Bear in Mind

How To Do News Online: Think of News as Data

2011-04-13T11:04:00.004-05:00

Thomas Baekdal‘s critique on what newspapers did wrong in their approach to online news has attracted a lot attention. I think his suggestions also apply to us broadcasters if we want to develop a strong online presence.

Forget the limitations of on-air broadcast

“Newspapers need to stop thinking of news as an article,” Baekdal said, “People do not want a format. They want news.” Likewise, broadcasters also need to stop thinking of news as a audio or video clip with text. The Internet has no limitation on distribution schedule either. “Everything is now!”

Think of news as data

The wrong way to bring news is to create 170 articles and just post them on your website. That just wastes people time. There is no way to differentiate between topics, get the bigger picture, or dive into the details.

Instead, think of news as data. Some news, like the analysis and the insights, are perfect as an article. The stream of news, as the story develops, is perfect as a live stream. The rumors and speculations are better as a list. The quick overview is best presented like an illustration.

Here is a nice example of how that could be done for a complicated big story.

Communication Strategies and Tools from Project Argo

2011-03-30T14:42:00.001-05:00

NPR’s Argo Network (formerly known as Project Argo) involves collaboration among 12 local public radio stations in three time zones with various numbers of bloggers and editors at each station. How its members communicate across timezones and locations offers lessons for anyone looking for collaboration strategies and tools.

One-to-One Communication

The team has been using email, phone calls, Twitter and Skype. Lately they start augmenting phone conversations with PiratePad that allows members to share document editing in real-time, more immediate than using Google Docs. "Despite the surfeit of tools to choose from, however, the most valuable one-on-one interactions we can have are in person," said Matt Thompson, Argo's Editorial Product Manager. "Of course, this is the most time- and resource-intensive way to communicate. But there’s still nothing like it."

One-to-Many Communication

The team used GoToMeeting initially, but it requires too much advance set-up and coordination, and has trouble with Mac. "We’ve since moved to a lower-fidelity approach, using free tools. Join.Me to share desktops, and FreeConference.com for voice communication," Thompson said. "For a small fee, FreeConference.com allows us to record the audio when we need to. Pair that audio up with video of the related slides, and you’ve got a webinar recording." To capture and share best practices, the team uses the Argo blog and the Argo documentation site.

Many-to-Many Communication

Webinars and phone calls help. The team is also creating a Stack-Overflow-esque board that allows members to discuss issues and solicit advice as a group. "There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to keeping in touch," Thompson emphasizes, "What’s served us best are flexibility and adaptation. Setting up a phone call over Twitter while we trade notes in a PiratePad. Using Basecamp to agree on a time for a webinar that mashes up FreeConference.com with Join.Me."

New Approach to BBC Online: Doing Fewer Things, Better

2011-01-27T15:08:00.003-06:00

BBC’s Director of Future Media & Technology, Erik Huggers, reveals a new approach to BBC Online today as the result of a strategy review and a 25% budget cut. The approach emphasizes putting quality first and curbing service sprawl.

Doing Fewer Things, Better: Move from building one-off websites to managing online products.
Maximizing Distinctiveness: Apply three tests to each site. First, do we really need this website to meet our public purposes? Second, to what degree does it help meet our five editorial priorities? And third, how does it differ from what else is out there in the market; is it distinctive?, and if not – should we be doing it all?
Fewer, Better Products: Key products are news, sport, and weather. Homepage and Search bind all the products together.

BBC Online will pull back from some editorial areas and even close down some websites completely. Meanwhile, BBC Online will NOT:

Launch its own social network
Offer specialist news content for specialist audiences
Publish local listings
Develop encyclopaedic propositions in Knowledge
Provide continuing professional development materials for teachers or a managed learning environment for schools
Become a video-on-demand aggregator in BBC iPlayer, although it will link to other on-demand providers
Produce online-only music sessions Offer track-by-track music streaming
Invest in exclusive online sports rights

Lessons from The Atlantic and the Columbus Dispatch

2011-01-24T15:07:00.001-06:00

A story of success and a story of failure. The Atlantic posts profit in the fourth quarter of 2010, the first time in decades. Its online traffic grew 34% with a monthly average of 5 million unique visitors. The turn-around is attributed to

Creating a solid brand identity
A digital-first strategy
Building a marketing services operation
Expanding live events; and
Maintaining a relentless focus on hiring top talent.

Stop Thinking Like a Portal is the hard lesson the Columbus Dispatch newspaper in Ohio should learn from its poor handling of the homeless golden voice video that was shot by its reporter and went viral on YouTube thanks to a reader.

Few publishers … seem to have really embraced the idea that content can’t be bottled up and locked behind walls any more, and that there is more to be gained by letting it be shared than there is to be lost.

Free Video Editing Tools

2010-12-15T22:53:00.000-06:00

I used iMovie to edit some video clips for work last year and really like it. It's every intuitive, easy to use, yet still powerful. But I'm a Windows person, by choice and by circumstances, and no longer have easy access to a Mac machine.

Windows' answer to iMovie is Windows Movie Maker. The XP version is simple but too simple, lacking many features of iMovie and the ability to edit MP4 video which is the format of my beloved Flip video camera. I have to use a free tool called Simple Video Converter to convert MP4 files to AVI files before loading the files into Windows Movie Maker to edit. Most of its visual options have a 1990s look.

But I'm very happy to discover last month that the Windows 7 version of Windows Movie Maker is a huge improvement and can edit MP4 files directly. Its visual options have a more modern look. It offers more choices of transitions and effects than the XP version. But it's still not as intuitive or powerful as iMovie. I especially miss the cut-away feature of iMovie.

Below are three video clips I edited using iMovie and two versions of Windows Movie Maker:

iMovie

Windows 7 version of Windows Movie Maker

Windows XP version of Windows Movie Maker

Gawker's News Model: Beyond Blog and "River of News"

2010-12-14T17:34:00.002-06:00

Gawker Beta Site

Gawker’s new design of their news site has moved beyond the typical layout of a blog.

The blog scroll, long the central element of the page, is shifted to the right column, still prominent but subordinate; … and only headlines are displayed. … In place of the original content column: one visually appealing “splash” story, typically built around compelling video or other widescreen imagery and run in full.

Gawker explained why they moved beyond blog towards a convergence of blog, magazine and television: Scoops drive audience growth, aggressive news-mongering trumps satirical blogging. A powerful story deserves the most prominent real estate and should stay there as long as readers still have strong interest in it. “In our current layout — there is no meaningful distinction between the quick post and a deeper story. Simple blockquotes and other short posts rapidly push our big exclusive down the page.”

They came up with two solutions.

The creation or recognition of two different classes within the editorial teams: the curator or editor; and the producer or scoopmonger.
Abandon the single blog flow and separate out the strongest stories.

We need a few breakout stories each day. We will push those on the front page. And these exclusives can be augmented by dozens or hundreds of short items to provide — at low cost — comprehensiveness and fodder for the commentariat. These will typically run inside, linked by headlines from the blog column, so the volume doesn’t overwhelm our strongest stories.

NPR’s Keith Hopper, who’s working with several public radio newsrooms to implement the Core Publisher platform that follows the “River of News” publishing model, blogged about Gawker’s new design. In the newsrooms that are piloting Core Publisher, he saw a similar division of labor emerging “between reporters who are tasked with keeping the river flow going and those who’s function has always been to produce deeper original pieces for the radio.” The “River of News” model uses traditional blog layout with stories presented in reverse-chronological order rather than in the order of importance. But the stories are also grouped by a set of pre-determined topics or beats such as energy and health (example of a River of News site) . Hopper is undecided whether Gawker’s new design is suitable for public radio newsrooms.

There’s still the challenge of ensuring the deeper piece is timely and compelling for a web audience, but the role division likely makes more sense in a traditional news shop like public radio newsrooms. Denton’s other solution is more complex and involves flipping the scanable blog flow to a subservient right rail and featuring a single lead story in the primary content well. For me, the jury is still out on the suitability of this approach.

I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution. Most local stations have a small newsroom with very limited capability to produce big exclusive stories on a daily basis. They may do a few in-depth features a year by themselves or in collaboration with other news organizations. For those stations, the “River of News” layout still works. For stations with significant news gathering capabilities, they may be better off using Gawker’s model. NPR can also consider adding a new “beyond blog” layout template to Core Publisher that allows stories to be presented in the order of importance. Core Publisher is built using Drupal, a CMS with capability to switch layout themes or templates. So there should not be much technical difficulties in adding more templates to Core Publisher.

Profile of iPad Users

2010-12-10T14:37:00.000-06:00

NPR iPad app

The full results of 2010 National iPad News Survey are out. Conducted by the Reynolds Journalism Institute between September and November, the 20-question online survey had 1,609 respondents from U.S. (92%) and 49 other countries. A follow-up panel survey is planned for March, June and September. The main findings are:

iPad users are predominantly well-educated, affluent men between 35 and 64 who purchased the device within the first two months of its release.
The overall satisfaction and time spent with the iPad are very high.
Keeping up with news and current events is the most popular use.
iPad news consumers prefer newspaper applications to newspaper websites and are less likely to use print publications.
Positive iPad reading experience is influenced by age and traditional media habits.
Low prices and ease of use are key factors in users’ decisions to purchase newspaper subscriptions on the iPad.

A similar survey was conducted by AP in July and August via links on AP, BBC and NPR iPad applications. It found that

iPad users predominantly consumed news at home
iPad users preferred reading long-form text stories on the iPad

Primary Election Night

2010-09-20T13:28:00.003-05:00

I was able to vote for the first time in my life in 2010. And I got to cover Wisconsin primary election online as well! Wisconsin Public Radio had a 2-hour live radio coverage on the evening of September 14. It was fun. I was in and out of news room and studios shooting video with my Flip camera, updating WisconsinVote.org with latest results from AP, posting who wins on WPR Facebook and Twitter pages, and dashing to the parking lot to feed my meter. In the next couple of days, I edited all my footage down to this little video with an awesome piece of music (thanks, Joe!) expressing the atmosphere I felt that night. I know I shouldn't get too excited by a primary election, but I'm Chinese. So :-)

Independence from Proprietary Publishing Systems?

2010-07-07T16:01:00.001-05:00

On July 4th, Journal Register Company declared independence from proprietary publishing systems by publishing and distributing its 18 daily newspapers, both online and in print, using only free web-based tools. The company started the Ben Franklin Project that “not only proves that websites and newspapers can be freed from the restraints of legacy, proprietary publishing systems, but also heralds the potential of an open and transparent news gathering process.” I really like the list of free tools on the project site. It’s worth checking out. I’m adding them to my own list of free tools collected over the years.

Public Broadcasting Stations and Digital Media

2010-04-20T22:07:00.011-05:00

This is a very thoughtful post from PRPD responding to the appeal from Wyoming Public Radio’s Jon Schwartz on behalf of stations faced with the potential of new platforms, but challenged by the lack of a clear strategy or business model to take advantage of the opportunity.

Digital isn’t going to pay for itself – probably for awhile. E.g. Despite increasing its investment in digital, revenues now cover 85% of the expense of the regional MPR service.
We still need to invest in digital media for one simple reason, our audience. The shortest path to irrelevance is to ignore what our audiences are telling us, and our audiences are increasingly using digital media.
Stations need to add digital media to the list of priority activities, like the news department and the local talk show.
Strategies and practices are emerging, but strategies and best practices emerge as a result of doing. It’s testing, experimenting and learning. It is risk and innovation and failure.

Videos of 2010 Neale-Silva Winners' Recital

2010-04-19T22:05:00.000-05:00

I had lots of fun interviewing the host and some young audience of the 2010 Neale-Silva Winners' Recital on April 11. The video was shot using my handy Flip camera and edited using iMovie. It's amazing how much easier now to shoot and edit video.

Wisconsin Public Radio's Lori Skelton Previews the Recital

Young Audience Members Share Their Impressions on the Recital

How NPR Designed iPad App in One Month

2010-04-07T10:04:00.000-05:00

Here is an interesting peek into the design process for NPR’s iPad app. NPR’s Paulo Lopez and David Wright Jr. shared the development team’s experience. I found the following points interesting:

“It was not quite as easy to repurpose certain core iPhone app features -- the playlist, the station finder -- as we had first imagined.” NPR worked with Bottle Rocket again who developed NPR’s iPhone app.
“We were able to leverage a great deal of code from our recent redesign and CMS improvement. The decision to create an entirely separate instance of the site was a lot easier because of the planning infrastructure we put in place last summer.”
“We’re lucky to have a great team of developers who understand storytelling as well as the value of iteration and rapid prototyping.”
“Our research indicated that a large number of NPR listeners would also be heavy iPad users.”
“There were many features in the original concept that did not make it into version 1, such as landing pages for topics and a more hierarchical presentation of the day’s news on the homepage.”

Wisconsin Public Radio Listener Survey

2010-03-15T09:25:00.000-05:00

This morning I got a flood of emails after sending out a survey to a randomly selected 10,000 Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) listeners yesterday for my dissertation (I'm working on my PhD in journalism). Many of the emails complain that the survey is too long.

I agree that it's a pretty long and comprehensive survey. The main reason is because my dissertation project, a study of digital media habits of public radio listeners and producers, needs to answer many questions that no other studies have asked before. So I really appreciate your patience in filling out the survey. To ease the burden, I've set up the survey to save your responses automatically so that you don't have to finish it in one session.

I understand that we ask a lot from listeners. You just endured a pledge drive earlier this month, for example. But WPR is at a pivotal point of its digital media effort. We just started the first stage of total makeover of our website. For that gigantic task, WPR just hired me as their New Media Content Director this month. A long-time listener, I really want to do a great job and give all of us a brand new, easy to navigate website and mobile application down the road. Your input is the most important advice I can get to make the new website a success.

Thanks so much for your time and help.

Lisa

Review of Zinio

2010-01-18T21:57:00.037-06:00

In a previous post I praised the "iTunes for magazine," an online newsstand planned by a group of magazine publishers including Time Inc. and Condé Nast. Then I got an email from Zinio and learned that Zinio has already developed such a newsstand that is selling more than 50,000 digital magazines and books in 15 languages. I was really intrigued why the other group is reinventing the wheel. So I did a little digging on Zinio and talked to its Global EVP and CMO, Jeanniey Mullen.

A private company established in 2001, Zinio, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, has about 5 million active customers and powers Barnes & Noble's electronic magazine sales and e-book previews. The business model of the company is to take a percentage of the revenue from magazine sales, Mullen said. But Zinio is not making money yet, according to Globe and Mail.

Zinio is pursuing a "unity" platform that will allow its readers, with no extra cost, to enjoy their digital magazines on any existing and future device, be it computer, smart phone, tablet, or TV with Internet access. To read their magazines on computers and enjoy the full print-link glory and feel, readers are recommended to download Zinio's free reader software. They can also bookmark, take notes, print any magazine page or share a copy with a friend. To read their magazines on smart phones, the readers need to download an app and the iPhone app was released earlier this month.

I downloaded Zinio's reader software, purchased a few free magazines, and read them on my computer. The process is rather simple and pleasant. Zinio's reader software is quite similar to FLYP, another gorgeous digital magazine reader, and the New York Times Reader. But the latter two are built for a single publication. I don't want to spend so much time and storage space on single-use softwares. I would much prefer a more universal magazine reader like Zinio's.

I really like the Unity platform. I can imagine myself flipping through the beautiful pages on my computer, reading bookmarked articles on my smart phone while commuting on bus or waiting in the dentist's office, or showing saved videos from magazines on an Internet TV to guests in my living room.

If Zinio is already serve as "iTunes for magazines," why does another group of magazines, some of them are Zinio's customers, want to start another platform? Zinio's Mullen didn't answer. My guess is that some magazine publishers do not like the Unity platform since it limits the publishers' ability to have different price and access models for different devices. Even though publishers have an alternative choice to use Zinio's "private-labeled newsstands" service to create their own web front (e.g. Four Points) while using Zinio's technology only as a power engine under the hood, the cost may be too high, or the design possibility offered by the power engine may still be too limited for a magazine publisher. It's a power struggle between content providers and distributors. In the off-line world, the struggle often leads to vertical integration of the whole publishing process. We'll see how the struggle plays out in the online world. The same struggle happens in the newspaper industry as well, with NewspaperDirect trying to be the "iTunes for newspapers."

