Technology360

NPR API: The GillmorGang interview

Steve Gillmor interviewed NPR digital media directors Zach Brand, Daniel Jacobson and me July 17th on NPR's release of its Application Programming Interface for his GillmorGang podcast.  Although it's a little technical, it should give you a good overview of what it's doing.  It's now been posted.  Link: GillmorGang.

Bryant Park Project - what we learned

Nearly everything you read on this almost five-year-old blog is only indirectly related to my professional responsibilities, but this is a rare post that relates directly to them  (currently interim CEO at National Public Radio).  A week ago, we announced a joyless decision to discontinue the innovative program, Bryant Park Project, produced in our New York facility across the street from Bryant Park.  The paragraphs below are a lightly edited and linked version of an email that I sent this morning to a BPP staff member in response to a suggestion that we turn BPP into a web site.  Look for another post on the Bryant Park blog from me that provides additional information (see update below). 

I've read about a quarter of the comments about the cancellation on the BPP blog and you're of course characterizing them accurately.  Obviously, you and the rest of the staff have done a great job building loyalty among your audience and in presenting news in a different way.  You have my gratitude for that.   

I'm not sure how someone who has done articles, speeches and consulting about the importance of disruptive investments (in the Clayton Christensen sense), supported the BPP initiative when I was an NPR board member, and is now trying to shape NPR into more of a digital company finds oneself on this side of a decision to end this great project.  It's not  an abandonment of young people.  Look at npr.org/music or our successful podcasting efforts.  Age demos are curves.  This is not meant to diminish BPP, but Morning Edition and All Things Considered have more younger podcast listening than does BPP, and way more radio listening, simply because wide radio carriage delivers awareness of both.  BPP's great contribution wasn't quantitative, though, it was in helping us learn.   

We've/I've learned -- or relearned -- a lot in the process.  Sustaining a new program of this financial magnitude requires attracting users from each of the platforms we can access.  In this case, radio carriage was inadequate and web/podcasting usage was hampered -- here's the relearning part -- by having an appointment program in a medium that doesn't excel in that kind of usage.  Web radio is growing very rapidly (much faster than FM did, for example), but it's almost all to music and, increasingly, to attention-tracking music.   

Perhaps the future of news on the web is in the same user-programmed direction.  I'd like to see good minds like those of the BPP staff think about how we can do good journalism delivered via the web using techniques beyond just throwing up another portal-type web site and expecting people to come to it.  Our new open API release is a great tool for that.  The realities of how people use the web, how web audiences grow through search, and technologies for tracking attention and tailoring content delivery to match how people spend their attention all need to be considered.  Portals still have a place, just as their close cousins radio transmitters do, but we can no longer put all our eggs in that basket.   

NPR will, I hope, be a leader in a new generation of news delivery over multiple platforms, including ones we've never conceived.  But we can't make those 2nd generation investments if we continue 1st generation efforts that aren't consistent with what we know about how media usage is maturing.

Updated, 3:45 p.m. Eastern:  A longer version of this has been posted to the Bryant Park Project blog. 

--Dennis
Twitter: @haarsager

Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition

My favorite toy is Nokia's N810, a diminutive WiFi- and Bluetooth-enabled Linux-based touchscreen tablet computer.  It connects super-easily to hotspots, has a decent if unremarkable pair of speakers, and runs a wide variety of open source Maemo applications.

Of late, I've used it a few times with my Verizon EVDO USB card, a Cradlepoint Technology battery-operated wireless router, and my Jeep's sound system to create a mobile Internet radio (together, they're smaller than most portable radios).  I've driven from downtown Washington, DC to both Dulles and BWI airports listening to my former station in Washington State without a dropout.

Now I see that Nokia has introduced in the U.S. a WiMAX edition of the N810, and better yet it supports the 802.16e, the mobile flavor of WiMAX.  It's intended for use on Sprint's Xohm network (Washington, DC will be, or perhaps already is, a test market).  So since its range should be similar to EVDO when it's rolled out, one might be able to omit the mobile router.  According to the Xohm article in Wikipedia, the intent is to merge it with Clearwire.  I was a Clearwire customer back in the Northwest and loved it.  It uses an early flavor of WiMAX and I was able to get good WISP service five miles from the transmitter using only a small indoor antenna perched in a window.

