Putting the Public in Public Radio
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A presentation I gave at the Radio Days Europe conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Contact me on Twitter: @jim_colgan
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Putting the Public in Public Radio
- 1. Putting the public in public radio
- 2. Public radio: The Stats 33.9 million listeners per week 27% of college educated listeners Potential to reach 49 million people who are college educated in the US ...room for growth
- 3. Ready for engagement: Snow storm in NYC
- 4. Early crowdsourcing: The Brian Lehrer Show. Few tools available
- 5. The Takeaway: Engaging every day
- 6. Through voice messages with Spinvox
- 7. Through texting with Mobile Commons
- 8. Starting with listeners: One example
- 9. Listener photos of class signifiers
- 11. Another example: The Great Migration
- 12. Recruited listener interview before author’s
- 13. Breaking news now: Ready for engagement
- 14. On air and online: Texting, calling, mapping
- 16. Interest from government agencies
- 17. Now have crowdsourcing apps
- 18. Share responses with partner stations
Editor's Notes
- -Intro: me, NYPR, national, local\n-going to talk about some of our successes with listener engagement\n-first, some context...\n
- -Intro: me, NYPR, national, local\n-going to talk about some of our successes with listener engagement\n-first, some context...\n
- -Public radio gets 33.9 million listeners a week\n-College education is one way we can identify people who could be public radio listeners. \n-Public radio stations currently reach 27% of college educated listeners 25+ according to Arbitron Nationwide/Act 1 Systems data. \n\n-weather\n\n \n
- -In January, massive snowstorm hit New York -- 20 inches.\n-city was very slow to cleanup -people all over NYC were stuck, some couldn’t leave their houses\n-reporters couldn’t get around easily, so opened it up to listeners\n-We needed the technology to do it fast, and for the first time, we had it.\n-But it wasn't always that way (and we still have a ways to go)...\n-did our first listener interactive project at WNYC 4 years ago at Brian Lehrer Show.\n-established community of callers. poised for something like this.\n\n\n
- -Came up with something of value: price gouging. had people go to their local store and come back with the prices of three goods: lettuce, beer and milk.\n-only tool was a website with a comments page.\n-been able to add more tools to make it much easier.\n-we tried a few of those projects, designed a more sophisticated way of getting the info, used it at The Takeaway\n\n
- -try to involve our listeners in every show\n-this is different, because we’re a morning news magazine, with short segments, rather than a longer-form call-in show like The Brian Lehrer Show.\n-i’ll go through a few of the different ways\n\n
- -get many by voice message. Have a tool that let’s listeners leave audio messages really quickly -- perfect for the radio medium.\n\n
- -have people text us every day -- during the hours of the morning show, and in the afternoon to people who subscribed to questions from us.\n-use these tools to get listener input every day, \n-example of how we used it with some of the other tools we’ve added at WNYC...\n\n
- -one example: tax cuts -- decided to not even have a guest\n-put the question out \n-What does it MEAN to be middle class in America today? And who calls themselves middle class?\n-THAT turned to what around them signified class at all. \n-So we asked them to send us PHOTOS of what those things were.\n
- -And we were flooded by photos. (Well over a hundred - only 41 displayed)\n[Read]\n
- -interesting thing here for me was how we were able to feed it BACK to the on air part -- by doing a slideshow for the RADIO.\n\n
- [audio]\n
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- -we applied a similar approach to a story we did about the “great migration” of African Americans from the South to the North of the U.S.\n-really targeted people outside our regular base\n-do that with the guests we choose for The Takeaway and the way we structure the show\n
- -we applied a similar approach to a story we did about the “great migration” of African Americans from the South to the North of the U.S.\n-really targeted people outside our regular base\n-do that with the guests we choose for The Takeaway and the way we structure the show\n
- -back to this January when the snow storm hit.\n-snow fell, overwhelmed everyone, city officials were away, the mayor may or may not have been in Bermuda. \n-Much of our staff was away. But the technology was there (as was I).\n-had a breaking news situation where the tools were all in place.\n-had the crowdsourcing tool, we knew how to get recorded listener calls on the air. And most importantly for this, we had a TEXTING service.\n\n
- -realized the story was quickly becoming about the cleanup effort -- or lack thereof. \n-realized one of the best ways to report this situation was by asking our listeners.\n-Even the reporters were finding it hard to reach certain places with all the transportation problems.\n-Within 15 minutes of deciding we wanted to do this, we were able to set up the texting campaign.\n-we asked a very simple question: Has your block been plowed? On-air, we asked people to text the word PLOW to the shortcode 30644. Once they did so, that person received a message asking for his or her address and the response to the question.\n-then person was sent another message asking if he or she would like to contribute more details, in his or her own voice. If the person responded to this SMS message, he or she was connected to a voicemail line and could describe how the snowstorm and roads were affected. \n-were able to start playing the audio messages on the air very quickly\n\n
- -received hundreds of reports, and close to 100 people left voice messages with detailed stories.\n-Some stories included issues of access to emergency services, getting to and from work, and the ensuing trash buildup after the storm.\n-had an on air and online story about a major news event affecting huge swathes of the city, almost entirely driven by listener reporting.\n\n\n
- -were able to link all of the text messages to a Google Fusion Table, which is designed for fusing different sets of data. But it also has a very easy GEOCODING feature.\n-It also lets you add HTML to the placemarkers, and we could include the audio of the voice messages, wherever someone left one.\n-We created the map on Tuesday. We continued to receive information throughout Wednesday, so we created an updated map on Wednesday. \n-Then on Thursday, I said, “Why not just follow up with these people?” So we sent them back a text blast, asking, “What’s your situation like now?”\n-That kind of follow-up is really good. You often aren’t able to do that with a traditional man on the street interview.\n\n
- -a similar storm hit Boston, they had heard about what we had done and they wanted to do the same thing. \n-they called us and they used the same texting service and linked it to a Google Fusion Table in the same way.\n\n-even got a call from someone who works in government -- not NYC govt., but in Colorado’s state division of emergency management. \n\n
- -Someone with the title of Mitigation Technical Specialist. It’s her job to use technology to help respond to emergencies like wildfires.\n-she said she had never seen a setup like ours and she quizzed me about the project.\n\n\n\n
- -At The Takeaway, we also have a new iPhone app that lets people send images, audio or video directly from their iphones.\n\n-WNYC is developing something similar across the whole station.\n\n
- -also built a dashboard for stations that carry the Takeaway, so that they can see all the responses we get as soon as they come in, and they can filter them by their local region. \n-shows up right next to the place where they access their programming information.\n\n\n
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