Technology360

Seven Six ways to use public radio on your smartphone

Updated 19 September 2008:  Forgot to add RSS feeds as #7.

The other day, I took out my Nokia N82 smartphone  (phones that combine cellular, PDA and media functions) while grocery shopping and the slippery thing squirted out of my hand and onto the ceramic tile floor of Harris Teeter, scattering in pieces.  I reassembled it, but there was a big ding in the keyboard plate.  Worse, while I could call out fine, incoming calls worked only about half the time.  I'd been holding out for one of the new Nokia models due out later this year (N85, N96), but it was time for another new mobile phone.  The higher end Nokia phones have a great camera (5 megapixels) and media features (including an FM radio), so I decided to go  with the N95 pictured here.  It has very similar in features to the N82 but has a different form factor, a much better keypad, and the back is coated so it isn't so darn slippery.

I got a late start with my weekend bike riding on Sunday and NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday was already over on WAMU.  So as I often did with the N82 when WAMU's schedule and my life don't coincide, I transported myself to the Pacific Time zone to listen to Northwest Public Radio, where I worked until  early March.  This I did by simply pointing the browser to its Real stream and pedaled away.  Works just fine, although with T-Mobile's non-3G service there is a bit of buffering while in motion.  Note to self: switch to the competition's HSDPA service.

So while I was pedaling, I was thinking about all the ways I use this phone as a radio and "radio surrogate."  Here's my list in declining order of frequency that I use them:

1. [5-6 times per day] The @nprnews feed on Twitter.  If you're not familiar with Twitter, it permits users to follow each other's exploits, those exploits being limited to what you can say in 140 characters.  My postings there are few, but there are as of this writing 208 people following (subscribing to) them.  Some media organizations and bloggers are using Twitter to let people know when a new story is posted elsewhere.  NPR has @nprnews, which comes to my cell phone, and a few others, which I read online.  Since you can embed a link (usually in condensed form using tinyurl.com) in the "tweet" (post), you can follow the link to the online version of the story if you're interested.  One that came tonight reads, nprnews: Calif. Regulators Ban Cell Phone Use By Train Operators http://tinyurl.com/4ro76d.  Several public radio stations also have Twitter feeds that let followers know of news stories as they're posted to the web.
2. [1-2 times per day] Nokia's built-in FM radio for WAMU.  Although the Nokia has usable speakers, you still have to plug in the headset because it's the antenna.  There is a fairly comprehensive and accurate directory of stations.  I use this less often than with the Twitter feed, but for more hours -- while in the gym or walking to/from work.
3. [3-4 times per week] Listen to Northwest Public Radio's Real streams as described in the second paragraph above.  I even listened to it from Iceland in June.  Caution, though -- I've found several station Real streams that don't work on my phone, probably due to streaming rates that are too fast.  Check out publicradiofan.com for links to just about every public radio station in the world, including feeds.
4. [2-3 times per week] NPR's mobile web site, m.npr.org or mobile.npr.org or npr.mobi.  It's just a sparsely formatted version of npr.org featuring selected offerings.   Also lets you get local news from several partnering member stations.  Several public radio stations stations have mobile sites also, including my old one, mobile.nwpr.org.   I just bookmark this in the phone's web browser (same as with NWPR's Real streams).  My NPR phone, a BlackBerry, also has a downloadable shortcut to this (also available for the iPhone) where you can just click an icon and up comes the mobile site.  Even has a link to a number you can call to listen to hourly news updates.
5. [1-2 times per week]  I just visit NPR.org and look for a story that I missed but heard about.  Since it's got text versions, one can get the story that way.
6. [once a month]  I subscribe to a few podcasts, but listen only occasionally to them on the phone.  I also have them on my iPod, and listen there more often in heavy travel months.
7. [once a month or less] Public radio RSS feeds on Bloglines mobile (or your favorite feed reader).  Before March, when I had a life, this was a weekly source of audio, but I've been slacking on my feed reading.  Radio RSS feeds often provide both text and audio versions of a story.  NPR maintains a large list of NPR news, program, topic and member station feeds.  I also use Google Reader on both the Nokia and the BlackBerry.

Nokia uses the Symbian S60 operating system, so these things all work on its N series phones.  Windows Mobile smartphones also carry some or all of these features (many don't have the FM radio -- too bad) but access streams through Windows Media.  Some BlackBerries (not mine) support streaming media also.