The magazine industry is experiencing the crushing impact of advertisers' migration from print to online. American magazines lost a quarter of its ad pages between 2008 and 2009. One forecast says that in 2012, the industry's ad revenue will shrink 28% from its peak in 2007. Readers are migrating online too. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, from 2005 to 2007, the number of digital publication subscribers grew from 5.2 million to 13.4 million. So the industry is in a hurry to catch up with advertisers and readers, and to come up with a new business model. Will Zinio succeed? Will "iTunes for magazines" succeed? It's hard to say. But the common external threat may force them to join forces to survive. I won't be surprised if Zinio ends up with being acquired by an alliance of publishers for its technology and customer base.

Delicious Today: When Internet Marries TV

2010-01-07T15:37:00.018-06:00

1. Internet Users Embrace TV

"In 2009, 65% of Internet users wanted to connect their TV to the Internet, a 7-percentage-point increase over 2008. Web users across all generations increasingly wanted to watch online content, as well as content on their PC, on traditional television screens."

At a gathering yesterday, a friend of mine told me, with excitement and proud, that her family have figured out how to download movies from NetFlix to their big-screen TV, and really love the convenience and instant gratification of the service. Her description really made me envy. Once I tried watching television shows with a friend from Hulu.com on my laptop. The choice of content was amazing but group watching on a laptop quickly became a physical strain -- we both got a neck ache after 15 minutes. Laptop is definitely not designed for group watching.

But a TV show or movie is so much more enjoyable when we watch it with friends or family than solo. There are some huge advantages in a marriage between the high-speed Internet and big-screen TV:

Group watching from the comfort of a sofa.
Always something fun to watch without commercials most of the time.
With social media applications embedded in the Internet TV (Skype, Twitter, instant message, etc), we can group watch with friends and family who live far away, exchanging comments and recommendations at real time.
No more pledge drive interruptions. Public broadcasting stations can run their pitches alongside the show with messages timed with specific moments in the show to achieve the maximum impact.
On-screen pledge. No more phone calls or filling out online pledge forms, audience can enter an amount and click a button on their TV screen to make a donation.
Less or no pledge drives. If each piece of video content has built-in donation message and button, the pledge becomes constant and there's no need for special drives.

2. Skype: Coming to a Couch Near You

Up to 5 million Skype-enabled TVs will be delivered during 2010. The TV's specially designed web cam can pick up audio from a greater distance, so Skype TV users will be able to remain seated instead of huddling around a microphone.

3. Video-streaming home-entertainment devices proliferate

"A new breed of home-entertainment device can stream movies and more over the Internet and onto a big-screen TV. This isn’t a brand-new phenomenon, but it has accelerated dramatically in the last year or so. Tons of streaming-capable gadgets are now available."

Delicious Today: Mobile Future

2009-12-22T14:30:00.014-06:00

1. Ford Brings Wi-Fi to the Highway | Watch Out Public Radio
Reading an article on Wired.com about car makers' race to put wi-fi into new cars, Robert Paterson becomes deeply concerned about the future of public radio. "The car will be a Wifi sanctuary. In a couple of years Wifi will be ubiquitous. Who will need a radio?"

It's a legitimate concern. Public radio is competing with other media products in multiple fronts: availability, convenience, content, etc. When technologies such as wi-fi give all competitors an almost equal footing in the fronts of availability and convenience, strength in content becomes increasingly crucial for an media organization's fate. Public radio has been producing a lot of great content. But it should not be complacent and underestimate the competition. The last big hit show on public radio is This American Life, one public radio manager told me, but that's more than 10 years ago. Public radio needs to rekindle the innovative spirit in the early years of its existence and be more risk-taking.

I agree with that manager that public radio needs to have a hard look at its content inventory and strategy. I love public radio but I still find myself listen to more non-public radio content on my iPod -- audio programs produced by New York Times, Ted Conference, iTune universities, foreign media, and just individuals (e.g. Psych Files). In a word, I have become much more picky about the quality of content now that I have limited time to listen but endless content to choose from. I'm sure I'm not the only listener who does this.

2. Morgan Stanley Mobile Internet Report, 12/2009

Key takeaways are:

Material wealth creation / destruction should surpass earlier computing cycles. The mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in 50 years, is just starting.
More users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.
Five IP-based products / services are growing / converging and providing the underpinnings for dramatic growth in mobile Internet usage – 3G adoption + social networking + video + VoIP + impressive mobile devices.
Apple + Facebook platforms serving to raise the bar for how users connect / communicate.
Decade-plus Internet usage / monetization ramps for mobile Internet in Japan plus desktop Internet in developed markets provide roadmaps for global ramp and monetization.
Massive mobile data growth is driving transitions for carriers and equipment providers.
Emerging markets have material potential for mobile Internet user growth. Low penetration of fixed-line telephone and already vibrant mobile value-added services mean that for many EM users and SMEs, the Internet will be mobile.

Delicious Today: All about Audience

2009-12-13T13:08:00.006-06:00

1. Public Eager For Mobile TV

"Nearly half of U.S. consumers are ready to watch live broadcast TV via a mobile device, according to a survey."

Two events in the past few days make me really want mobile TV, i.e. live television broadcast on cell phone. The first is the huge snowball fight in the UW-Madison campus here among 950 students during the blizzard that gave me and my fellow students the first snow day in 19 years. I wish I had known it while it was happening so that I could join the fight or at least forward the video to my friends and family. Mobile TV would be a perfect solution in that case. The second event is the long and brutal wait for bus on the morning after the blizzard. My toes were freezing in the below-zero temperature but the bus, half an hour behind schedule, was nowhere to be seen. For the first time in my life I thought seriously that I was going to lose my toes. How I wish I had a way to know the traffic status right there at real time.

Asia is the leader of mobile TV service. South Korea launched the service in 2005, and Japan in 2006. The two countries claim 80% of the mobile TV viewers in the world.

2. It's Time to Focus on "Tune-In"

"Arbitron has determined that more breaks per hour turn listeners away, and you're best off engineering two stops per hour, straddled across two adjacent quarter-hours."

Delicious Today: Tips from Public Broadcasters

2009-12-06T14:57:00.005-06:00

1. Interviewing Tips from 25 Public Radio Hosts
Advice from some of public radio's best-known hosts (Bob Edwards, Robert Siegel, Susan Stamberg), as well as its most experienced music producers (David Brown, John Diliberto, Marco Werman and Brian Newhouse, among others).

2. Social Media Trends of 2009, by NPR's Andy Carvin
4 trends:

Ascension of facebook
iPhone and the App Store, including a few apps such as foursquare, Kaboom, and the Extraordinaries which integrate geolocation awareness with nightlife, playground mapping or two-minute volunteer opportunities
social gaming
data portability

Keeping track of technological trends can be an overwhelming task. But the burden won't be so heavy if more public broadcasters are like Andy Carvin who share their research and experience with colleagues. Andy mentioned Public Media Camp held recently in Washington, D.C. which I attended as well. With hundreds of people gathering together, who have diverse experience but same passion about public media, the camp is a great facilitator of sharing ideas and best practices. But a physical camp is expensive and time consuming to organize and attend. I hope there is a permanent virtual "camp" on the Internet where we can find Andy's presentation and other practical guide. In other words, the virtual camp can serve as a knowledge depository for all public broadcasters.

Delicious Today: Transformation of NewsHour, Views from Inside and Outside

2009-11-30T16:48:00.010-06:00

1. Merging Online and Broadcast Cultures to Reinvent 'NewsHour' (insider's view)

The "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" is re-incarnating itself as the "PBS NewsHour" on December 7. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes details involved in creating the new program, and chief among them is a complete reorganization of our editorial teams to create a merged newsroom for online and broadcast.

2. Stressing the Web, ‘NewsHour’ Begins an Overhaul (outsider's view)

With almost no current overlap between the show’s Web and TV audiences, “NewsHour” executives see significant potential in the reorganization. ...The news and public affairs lineup on PBS is undergoing a broader overhaul, as well. “Nightly Business Report” will have a new anchor in the new year. Bill Moyers is ending his weekly Friday show at the end of April, and PBS canceled the companion “Now on PBS.”

I first learned about NewsHour's merge of its on-air and online staff when I visited its online editor, Lee Banville, while interning at CPB this summer. I immediately like the idea because as the web producer at Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth show, I have reached the same conclusion that on-air and online staff have to work as a single team in order to harness the synergy of radio and Internet. The two technologies are like two musical instruments, when they are played together in an orchestrated way, their music sounds better and richer. But during the merge process, the two teams inevitably will experience storms before they establish new norms (work routines) and perform well again. Old habits die hard. It takes a determined yet sensitive management and a committed yet open-minded staff to sail through the storms. I'm very glad and encouraged that NewsHour is sharing its transformation process with the rest of us. Its experience will provide valuable lessons for other public broadcasting organizations.

3. Group of Magazine Publishers Is Said to Be Building an Online Newsstand

A consortium of magazine publishers including Time Inc. and Condé Nast plan to jointly build an online newsstand for publications in multiple digital formats ... sometimes characterized as an “iTunes for magazines.”

A very smart move for magazines. I wish there was a similar space for content produced by hundreds of public radio and television stations, a public media cyber mall. Without it, it's really hard to cross promote content or encourage healthy competition to improve the quality and variety of public programming.

4. How a shift in perspective salvaged Boston.com’s local search project

In 2006, Boston.com launched a local search tool that was supposed to be a big part of the site’s future. ... The reality is that Boston.com’s local search never caught on. ... Disappointing numbers didn’t lead Boston.com to abandon local search. ... The “aha” moment came when the team stopped looking at search as a product and started seeing it as a platform.

Boston.com found two new uses for their local search engine and averted a total loss on their 6-figure investment. It serves as a good example of how we should approach experiment and technology: always take a second and different look before giving it up.

Delicious Today: Innovative way of teaching journalism at NYU

2009-11-15T11:22:00.010-06:00

#1: Studio 20, NYU's new journalism MA program

The curriculum emphasizes project-based learning. Students, faculty and visiting talent work on editorial and web development projects together, typically with media partners (e.g. the Economist magazine in 2009) who themselves need to find new approaches or face problems in succeeding online. The curriculum has three parts: 1.) the traditional requirements of two basic reporting classes plus "the ethics of the web;" 2.) a core of three project-based classes called Studio I, II and III; and 3.) elective enrichment courses that allow students to pursue interests and work on initiatives of their own. In their third and final semester, students design their own project with an appropriate media partner and try to create innovation--as well as a name--for themselves.

I really like this project-based approach to teaching journalism. It allows students to interact more with real-world media organizations, to gain more practical experience and skills, and, most importantly, to develop ownership of media innovation process. From my experience of working with media technology, learning to use technical tools is just the first step of innovation. Innovation is a process, a mindset. An innovator needs to be quick in learning new skills, but also be willing to discard what he has learned in the past and know when and how to do that.

#2: How U.S. Adults Use Radio and Other Forms of Audio
Results from the Council for Research Excellence, Video Consumer Mapping Study based on 2008 data:

90% of adults are exposed to some form of audio media on a daily basis, with broadcast radio having by far the largest share of listening time.
Audio media exposure has the highest reach among those with higher levels of education and income.
Broadcast radio is the dominant form of audio media at home, work, and in the car.
On average, individuals spend almost identical amounts of time during weekdays (454 minutes) as they do on weekends (458 minutes) using one of the five key media sources.

#3: Top 50 Journalism Blogs

"The following list of top fifty journalism blogs includes blogs that focus on citizen, or grassroot, journalism, personal blogs from professional reporters, journalism school-supported blogs, blogs on a new media focus, organizational blogs and self-professed bipartisan resource blogs that provide primary resources for investigative writing."

This is an excellent collection of journalism resources and thinkers that can help us keep track the current development and debate in journalism. It saves me a lot of searching time.

Delicious Today: Twitter List, Data Mining Journalism

2009-11-08T11:08:00.010-06:00

#1: Fort Hood Shooting Shows How Twitter, Lists Can be Used for Breaking News
#2: Good Example of Twitter List Use: New York Times

"Lists proved a new way to follow breaking news on Twitter, with filtered groupings of local news outlets, military accounts, and local citizens."

Two media organizations shine in the coverage of the shooting. The Austin American-Statesman, the biggest news provider in Central Texas, created a new Twitter account for the event, "FtHoodShootings," immediately and used it as the central place to publish latest reports from its journalist on the scene and information from other media outlets and citizens. The New York Times created a Twitter list of Fort Hood sources and posted the list as a content module prominently on its website. These two organizations demonstrate a good practice of using Twitter in covering breaking news:

If you, a news organization, are near where the event happens, create a new Twitter account dedicated to covering the event and sharing information from other media sources and citizens. In other words, make your new Twitter account the destination for information about the event.
If you are not near the site of the event, create a Twitter list and curate the information for your audience. By listing local sources on the event, separating facts from rumors, and providing useful context information, you build your reputation as a trusted guide and will attract more audience.

#3: Duke University's Computational Journalism

"Computational journalism’ s combination of algorithms, data, and knowledge from social sciences could help preserve the watchdog function of journalism. Accountability Through Algorithm: Developing the Field of Computational Journalism describes how computational approaches, such as the development of a suite of open source reporting tools, can make it easier for reporters and citizens to hold government accountable."

Computational journalism is similar to what I call data mining journalism, an Internet-native form of journalism that's still in its early stage of development. I'm excited to see that the academic world has taken such interest in it.

Delicious Today: 2 Business Models for Journalism

2009-11-02T13:42:00.013-06:00

I did some research over the summer on journalism business models for CPB. There seem to be five major revenue sources: pay wall, syndication, ads, product subsidy, and membership. Today I came across two successful examples: GlobalPost with its ads-syndication-membership combination model, and Washington Post with its product subsidy model.

#1: GlobalPost generating revenue of $1 million in first year

"GlobalPost’s current revenue streams are advertising (sold exclusively in-house), syndication (with partners like CBS and the New York Daily News), and its subscription Passport service."

Profiled by the New York Times, GlobalPost is a for-profit online news organization launched in January this year. It has more than 65 correspondents in nearly 50 countries. Its co-founder Charlie Sennott calls the organization "a lifeboat" for serious international news reporting. I'm a bit surprised but glad to see that it's doing so well financially in the first year.

What public broadcasting can learn most from GlobalPost's business model is syndication. We've been putting a lot of effort in underwriting and membership drive, but not enough in syndication.

#2: Washington Post Co. Quarterly Profit Up 69%
The Washington Post company owns Newsweek magazine, Kaplan education services and television properties along with its namesake newspaper. Its print and web publication are losing money, so journalism operation in the company is subsidized by its Kaplan and cable divisions.

What products can public broadcasting use to help pay for its journalism operation?

Delicious Today: All Together Now

2009-10-22T18:54:00.005-05:00

All Together Now

"All Together Now is a collaborative journalism endeavor by news media in Madison, Wisconsin, to produce print, broadcast and online reports on a common theme. ... The inaugural topic of All Together Now aims to look at the difficulties encountered by people seeking access to health care in the Madison, Wisconsin area."

I'm delighted to see this collaboration journalism project, right in my city! And hooray, both Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television are part of it. As in many cities, serious journalism is in financial crisis. One of the two major newspaper in town, the Capital Times, has abandoned its print operation and gone online only. I'm very glad and relieved to see that these local media competitors have chosen to collaborate at the worst and best time for journalism. The worst time because the traditional business model of journalism is broken with advertisers migrating online. The best time because journalists have never had so many powerful yet affordable technologies at their disposal to reinvent journalism and achieve its highest potential.

I'm also excited to see that UW-Madison is involved in the project. The academic institution can not only bring insights from research to help guide the reinvention of journalism, but also address the needs and desires of journalism in classrooms to educate a new generation of journalists. That's the spirit of Wisconsin Idea that education should be relevant to and have a positive influence on people’s lives beyond the university boundary.

