Piping public media’s economy stories

We’re one of a number of stations participating in a collaborative effort to share reporting on the economy. It’s a good and timely project, one that I hope will get enough buzz to encourage more than just a few stations to join.

There are a lot of free resources, ranging from widgets to audio and video reports for the web, and for use on-air, graphics, special purpose RSS feeds, etc.

It’s all good stuff, but one big thing seems to be missing: a true sense of collaboration.

Together, public media’s reporting on the economy is exceptional. There’s The Newshour, NPR News and its Planet Money brand, The World, and Marketplace… and that doesn’t even get into the fine reporting from other specialty shows and a range of local stations. In the collaboration, I have a number of widgets available for my station web site, each of which displays reports from the provider, with logo lovingly attached.

If I want to add stories from Marketplace, The World, The Newshour, and NPR, I must install separate RSS feeds and widgets – one for each service. The result: a widget-infested, RSS-ey goo.

Apparently, the collaboration here is limited to the page on which all of this stuff is hosted.

Now, this collaboration implies that public media collectively has excellent economic reporting. If this is true, has it occurred to anyone to create a widget that:

• aggregates it into a single feed or widget so that it’s more usable for our audience
• makes it possible for us to have all the valuable content in one place so our web pages look more well organized
• mimics the same seamless experience our listeners have on-air, where programs from many providers live together in a way that makes sense to listeners and to us.

Actually, I think it has occurred to some and has been rejected because everyone wants only their logo on a widget. Perhaps I’m being presumptuous, but I think I’m not far off the mark. If it is true, the most charitable response is that this is short-sighted and gives up an important opportunity to offer our audience the depth and quality of what our national organizations are producing daily, in aggregate.

Click on the pic for a bigger version.

Well, I don’t feel like complaining; I feel like Piping. I built my own widget for WFPL in Yahoo Pipes. It’s an extremely simple pipe, importing specific RSS feeds from NPR News, The World, The Newshour, Marketplace, The Takeaway and the PRX blog EconomyBeat. I’ve also added PRX’s economy feed of select content from local stations around the country to throw a bit of a wild card into the mix.

The Pipes feed exports as a straight RSS, and as a javascript widget, among other options. I’m using the RSS feed on the right sidebar of The Mediavore. I’m using a javascript widget on WFPL’s Economy page. The widget isn’t perfect: I’m still thinking about that “Public Media on the Economy” title; and I now have a Yahoo Pipes logo on my web page, but it’s thankfully small, leaving the focus where it should be – on the content.

I’ve been watching the feed for the past week and I like the results a lot, although I’m open to suggestions and tweaks. If you want to use this aggregated feed for your site, go ahead. If you want to create your own feed, Pipes is very easy to use and is configurable in all kinds of ways.

But without getting strident, let me stress again that the point of this Economy project is collaboration. We can do better than we’re doing.