It's great to have this media companion along and providing worldwide access to public radio.  Good listening!  --Dennis

Wilmington Becomes Model For Digital TV Switch

I posted Sunday about the Wilmington, NC market switch from analog to digital TV transition, linking to a story on NPR by WHQR's Catherine Welch.  Catherine had a follow-up story on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday.  The link includes text and audio for the story plus additional information on the transition.  Nice job covering this.

[By the way, if you're reading this fairly soon after this is posted, you'll see that NPR's open API already snagged this story and automatically posted it to the column of stories on the left of this blog.  The stories are licensed for noncommercial use, so if you're site qualifies, check it out.]

Also see John Dunbar's story for the Associated Press, Old antennas cause complaints in digital TV test.  Link:  AP.

Big cable thinks it's going to gain subscribers, and they're probably right.  See Deborah Yao's report, also for the AP, Comcast, Time Warner Cable sees digital TV gains.  Link:  AP.  --Dennis

NPR's digital distribution strategy

N.B.   Many readers know that I'm the Interim CEO at National Public Radio, but this personal blog (now closing out its fifth year) has only a couple of times been used to talk about related things going on at NPR or at my previous workplace.  However, since what we're trying to build is so closely related to what I've learned over those five years and earlier, all of which I've shared here, I thought it made sense to share this "private" email to NPR station managers here.

If you're at a public television station or in a non-profit, education or government organization, please read on because this initiative could very well be for you also.  So now, I'll quote from this morning's email with only very minor changes.  --Dennis

_______________________________

Dear station colleagues,

 

Happy Monday!  With apologies for the length of this, I’m hoping to stitch together several developments at NPR in the context of what they mean for the future of your station.  It will pay special attention to connecting a number of developments into a coherent digital strategy.  I am excited about these because I think they can be important building blocks in lifting all of public radio.

 

The 90 stations that founded NPR did so because they wanted to serve the public in a way that could only be achieved through collaboration.  This collaboration has encouraged impartial distribution of both branded programming (NPR, PRI, APM) and independent productions - in the intervening 38 years through PRSS and, more recently, PRX. Distributed hours have grown tremendously over the past four decades.  As we seek to strengthen our relationships in content creation and fundraising, we must make a strong commitment to reinventing distribution for a new age, or we will fail to reach the audiences we seek to serve.

 

Radio will remain strong long after I’m a full-time grandpa, but the rapid adoption of new digital platforms means we must effectively utilize these platforms or ultimately witness the erosion of our audience and economic model.  More importantly, the new digital platforms give greatly expanded opportunities to deliver broader public service, to be more significant in our communities and nation.

 

Toward this end, there are now several initiatives on our plate at NPR.  I'll write primarily about a cluster of digital distribution projects from which we will draw to create something we're calling the "Community-Building Initiative," but I also want to mention a news-related one that will benefit from the same initiative.

 

• A “News Network of the Future” (NNoF) is envisioned to provide structure and scale for collaboration in the support      and production of news for all platforms, building on ideas which have already brought promising results to a few stations (e.g., N³, the Northwest News Network);
• Three related projects in the category of what I’ll call “distributed distribution” —expanding our ability to reach our listeners better, and expanding and engaging our audience:
  • The open Application Provider Interface (API),
  • The acquisition of Public Interactive (PI), and       
  • The Community-Building Initiative (CBI), which I’ll discuss below.

 

There have been several digital distribution efforts in public media in recent years.  Leaving out many, I’d like to tip a hat to a few that have made extraordinary contributions.  Independent producer Stephen Hill showed us that the web can be an important means to serve the audience, and that they will financially support such efforts.  Entrepreneur/philanthropist Mike Homer developed Open Media Network, a functioning content delivery network for public media, with the help of Stephen, KQED’s Tim Olson, myself and several others, and gifted it to public broadcasting.  PI (above) under the direction of Debra May Hughes has been public media’s innovative application service provider for years.  Jake Shapiro’s team built Public Radio Exchange (PRX) under the sponsorship of the Station Resource Group, creating a way to cultivate, discover and distribute new talent, voices and ideas and to innovate with models that connect listeners to a broader world.  Mark Fuerst’s Integrated Media Association has led beyond-the-transmitter thinking for years. NPR’s Dana Davis Rehm has championed both the News Network of the Future and the Digital Distribution Consortium (DDC) of 2006 in which Jake, Tim and others played critical roles.  Lastly, the WGBH Forum Network and Twin Cities Public Television’s Minnesota Channel are important inspirations to the CBI.