Lastly, my Jeep's sound system already has a USB port on the front panel, and Cradlepoint's technology makes connecting 3G or 4G cards very easy, so adding EVDO or WiMAX capability to car radios is just a matter of software and should be a no-brainer.  I've written here previously that I think a great path to that is marrying it with HD Radios using SMIL and listeners can be their own programmers.  --Dennis

Christian radio questions concept of localism

Michael Lasar writes:

The Communications Act requires broadcasters to serve "public interest, convenience, and necessity." But a campaign by a Christian media group to defeat Federal Communications Commission proposals to encourage more locally-oriented radio reveals the extent to which some Christian broadcasters see their mission in sectarian terms.  ¶  "The FCC is considering a proposal that would force every radio station to take programming advice from community advisory boards broadly representative of an area’s population," a statement distributed by Save Christian Radio (SCR) darkly warns. "That means that Christian broadcast stations could be forced to take programming advice from people whose values are at odds with the Gospel!"

Link:  Ars Technica.

In The Decline of Localist Broadcasting Policies, Ed Felton then comments on this development and also the debut of Pandora for the iPhone:

... Many people are like the Pandora or Christian radio listeners, in wanting to hear content aimed at their interests rather than just their location. Public policy ought to recognize this and give broadcasters more latitude to find their own communities rather than defining communities only by geography.  ¶  Now I’m not saying that their shouldn’t be local programming, or that people shouldn’t care what is happening in their neighborhood. Most people care a lot about local issues and want some local programming. The local community is one of their communities of interest, but it’s not the only one. Let some stations serve local communities while others serve non-local communities. As long as there is demand for local programming — as there surely will be — the market will provide it, and new technologies will help people get it. ...

Link:  Freedom to Tinker (about a dozen comments follow his post).

Adam Thierer provides some comments on this in The Progress & Freedom Foundation blog and expands on this theme in Our Continued Wishful Thinking about "Media Localism" where he points to a debate on this in Editor & Publisher:

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at Editor & Publisher in which E&P columnist Steve Outing and Mark Potts of the now-defunct Backfence.com are debating media localism and recent efforts to give dying newspapers a new lease on life by focusing on the “hyper-local” coverage and community services. Potts obviously didn’t take too kindly to Outling saying of Backfence that: “We know from its experience that relying too heavily on non-paid citizen contributors isn’t a winning strategy.” And that the: “content is often of low quality and boring, and dull just doesn’t fly in the hyper-competitive Web environment. In response, Potts suggests that other factors were responsible for the site’s demise and that hyper-localism and user-generated local content is the future of the industry...

Link:  Technology Liberation Front.

Nota bene to fellow broadcasters from the Boy Scouts: Be Prepared.  Unless we're serving both geographical and affinity communities, we'll likely be marginalized.  --Dennis

Shift Happens – The Future of Advertising

John Hagel writes in a very interesting post,

In a world of rapid change, shift piles upon shift.  One can get thoroughly confused and draw the wrong conclusions by focusing on one change while losing sight of the shifts that are coming up. ....

In the advertising world, multiple shifts are piling on top of each other and it is often hard to keep track of them, much less understand their implications. Let’s look at just some that are re-shaping the advertising world:

• Shifts from advertising placed in digital content to ads placed in social networks and applications
• Shifts from digital advertisements delivered through conventional PC’s to a growing array of mobile devices, with an increasing ability to target messages based on the physical location of the person
• Shifts in the behavior of digital users in their responsiveness to advertisements online
• Shifts in the way that companies connect with and build relationships with stakeholders (e.g., blurring boundaries between customers, partners and suppliers)
• Shifts in the revenue models for businesses, as online businesses in particular become more and more dependent on advertising as a key revenue source (e.g., is there any Web 2.0 start-up that doesn’t blithely answer “advertising” when asked about their revenue model?).
• If that isn’t complicated enough, we also have broader macro-economic shifts like potential near-term recessionary pressures ...

Link:  Edge Perspectives with John Hagel.  --Dennis

Public Media: "7 Ways to Monetize..." and "Ideally Suited for Digital World"

I'm way, way behind in reading my blogroll, so here are two posts from ace media observer Diane Mermigas that I missed. 

In the first, she writes about monetizing consumer engagement, proactive content by attracting investor support, social-marketing connections, local connections, signature quality content, "free" versus so-called "payment", and independent third-party content distribution.  Link:  MediaPost.