Delicious Today: Social Networking Sites Dominate Mobile Web

2009-10-13T18:04:00.006-05:00

#1: Social Networking Sites Dominate Mobile Web

"Four of Ten Top Mobile Destinations are Social Networks, Says Openwave. ... The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported last month, there has been a one-year increase of 179% in subscribers accessing social networking sites from their mobile devices while those same sites only saw a 10% increase on the PC versions of the sites."

Despite the strange lack of presence of Google in the top mobile destination list, this report echoes findings from other sources that social network visits dominate mobile web use. It suggests that the consumption pattern on mobile devices is quite different from that on computers.

I produced a talk show about cell phones in 2005 for Wisconsin Public Radio. The guest was an anthropologist employed at Intel who studies how people use technology around the world. One thing she said during the interview has stuck with me: In any culture, technologies that help connect people are usually the fastest ones to be adopted by society. Why? Because we human beings have an innate desire to communicate with other human beings.

A mobile phone is a deeply personal device, much more than a computer. It's an extension of one's self to her social network. I'm not surprised at all at Openwave's finding. If mobile use is very different from computer use, content providers need to keep that in mind when providing online content -- they need to have different content strategies for these two different types of users.

Delicious Today: 8 Public Media 2.0 Projects That Are Doing it Right

2009-10-07T14:35:00.004-05:00

#1: Eight Public Media 2.0 Projects That Are Doing it Right

1. Involve: Buffalo Rising, an example of community-based media project
2. Go deeper: Yale Environment 360, an example of an increasingly common digital format for in-depth reporting and analysis.
3. Reach new and non-traditional publics: New America Media
4. Repurpose, remix, recycle: The ScienceBlogs website expands the reach of 100 independent science-related bloggers by connecting them with a community of more than 1.5 million monthly users.
5. Collaborate: Economy Story is a collaboration among NPR, the "NewsHour," PBS, PRX, PRI's "The World," American Public Media's "Marketplace," the "Nightly Business Report," Youth Radio/Youth Media International, Capitol News Connection, Public Interactive, WNYC, and KQED.
6. Enable media literacy: Know the News employ interactive tools and games to help users develop news literacy skills.
7. Play with form: Experiments range from the whimsical (check out Doo dlebuzz), to the hyper-topical (think Twitter's role during and after Iran's election) to the prescient (see the multiplayer game, World Without Oil).
8. Promote political discussion and participation: PolitiFact, a project of The St. Petersburg Times, offers three "meters" that help users "find the truth in American politics."

Digital media is a complicated terrain to navigate. Fortunately with many fellow travelers we don't have to reinvent the wheel in many situations. These eight projects have a lot to offer.

Meeting Helen Thomas

2009-10-05T07:56:00.002-05:00

Thanks to my dear friend Emy, I had a chance to meet Helen Thomas, the legendary White House correspondent, at Madison Civic Club's luncheon Saturday.

Called "the dean of the White House press corps," she has asked questions to 10 presidents. The audience applauded when we were told that her front row seat in the White House press room has been restored by President Obama.

At age 89, she's still quick-minded, straightforward, and down-to-earth, pretty much like this profile of her in last Friday's Washington Post. Somehow she reminds me of the little kid who shouts "but the emperor has no cloths on!" For example, when asked which press secretary of the President was most effective, she answered in one word, 'none." Another question asked of her if there should be a term limit for Senators and Congress Representatives to get rid of incompetent ones, she said no and offered an alternative solution -- "fire them."

I admire women who are not afraid of speaking their mind. We need more female (and male) journalists like her.

Delicious Today: Mobile Use Survey, NYT Custom Feeds

2009-09-29T08:24:00.011-05:00

#1: Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index

"77% of respondents used their mobile for a purpose other than voice and SMS.
Most participants used voice (95%) and SMS (98%).
56% of respondents used their mobile phone to get information at least once a month.
51% of respondents used their mobile phone for entertainment purposes at least once a month.
21% of respondents said they visit websites on their mobile phone at least once a day, while 25% of respondents said they carry out mobile searches at least once a week.
Overall, 34% of respondents accessed websites on their mobile phone by typing in a URL, 18% were likely to access the Web using the mobile phone company’s portal and 17% accessed the Web from a text message.
Only 30% used their mobile phone exclusively for personal use. This result is consistent with previous surveys."
About advertising on mobile phone:
"39% of respondents stated that they would accept ads on their mobile phone in exchange for free mobile content or special offers (not collected in Survey 3)
25% of respondents stated that they would accept ads on their mobile phone (up from 5% in Survey 3)
44% of respondents stated that they would accept ads that offer them incentives (down from 55% in Survey 3)
36% of respondents stated that they would accept ads from companies with whom they have an existing relationship (up from 8% in Survey 3)"

For public broadcasters, two findings in the survey are most relevant.

More than half of respondents use their mobile phones to get information and entertainment, which means that mobile phone has become another mass media channel alongside newspaper, radio, television, computer. Because mobile phone is a "security blanket" for many people -- can't go anywhere without it -- it's likely that mobile media channel will be the most personal, most programmed, and most customized among all channels. To effectively reach people on mobile, public broadcasters need content and delivery strategies to allow mobile audience to quickly identify content of their interest, and easily assemble a personal stream of content from different programs and stations. One good example is the New York Times' custom feeds prototype (see #2 in this post).
About a third of respondents are willing to accept ads on mobile. That should give public broadcasters a reason to explore use of ads on mobile as a revenue stream.

#2: New York Times Custom Feeds
This is a very easy yet extremely flexible tool. You type any search terms, NYT then assembles all news stories in its archive about those terms into a single news feed for you to subscribe to. I'm a big RSS feed user. But most RSS feeds are dictated by news organizations with categories like "international," "editorial" -- too broad for my purpose. I just want all stories about, say, the future of journalism. I can use Google Alerts to get stories about that, but the results are from general Google search thus include too much junk; and results are delivered only by email, not RSS feed that's much easier to manage. NYT's custom feeds solve both problems.

Public broadcasters need to have our own custom feeds. NPR allows audience to build their own custom podcast. Why not custom feeds, not just for NPR content but for all public radio and television stations' content?

Delicious Today: paywall model

2009-09-23T16:13:00.011-05:00

Interesting findings from the paidContent:UK/Harris Interactive poll:

#1: Only Five Percent Of UK Readers Would Pay For Online News

"If their favourite news site begins charging for access to content, 75% of people would simply switch to an alternative free news source. Just 5% of those readers would choose to pay to continue reading the site. And 8% would continue reading the site’s free headlines only."

#2: Readers Prefer Subscriptions To Micropayments

"Per-article fees (ie. micropayments) are the favourite option for 21 percent. A day pass giving unlimited articles within a 24-hour period is favoured by 26 percent. But a subscription of up to a year is the most desired model, supported by 54 percent."

#3: How Much Do Readers Say They’d Pay?

"Answer: as close to nothing as they can get away with... That’s a wake-up call to publishers who think their content is worth something - in this day and age, it will have to work hard to earn a fee."

#4: Will bundling a newspaper subscription help?

"While only five percent of people who read a news site at least once a month told us they would pay for online access, when you throw in a free or discounted subscription to the printed paper, that rises to a combined 48 percent. ... The message is loud and clear - people continue to believe that touchable products command tangible economic value but, divorced from physicality and its associated costs, that digital content should manifest itself cheaper."

The fourth finding is most interesting and relevant to public broadcasting. It can be applied to the membership model of public radio and televison stations. For some members like my dear friends Emy and Paul, pledging is a noble thing to do, a civic duty; they don't want any tangible thing in return because that will make the pledge feel like a business transaction. In contrast, some members pledge because they want the tangible gift included in the membership. We have to design our membership model carefully to cater to both types of members.

Delicious Today: membership model

2009-09-23T15:19:00.008-05:00

#1: Can Memberships, Clubs, Cruises Keep Media Companies Afloat?

"These new memberships and clubs, which focus on offering services to readers that are largely different than a pay wall, are a byproduct of declining advertising revenues. As a result of that lost income, news organizations are looking at new ways of generating revenue from readers. ... One example of a successful membership model is in place at Minnesota Public Radio."

#2: O’Reilly may be an idiot, but his team gets membership concept

"There are 16 benefits to being an O’Reilly Premium Member. Some are comical. ... The O’Reilly Premium Membership isn’t especially innovative, in that some Hollywood stars, other celebrities (and especially porn stars), and athletes do the same sort of thing. ... as the news industry ponders news membership models, creating Premium memberships that get you more from a favorite star journalist and access to the person could be worth paying for. ... My gut reaction is that individual premium memberships might be an easier sell than a similar membership for an entire news brand."

It seems that the membership concept is catching up in commercial news organizations. Even though public broadcasting has been using it for years, we still need to fine tune it to make it more effective and recession-resistant. As a producer for Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth program, I've been involved in many pledge drives and seen many hits and misses. At this point, deciding what premium works and what doesn't is still more of a hunch than a science. I wish there is an exact and reliable recipe we can follow.

Delicious Today: How news sites can cover an election night – examples from Norway

2009-09-20T13:44:00.007-05:00

#1: How news sites can cover an election night -– examples from Norway

"TV would be the channel of choice for most users where you could follow the counting of votes live. This has changed. More than at any earlier election the news web sites this year took an active part not only in distributing the latest results but also in giving people a platform to discuss the elections. In fact we see a new user habit on big events like elections: Many people watch television and visit web sites simultaneously. More and more web services like Twitter and Facebook are being used to discuss what they watch on TV, creating a new form for social experience around the televised event."

This article summarized some of the new digital media techniques used by Norway's leading news organizations in covering the September election. In U.S., with the senate elections in 2010 and presidential in 2012, media organizations need to start preparing for their coverage now in order to stand out among countless choices that the audience has. I remember my disappointment at PBS on the evening of the 2008 presidential election. Most of the time it was talking heads on the screen. Where was the latest results? Where were the interviews with voters? Where was the interactive map that other channels have? Despite my deep affection for PBS, I ended up watching commercial channels that night. I hope public broadcasting will do much better job next time. Please! Let's treat the next big election event as our Superbowl moment; let's plan now and present a coverage that will blow Americans away.

Delicious Today: Two Research Reports on Digital Media

2009-09-20T12:48:00.009-05:00

#1: European Digital Journalism Survey 2009
Some notable findings of this survey of over 350 European journalists are:

54% of the journalists predict that "the editorial quality will erode because of lack of resources."
42% predict that "In a landscape of 'opinion driven new media,' audiences will return to 'reliable media brands.'"
"When it comes to how publishers have embraced the web, the balance is tipping away from using it purely to archive material to increasingly using it for new content."

The concerns of journalists in the survey echo the result of the Pew survey of American audience this month which reports that press credibility is at its lowest level in two decades. It's expensive to produce quality journalism that is based on rich and deep facts. As so many radio and television programs have become talking heads shows, public broadcasting can make itself stand out by producing more fact driven programs. To help reduce the cost of production, we need to have a new mindset and news ways of engaging our audience, especially those who pledge, and crowdsourcing the tasks of gathering, verifying, and making sense of facts and information.

#2: Citizen journalism will remain part of changing news models, says report

"Citizen journalism is here to stay and journalists must look for ways to work with user-generated content, argues a new paper from Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. .l. While the rise of new forms of newsgathering, such as citizen journalism, and revenues may not be fast enough to compensate for the decline in Western news media, ... 'the impulses underlying the rise of citizen journalist are here to stay'."

Delicious Today: quality news, business model, measurement, iPod

2009-09-12T16:55:00.016-05:00

#1: In America, No News is Good News
A College junior from Jakarta, Indonesia describes one thing she misses about home while studying in U.S. -- "access to quality news broadcasting."

"I lament the moment when I turn to the TV Guide channel to find that BBC World, CNN International and ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) are replaced with FOX, CNN America and CNN Headline News. While the brightly-colored studios, extraneous props and chummy presenters on most American news channels lure me like a moth to flame, the content leaves me feeling uninformed. ... It seems to me that our desire for instant, convenient access to information has been prioritized over depth and greater understanding. ... In a society where commercials are shortened to correspond to short attention spans, it feels like news channels are being run by ad agencies."

People want quality journalism even when it's not flashy. That desire is especially strong once they have had exposure to good journalism. I listened to BBC for many years before coming to the United States. I was dismayed by the trashy quality of commercial radio on my arrival in U.S. and thought it was worse than Chinese radio which at least didn't sound like infomercial. The commercial radio hasn't improved much since then and I listen only to public radio (thank goodness). When I need more variety of content, I listen to my iPod with podcasts from BBC, ABC (from Australia), Radio Netherlands, and the Ted conference. I'm sure the article's author and I are not the only people who want more quality journalism. I'm sure most Americans want it too. But why haven't we heard a loud request for more quality journalism from the public? Are they happy with the current state of journalism or is the unhappy audience bypassing American media and has gone straight to non-American sources such as BBC?

As a public radio producer, I'm glad to hear that the articl author likes PBS: "'NewsHour with Jim Lehrer' may not be exciting — but at least it doesn’t substitute content for flashing lights."

#2: Lots of Fee Ideas for Media Online
#3: Journalism Online’s charging clients a 20% commission
#4: Google Plans Tools to Help News Media Charge for Content
This collection of articles summarizes the latest activities in developing a paid content business model for the media industry. Journalism Online, a private venture founded by three former media executives, is selling an e-commerce engine that "allows customers to have one easy-to-use account common to all the publishers' websites" by paying an annual, monthly, or per-article fees. Google's micro payment model extends its Checkout payment system, one of the leading systems for online payments. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation hopes to duplicate the success of its Wall Street Journal, one of the largest paid news Web sites, to other news sites it owns.

#5: Major Media Companies Form Measurement Initiative; ‘Not An Attempt To Replace Nielsen’

"Tired of waiting for the various audience measurement firms to provide seamless, cross-platform data covering consumers’ total media usage, a group of 14 companies representing all the major TV networks have joined with major advertising agencies and marketers to create the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM)."

Lack of good audience measurement has been a bottleneck for digital media development because without quality measurement, we have no clear idea whether an online project is successful, little evidence to persuade investors to give more money, and few arguments to attract advertisers. Even though there are plenty of web visit numbers around, their meaning is debatable and their reliability questionable. For example, how can you tell an accidental visitor from a loyal one whose browser doesn't store cookies thus who appears as a new visitor every time? How can you tell whether a visitor has paid attention to an ad on a web page?

*** Extra
Another big news item is the new iPod Nano which touts a built-in FM tuner and Live Pause button. More people will listen to radio, I think, but it won't save radio if the radio industry doesn't adapt to the digital age.

Delicious Today: critiquing public broadcasting

2009-09-08T18:21:00.005-05:00

#1: Public Radio Me

"Public radio apps (which are some of the best out there), for example, tend to be bundled into menu-filled portfolios of public radio stations and shows ... And if I'm a fan of WHYY (for example) in Philadelphia, don't give me an app that simply replays the station. Give me a choice of streams, including ones not duplicated on-air. Give me an app that brings me more of ME, not simply more of you. ... The reason we approach this so narrowly is that we have a natural tendency to bundle our assets the way they're bundled in our industry (our 'functional fixedness'), rather than unbundle them according to the tastes of each individual fan. We must configure our apps around that fan's interests rather than our over-the-air stream."

I follow Mark Ramsey's blog (hear2.com) and find this post about public radio insightful. It's easy to accept the audience-centric approach to digital media, but much harder to implement it. As media organizations, we have a deeply embedded habit of seeing media from producers' point of view and automatically carry that habit from the traditional to digital media world. That's why it's so important to seek out the viewpoints of outsiders like Ramsey, and better yet, our audience.

#2: Membership has its meaning

"The membership bar has moved up. It’s not enough to let people give you money and promote you. Now you have to invite them to have a real and meaningful role in what you do, even a sense – if not a stake – of ownership and, consequently, control. ... News organizations, please think about membership. But don’t think if it as merely a revenue opportunity. That is doomed."