 

Bottom line – there has been a ton of work by dozens of people over nearly a decade during which, independently, Web strategies and content distribution over the Internet have matured.  We have learned a lot in this time, we have successful exemplars, and it’s past time to put those to work in ways that strengthen public radio. 

 

This and what follows provides some context for the announcements you’ve heard about the open API and the PI acquisition and why it’s important for the future of your station.

 

The open Application Programming Interface (API) is an awful name for a very powerful functionality that permits accessing NPR and, soon, station and other content and placing it with modest but important restrictions on non-NPR web sites.  These might be your station’s web site, or it might be a non-profit organization with which your station has a relationship, or it might be a blog that your sister maintains.  If you look down the left column of [this] blog, you can see an example that took me ten minutes to install.  Why do this?  Because open, distributed access to public radio content will result in much greater usage than if we require everyone to come to our portals.  It’s expanding the reach of public radio beyond the radio or our own websites.  This is being fairly recognized as one the most progressive and powerful web initiatives in American media.  Open APIs are common on the web but are very rare among major media companies.

 

Public Interactive (PI) has been around for a long time and has a great reputation for providing Web services to the public broadcasting community.  We’re pleased to have reached an accord with Public Radio International to bring it into the NPR family.  Its mission is entirely consistent with our goal of increasing NPR’s commitment to station services, as was our acquisition of National Public Media(NPM) last fall.  PI has a great suite of products and its core competencies are consistent with our open API and other “distributed distribution” efforts to grow the quality and relevance of station websites.

 

Combining these, we are developing the Community-Building Initiative to expose public media content to broader audiences, strengthen public stations as a key community anchor, help national and local community service organizations be more effective, and, through all that, enhance and diversify the public media economy. Like NNoF, the CBI is a “child” of NPR’s New Realities effort.  An example follows and this weekend I doodled a simplified drawing [see link] for those among you who are visually oriented.

 

To seed this effort, we are working to establish several model national partnerships with non-profit organizations which have affiliates in your communities.  There is a complex array of ways new partnerships of this kind could work, so to help in understanding one of them, here’s a fictional example:

 

Let’s say that you’re a public radio manager who wants to gain exposure for what your station does and build community public service alliances, adding local value.  You have recently been approached by a local conservation organization that has a best-practices initiative relating to salmon recovery for which it would like build awareness.  It is also interested in building a community dialog using modern social media tools.  Traditionally, you might have put them in touch with your news director, who has done stories on salmon recovery in the past and perhaps might be interested in another one.  She handles the story in the journalistically critical arm’s length way and it is heard by 10-15% of your weekly cume on the air and then it (maybe) goes into a podcast or is archived on your web site.

 

But the CBI expands possibilities.  Let’s say that the organization also has some video content that it commissioned, perhaps from your local PTV station.  With proper guidelines, branding and labeling, it can be part of a larger collection that you can distribute.  So this video piece, the ten radio stories you’ve already produced archived on this subject, some NPR stories on the subject (Google gives 574 hits for “salmon” on npr.org), a couple of related stories from PRX, and links to related blogs in your community are curated by your web producer into a widget (a piece of portable code that can fetch content from other web sites) carrying your branding, the template for which has been provided to you by Public Interactive.  That template also includes social media features to build communities of interest, plus opt-in sponsorship messages arranged by NPM.  The widget then goes on the partner’s web site, on those of many of your other partners, on your own pages, on relevant blogs, etc.  Others will use the API tools to extract some of these pieces and republish them still more places.  Web searches build still more users, not just for the distributed content but for your main web site.  In the context of how search works (see PageRank), these multiple linking relationships make it more likely for your content to emerge higher in search results.  This strategy builds a much larger audience by bringing content to people rather than requiring them to come to your website.

