’t have a very good way for accessing podcasts. And then a lot of people talk about this idea of search and discoverability … But I don’t think it’s that huge a barrier, and naturally, it’s already happening. Like, companies like Spotify and Acast are creating algorithms so that you can tag podcasts — like you can listen to one and be recommended another.

I think another huge barrier, though, is the industry standard. The metrics. It’s like reading apples and oranges. And there needs to be the creation of one standard for metrics so that people can people see what they are and compare them. Because I do think there is probably some inflation happening.

Is there anything else you wanted to add?

Quirk: I think an important part of the report is this idea of having control over your audience. And using podcasting as a way to gain direct contact with your audience. And perhaps that’s easier to do via podcasting than other digital media.

For example, when PRX did a crowd-funding campaign, they used Kickstarter, and it was a tremendous success. And this year they used a different platform called CommitChange. And the reason why they did that is that via CommitChange, they had access to a database where they could distribute. So now they have a community they can tap into…Versus in Kickstarter, everyone who signs up via Kickstarter belongs to Kickstarter. And that’s an interesting problem facing podcasting. Because there’s even a problem with iTunes — they [the audience] are not yours. So there is a tension there, with having control over your audience versus the platforms that might make it difficult to access them directly.

Right….but that’s kind of true too when discussing Facebook being a gatekeeper to news and information.

Quirk: Definitely, it’s very similar to that.

UPDATE: This post has been updated to clarify that StartUp podcast is a part of Gimlet Media, and that Android users could access podcasts, but not easily.

If you were hooked to this Q&A, be sure not to miss this upcoming event sponsored by WNYC and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, “Why Podcasting Matters.” Vanessa Quirk, along with WNYC’s Paula Szuchman, Gimlet Media’s Matt Lieber, Acast’s Sarah van Mosel, Panoply’s Andy Bowers and PRX’s Kerri Hoffman, will discuss the challenges facing the industry and ideas for fostering creative content and diverse talent. The event takes place Feb. 4 in New York.

Sonia Paul is a freelance journalist reporting in India and the United States, and is the editorial assistant at MediaShift. Her work has appeared in a broad range of media, including the Al Jazeera Media Network, Caravan, Foreign Policy, Guardian, Mashable, New York Times, PRI’s The World, Roads & Kingdoms and VICE News. She previously produced the grant-funded podcast series Shizuoka Speaks, based in Japan. She is on Twitter and Instagram @sonipaul.

The post Tow Center’s Vanessa Quirk: Podcasts Not All About Profit appeared first on MediaShift.

Click the image for the full series

“Redefining Engagement” is a special 11-part series on the progress, promise and potential challenges of community engagement in journalism. The series, produced by the Agora Journalism Center, will be published in serial this month by MediaShift. Click here for the full series.

Earlier this year, Georgia Public Broadcasting sent a text message to members of Macon’s Listening Post network asking them to finish this sentence: “I wish Macon would….” Dozens of residents replied, including one woman asking for Sunday bus service. When GPB reporter Michael Caputo picked up the feed, he followed up with a story explaining why Macon’s Sunday bus service had ended — and what it would take to bring it back.

Supported by funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Listening Post in Macon aims to build community conversations around the issues that matter to people. It’s hardly a radical new idea for journalism, but the fresh twist is that these conversations begin in the community and then migrate to the newsroom, rather than the other way around.

“Why are we assuming we know what people care about,” says Burgess Brown, project lead for The Listening Post, “when we can ask them?”

Listening to Communities

It’s no secret that many of journalism’s experiments in “engagement” begin by asking how journalists can use social media, live events and other strategies to get more people to listen to them. But at the Experience Engagement “un-conference” in Portland, Oregon, Brown and others brought a very different question to the fore: How can journalists do a better job of listening to their communities?

Participants at Experience Engagement asked: “How can journalists do a better job of listening to their communities?” Photo by Emmalee McDonald.

On one level, this question calls for a re-examination of what journalists are listening for. In daily journalism, reporters and editors are wired to look for the latest-breaking story or front-page scoop. But as Jon Stewart so often lamented on “The Daily Show,” this obsession with shiny objects leads to coverage without context. Race riots in Baltimore, for example, get stripped of history and covered not as symptoms of inequality and discrimination on a generational scale, but rather as isolated incidents popping up like purple unicorns. Deep community listening requires journalists to listen for human stories with depth, texture, nuance and history — not just for sound bytes and quotes.

But in addition to the ‘for what’ question, deep listening also challenges journalists to think about whom they’re listening to. Traditional news routines privilege the voices of politicians, official spokespeople and perceived “policy experts,” while largely marginalizing community stories. This norm explains why people in positions of power often dictate civic discourse — and why news coverage tends to focus on presidential candidates’ xenophobic immigration proposals and fear-mongering war cries instead of on, say, how immigration policy impacts the children of undocumented immigrants.

To improve the breadth of voices and stories in the news, some newsrooms are shaking up traditional routines and experimenting with new approaches to community engagement. NPR, for example, created a Source of the Week initiative to increase the diversity of its news sources, and WBEZ launched Curious City, a project that crowdsources story ideas by inviting questions from curious listeners and allowing the community to vote on which questions reporters should investigate. (Jennifer Brandel, Curious City’s co-founder, has since launched another audience-driven news platform called Hearken.)

There’s also The Listening Post in Macon and its sister operation in New Orleans, which use the mobile messaging platform GroundSource to connect journalists with the pulse of the community. Andrew Haeg, founder of GroundSource, envisions community listening posts as a journalistic version of the neighborhood barbershop, where voices are equal and conversation is authentic. Sometimes that might mean talking about tomorrow’s weather or yesterday’s high school football game, but in other cases the conversations could sow the seeds of traditional journalism. Case in point: GPB’s story about Sunday bus service.