A journalism professor at the City University of New York, Jeff Jarvis is another media critic I respect and follow. Public broadcasting has been using the membership business model for many years. Donating to and becoming a member of a public broadcasting station have many benefits, some extrinsic and some intrinsic. Extrinsic benefits tend to be monetary (pledge gifts) or utilitarian (convenience of downloading). Intrinsic benefits tend to be psychological (good feeling of doing something right, sense of belonging). In terms of long-term effectiveness, intrinsic values are far more powerful than extrinsic values to motivate action. A community formed around ideas rather than business transactions is stronger and lasts longer. In the digital age when communities have become critical to the success of any product including quality journalism, public broadcasters need to focus more on offering extrinsic values, as Jarvis suggested, in their membership drives.

Delicious Today: media habits, audience

2009-09-04T11:22:00.011-05:00

#1: Friends, not editors, shape internet habits

"Just a year ago, the customer service executive for DirecTV in Los Angeles began his day by looking at the home page of the Yahoo website, surfing links to the big news stories selected by the site’s editors. But today Mr Miller begins his day on Twitter and Facebook – primarily social networking sites – where he reads stories and watches videos suggested by his friends and connections. Mr Miller’s changing habits are representative of a broad shift occurring among internet users. "

This media habit change happens to me as well. A quarter of my media diet comes from Twitter nowadays. As the web producer for the Here on Earth show at Wisconsin Public Radio, I also noticed that more and more people send us questions and comments during the show not by calling but by responding to our Twitter messages. As the audience pick up the habit of using their social networks to filter news and interact with media organizations, public broadcasters need to be more active in social media sites and worry less about attracting audience to a station website. The important thing is to meet the crowd, not where the meeting takes place.

Delicious Today: audience, video

2009-09-02T11:31:00.007-05:00

#1: Three Screen Report: Media Consumption and Multi-tasking Continue to Increase Across TV, Internet, and Mobile

"The number of people watching mobile video increased 70% from last year and people who watch video online increased their viewing by 46%. ... Although we have seen the computer and mobile phone screens taking on a significant role, their emergence has not been at the cost of TV viewership."

With video becoming more available and popular with audience, public broadcasters need to think seriously if it's time to start merging the web operation (if not organizational operation) of their radio and TV services. That way, they can not only provide better and richer multimedia services but also cut down operation and promotion cost. To most audience, public radio and TV are "the same." When I tell people I work for a public radio station, they often talk back to me about some public television shows they love. Some stations such as KQED in California have already merged their radio and TV online service into one integrated web site. That makes a lot of sense for the audience.

#2: Pew Report: The Internet and Civic Engagement

"Political and civic involvement have long been dominated by those with high levels of income and education, leading some advocates to hope that internet-based engagement might alter this pattern. However, a new report by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows that the internet is not changing the fundamental socio-economic character of civic engagement in America. ... Still, there are hints that the new forms of civic engagement anchored in blogs and social networking sites could alter long-standing patterns."

Delicious Today: digital storytelling, emotional geography

2009-08-28T10:23:00.018-05:00

Today is the last day of my summer internship at CPB. I have had a wonderful and productive time here. I'll keep posting "Delicious Today" on a weekly basis. Thanks for reading and sharing.

#1: Jim Gaines: Magazines Need to Embrace Multimedia Storytelling in Digital Age
#2: FLYP: multimedia magazine

"Gaines has had a long career in magazine journalism. ... Gaines came back to long-form publishing with Flyp Media, an online publisher of magazine-style content that combines video, audio, Flash animations and interactive features. Flyp was created as a proof of concept, financed by Mexican media mogul Alfonso Romo, and is only now starting to look for advertising and business partners."

I tried a few stories on the FLYP website and think it's one of the best digital storyteller I've ever seen. The design is sleek and clean. The delivery technology is easy to use and intuitive. It's really like reading a print magazine. You even get that "whoosh" sound when you flip (click) from page to page. But best of all, the multimedia components -- audio, video, animation -- are used judiciously thus feel natural as part of the storytelling. This is a rare case of happy marriage between content and technology: they seem to have surpassed the stormy early years of marriage and evolved into a comfortable partnership. Public broadcasters have a lot to learn from FLYP's experiment.

#3: Emotional Geography explained by Daniel X. O'Neil of EveryBlock
#4: Emotional Geography: list of resources

"Emotional Geography is a concept I’ve had for a web-based application that allows people to create customized maps with highlighted points of personal interest."

This is an intriguing idea for public broadcasters to rethink what "local" means and how to serve different "local audiences." When technology has broken down the barriers of space in communication, local stations need to get out of the habits of thinking local only as a physical location, and thinking audience only as residents living in that location. We all have multiple "local" communities: our neighborhood, our friends scattered around the country and the world, our work connections who reside in one industry but many geographical locations, etc. So the concept of emotional geography makes a lot of sense and should be helpful in stimulating new programming and growth strategies for stations. Take the Washington Post for example, it "has begun to embrace the idea of defining itself not as the newspaper of Washington, the physical entity, but as Washington, the idea."

Delicious Today: social media, $$

2009-08-27T16:24:00.013-05:00

#1: Twitter Yields Uneven ROI for News Organizations Using Automation, Curation, Interaction

"Journalists can find success on Twitter by crowdsourcing story ideas and stories, connecting with sources, doing research and more. ... Many people have decried news organizations' use of automated RSS feeds into Twitter. ... They are anything but social and are a poor-man's version of an RSS feed. ... Colonel Tribune, the Chicago Tribune character run by staffers, was one of the first to show news organizations the value of curation. ... The Colonel curates interesting content focused on the Chicago area, while also mixing in a healthy amount of interaction with users. The Colonel has paid off for the Tribune, despite the work it requires, because the Colonel has a lot of followers and sends a lot of traffic to chicagotribune.com. ... The big downside of curation is the time it takes."

The hallmark of social media is to have social relationships above and beyond business transactions with its users. But building a relationship takes time and care. Thus it's a constant challenge for media organizations to balance the efficiency of computer automation and "humanness" of staff engagement.

#2: New Models, New Challenges

"One of the questions we at the Rocky Mountain Independent hear a lot is, 'Did you guys think about operating as a nonprofit?' ... The answer is, yes, we did consider going nonprofit but decided it wouldn’t be sustainable for us in the long term. ... We wanted to be as independent as possible, and that’s why we developed a three-pronged revenue model: advertising, memberships and consulting work."

Revenue from consulting work for a media organization? Yes, that's one form of the subsidy business model I covered in my presentation to CPB Radio staff today. Journalism today has to be creative in finding ways to support itself.

#3: The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine

"What consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. ... And businesses need to get used to it, because the Good Enough revolution has only just begun."

The article makes a convincing case that for many products and services, consumers are willing to sacrifice quality. But is it also the case for journalism? Personally I can tolerate poor delivery such as scratchy sound and blurry video, but "good enough" content is not good enough for me. I want the best content possible. It's like going to a restaurant. I can tolerate paper plates and plastic forks, but if the food tastes bland, I'm done with the restaurant and will never go back.

Delicious Today: business models

2009-08-26T13:55:00.017-05:00

#1: Newspapers find a new way to monetize their journalists

"It’s the first time that Times columnists have participated in the newspaper’s three-year-old Knowledge Network, an adult-education program operated in partnership with local universities. ... They’re offering weeklong, largely online courses for Times readers who pay between $125 and $185."

#2: New York Times to decide how to charge for its website by August

NYT "is deciding between two charging systems – a 'metered' and a 'membership' model. ... The metered model, as the Financial Times uses, gives access without a charge for a certain number of page views. The so-called 'membership model' includes a collection of different privileges and services not available to the non-paying reader."

#3: The New York Times Describes Online 'Membership' Plans

"The Times was gauging interest in two premium packages that it calls NYT Gold and NYT Silver. ... The packages carry an annual cost of $150 and $50, respectively, and emphasize behind-the-scenes benefits like newsroom tours, exclusive videos of reporters. ... In this, the new packages repeat the core mistake of the Times' last, abortive effort at premium online content, the TimesSelect opinion section: Assuming people are fascinated with the Times as a brand, and with the deep thinking of its insiders. Really, most Web readers just like the news."

So the New York Times is debating whether to adopt the metered model or membership model. Actually they can do both, each one targeting a different reader group. It's interesting to read their proposed membership benefits. Differing only in degrees but not types, both packages offer a mixture of economic benefits and relationship benefits, which may not be the smartest way to attract members. Social psychologists have found that people interact with another party either because the other party can offer them something, or because the other party is part of their social relationship, part of who they are. The economic benefits in the packages (discounts, convenience) will appeal to readers who see NYT no more than a news-seller, their interaction with NYT no more than a business transaction. They won't be interested in those relationship benefits in the packages (newsroom tour, talking to reporters). But readers who view NYT as a trusted friend will. So if I were to design the membership, I would offer two different types of packages: Gold targets transaction-focused readers, and Diamond relationship-focused readers.

NYT Gold ($365 annual fee):

Free subscription to (A) Kindle version of all newspapers under NYT (NYT, Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune). The regular price for the three Kindle papers is $407.64 per year; or (B) daily delivery of NYT print paper + Kindle version of Boston Globe and IHT. The regular price of NYT home delivery is $384.8 per year. The regular price of the two Kindle papers is $239.76.
TimesMachine: free access to all NYT archive (already in NYT proposal)
TimesWire: real-time news alerts (already in NYT proposal)

NYT Diamond ($365 annual fee)

Free subscription to (A) Kindle version of NYT + a gift subscription to a friend or family. The regular price is $167.88 x 2 = $335.76 per year; or (B) daily delivery of NYT print paper. The regular price of NYT home delivery is $384.8 per year.
$100 credit that can be used for NYT store merchandise, TimesEvents tickets, TimesTalk tickets
TimesInsider: free newsroom tour, etc

#4: Open for Business: If you want readers to buy news, what exactly will you sell? The case for a free/paid hybrid

"At its base are the many visitors to CQPolitics who pay nothing but who do deliver eyeballs. At the top are those so ravenous for particular slices of news they can use that they will pay $10,000 or more a year for access. In other words, CQ sells various products for various media to audiences who differ not by geography or income but by need. It was doing so well before analysts like Wang and Mignon began preaching the virtues of the “hybrid” model to their sometimes-reluctant clients."

"General news has long been predicated on the idea that people’s primary interest in news was defined by where they lived. But that was never completely so. ... But now, The Washington Post, for one, has begun to embrace the idea of defining itself not as the newspaper of Washington, the physical entity, but as Washington, the idea—just as The Wall Street Journal ... is not about Wall Street, a district in lower Manhattan. ... Once a news organization sees itself as something more than in service of a place, it puts itself in a position to tap into one of the emotional imperatives that sustain the niche sites. ... Journalism’s crisis offers an opportunity to transform the everyday work of journalism from a reactive and money-losing proposition into a more selective enterprise of reporting things that no one else knows."

This is a long but thoughtful article. The key is to find a sustainable niche area that readers are willing to pay for.

Delicious Today: crowdsourcing, data mining, Craigslist

2009-08-25T16:49:00.012-05:00

#1: MPs expenses: Guardian's crowdsourcing experiment

"We have 458,832 pages of documents. 23,654 of you have reviewed 206,594 of them. Only 252,238 to go..."

This is a great example of crowdsourcing in journalism. Guardian posted online half a million MPs' receipts and claim forms and ask readers to review and report fishy ones for investigation. As you can see by the numbers, the public has responded and the discoveries are fascinating to read unless you are an MP. This kind of journalism deserves to be called "journalism by the people and for the people."

[Aug 26 update] I just heard this morning on NPR that the New York Times and Washington Post are also using crowdsourcing and asking readers to help dig through hundreds of pages of CIA inspector general's reports on the agency's interrogation program that the Department of Justice released Monday this week.

#2: Interactive-MP-Media-Appearance-Timeline: mashup from BBC and Guardian's websites
#3: Mashup screencasts
"By crawling this data using the MP's name as the search key we were able to extract information about the TV and radio programmes in which a given MP had appeared. ... This project shows how powerful the linked-data concept is when used in conjunction with other data that has been exposed in a similar way. As more media organisations expose their domains in this manner, more interesting and wide-reaching visualisations and web-applications can be built."
This is another good example of data mining journalism.
Interesting features can emerge from digging into a media organization's own archive and, better yet, in linking into other media organizations' data. Public broadcasting has vast amount of archive which can be potential gold mine for data mining journalism. But to turn it into gold, we have to overcome several big obstacles.

Digitization. Most of the archive is still on tape or other "ancient" formats. Digitizing them will be a costly and time-consuming task. But the work has begun under the American Archive Project.
Metadata standardization. For effective data mining journalism, digital content scattered in hundreds of stations has to be stored and catalogued using the same metadata scheme so that computers can quickly search, assemble and present it in a meaningful way.
Technical infrasture and training. When the gold mine is ready, we still need machinaries and skilled workers to dig it. Ideally the technology will be designed to be so easy to use that even journalists and the public can handle it without much training.

#4: Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess

"With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone—nearly a fifth of the nation's adult population—it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down."
"Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon .com. eBay has more than 16,000 employees. Amazon has more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30."
"Jim Buckmaster is tall and thin, Newmark is short and round, and when they stand together they look like a binary number."
"Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at craigslist. There is no business development, no human resources, no sales. As a result, there are no meetings."

It's a very charming and intriguing profile of the left (Jim Buckmaster, CEO) and right (Craig Newmark, founder) halves of the brain of Craigslist. NewMark calls himself "the Forrest Gump of the Internet" and Jim Buckmaster writes haiku to fight spammers. They are so unlike business executives yet very successful in what they do. One key principle they stubbonly adhere to is listening to the users, even when what they hear goes against the norm and trend of the world. They never go against what their users tell them.

Delicious Today: broadband, wisdom journalism, slow communication

2009-08-24T16:55:00.017-05:00

#1: Broadband Catching Up in Rural Areas

"Broadband has experienced the most significant gains in rural areas during the past two years." However, "Broadband penetration of 75% in rural markets remains well below the national average of 89%."

It has been a challenge for public broadcasters to serve rural areas. The increasing adoption of broadband means that people in those area now can access public broadcast online. That's really good news.

#2: Journalism Beyond News: A Call for a Wiser Journalism

"Mere stenographic recording of great, public events has lost much of its value. ... Journalists need to sell something else. The answer, this paper argues, is 'wisdom journalism': an amalgam of the more rarified forms of reporting — exclusive, investigative — with more informed, more interpretive, more explanatory, even more impressionistic or opinionated takes on current events."

This is a thoughtful essay with a historical perspective on the evolution of journalism. The value of traditional journalism is to tell readers what's happening just now, with journalists bearing the role of a witness. In the digital age when a witness is easy to find and quick to report, the value of journalism is shifting to explaining to readers all the prequels that have led to what's happening now. Journalists now need to bear the role of a historian. Reporting the appearance of an ice burg tip is no longer enough to get readers to pay. You need to show them the whole ice burg.

#3: Not So Fast: Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto for slow communication

"It is time to launch a manifesto for a slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them. ... If the technology is to be used for the betterment of human life, we must reassert that the Internet and its virtual information space is not a world unto itself but a supplement to our existing world."

This article appeals to the philosopher in me. Chinese art always stresses the importance of empty space in a painting. Buddhist chanting always stresses the importance of silence, the sound that makes all other sounds in the universe possible. Information overload is a huge problem in the digital age. It takes a conscious effort to keep life balanced and playful.

Delicious Today: data mining journalism, $$

2009-08-21T11:26:00.017-05:00

I commented briefly on data mining journalism in Monday's post which has attracted some interest. Today, this topic for some reason pops up again and again in my usual reading of RSS feeds and tweets. Maybe I've stumbled upon something big.

#1: Free the Facts: The Guardian's editor-in-chief on why open data matters
#2: Guardian Data Store: use our content to improve your site
#3: Guardian Data Blog

"Comment, as Guardian founding editor CP Scott said, is free. But the second part of his maxim holds equally true for the Guardian today: facts are sacred. ... The web has given us easy access to billions of statistics on every matter. And with it are tools to visualise that information, mashing it up with different datasets to tell stories that could never have been told before. ... That is where the Data Store and the Datablog come in. Every day we will publish the raw statistics behind the news and make it easy to export in any form you like. It is about freedom of information. But it is not a one-way process – we want you to tell us what you have done with the data and what we should do with it. The facts are sacred — and they belong to all of us."