In the second, she writes:

Public broadcasting may be better situated for the digital transition than its commercial broadcasting counterparts, having forged its fortunes on content bound by special interests, political issues and civic action. But it could be obscuring its own passage to financial sustainability through interactive ties with its close-knit constituents. ¶  The potential hurdles are long-held perceptions in the nonprofit public media space, and in public broadcasting in particular, about what constitutes commercial endeavors. These were cut-and-dried notions in an analog world. Video streamed online and downloaded to mobile digital devices and user-generated content exist without marketing support. Advertising is transcending to more sophisticated interactive connections with targeted consumers; transactions, marketing research and ongoing rapport can be honed over time. ...

Link: MediaPost. Good stuff.  --Dennis

What can come of NPR's release of an API giving access to its story database?

...asks Steve Behrens in DirectCurrent.  Check out his thoughtful post and Stephen Hill's reply there.

Also see Todd Mundt's, This NPR API is a BIG deal in Converge.  I think this observation of Todd's is especially important:

NPR content (and our content, when we join the API) begins appearing all over the web, and yes, this doesn’t diminish the value of our work or our web sites; it INCREASES its value as more people encounter and discover it, and click on the links to read more.

--Dennis

We're all dead

The death of broadcasting is a popular theme in web posts.  For example, Doc Searls asks, What happens after TV's mainframe era ends next February? in Linux Journal (you should read it, but that's not my purpose here).  Jeff Jarvis says in BuzzMachine they should Tear down the broadcast towers because Pandora is available on the iPhone.  Those are the A-list bloggers, but it's popular with us  Z to ZZZ-list bloggers as well.  So I decided to do phrase searches to see how the media stacked up in the death department.  Surprisingly, it wasn't old media:

Dead
"death of television", 13,000 results
"death of TV", 28,200 results
Deader
"death of radio", 227,000 results
"death of newspapers", 331,000 results
Deadest
"death of blogs", "death of the blogs", "death of the blog", 81,400 results
"death of the web", 215,000 results
"death of the net", 746,000 results
"death of the internet", 1,910,000 results

--Dennis

NPR API is Live on NPR.org

Blog posts here have been scarce of late since my interim CEO job at NPR, that began in March, has been so consuming.  However, as a long-time bit-head, I'm very proud of the work Daniel Jacobson, Zach Brand and others [see below] have done in the very progressive step of opening up NPR's API to wide usage.  To see what it can do, scroll down the left side of this page below the Files section to access NPR stories in three categories that I've chosen as relevant to the topic of this blog.  There are dozens of other categories.  Quoted below is Daniel's description on the NPR.org weblog:

... we launched our new API today. To find the API, you can either go directly to http://www.npr.org/api/ or you can follow the new link called "Tools / API" on the NPR.org left nav under the Services section.

In order to use the API, you will need to register using our new registration engine that Zach mentioned in a previous post. Once registered, you will need to generate an apiKey by clicking the Generate Key button on the API tab of your account profile. The apiKey is used to authenticate all requests to the API. After you get your apiKey, you can read our documentation or just go straight to the Query Generator, which is a comprehensive tool that allows you to easily create your API requests and see what your results would look like.

There were quite a few questions that we addressed when developing the API, but one thing that was not really in question was the need to open as much of our content as possible. As a result, almost everything that you can find on NPR.org that we have the rights to redistribute is available through the API. This includes audio, images, full text, etc. That said, there are elements, series and programs that we could not offer due to rights restrictions.

We also discussed in depth which output formats we would support. For launch, we are supporting RSS, MediaRSS, Atom, JSON, JavaScript Widgets, HTML Widgets and our custom tagging structure called NPRML. We would like feedback on what other formats we should support, although as of now we are planning to extend it to include NewsML. Which of the existing formats are you most likely to use from our API?

There were a ton of contributors to this new API with the primary technical architect being Harold Neal. Other major contributors include Joanne Garlow, Jason Grosman, Tony Yan, Ivan Lazarte, Stephanie Oura, Ben Hands, Shain Miley, Lindsay Mangum, Sugirtha Solai, Todd Welstein and Vida Logan, and others.

Finally, we would really like to get as much feedback from the community on the API, particularly on what you think you will use and what is missing from the offering. We will continue to post here with more thoughts and questions.

--Dennis

P.S.: Zach, Daniel and I want you to know the following:

Key contributors included members from [NPR] News, Strategy & Partnerships, Legal, and Business Development.  Technical work was done by Harold Neal, Joanne Garlow, Jason Grosman, Tony Yan, Ivan Lazarte, Stephanie Oura, Ben Hands, Shain Miley, Lindsay Mangum, Todd Welstein and Vida Logan and a host of others.