Todd Mundt

Is that a real term? Might be. Did I invent it or did someone else? I don’t care.

Whatever it is, we’re experimenting with it at WFPL.org. This is the first of two posts about it.

The experiment is a first stab at trying to address three problems: first, public radio web sites are really quite static. Yes, most of us publish all our news there, and WFPL reporters are churning out a lot of stuff every day. Yes, we switch out the boxes and pretty pictures and we update the text.

But compare any public radio web site to a blog like Talking Points Memo. Ignore the point of view, and look at the site. Two thirds of the page is the basic grouping of content call-outs, ads, RSS feeds, etc. It’s the near-static stuff that’s common on most public radio web sites. But what’s the heart of the site? The blog that’s squeezed in the left hand side. New stuff appears there all day, sometimes way into the night. Sure the content is compelling to partisans, but the pace of content itself drives audience. Technorati’s regular State of the Blogosphere reports make that clear: generally, the more fresh content, the bigger the audience.

Second problem: there’s a lot of stuff squirreled away on our internal pages, some of it good, some of it really good. There should be a better way to call out that great stuff on the one page most everyone arrives on (and leaves) than an auto-generated list. Sometimes it’s worth putting the graphic designer to work on a tile box. But often, it’s a piece of content that’s interesting or important right now, not yesterday, not tomorrow.

Third problem: Our radio stations succeed because they have a distinct voice, personality, point of view (I’m not talking politics). Our web sites are like a stainless steel room. All the “furniture” from the radio station is there, but it’s been scrubbed clean of any scuff marks, photos, curtains - all the personality and voice that is the connective tissue of public radio.

Now, users of public radio web sites connect with them for different reasons than they listen to the radio. Their “handling” of the web and radio are different. The architecture of the web is different than the architecture of radio, and we build each differently. But do they have to be that different?

Blogs help because, by their very nature, blogs are more personal (even when authored by many), off-the-cuff, they have a distinct voice. So our ancillary blogs help us create a kind of stationality on the web.

But why does that sense of life and personality exist in a separate place from the main web site? Why couldn’t we find a way to combine them? Community tools do this very nicely, but we think we can approach it from the content side, too. Naturally, I’m not talking about turning our journalism into blogging. But our journalism co-exists with our stationality on the radio; at WFPL, we think it can co-exist on the web.

We’re experimenting with the WFPL Content Concierge as a toe in the water to begin addressing these problems. On Monday, I’ll write about what we’re trying.