#4: The Future Of Work: It’s Data, Baby (NYT)

"The ability to extract stories from a world of increasing and abundant data will be increasingly critical to many industries. Indeed, the opening of U.S. federal government data at data.gov (and the appointment of Sir Tim Berners-Lee to similarly open the UK’s data archives) implies a new societal and cultural importance for data wranglers."

#5: Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen (TED conference video)

"You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called 'developing world.'"

Mark Twain once said that "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." Yes, we can't always trust the "statistics" we read in news report because oftentimes it's interpretation rather than data which can involve human errors or, worse, deliberate manipulation. But with data storage price falling down almost to the floor and data analysis technology becoming easier to access and use, we can put more raw data in journalists' and the public's hands and give "transparency" a lot more meaning.

I'm very impressed by Guardian's vision in this direction and the huge volume of work they have already put in. Data mining journalism requires at least three steps:

Collecting data from government and enterprise database (e.g. data.gov, UN databases), a media organization's own archive (e.g. American Archive project), user contributed data, etc.
Analyze data focusing on finding interesting relationships, i.e. data as links instead of points
Tell story from data

A good example of data mining journalism in U.S. is Patchwork Nation, a joint effort to tell economic stories through data by NewsHour of PBS and Christian Science Monitor, two fine public media organizations. Another example is EveryBlock as I wrote about in Monday's post.

It's expensive to start data mining journalism because it takes a lot of time and money to write computer code from scratch to retrieve and present data. But the cost of keep doing it becomes less and less because of code reuse and scale of economy. For this reason, data mining journalism can be a sustainable business model that can draw revenue from two sources: (1) charging readers and/or other media companies for data content which is unique and hard to duplicate; and (2) selling data-mining technology and/or access to other media companies.

Delicious Today: $$ business models

2009-08-20T21:19:00.012-05:00

#1: MSNBC.com to Monetize its Videos Throughout the Web

"Seeking to monetize this "off-the-site" consumption of video, the company will soon insert advertising into its embeddable player. ... in doing so, we have a motivation to, and an incentive to, distribute our content broadly and not be in an old model where everyone has to come to our website to view the video."

This is an example of "push" strategy that breaks away from the old "pull" or "build a portal" strategy. Instead of spending a lot of resources on pulling users to a media organization's own site (portal), the organization may achieve better return on investment by breaking total content into reasonable smaller pieces, branding them, and pushing them into places where their target audience already gathers. Public broadcasters can definitely use this strategy.

#2: How To Save Newspapers

"Newspapers could find a lifeline to solvency and a return to social purpose in a new kind of business structure called an L3C, or low-profit limited liability company." L3C is 'a structure that encourages foundation investment while allowing a profit. ... The successful creation of newspaper L3Cs is largely contingent on passage of the Federal law, which would effectively expand charitable purposes to include newspapers. ... The L3C is different from a typical nonprofit because it can earn a return, but the social purpose must trump the financial purpose."

This is my first encounter with L3C. I find it intriguing and think that it could well be one model for sustainable journalism.

#3: Journalism Online Signs First Non-Profit Org

"Journalism Online, the company founded to help publishers monetize content, is going after non-profit news producers. ... Journalism Online recently announced that more than 170 dailies have signed on as 'affiliate partners.' They partners were not revealed in the press release though the Los Angeles Times found that McClatchy, Tribune and Dow Jones did not sign with Journalism Online. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did, reported Nieman Journalism Lab."

One way to make a practice or technology industry standard is to have most and key players accept it. JO seems to be doing that by courting both commercial and non-profit media organizations to use its e-business engine. That engine may not the best solution for public broadcasters, therefore there is an urgency for public broadcasters to come up with their own answer about a sustainable business model.

Delicious Today: $$, local, BBC

2009-08-19T17:10:00.013-05:00

#1: "Silly Season" Summer Roundup: Squeezing the Value From Online Content

"I divide the numerous 'value from content' plans into four general categories: (a) the paywall, (b) tracking users for ads (c) tracking content for extraction (d) reinstate online scarcity via legal doctrine."

This is a well-written but incomplete overview of business models in trial for digital media. It (especially point a and b) gives a nice and brief summary and analysis of the action on commercial side of action. On the non-profit side, to my observation, people are also trying the following models:

Membership: users purchase membership for experience or benefits. E.g. Folk Alley, Guardian.
Commission: users commission the coverage of a story by paying part of its cost. E.g. Spot.us, PublicPress
Foundation: operation is fully supported by a foundation. E.g. Kaiser Health News
Subsidy: non-profit part of the operation is supported by its commercial part. E.g. BBC Worldwide, the main commercial arm of BBC, generates revenue and re-invest part of it in BBC's public service programming.

#2: Beyond advertising: Choosing a strategic path to the digital consumer, by IBM
This 2008 online survey studied the shifting demands of digital consumers in six countries, and offered strategy suggestions to content owners, media distributors, and agencies. Three categories of consumers have emerged from the study:

Massive passives: slow adopters
Gadgetiers: early adopters, cash rich, time poor
Kool kids: youth, quick adopters, cash poor, time rich

Public broadcasters are content owner first, media distributors second. We often use audience demographics and VALS (Values And LifeStyles) to guide our business strategy. Now we have one more tool to help us.

#3: Improvements to BBC Local Radio online
#4: BBC iPlayer Local Radio Integration

"You will see we are no longer purely in the land of software. We are now into setting up new processes, re-engineering the business chain and finding people to use these tools to put together a consolidated data view of a Local Radio schedule which could drive interactive services."

This is a detailed account how BBC finally integrated all 40 local stations' audio and schedule content into iPlayer, BBC's sleek multimedia player. There are plenty of not only technical but also organizational and business challenges. BBC's experience provides valuable insights and lessons to American public broadcasters as we, as individual stations and as one collective system, are searching for more effective ways to deliver content and serve the audience.

Delicious Today: tools, free and easy tools

2009-08-18T14:38:00.043-05:00

There are tons of free and good tools online to help public broadcasters (and others) accomplish essential online media tasks such as creating and posting image, audio and video files, having audience share content with one another, and so on. Below are some of the free and easy tools that I have accumulated so far. Please add yours to the list and together we can build an impressive online tool kit for public media.

#0: CMS (Content Management System)

#1: Screen capture as image, video or narrated slide show
These tools record your action on computer screen (whole or part of the screen) and narration. So they're perfect for creating demo video, narrated slide shows, and illustrated stories.

Screenr: can send screen capture video to mobile, too
ScreenToaster: can add subtitle and capture webcam images
Jing: can't record webcam

#2: Sharing and collaboration

Delicious: share bookmarks with your other computers or other people
AddThis: generates buttons or icons that allow users to print, email, and share content via over 50 social network destinations. I use it on this blog (see icons at the bottom of this post).
Publish 2: used by New York Times and many other media organizations, the tool facilitates collaboration among journalists. A great example of its use in the snow flooding coverage in Washington state.
Top 10 Apps for Scheduling a Meeting Online
Doodle: easy scheduling
Google Groups: share documents, have discussions among group members

#3: Image, audio and video editor

Paint.net: image editor for Windows only
Free Alternatives to Photoshop With All the Bells, Whistles, Filters, & Layers: a list of free photo editors with comparison scores against PhotoShop
Kaltura open source video: a video editing tool. I haven't tested it yet since I don't work with video much.
Animata: animation editor
Dipity: tool to create timeline
Google Maps: create your own
FusinCharts: use Flash to animate charts and graphs
Switch: audio converter Software

#4: Web traffic measurement

Google Analytics: can measure web visits by iPhone as well.
CrazyEgg: visualize visitor data
Twitoaster: Twitter ranking and stats

#5: Website design

WordPress: can create not only blogs easily, but also non-blog web pages. Web traffic stats is built in. I would have used it for this blog if I had discovered earlier because it offers more flexibility and usability.
Jimdo: also offers lots of widgets that can be embedded in a web page
The Codeless Website: Four Awesome Tools for Creating Cool, No-Tech Sites

#6: Data mining and visualization

Processing: open source programming language to program images, animation, and interactions
Flare: data visualization for the Web
Google visualization API gallery
Dabble: online database (free version for up to 15 users and 100k entries)
Zoho Creator: online database (free version for 2 users, 3 apps and 1000 records)
Tweet Cloud: cloud of words that your tweets mostly contain

#7: Other useful functions

TagCrowd: creates your own tag cloud from any text
Wordle: generates word cloud like an art
Qualtrics: online survey software
CutePDF: creates PDF from any file that you can print
Widgetbox: self-service web widget platform
Monitter: Twitter conversation monitor

Delicious Today: local, social news, $$

2009-08-17T17:05:00.018-05:00

#1: Msnbc.com acquires local news Web site: Chicago-based EveryBlock will continue as independent brand
EveryBlock "allows users to type in their address, neighborhood name or ZIP code to view nearby news coverage, blog entries, civic data, photos and dozens of other types of information — all updated throughout the day."

Even though it covers only 15 big cities, EveryBlock is a rare example of data-mining journalism that digs deep into government and public databases (using technology and people) to create useful and meaningful local content. It has invented a new form of journalism practice that's native digital journalism. The significance could be like that of camera movement for movies. Early movies often repackage theater performance for screens using a fixed movie camera. Then people discovered the wonder of moving cameras, and a new form of visual storytelling was born. Most of the online journalism today is still in the repackage phase. EveryBlock's data-mining journalism is an exciting step into the next phase. Now empowered by MSNBC's vast resources and market space, EveryBlock can really go far in its exploration of native digital journalism.

Public broadcasters need to be aware of, if not engage in, the latest development in journalism practices such as data-mining journalism. Being an early adopter is costly, but it's equally costly if we are not a close follower.

#2: Facebook, Huffington Post Launch Social News Service
"The Huffington Post and Facebook have teamed up to create HuffPost Social News, a service that lets HuffPost users easily connect with friends on Facebook around the news and opinion site."

Social news could be another form of native digital journalism. I tried HuffPost's service but was confused by the site. I don't know exactly what the attraction is and how to navigate it. Let's wait and see how many people will sign up and how they will use it.

#3: The CUNY Nonprofit Model
Should nonprofit news organizations accept advertising? "The City University of New York's New Business Models for News Project is rendering its own verdict: Nonprofits can't afford not to."

Public broadcasters can't run ads on air but can online. This research adds one more reason why we should be more active in finding an effective way of doing it online.

#4: A Social-Network Solution: How investigative reporting got back on its feet
"Most investigative reporting falls into specialized subjects or themes—corruption, human rights, energy and the environment, international security, health and safety, etc. Each of those subject areas is of interest to vast, worldwide social networks of reasonably well-educated and well-informed people—cumulatively, tens of millions of people. ... Now these vast networks became both specialized markets for the work of wire’s international cadre of reporters—exponentially increasing wire’s Web traffic—and pathways to new information resources, crowd-sourced experts, and potential citizen muckrakers."

I agree with the author's vision, but the hard part is implementation. Public broadcasters have a vast internal network of journalists and producers. Right now, we don't have to tackle the extremely hard problem of how to use external social networks to aid reporting and distribution. Let's start with an easier and more rewarding one: how do we better utilize our internal network to improve our investigative reporting?

#5: The Role of Research in the NPR.org Redesign
"We feel it's important to share exactly how the perspectives and needs of our radio listeners and web visitors were incorporated into the new site design."

I'm so glad that NPR gave a detailed account of the process of the redesign. The result of a web design is easy to copy, but it may not be what you want if you have a different audience. The key is to understand and own the process. NPR does a great service to other member stations by disclosing the process of their redesign. That is the right way to create a learning organization. I wish more of this will happen in the future.

Delicious Today: audience loyalty, $$

2009-08-14T11:52:00.013-05:00

#1: Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous
Scientists find that our brains experience two kinds of pleasure: the pleasure of seeking (wanting, curiosity, interest), and the pleasure of liking (enjoyment). The two are complementary. "The former catalyzes us to action; the latter brings us to a satisfied pause."

I can't help thinking that this corresponds to the two kinds of content that public radio provides: talk and music: we're on the right track! Now I also have a better sense why some listeners were so upset and others thrilled when my station cut some classical music time for more Morning Edition. The research can further help us tailor on-air and online content to listeners' different needs.

Maybe we should follow the example of BBC and ABC (A for Australia) and set up a "channel" system online so that listeners in the mood for seeking won't step on the toes of listeners in the mood for liking. NPR's web redesign is a good start. It separates news and music programs into two separate tabs. But we can go one step further and organize/curate all member stations' content into an intuitive and informative channel system:

- Talk: news, science, arts and entertainment, lifestyle, etc.
- Music: classical, country, pop, etc.
- Kids
Content delivery should also match listener's brain mood: less interruption for music programs and more listener engagement for talk programs.

#2: Birmingham Post Reaps Benefits of Responding to User Comments
"By being responsive to comments and acknowledging a mistake, the Post benefited from extra page views, extra time spent on the site, extra registrations and extra comments. "

This is a good example of the value of audience engagement. People who feel their voices heard and valued are more likely to become loyal audience.

#3: No secret to readership: Give them something to talk about
"'Something to talk about' is a powerful motivator that can drive readership. Across all demographics, researchers found similar responses. ... Certainly big news events - just like the weather -- are easy fodder for conversation ... And nothing beats a great story to prompt conversation, even between strangers on a train."

No technology shall diminish the importance of being a good storyteller. Public broadcasting system has many talented storytellers whose craft takes long time to hone and can't be copied easily. They are our competitive advantage and critical to the future of public media: we need them to create quality content, to explore new possibilities, and to mentor the next generation of storytellers.

#4: Building Reader Loyalty
This is a presentation given at Minnesota Newspaper Association convention in January, 2009. It identified four communication needs of audience (slides 10-11): connectivity, information, entertainment, and shopping and consuming.

The nice thing about the presentation is its huge collection of real world examples. The hits and misses of other media organizations should stimulate some ideas for public broadcasters.

#5: My Advice to Fox & MySpace on Selling Content – Yes You Can
Mark Cuban, an Internet billionaire entrepreneur, gave Rupert some interesting advice on how he can sell content online. It's a fun read. I'm most impressed by Cuban's idea of selling bundled products valuable to a specific audience group. For example, he proposed a "newsjunkies subscription" that includes access to multiple news websites owned by Rupert, 2 books from Harpers Collins collection, paper or e-copy of a news magazine, and a discount for DVDs at the Fox Store.

Public broadcasters can't sell content. We have to find other ways to raise money. My take-away from Cuban's article is that we need more entrepreneurial spirit and practice in our search for a sustainable business model in the digital age. Maybe we can allocate a small "venture capital" fund to support and take a chance on a few unconventional projects.

Delicious Today: audience, $$, Australia

2009-08-13T15:38:00.014-05:00

#1: Study: Teens like Headlines and Photos -- But Not 'Dumbed Down' News
#2: What It Takes to be a Web Favorite
Both studies are posted on the Media Management Center at Northwestern University. The first one finds that "teenagers don't like their news watered-down, but rather encourages online news providers to 'be bolder' with their Web sites," and that "teen responses were very similar to those of adults who are light readers." The second one notes that "users form particularly strong habits when it comes to news, ... news Web sites must strive to be on a user's short list of three to five favorite sites or be lost among hundreds of largely overlooked alternatives."

Taken together, these two studies speak the importance for a public broadcasting web site to not only catch audience's attention on their first encounter with the web site, but also becoming their habitual news destination. This requires consistent interesting web content that respects audience's intelligence. The center has a long list of research reports that look useful for public broadcasters.

#3: More Than 170 Dailies Sign On with Journalism Online
"Journalism Online, the company that plans to help publishers monetize content, has signed 176 dailies as affiliate partners. In total, more than 500 newspapers, magazines and other sites have agreed to join Journalism Online representing more than 90 million monthly unique users. Publishing affiliates will be able to select their own pay models" including micro-payment, single account to multiple publications, bundle of print, online and e-reader subscriptions, etc.