“That woman said something, and then a journalist did a story, and now maybe it’s going to come up at the next debate,” Haeg says. “I think that’s the future of journalism at the local level.”

Andrew Haeg, founder and CEO of GroundSource, participates in a breakout session at Experience Engagement. Photo by Emmalee McDonald.

Creating a listening post

On Day 1 of the Experience Engagement event, Haeg and Burgess teamed up with American Public Media’s Public Insight Network (PIN), Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) and The Piece, a Portland-based nonprofit leadership program for youth, to host a listening workshop. But instead of focusing only on journalists, workshop organizers recruited a diverse group of professionals who rely on listening as a core part of their work, such as youth leaders, psychiatrists, urban planners, artists and educators. The philosophical pivot for journalists: Instead of interviewing a few sources and reporting back to a mass audience, each group was paired with a single Portland-area youth partner and tasked with listening to community members on their behalf.

The groups didn’t get to meet their audience of one, but the responses from an OPB PIN questionnaire helped them develop a sense of what mattered to their youth partner. The issues at play were diverse. One youth, an incarcerated juvenile, wanted to know how he could influence people’s perception of juvenile offenders. Another asked for help getting her friends to put down their mobile devices long enough to have real conversations.

“The teams could have taken those issues and found good stories to tell,” said Linda Miller, director of network journalism and inclusion at American Public Media. “But this time their job wasn’t to find a story or chase a lead. Their job was to go out and listen” and report back on what they were hearing.

The teams came up with different strategies for putting their listening into action. Noticing some leftover hard-boiled eggs from the breakfast spread, one group canvassed the streets with an “egg for your thoughts” motto. Another carried a sign asking, “Are you being heard?” When locals stopped to talk, they asked questions and listened.

Linda Miller (far left), director of network journalism and inclusion at the Public Insight Network, listens during a breakout session at Experience Engagement. Photo by Emmalee McDonald.

The participants also used GroundSource to solicit digital feedback from the community, and while some of the responses they received might sound like throwaway lines with no purpose for “the story,” Miller says listening isn’t about sniffing out the perfect answer. Rather, it’s about stepping back and relinquishing control of a conversation that journalists have become too comfortable dominating. “Sometimes that means listening to what other people want to tell you,” she said, “and not what you’re interested in learning from them.”

Deep listening for journalists

Although the workshop was an exercise in deep listening and not a model for journalism per se, it’s not difficult to imagine how the two could converge. Take the example of KPCC’s Make Al Care project, which began when reporter Meghan McCarty met a local chef named Al Gordon who said he didn’t plan to vote in L.A.’s municipal elections. For the next two weeks, McCarty led a #MakeAlCare campaign on the radio, soliciting advice from listeners, talking with a political scientist and even taking Al to a local forum where he could hear from the candidates himself.

By Election Day, KPCC’s campaign had successfully convinced Al to vote, which makes sense. McCarty listened to Al’s concerns and interests, and then she listened to members of the community with those concerns and interests in mind — an approach that connected not only with Al, but also with hundreds of other community members who shared his apathy for local elections.

This strategy should feel vaguely familiar to journalism, which regularly uses one person’s story to stand in for the collective experience of a larger community in news feature ledes. The difference here, Miller says, is that Al’s experience isn’t generalized. He’s not simply an anecdote or a “human voice” in an otherwise banal election story. Nor is his experience easily discounted or assailable. He is allowed to be authentic and relatable.

Miller notes that deep listening doesn’t ask journalists to abandon professional skepticism or sensemaking. It asks them only to be more human and empathetic, to try to see and explain the world the way others see it. “There’s a saying in journalism: ‘Don’t write for your sources,’” Miller explained. “But this approach is saying, ‘Write for your sources. Care about them.’ I think that’s where relevance resides.”

Andrew Haeg’s Interview from SOJC Agora Journalism Center. Video by Emmalee McDonald.

Throughout the Experience Engagement event, conversations kept returning to the idea that true engagement — the kind that makes audiences trust and value their local news organization — begins when journalists suspend their own snap judgments about news value and instead listen to what community members (instead of politicians) say is important.

That requires deep listening, which doesn’t just mean more interviewing. While the journalistic interview generally begins with a very specific purpose — to unearth quotes or sound bytes that add color to a journalist’s reporting — deep listening doesn’t begin with an agenda, and its purpose isn’t to fill a hole after the nut graf. Listening is a process, and while that process may often unmask important news stories — like when a woman asks for Sunday bus service and gets a response on the radio a few weeks later — journalists should embrace the act of listening as its own destination.

“Redefining Engagement” is a special 11-part series on the progress, promise and potential challenges of community engagement in journalism. The series, produced by the Agora Journalism Center, will be published in serial this month by MediaShift. Click here for the full series.

Ben DeJarnette is a contributing writer for the University of Oregon School of Journalism & Communication’s Agora Journalism Center, the gathering place for innovation in communication and civic engagement. On Oct. 1-4, the Agora Journalism Center and Journalism That Matters partnered to host Experience Engagement, a four-day participatory “un-conference” in Portland, Oregon.

Correction: This post has been updated to correct that Michael Caputo was the Georgia Public Broadcasting reporter who followed up a Listening Post feed with a story on Macon’s Sunday bus service.

The post Before Interviewing, Journalists Must Listen Deeply appeared first on MediaShift.