 

Perhaps the station undertakes similar partnerships with 25 or 50 or 100 other community organizations. Some of these are local affiliates of national service organizations with which NPR will have initiated relationships that stations can opt into.  Others are those you develop yourself.  You can see that the placement opportunities for content grow tremendously.  So do new partnerships that increase your station’s impact in the community, not to mention new funding opportunities from new sources.

 

Public broadcasters have learned over nearly 40 years that distribution success depends on brand impartiality.  Recent digital distribution work has taught that we’re better off starting with a service   model and related economics, instead of with technology, and that we need a to place our content many places on the web, not just on our own web sites.  To be sure, there are important issues, especially with the need to maintain a wall between partner-generated content and station journalism efforts, but there are numerous successful examples to follow.  The CBI plan is to incorporate all of these assumptions in a way that just might transform the value equation for public broadcasting stations in their communities.   

 

These are exciting and challenging times for all of us in public radio.  I continue to be encouraged by what I see and hear from stations around the country, and what is happening here at NPR.  These latest developments should give us some important new tools to address our common future in a way that can transform both the impact and economics of public media.  Please share your thoughts about these issues with me by posting a comment below. 

 

Dennis Haarsager, Interim CEO, NPR

Wilmington, NC cuts over to digital television early on Monday

Since for the past six months I've a radio-only job for the first time in my career, the FCC's transition to the new digital television transmission standard next February is suddenly a non-event, so I can say with Mad's Alfred E. Neuman, "What -- me worry?"  The FCC and the broadcasters in the Wilmington, North Carolina market are trying to determine exactly how much to early tomorrow when the entire market cuts over to DTV early.  Catherine Welch of Wilmington's public radio station, WHQR, had the story on NPR's All Things Considered today.  It will be interesting to see what they learn. --Dennis

Who are you, Master, and why do you want to control me?

My sister and brother-in-law have been staying with me in Washington this week, so I've played hookey a few hours during the week to do touristy things with them.  One of them was a visit to the Newseum yesterday, a beautiful tribute to the values of big craft journalism -- which, of course, I try to nourish every day.  However, that particular visit followed a briefing that our management team at NPR got from Andy Carvin concerning social media plans.  I'm trying to nourish this kind of thinking every day also.  So this juxtaposition of media values, which some observers might think are contrasting, were at work when I ran across the foot tall MASTER CONTROL letters on the 3rd floor of the Newseum.  What room in a media company could be more at odds with social media?  --Dennis

The delusions of net neutrality

Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota makes a withering analysis of the arguments of network service providers concerning why (real-time streaming capabilities) they oppose net neutrality.  Odlyzko's analyses frequently challenge flabby assumptions with hard data and this one is particularly valuable.

Two of Om Malik's blogs today provide an overview of this important paper.  In Streams Won't Pay for Themselves, Chris Albrecht writes:

... Video can be delivered more efficiently and less expensively using downloads over streaming, says Oldzyko, and these downloads can be more accommodating to the viewing habits of online audiences and just as secure as streams. ¶  Oldzyko thinks the belief that we need real-time streaming is a holdover from broadcast and phone networks. ...

Link:  NewTeeVee.

Then, in Hulu Bad For the Net, Video Still Not Clogging It, Stacey Higginbotham writes:

... the largest part of the paper is devoted to data that supports his conclusions that content, such as Internet radio and video, is worth less than connectivity such as voice or Twitter. People don’t pay for content, they pay for connectivity, says Odlyzko. ...

Link: Gigaom.

Here's the abstract of and link to Odlyzko's paper:

Abstract. Service providers argue that if net neutrality is not enforced, they will have sufficient incentives to build special high-quality channels that will take the Internet to the next level of its evolution. But what if they do get their wish, net neutrality is consigned to the dustbin, and they do build their new services, but nobody uses them? If the networks that are built are the ones that are publicly discussed, that is a likely prospect.

What service providers publicly promise to do, if they are given complete control of their networks, is to build special facilities for streaming movies. But there are two fatal defects to that promise. One is that movies are unlikely to oer all that much revenue. The other is that delivering movies in real-time streaming mode is the wrong solution, expensive and unnecessary.

If service providers are to derive significant revenues and profits by exploiting  freedom from net neutrality limitations, they will need to engage in much more intrusive control of traffic than just provision of special channels for streaming movies.

Link:  University of Minnesota [pdf].  --Dennis