This is a substantial development in the movement of paid content. I mentioned Journalism Online in Monday's post. It's impressive that so many publications have jumped on board, but we don't know if they're influential ones since JO has declined to name them. Of course the more important indicator the industry is watching is whether readers will sign up and for what kind of package.

#4: Can Anyone Actually Tap the $100 Billion Potential of Hyperlocal News?
The New York Times and AOL are experimenting in Maplewood, New Jersey. Google's business model, "'a billion dollars, one nickel at a time,' is a perfect description of how media companies hope to take tiny sources of local revenue and roll them up into big money. Hyperlocal sites ... can deliver precision-targeted advertising to local and global businesses. As the once-exponential growth rate for most Internet advertising in the United States grinds to a halt, the online local-advertising market is projected to grow 5.4% in 2009 to $13.3 billion."

With hundreds of member stations across the country operating and deeply involved in their local communities, public broadcasters have a structural, knowledge, and trust advantage over other media organizations in tapping into the online local advertising market. But we should not feel too comfortable or confident because the competitors are coming with deep pockets and technology know-how. We need a strategy and action, now.

#5: ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) iView
This is ABC's equivalent online TV viewer to BBC's iPlayer. It's very sleek. The program offering is categorized into 9 channels by topics and viewer age groups. But I can't get any content because its copyright allows access to Australian IP addresses only.

PBS has a nice video portal where content is organized by programs, topics, and collections. But compared to ABC and BBC, we don't have a system-wide portal where people can do one-stop shopping and find all programs from all stations, radio or television, local or national. Right now it's really hard to find and sample local stations' programs online unless I manually go through individual station sites or iTunes store. Who has that time? I really wish there was a well-organized public broadcasting online portal. It will (1) provide convenience for audience; (2) help promote programs and grow audience across stations and platforms; (3) encourage internal competition and learning thus more innovation and higher quality content; (4) build stronger collective public media brand name; and (5) offer another efficient fund raising vehicle.

Delicious Today: mobile, Kindle, radio, $$

2009-08-12T15:51:00.013-05:00

#1: Mobile Internet Use Shrinks Digital Divide
“The report found that nearly half of all African-Americans and English-speaking Hispanics (the study did not include a Spanish-language option) were using mobile phones or other hand-held devices to surf the Web and send e-mail messages. By comparison, just 28 percent of white Americans reported ever going online using a mobile device. Not only are African-Americans the most active users of mobile Internet, they are also the fastest growing group to adopt the technology.”

This is based on Pew data. Since the majority of the public broadcasting audience is white, this trend presents an opportunity for public media to reach minority groups by putting on mobile more content that’s interesting and meaningful for the groups.

#2: My Love/Hate Relationship With My Kindle
“It's a miracle you can walk about with a full library contained in a single, slender device. … But I can see that as an invention, the Kindle's shelf-life is limited. I can't imagine my children wanting one--and that's not because they don't read or dislike books. They have grown up in the online world, which means they are completely comfortable getting most of their information in an online format.”

With its main goal to replace books, Kindle does allow MP3 to play as an experimental feature. I’m not suggesting public broadcasters to spend a lot of effort on pushing content to Kindle. What I take away from the article is that technology platform is audience specific. There’s no one technology platform that can satisfy all kinds of needs and desires of the audience. When deciding on what technology to use to deliver content, instead of going all out to all platforms, public broadcasters should take an audience-centered approach and focus on delivery platforms that the content’s target audience is most likely to use. Less is more here.

#3: Big Radio Reports Big Declines
"A slew of radio broadcasters reported their second-quarter results this week, with little cause for celebration. Led by Clear Channel Communications, the radio groups all posted double-digit declines."

This means that radio listeners are moving elsewhere and public broadcasters need to not only follow them, but also figure out where they're going, why there're going there, and then adjust our content and delivery strategies to meet them and be their listening destination.

#4: How We Got Here and How We Get Out of Here
Kenneth Lerer, co-founder of the Huffington Post, delivered this annual Hearst New Media Lecture at the Journalism school of Columbia University in April. It's about the newspaper industry but a lot of his insights apply to public broadcasting as well. What I like most about his speech is his historical and system-wide perspective about the causes of newspaper's trouble today. The fixes he suggested are still abstract and simplistic. That's very understandable since the lack of obvious and easy fix is exactly what's crippling the newspaper industry.

"It was obvious that the old assumptions wouldn't hold for much longer. Part of the problem was that these assumptions were embedded into huge corporate structures that weren't built for sharp turns."
"It's time the industry got comfortable with the idea that media today is a networked/ecosystem. It's all about originating, aggregating, curating, linking, and spurring conversations. Why? Because users want it this way."
"Ubiquity is the new exclusivity. The way for newspapers to be somewhere is to be everywhere."

If you prefer listening to him to reading the transcript, here's the video.

Delicious Today: business models for online journalism

2009-08-11T16:17:00.008-05:00

#1: Pitfalls of the pay wall
A very thoughtful essay. The author asks local publisher or editor to ask five questions before charging for content:

Will the content behind the pay wall be unique and essential to users?
What about the competition?
Is it even possible to put a lid on your content?
How many users are you likely to lose?
What is your plan for finding out what people in your community will pay for and providing it to them?

#2: Goodbye Guardian. Hello the Guardian Experience
"The Guardian was a life-style, a niche, an affinity group. Whatever the point of entry, somewhere behind a paywall was a beckoning club, privileged access not just to news and comment but to a galaxy of media brands, events, concerts, courses, seminars, conferences, tours and related discounts and dating agencies. To pay was not to read, it was to join."

Guardian has decided not to use the paid content model but is proposing a members' club one. I like the idea a lot: not to sell content, but to sell an experience. Public broadcasting audience always feel a sense of community with their stations and fellow listeners/viewers. During pledge drives, events that give audience more face time with program hosts always do well in raising funds. We could do more of those events. But one drawback is those events take a lots of effort to organize. Are there any easy face-time events we can do or sponsor?

#3: Growthspur Q&A: Supporting local media through networks
Founded by several high-profile media executives, Growthspur is a new company that aims to find and sell business strategies to local news and information web sites. "While ad-based revenue is the most obvious, Growthspur will also investigate e-commerce, couponing, mobile applications and other possible streams of revenue for its partner sites." The company site says that "there’s no upfront cost to local sites for a GrowthSpur partnership. Our revenue model is a service fee on the advertising revenue we help you with."

This article makes me wonder why can't public broadcasting industry have our own Growthspur? While there are some organizations doing research and disseminate knowledge for the industry, we don't have a strong body/place to act as a clearing house for best practices and implement support. There is too much duplication of digital media start-up effort in stations. There is too little learning or "borrowing" from front-runners such as NPR who can't afford or feel comfortable to be the trainer for the whole system. Is it possible to form a public media "growthspur" to provide information, implementation and training services to stations and other non-profit organizations? It can be funded by CPB, by a small membership fee from stations, or by charging for service. In a way, Public Interactive is already providing some of those services, although most of its services are on the technical side and not enough on the business side.

What's your take on this?

Delicious Today: online video, content, Twitter, $$

2009-08-10T17:27:00.007-05:00

#1: UK: Faster broadband won't make us watch more TV online, viewers tell survey
#2: U.S.: The Audience for Online Video-Sharing Sites Shoots Up
This survey in UK found that "53% of people would not watch more online TV or video clips even with a faster, more reliable broadband connection. Some 29% of the 2,123 viewers surveyed felt that there was "little importance" in being able to watch TV using an online service." The trend of online video watching in U.S. appears to be opposite. A 2009 survey by Pew found that online video "has started move into the spaces that are typically reserved for traditional television viewing."

In the competition for audience between online video and traditional television, online wins in terms of content choice but television scores higher in simplicity. Having to tolerate technical inconvenience to access video, online viewers are much more picky about content and have shorter attention span. For public broadcasters, this means that quality of content should be their concern number one. If a program has no compelling content, putting more episodes or distributing it to more places online will have much less return for their investment than having less but really good content that resonates with viewers.

#3: Traffic on the Nones
It's a video about Aha, an impressive iPhone app that provides traffic information. Users will never need radio again for intermittent traffic reports. Weather may be another category of content that listeners don't need radio for in the future. What should radio stations respond to it? They should really focus on offering things that nobody else can do better.

#4: Spot.Us, pioneer of crowdfunded journalism, preps for expansion
#5: How Steve Brill pitched newspaper executives on charging for online content — and why they’re buying it
These are two examples of latest search for a viable business model of online journalism. Spot.us asks readers to micro-fund journalism projects at $20 per reader per story. Brill's Journalism Online company is selling an e-commerce engine that "allows customers to have one easy-to-use account common to all the publishers' websites" by paying an annual, monthly, or per-article fees.

Public broadcasters can't really sell their content. But the ideas of crowd-funding and common e-commerce engine are worth thinking about. During public radio pledge drives, I often hear listeners a bit surprised and disappointed that they can't demand to which program their donation should go, because all pledges go to the overall fund of a station. Allowing listener to decide which program their donation (or part of it) should go to may give more incentive for donation and encourage more internal competition among programs thus higher quality content and more innovation. An e-commerce engine shared by stations can not only cut down infrastructure and fund-raising cost, but also allow system-wide innovation more easily.

Delicious Today: return on Monday Aug 10

2009-08-04T16:54:00.002-05:00

Delicious Today is part of my job as a research intern at CPB this summer. It's a daily posting of online readings that I find to be useful to people interested in digital media or public broadcasting. For the rest of this week I'll be in Boston to attend a journalism conference and visit several public broadcasting organizations. So the next Delicious Today will be on Monday Aug 10.

Delicious Today: mobile, audience, $$

2009-08-04T14:31:00.014-05:00

#1: Radio, E-Riches can be yours!
"It's a straight-forward primer for anyone confused about the muddle of digital options facing them nowadays."

The MP3 audio of the interview with its author, Scott Fox, is worth listening to. The most important take-away from the book is that marketers should not "waste energy trying to get customers to their own Web sites, but to get online and find customers where they are already hanging out" (Publishers Weekly). That makes me question the wisdom of focusing on attracting more users to public broadcasting stations' own websites. Are we still in the old mentality of thinking content and its delivery platform together? Content and delivery platform have decoupled in the digital age. Public broadcasters are content providers thus should attract users to their content, not necessarily their websites. Instead of having each station to spend enormous resources on building and promoting its web site, a more effective strategy may be to place the content where there is already an online crowd. It may be also time to build a public media cyber "mall" where each station has a content shop. The "mall" has several advantages:

Less expensive to build and promote. The average cost per station will be much less than the cost for a station to build and promote its own web site.
More cross promotion opportunities for stations. Broadcasters and/or listeners can play the role of curators and point audience members of one program to other programs they may also like.
More convenient and useful for the audience. They can do one-stop shopping for their media need and have more and better programming choices.
Encourage internal competition and collaboration. Stations will feel less isolated but a part of something bigger and greater. Competition and collaboration will lead to more innovation and higher quality programming.

#2: Breaking News Online: How One 19-Year Old Is Shaking Up Online Media
Michael van Poppel became famous after "came into possession of a full video of an Osama Bin Laden statement before any of the major news outlets had it, and sold it to Reuters." His Breaking News Online became a popular Twitter service and has just released an iPhone app. "The BNO app will cost $1.99 to download. Even crazier, BNO says it will charge an ongoing subscription fee of 99 cents per month for breaking news updates."

BNO is an aggregator and does little original reporting (even though it says it'll add more original reporting). So what's the significance of its app? First, it uses push notification technology that allows users to receive BNO news even when they are not using the app or their iPhones are off. This automatic alert feature is great convenience and attraction for news junkies. Second, BNO dares to charge money for aggregated news. It's controversial, but someone has to try it. If BNO's business model proves to be sustainable, it'll be a great example for other media organizations to follow.

#3: Consumers Spending More in Paid Media Than Ad Supported: VSS Study
"Consumers last year for the first time spent more time with media they paid for, like books or cable TV, than with primarily ad-supported media, like newspapers and magazines." According to John Suhler, Co-founder, President and General Partner of VSS, "this development is a culmination of two decades of this secular shift towards consumer-controlled media, and shows no signs of slowing."

"Consumer-controlled media." That's the key to understanding the digital age. Upset by the amount of ads in "free" content and pressured by the scarcity of their "free" time, many audience members have reached the stage where they're willing to pay for quality time provided by excellent media content. The continuation of the trend will make it easier for content providers including public broadcasters to charge for content. The key is to figure out what content an audience is WILLING to pay for.

#4: Microsoft Details How to Port IPhone Apps to Windows Mobile
"Microsoft has published a case study detailing how to port an iPhone application to its Windows Mobile platform as it prepares to launch an online store for mobile applications to compete with Apple."

For me this signals the trend that mobile applications eventually will become platform-free, much like what happened to software that has become operating system free (e.g. a document can be read in either PC or Mac). As a result, the mobile devices people use will have less and less limitation on what content they can access, and content providers will have less worry about delivery platforms, but should focus more on the quality of their content.

Delicious Today: local news, Indico, serendipity, $$

2009-08-03T14:41:00.012-05:00

#1: Now on YouTube, Local News
YouTube "has created a News Near You feature that senses a user’s location and serves up a list of relevant videos." YouTube sells it as a new source of revenue to TV stations. But stations see it as a potential competitor. "So for now, most of the YouTube videos near you come from nontraditional sources: radio stations, newspapers, colleges" and user generated material.

This is another sign that the competition to monetize local news is intensifying. With its hundreds of local member stations, public broadcasting system has an opportunity and obligation to be a big provider of local news. The key is to figure out a one-stop shop where the public can get their local news easily and quickly, whether the news is about their own community, their far-away loved ones' community, or other location of interests. Each of us has more than one local communities. Right now it's just too cumbersome to manually aggregate local news of those communities by going through each individual local station's web sites of different menus and designs.

#2: Indico News: 'Everywhere news is on the local level and people are the news'
This is a promising example of citizen journalism. "Three features -- setting assignments for another user; 'interview me', where the site will match up users' questions with an expert to answer them; and the ability to tip off contributors about local events they might want to cover -- set the site apart from other citizen journalism efforts. ... A payment system for contributors is also being developed, offering a percentage of the ad revenue generated by any content next to a user's byline."

The article doesn't give out the details/secrets of the site's business model. But interested public broadcasters may want to talk to the site for lessons or even collaboration.

#3: Serendipity, Lost in the Digital Deluge
"WE’VE gained so much in the digital age. We get more entertainment choices, and finding what we’re looking for is certainly fast. Best of all, much of it is free. But we’ve lost something as well: the fortunate discovery of something we never knew we wanted to find. In other words, the digital age is stamping out serendipity."

That's my feeling about the Internet as well: I miss the delight of discovering something when I'm not searching. This phenomenon is similar to what sociologists call "the strength of weak ties": our ingenious ideas or information scoops often come from not strong ties in our personal network such as family and friends, but weak ties such as acquaintance or co-workers who are more likely to have a different information network and perspective. That's why collaboration, with people very different from us, is so important. That's why collaboration across media platforms and organizations is so critical for public broadcasters to survive and thrive in the digital age.

#4: Social Cord: Charge for Content Via Twitter
"New service Social Cord has devised a way to charge your Twitter followers to access premium content": pay via text message rather than credit card.

I doubt that many people will pay to access premium content in Twitter. But the payment via text method is interesting and may be the direction of future. In Japan where mobile use is a decade ahead of U.S., people use mobile to pay for all kinds of thing -- gas, snack in vending machine, etc. This story makes me think that as more people use iPhone or other mobile devices to access public broadcasting content, it may be worthwhile to build a "donation" function in the mobile app. That's a much easier way than donating by phone or online. Entering credit card number online always makes me nervous.

Delicious Today: link journalism, audience, $$

2009-07-31T11:11:00.009-05:00

#1: Networked link journalism: A revolution quietly begins in Washington state
"Four journalists spontaneously launched one of the first experiments in collaborative (or networked) link journalism to cover a major local story. But it gets better. Those four journalists weren’t in the same newsroom. In fact, they all work for different media companies. And here’s the best part: Some of them have never even met in person. ... The Washington link projects should serve as models for the entire news industry. They show that collaborative linking draws readers, is easy, and costs nothing more than time (and not even much of that)."

This is the best example of collaborative journalism among competing media organizations that I have ever seen. I got really excited reading it because it can be a good model for hundreds of public broadcasting stations around the country: local expertise + easy collaborative tools = excellent journalism and collective brand recognition.

#2: Publish2
This is an easy and effective online tool for collaborative journalism. Combining it with Twitter and other tools can make collaboration of journalists across organizations and locations fast and easy. It is used by many media organizations including New York Times and Washington Post. Free account is available to journalists.

#3: The Web Is Flat: Why Time Spent Online Is Leveling Off
Recent Forrester survey shows that "web surfing leveled off at 12 hours a week after growing from less than six hours a week in 2004." The main reason is because web use is no longer a novel thing to do but a stable part of people's daily life routine.

For public broadcasters, this means two things: (1) online content consumption is becoming more habitual than experimental; and (2) with unlimited program choices but fixed time budget, audience will be more picky about program content. One-hit wonder won't gain their loyalty. Only a program that consistently catches their hearts and minds will turn them into a loyal and habitual audience.

#4: PAID CONTENT: Newspaper Economic Action Plan
In this May 2009 report, the American Press Institute "provides models and recommendations for the migration of online content from free to paid. They are intended for the development of consensus, protocols and technology. As such, they provide a link to the future."

This is a nice try of finding the next business model for newspapers. A lot of thinking in it can stimulate discussions and experiments among public broadcasters.

Delicious Today: cloud, radio, iPlayer, $$

2009-07-30T14:19:00.011-05:00

#1: US Federal Government to Offer Cloud Computing Services
"The US Federal Government has plans to offer both Software as a Service for government agencies and a cloud-based platform for agencies to develop, test and deploy new applications." No, the government won't build it by themselves but contract it out. Request for quotes for infrastructure-as-a-service will be issued in the next few weeks.

A universal infrastructure also sounds like a good idea for public broadcasters so we can pool resources to achieve higher efficiency and investment return through economy of scale. We can even incorporate a business layer into the infrastructure to allow local stations to share easily and fairly any revenue generated through the infrastructure. But there's one downside in having a single giant infrastructure -- inflexibility. This is a caution I learned after talking to a technology expert at BBC. When a technology becomes obsolete which happens quite often, it's very hard to replace it with a better one when it's embedded deeply in a giant infrastructure. So the challenge is to build some flexibility into a universal infrastructure.

#2: Radio's "Rules of Thumb" - an interview with author and Fast Company founder Alan Webber
"Could radio stations have members, rather than just listeners? Membership – as the old American Express ad used to say – has privileges. So if you become a member of a radio station, you end up with different levels of privilege; you not only get to listen to the broadcast, you get to meet the people in the programming department, you get a briefing from station managers, you get the participatory role in shaping the direction of the station. You are a member, not just a receiver of the broadcast. So it’s participation and a partnership rather than a one way broadcast and passive reception by the audience. I think that’s one thing that we’re seeing across all media platforms, and it is really one of the big changes in technology."

What privileges can public broadcasters offer to audience? Are there any privileges that can also become source of revenue?

#3: BBC's iPlayer
#4: iPlayer's new competitor: MSN launches free streaming video
"Microsoft has announced a UK service that will stream full-length videos of television shows for free." The MSN Video Player will be advertising-funded and a competitor to BBC's iPlayer and Hulu, an ad-funded service from News Corporation, Disney and NBC Universal. Hulu is already popular in U.S. and will be available in UK later this year.

There are some big differences among the three.

iPlayer: ad-free, both BBC radio and TV programs in the past 7 days, TV content is available for UK Internet users only.
MSN video player: ad-supported, TV programs only, content from BBC and other media, not limited to content aired in the past 7 days
Hulu: ad-supported, TV and movie content from News Corporation, Disney and NBC, not limited to content aired in the past 7 days

It seems that the companies are using the players (technology) to promote their content. I'm not sure this is a viable long-term strategy because eventually the difference between players will shrink to be negligible in terms of usefulness and convenience, two determinants in people's choice of media channel. It's content that will decide who is the winner.

#5: New Business Models for News Project
Funded by the Knight and McCormick Foundations and based in the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, the project "is researching best practices in the business of journalism online, gathering new ideas and experiments in revenue for news." The lead of the project is Prof. Jeff Jarvis, head of the school's interactive program. He has a popular blog, Buzz Machine, and also writes a new media column for The Guardian and is host of its Media Talk USA podcast.

The Guardian is very aggressive in its digital media effort and its Media Talk podcast is worth listening to. For example, it launched an experimental project to offer a Chinese language version of its selected content using volunteer translators.

Delicious Today: viral, social networks, bbc, radio

2009-07-29T13:15:00.016-05:00

As part of my research internship at CPB in Washington, D.C. this summer, I'll start today a daily posting of online readings that I find to be useful to people interested in digital media or public broadcasting. All the reading links will also be available on my social bookmarking page, delicious.com/lisabu.

#1: Bill Wasik’s new book: The view from atop the spike of viral culture
Bill Wasik talks about what makes content viral and the difference between viral and popular content. "When I think about viral, I think about not just the quantity of attention but the speed of it." So viral content has to be compelling and contagious at the same time.

In the digital era, content is still the king, and viral content is the king of kings. In my presentation to CPB Radio yesterday, I used two examples of viral content: Oregon Public Broadcasting's online video about an electric car drag race and Minnesota Public Radio's "Challenged Ballots: You be the Judge" web feature. They're produced with low-tech, plain video and scanned images, but resonate deeply with the audience.

#2: Report: Social Networks Growing while Other Social Media Sites Stagnate and Decline
"Report shows that internet users are beginning to now center their digital life around social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut, choosing to share their content within these sites instead of on services with a single focus, like Blogger or Flickr."

Implication: public broadcasters may need to think about providing an aggregation space where people can access, mix, and share content from different local and national radio and television stations.

#3: BBC News widget becomes default news provider on iGoogle UK
#4: BBC to share videos free with UK news sites, starting with Daily Mail, Guardian, Telegraph and Independent
"The video news sharing proposal marks a significant shift in relations between the BBC and rival media companies. ... The BBC has embarked on a series of partnerships with commercial media companies."

This is a smart move on the BBC's part to extend its reach and to "fend off government proposals to top-slice the licence fee to help support other public service broadcasters." Should public broadcasters in U.S. also re-evaluate their relationship with commercial media? At present time when serious journalism is facing unprecedented financial challenge, there should be some opportunities for collaboration and innovation.

#5: The future of radio –- technical innovation
From James Cridland, Executive Product Manager, A/V Products at BBC

"A hybrid receiver – one capable of using internet and broadcast – is the most interesting place that radio is headed right now." It "brings the best of both worlds to a listener – a reliable and free over-the-air, mobile, mass-market audio source, and a personalised connection to that station as well."

As a big fan of shortwave radio when I grew up in China, I want this hybrid. Period.

When Poetry Meets Twitter

2009-07-08T10:30:00.004-05:00

When hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the street to protest against the presidential election results last month, many of them also flooded to Twitter, a popular social networking tool, to distribute information and voice their opinions.In the torrent of tweets from Iran, one voice stands out with its Persian prose and poetic power. That voice belongs to Parham Baghestani, a 26-year-old engineering student and web developer from Isfahan. “My love has gone underground. The taste of night is nothing but awareness.” His tweets like this one caught the attention of NPR and landed him an interview on the Weekend Edition program. When poetry meets Twitter, readers are just one click away from the poet, but more importantly, the poet knows exactly who is following his words. He’s not alone, he’s within a network of readers, a network of support.

"Poets are the refuge of every wounded nation,” Roger Cohen of The New York Times wrote. When their voices are silenced in official media during political turmoils, poets with a will to speak will find another outlet. In China, the country where I grew up, underground poets posted their poems on a wall along a busy street in Beijing during the democracy movement in the winter of 1978. Twitter is much harder to close down than a brick wall. A network of readers in cyberspace is much harder to dispel than a crowd on a street. Poets in Iran, one tweet at a time, shall always have their voices heard.

(Originally posted on the Inside Islam blog on July 7, 2009)

If I Were to Take Prelims Again

2009-06-28T12:00:00.015-05:00

I finished my five PhD preliminary exams a week ago after a month of especially intensive preparation. Marking the completion of course work, prelims are a big hurdle on the road to PhD. While waiting anxiously for the result of my exams, I’d like to note down a few lessons for myself and future fellow prelim takers.

Lesson 1: Have a good study plan and stick to it. The study plan involves two main decisions: do I read on paper or on computer screen, and how much study each day. I prefer reading on paper because it’s easier on my eyes and allows me to flag super important pages using color coded Post-It plastic flags. Paper copy is also handy during the exam because I think better and faster when I can see the whole forest of papers in front of me, which is hard to do with electronic copy. I know paper copy is bad for the environment. But I just can’t find a paper-less way to achieve the same study results. If you have a good tip, let me know and I’ll be happy to try it. The second decision, how much study each day, is easy to make. After finalizing the reading lists with my committee members, I get a paper copy of every item in the lists and organize the material by professor then by topic. Dividing the material by the number of study days, I know exactly how much reading I have to do everyday. After a few days of trial, I also know how fast I have to read and how to schedule my day in order to finish the daily reading quota. Once my study plan was in place, I stick to it because I know it was the only sure way to finish the reading on time without cramming or worrying myself crazy.

Lesson 2: Take sketchy notes and make them searchable. I use pencil to underline important passages while reading. I find pencil better than highlighter because I can undo the underline and jot down notes beside the passages with pencil. After reading a batch of papers or books, I usually transfer those underlined passages, with their original page numbers in case I need a direct quote or re-read the original later, to a separate Word document, my own digest version. I have one such digest document for each prelim topic, and it takes one to two days to finish a digest document. I find it a wise investment to spend time making the digest documents. During a prelim, I can print out its digest document, use computer search to find the useful parts for the exam question, and highlight the parts in the printout. When I write answers, it’s much faster to just check the digest document rather than searching through the mountain of original material. Later on when I write my dissertation, the digest documents will also be a time saver because I don’t need to read the original material again.

I choose Word to take notes out of habit. It’s on almost every computer in campus libraries and public libraries, so I can work on my digest documents in any library without my own computers. Word also allows me to have a color coding system to quickly identify notes text by topics, importance, etc. But Word doesn’t allow search in multiple documents at once. Nor can I tag a document with key words and assemble a “play list” of Word files by tags. Although Google Desktop can search multiple Word files in a computer, it is not available on library computers. A great citation management software, Endnote has a field to store notes and offers easy search of it. But I can’t format the notes in any way, and, again, the software is not available on library computers. I wish there were a super easy notes management software that combines the formatting capability of Word with the search power of Google Desktop or Endnote. Does anyone know a good software or use a different strategy?

Lesson 3: Make a theme map with citations. During the last days of my preparation, I realized that I needed an overview document that maps out the major themes of research in a topical area with related citations. For example, in the topical area of social networking, several themes have emerged from my reading – features of network itself (e.g. weak ties and homophily), influence of social network (e.g. social capital), methodology issues, etc. My theme map lists in bullet points those lines (and sub-lines) of research with major citations and a super short summary (a few words) of each citation. During the prelims, my theme map not only saves me precious time in outlining the answer, but also helps me identify the unexplored or under-explored spots in the research area. Those spots become targets of my research.

Looking back, I wish I had started making notes and theme maps since day one of my PhD program.

Lesson 4: Develop a study routine. A good routine helps maintain productivity and reduce stress. I spent several days trying different study locations and hours. I settled on the Middleton Public Library as my location which has minimum distraction, comfortable desks and chairs, free parking, and good food and coffee nearby. Starting with an self-indulgence of latte, my study hours were from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. with one hour of lunch break, six days a week. I didn’t study in the evening but rewarded myself with relax time, usually watching the Everybody Loves Raymond DVDs that I got from the public library (finished season five when my prelims were done). The daily reward and relax time are important because they keep me motivated and interested in the study. Also, out of a personal principle, I simply refuse to live like a machine just because of an exam. I’ve been through the gruesome Chinese college entrance exams and spent my last two years in high school like a study machine. Afterwards I vowed to myself never again to allow an exam to take my life away.

I also developed a routine during the prelims. The first five minutes after getting the exam question are the scariest: where do I start? Instead of staring at a blank computer screen, I find it calming to just type the question onto the screen. Somehow the physical act of typing breaks the spell of terror and my brain cells can move again. Besides, I need to include the question in my answer document anyway, so typing it is not a waste of time. Second, I make a paragraph outline before diving into writing. Utilizing my notes and theme map, I come up with an outline in bullet points with relevant citations. The outline not only makes writing easier and to the point, but also guides me how much exam time I should give to each bullet point to avoid rushing at the end.

OK, that’s my two cents on prelims. Good luck, everybody!

Happy Birthday, Emy!

2009-04-03T17:00:00.010-05:00

Emy is the first person I met when I came to Madison from China in 1995. A volunteer for Madison Friends of International Students, she was generous to let me stay in her house for three days for free before I could find my own lodging. For me, a foreign student in a foreign country for the first time, the first few days were scary, confusing, and overwhelming. Emy's kindness and resourcefulness really calmed me down. I can never thank her enough for that.

As we know each other better, a "forget-age-friendship" (wang nian jiao in Chinese) blossomed since we have so much in common. For example, she was an international student herself half a century ago. We both love opera (Italian opera for her and Chinese folk opera for me), and dreamed as a child of becoming an opera star. Over the years, we traveled together to see opera in New York City, to watch whales off Mexico, and to visit Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture in Illinois.

Emy always amazes me with her energy and wisdom. Some quotable sayings from her:

A girl's face without freckles is like sky without stars (so don't feel bad about them).
Even if you are a street sweeper, you should still try to be the best ever street sweeper (and treat every job seriously).
Prepare as if you'll live forever, enjoy life as if you'll die tomorrow.

Her whole family are warm and interesting people. A large part of my American experience is shaped by my time with them. I spent almost every Thanksgiving in their cottage and became a good potato masher. I went to her grandson's Bar Mitzvah and witnessed a Jewish ritual for the first time. I tasted the smoky maple syrup her son made from trees planted by the family decades ago. I got to know and love Robert Frost's poetry and Alec Guinness's movies because of her husband.

On Tuesday I joined her and some of her family and friends to celebrate her 80th birthday at the Black Hawk Country Club. We had a good time sharing stories and memories.

Happy birthday, Emy!

Dressing up David: Creative Protest

2009-03-17T10:57:00.010-05:00

As part of the recent crackdown on "indecent" content on the Internet, the Chinese government has ordered the deletion of the pictures of some famous Renaissance art from Chinese web sites. To protest it, a creative citizen in Shanghai started a project to dress up historic paintings and sculptures and posted the "decent" version of the artwork on the web. It's hilarious yet powerful: some deleted art has reappeared on Chinese web sites. But now it's the "decent" version that has been censored.

For more info about China's grassroots protest against Internet censorship, check out this BBC story (in Chinese).

Could Facebook Hinder Your Growth?

2009-03-14T13:24:00.006-05:00

That's a question that Peggy Orenstein mulled over in her article about Facebook in the New York Times Magazine today. Facebook as "the best evidence yet of the undead past," she wrote, can have a profound impact on how young people become adults. If they can never shed their old identities formed in middle school or in the hometown, it could be a struggle for them to forge a new self, the self they want to be, later on in college, in a new career or a new city.

I can relate to her concern. When I was growing up in China, the pressure to be a dutiful daughter and a good student in a pre-described, non-negotiable way was so intense that I couldn't wait to go to college and leave my hometown as far behind as possible. Life in college had its own challenges, but I was happy and thrived on them, because finally I could be myself and in command of my own battle -- a battle that I had chosen to fight, I was willing to fight, and I enjoyed fighting. Nobody knowing my past "traditional" self helped tremendously because I felt free to explore even experiement different versions of self.

If Facebook were around then, would I have grown up in the same way? I doubt it if my old Facebook friends, knowingly or unknowingly, kept putting me back into my old social cocoon. A caterpillar can't evolve into a butterfly if it clings to its old shell. Breaking away from old social networks, sometimes, is necessary for young people to grow.

That's also the conclusion of Peggy Orenstein: "Something is drowned in that virtual coffee cup — an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness. Perhaps my nieces will find a new way to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation."

Do Commercials Make TV Shows More Enjoyable?

2009-03-07T13:08:00.002-06:00

I thought the answer to the question was absolutely "no" until I read this article on the New York Times this week. The two studies reported in the article find that "commercials make TV programs more enjoyable to watch. Even bad commercials." I'm not totally convinced by their argument but have to admit that it could make sense in some cases. The case coming to my mind immediately is a serial radio drama I loved to listen to when I was a kid. Broadcast each day for 30 minutes, the drama was the biggest reason for my dashing home during the lunch break in order not to miss any bits of new development in the drama. The 23.5 hours of waiting for each new episode definitely enhanced my enjoyment of the drama.

According to the studies' researchers, their findings suggest that oftentimes we human beings don't really know what makes us happy.

Bill Moyers Answered My Second Question, Too

2009-02-10T14:44:00.007-06:00

I posed another question to Moyers during his live chat on PBS web site and was really excited to find it too being selected for answer. But the answer never showed up on screen then the chat web page was down. After about 30 minutes of waiting, I was relieved to see Moyers's answer to the question in the chat archive when the web page was back online.

So below it is his answer to my second question. The class I refer to in the question is the J201: Introduction to Mass Communication for which I'm a TA. Sorry I should have said "intro to mass communication" instead of "intro to Journalism" in the question.

***

Lisa, Madison, WI: Few of my students in a college intro to Journalism class watch PBS. How do we attract more young citizens to quality/public media?

Bill Moyers: That's our fault in public television . We have too few broadcasts grounded in reporting -- the best is NOW with David Brancaccio and Frontline, the best documentary series since CBS Reports -- so we don't have that farm club I spoke of earlier. Our local stations have too few resources to cultivate new talent. The BBC is a great newsgathering organization because it was established with a dedicated tax that produces revenues of about six billion dollars a year -- that's why listeners and viewers get a feast of news and information not to mention some great cultural programming. Public media in this country has never had the means to grow our own journalists, and we don't now. We need to reconstitute ourselves with at least a third of our programming devoted to news and public affairs and a trust fund to provide the training that produces generation after generation of independent journalists.

Bill Moyers Answered My Question During Live Chat

2009-02-10T13:53:00.001-06:00

Bill Moyers, host of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, is one of my most respected people. He's having a live chat at this moment on PBS web site. Many people have submitted questions, and I did too, expecting only a slim chance of being picked for answer. But amazingly, he picked mine and gave the following answer. That made my day today.

***
2:13 pm EST
Lisa: Where do you get your news among gazillions of sources? Any strategy to overcome information overload?

2:21 pm EST

Bill Moyers: Every morning I read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and segments of the Washington Post -- to get a sense of how they are playing the same stories as well as their own original reporting. The Times has done superb coverage on the Great Collapse (my term for what's happening to us.) I spend a couple of hours on several Website--starting with talkingpointsmemo.com (TPM.com), going on to townhall.com to see how the conservative base is responding to the news and alternet.org and/or truthout.org for the liberal perspectives. I graze all day as time allows across a mulitude of sites --news and opinion --and check in occasionally with the AP and Reuters. I also have several newspaper among my "favs" -- Los Angeles Times, Times of London -- that I will visit over the course of a day. I still prefer magazines stacked beside my bed, however -- and right now they include Harper's, Reason, National Review, The American Prospect, In These Times, Mother Jones, the Economist, the New York Review of Books, YES, and the quarterly of the East Texas State Historical Society. I don't have a strategy for managing the information overflow except to read what I want and then ask myself, with the computer off and the magazine closed, what do I thik about what I've just read? Well, actually, I find good movies a great antidote to overanalyzing the news.

What's on Your Front Page?

2009-01-24T01:02:00.001-06:00

If you haven't visited the Newseum, a museum in Washington D.C. about journalism, be sure to visit its website, especially the page where you can read the front pages of 725 newspapers from 69 countries. It's colorful, intriguing, and full of energy. I find it fascinating.

There is a loud cry in this country that the newspaper is dying. It may be ture, especially for the paper newspaper. There is even a Newspaper Death Watch web site counting down the last days of newspaper. But the situation can be different in other countries, especially the developing counties. In fact, according to an article in the Economist, newspapers are kicking and thriving there, many enjoying double digit growth in circulation. The sheer number of newspapers on the Newseum web site seems to validate that article.

You would also love the web site if you are curious about how other countries handle news and interpret current events. What's in a country's newspaper (and what's not) can tell a lot about that country's news environment, politics and culture. I once used several front pages from the Newseum web site to illustrate the world's reactions to Obama's presidential run in a radio show. It worked out pretty nicely.

Learning Japanese

2009-01-13T06:58:00.015-06:00

I love languages. One of my favorite ice-breaker questions is: if you could have any super power, what would it be? Two most popular answers I have heard are being able to fly, and ability to read other people's mind. For me, the answer is always to be able to speak other people's languages instantly.

I learned English and took French, German, Spanish, and Russian for a while in college in China. But English is the only one that still sticks with me. Chinese way of teaching foreign language in 1990s was to focus on reading and grammar. So at the time of my college graduation, I still sounded like a five-year-old in English conversation.

Curious about how American universities teach foreign languages (also to earn credits for my East Asian Studies minor) , I took a semester of Japanese last year and, what an experience!

The 6-credit course was super intensive with eight classes a week. The professor and all TAs were Japanese native speakers and each discussion section had a dozen or so students only. The class was like a boot camp challenging our eyes, ears, mouths, and brains every single day. We spent more quality time with our TA than with our significant others. After a while I felt that my life had been taken over by Japanese and my head had become a memorization machine. The security of my apartment had greatly improved against burglars because the bunch of Japanese chatters (recording) there never shut up.

After surviving the semester, I think I like the approach of the class. From the very beginning, it emphasizes reading as well as listening, speaking and writing all at once. For example, as part of the final exam, we had to write and give a speech in Japanese in front of our class. It felt pretty cool for a Chinese to give a Japanese speech about her German friend in an English speaking country. I also learned a few tricks from the class in case I shall teach Chinese in an American university someday. For example, difficult grammar (e.g. te-form in Japanese) can be made easy to remember if you turn it into lyrics of a popular song (e.g. Santa Claus is coming to town).

Taking Japanese also intrigued me further about its similarity with Chinese. Japanese borrowed a lot from Chinese, such as kanji or Chinese characters, to develop their written language during the Tang dynasty (618-907). In the dialect of my grandparents' hometown in Lixian, Hunan province, they use the word "zuo-ne" to express sympathy: that's too bad. But the word doesn't exist in Mandarin nor do I know how to write it in Chinese characters. Then I heard the Japanese word for the same expression, "zan-nen." I was shocked how similar it sounds to "zuo-ne" and wonder if both words came from a common ancient Chinese word. If that's the case, what a marvel it is for the two words to remain similar after more than a thousand years of time and thousands of miles apart.

Weeping for a Politician

2008-11-05T00:38:00.003-06:00

I’m so proud of America tonight. I couldn’t help weeping a bit while listening to Obama’s speech after his extraordinary win of the election a moment ago. This is the second time that I have ever shed tears for a politician. The first time was for Zhou Enlai, former premier of China, when he died in 1976. I remember that it was on a cold January morning, I woke up to find my mother weeping silently while the radio in the house was broadcasting that he had died that day. I was five then, didn’t understand what had happened but was so shocked to see my mother cry that I broke down in tears as well. Only later on did I learn that Premier Zhou was extremely popular among Chinese and his death during the Cultural Revolution made people feel that they had lost the only person they could count on to stop the insane political turmoil at the time.

Tonight I had tears again for a politician. Obama reminds me of Washington and FDR who showed up in history when this country was in crisis. I feel lucky for America who once again has an extraordinary leader at a time of crisis. Obama reminds me of Lincoln and King who gave their lives to end racial discrimination in this country. I feel proud of Americans who today choose Obama and show to the world that past mistakes, no matter how immense and deep-rooted they are, can be corrected if the people have the will and work together. This is the America that I have admired and come here for -- a land of hope. What a privilege for me to witness this historical moment. I still can’t vote this year, but will next time. And I may weep again.

The Story Behind a Sound Clip

2008-09-22T16:51:00.005-05:00

Radio is about sound. A good sound clip is worth a thousand words for a radio program. So for each show, we producers spend a lot of time on the Internet or in video stores hunting for that perfect, short and punchy sound clip.

But sometimes the ideas come easily.

This past Wednesday's show is about a physician's journey to end nuclear madness. When Jean asked me to find some clips, the movie "On the Beach" immediately came to my mind. It's a movie with many of my personal memories.

I was introduced to this movie by a good friend and mentor of mine who was a foreign correspondent in Moscow when the movie came out in 1959 during the Cold War. A post-apocalyptic film about nuclear wars, the movie was banned in Soviet Union then of course, but many high officials in Moscow did watch it as part of their "internal reference information." My friend never forgot how shocked those officials were that the Americans could be so honest about the consequences of nuclear wars.

As a person growing up in a Communist country, I was intrigued by my friend's comments, so checked out the movie myself. The movie did not shock me but made me wonder why Hollywood has been so comfortable making and selling human disaster movies while in China that's almost impossible.

The second thing about the movie is its cast: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire. I was surprised that Fred Astaire had no dancing at all in the movie but played a serious role. How refreshing. Ava Gardner, Jean told me that her father always fell for Ava. For me, Gregory Peck is always special because I had a chance to meet him in person.

He came to Madison to give a talk in the Memorial Union Theater on Oct. 3, 1996. I was in my second year then studying journalism at UW-Madison. The talk would make a nice article for my Chinese hometown's newspaper so I went to see him. When he walked onto the stage, I could hardly recognize him because, at age 80, he had shrunk quite a bit. But when he opened his mouth, oh, thank goodness, that magnetic voice was still the same.

He entertained the audience for a full hour with fascinating personal stories and reflections. And he answered audience's questions with a great sense of humor and honesty. The most memorable question for me is the one from a man on the balcony. He said that during his 50 years of marriage, Mr. Peck was his only romantic competitor. But he was a generous man, so could Mr. Peck fly a kiss to his wife please? Peck obliged graciously among the laughter of the audience and embarrassment of the man's wife.

At the reception after the talk, I managed to sit down with Peck and asked him two simple questions. I have forgotten what the questions were, but I always remember how kind he was to take time to talk to a nervous foreign student like me.

That evening has gone by for 12 years. Mr. Peck has passed away for five years. But because of the sound clip, all that old memory rushes back to me. From my meeting with Mr. Peck, to my mentor's comments, to the radio show, life makes interesting connections. It's one nice part of growing older.

(This entry was originally posted on Blog without Borders on Sept. 20, 2008.)

Statistics and Sword Swallowing

2008-09-14T22:42:00.010-05:00

As a graduate student studying mass communication using quantitative methods, I have taken many statistics classes. Summarizing what's happening in the world with a simple language made of only numbers and Greek symbols, statistics is efficient and elegant. But it's a dull storyteller, giving audience the vitamin pill instead of juicy pie version of a story. But what can you do? I just can't see how anyone can make statistics sexy.

Well, one man can.

Two days ago, I watched a lecture of Hans Roslings on the TED conference web site. He made the impossible possible: statistics can be exciting and entertaining as sports. Armed with a mountain of statistics and a data animation software he developed, Roslings, a professor of global health from Sweden, presented the international trend of health and economic development in the past several decades. Watching those country bubbles moving and chasing one another on the screen accompanied by Roslings' colorful commentary and instant replay, I really felt like watching a football game. The audience was cheering too. Amazing!

I wish my statistics class can be exciting as that. I wish I can teach as Roslings did: there's no dull subject, only dull ways of teaching it. I also checked out Roslings's software. Google has bought it and turned it into a Google Gadget called Motion Chart. That's a future toy for me to play.

What does statistics have to do with sword swallowing? They demonstrate the same idea: the impossible can be possible. Just watch what Roslings did at the end of the lecture.

A Great Story, But It Won't Come to You on Radio

2008-08-31T14:14:00.004-05:00

People in the radio business often say that it's the guest, not the topic, that makes or breaks a program. A great guest can make any topic interesting, a bad guest can ruin the most interesting topic. It's often true.

This week I'm really excited about the story of Paolo Soleri, an Italian architect who built an extraordinary eco-city in the Arizona desert in the 1970s. But he was too ahead of his time and struggled for the past 30 years to make all his visionary plans into reality. Finally the world caught up with him and now recognizes his genius and vision. You can see him offering sage advice in Leonardo DiCaprio's documentary The 11th Hour.

Since Soleri is popular on the lecture circuit, he could be a good radio guest. So my fellow producer, Dan, and I set out to find him for a possible radio interview. Yes, he's still in Arizona at age 89. Oh, no, he has a very heavy foreign accent and is not up to a full hour live interview. So we ran into a classic problem for radio producers: a great topic but unsuitable guest. Reluctantly, we decided to drop the topic. What a pity!

Thanks to this blog, at least I can tell you about this great man. His life story is inspiring for all of us even though you may never hear it on radio. Now you may also understand a little better why that great topic you emailed us has never become a radio show.

(This entry was originally posted on Blog without Borders on Aug 30, 2008.)

Bless the Garlic

2008-08-31T14:08:00.004-05:00

I just booked Melissa Clark, a food writer for the New York Times, to talk about garlic on Friday, Sept 5. She wrote a very entertaining article about her family's love for garlic which was in every meal including breakfast and evening snack. Her father even tried to make garlic ice cream!

I love garlic as well, both as food and as a "weapon" to get rid of bad energy in my environment, an old Chinese belief. Taped to my computer monitor is a long dry garlic stalk given to me by a colleague. I'm positive that it has protected me from getting sick in the office where Joe had been coughing for weeks. My confidence about garlic comes from my childhood in China. During the flu season in spring, my mother would order me and my brother to eat a few raw garlic cloves soaked in rice vinegar before every dinner. Yuk!

But cooked garlic is yummy. In Hunan Province, you can find garlic cloves in every kitchen and in almost every dish: vegetable, meats, fish, etc. As my mother did, I always chop garlic cloves just before cooking to preserve their potency. One day last year I prepared a huge meal for a party and chopped a ton of garlic. The next day I could still smell garlic on my fingers. It struck me that I had become my mother because that's the exact same aroma that my mother's hands had smelled of when I was growing up. I knew she had done a lot of cooking for the family, but the garlic smell on my fingers finally made me truly realize how much she had cooked. Thanks, mom!

(This entry was originally posted on Blog without Borders on Aug 24, 2008.)

My Name is Wrong Number

2008-08-31T14:04:00.002-05:00

On-air producing is hectic: answering and forwarding callers to the studio, checking listener emails, checking instant messages on 2 accounts, communicating with host and engineer via computers, listening to the interview -- all at the same time! But the stressful job has its reward: each on-air producer has a sizable collection of moving, hilarious, or weird stories involving callers.

Here's one in my collection: A phone line flashed. I picked up the phone and asked the caller his name. He said "wrong number." I told him that the number he just dialed is Wisconsin Public Radio's number. No problem. Goodbye. One minute later, he called again. I started to get impatient because I needed to keep phone lines open for REAL callers. So I quickly pointed out that he's still talking to WPR and hung up. But he was insistent and called yet again. This time, after some confusing exchange with him, I finally figured out that he WAS trying to reach us and "Ron Number" (not wrong number) is actually his name! It turned out that he is a professor at the university. Guess which department? Mathematics. How perfect.

(This entry was originally posted on Blog without Borders on Aug 17, 2008.)