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.

Featuring host (and vocalist) Marion Dries of 91.9 WFPK Radio Louisville.

Oh, and to illustrate how great minds think alike:

from The Essential 885 XPN Songs

With fundraising in full swing, we didn’t fully activate the WFPL page until last weekend. (NPR is allowing station groups to operate multiple pages, so our other stations, WFPK and Classical 90.5, will launch as soon as NPR gives the go-ahead.)

NPR has wisely decided to let station pages launch with all community features turned off; stations that don’t have time, personnel, or an interest in pursuing this can let it be, and listeners who choose WXXX as their favorite will still see a page with basic information about the station.

But, more adventurous stations can turn on a number of features – an events listing, blog, photo and video upload – and listeners who “favorite” the station can directly contribute to some of the features.

At Louisville Public Media, we’re throwing a few darts at the wall to see what sticks. As soon as we decompress from the membership campaign, we’ll be actively encouraging listeners to join the community on-air, on our web site and on our twitter feeds. Our blog on the Community site will feature 2 or 3 posts a day on weekdays, and we’ll be adding more pics and videos. We’ll also encourage our staff to join the community – some already have.

I wish community membership at npr.org could port over to our station sites, and there are a number of other quibbles (no html view in the blog editor makes embedding video very hard) but this is a great start and it’s exciting to see a lively community already developing.

I’ll call this my Mark Fuerst post. This graph shows pageviews for our Election 2008 page over the last 30 days, ending yesterday. As with most stations, unfortunately, our Election 2008 page has not had much traction, despite lots of on-air promotion (at least once per hour). Mark pointed this out at IMA’s Public Media Conference in February.

What happened last Friday (the first spike) and this Wednesday (the point farthest right) to cause the spikes? Well, certainly the debates, but our big change was shifting from heavy generic promotion of the election site to heavy specific promotion of what we had to offer.

Generic Promotion: the latest election news, issues in-depth, an interactive map to explore races around the country.

Specific Promotion: watch the video of last night’s debate, fact-check the candidate’s statements, read NPR’s political blogs.

Notice, also, the halo effect on Monday and Tuesday – we had increasing pageviews both days after our typical weekend dropoff. These numbers still aren’t great when you consider that our election coverage is so front-and-center on-air, and it’s something listeners reference quite often.

This isn’t rocket science, of course. We avoid generic promos because they’re never as effective as the specific promos. But this is a nice visual illustration of the just how effective they can be, and a reminder that we have to be as diligent about web promotion as we are about every other kind of promotion we do. It means more time crafting and updating promo copy, but ultimately, it means more people find what we’ve worked so hard to create for them.

Here’s a sample from our in-studio “Live Lunch” program on WFPK Radio Louisville. The setup is simple – a couple of cameras, with audio piped in from the control room mix. (And, yes, by the way, we’re using two Flip cameras for this.) My personal preference isn’t for a lot of these “slow fade” transitions, but we’re having a good time trying some of this stuff out, and trying to provide a more meaningful experience for the vast majority of our audience not in the studio for the live performance.

We can’t offer long-form video of these concerts without incurring additional rights expenses, but several artists have granted permission for video streaming of one or more of their songs.

Over at Classical 90.5, we’ve tried to take advantage of occasional guest interviews, offering listeners the chance to be viewers.

We’re lucky to have a team of smart people at Louisville Public Media, who understand why this stuff is important, and are willing to learn how to do it.

• – what kind of video content can enhance a particular story we’re doing
• – how to juggle the responsibility of collecting good audio, conducting a good interview, along with handling a camera
• – workflow: the extra time required to edit and produce video; when overlaying the professional audio track on the video is worth the extra time, etc.

Our approach has been simple: give it a shot, see what happens, learn what works or what doesn’t, go out and try it again. So far, the reporters seem enthusiastic about being able to add another dimension to their reporting.

Reporter Gabe Bullard interviewed Louisville’s Mayor for a story he was doing; in addition to the standard audio setup for the radio piece, Gabe slapped his Flip Ultra on a tiny tripod, pointed it at the mayor and pressed the “record” button. The results are pretty good. Audio isn’t perfect; we could spend some extra time syncing the high quality audio track to the video and get even better results. But the audio is also quite acceptable for the web – this isn’t an $800,000 episode of Frontline, you know?

Cost of the camera? About $100 retail. Check out David Pogue’s review here.

In a group email exchange this weekend, Rob Paterson referred to the Flip and other cameras like it as a tipping point in outreach. We’re at the point where cheap=good in video and the potential is great, if we’re willing to explore ways to enhance and increase the content we provide our audience

Look at the quality of video that people (like Scoble, below) are getting with video and audio direct from their cell phones on qik.

Are you going to put that on TV? No, but does it work for the web? Yes. Add a heck of a tripod and Sennheiser mic like this, and you’re in business. (Thanks to Andy Carvin for this link.)

We’re going after grants to get an HD camera (good HD cameras are cheaper than SD these days) and the associated gear to pursue more high-end projects, but we also just bought another Flip for our reporters to use. At this price point, it’s hard to beat.

WFPL News went live on twitter about a month ago, after some brief conversations here in the building about experimenting with the channel. The foundation of our service is a rolling feed of news we’re publishing to our site, delivered automatically via rss. But we’ve also tried a few different things: very low key promotion, giving listeners a heads up about local pieces we’re going to broadcast on Morning Edition or All Things Considered; asking questions of our users (on Primary day, “tell us about your voting experience”); and responding to listeners who direct questions to us.

All of these approaches have worked well, from our perspective. We’ve tried hard not to treat the channel as simply another megaphone to reach the masses. We’ve also tried to avoid the trivial.

Our goal has been to speak to our “audience” on twitter with the same voice we use on-air – a voice that’s personal, approachable, authoritative, thoughtful, sometimes humorous. As I’ve noted before, the vast majority of our followers on twitter are from Louisville; they’re already our listeners and many are big fans. Our interaction with them on-air and on twitter changes slightly with the platform, even though the core values remain the same.

So, we’re ready to expand our experiment a little. Up to now, I’ve been the sole “tweeter” for WFPL News, besides the mouse on the wheel in the RSS engine. In the next few days, we’ll expand to three individuals, each of whom will spend a small amount of time each day with twitter.

Our strategy? Glad you asked.

• The auto-feed of news stories continues via rss
• Promotion of local content continues – local features during newsmagazines, promotion of topics on local shows. (by promotion, I mean one mention within an hour before broadcast, not multiple hits)
• Promotion of new web features like Budget Hero.
• We’ll look for 1-2 opportunities each week, initially, to “survey” our audience. We’ll take what I call a “public insight” approach, asking people questions where they can be the expert: what was your experience when you went to vote today? or what’s the price you paid when you last filled the gas tank? as opposed to why have Kentucky graduation rates risen this year? The questions we ask will have a purpose, providing either direct or anecdotal information to our reporters or producers.
• We’ll add a brief update on stories we’re covering for the day each morning.
• We’ll continue to respond to every person who asks a question or makes a comment; we’ll monitor the entire twitter stream regularly, too, so we can see any other conversations about us. (Summize is killer for this; you should go there right after you read this and enter your organization’s name in the box to see what people are saying about you.)
• Develop 1-2 new experiments to test on the channel.

And that, for now, is our strategy. It takes the elements that worked in our first experiment, and makes them standard, more intentional.

Why not more? Because in our “budget” of time and staff, that’s what we can afford at present. Right now, we have about 65 “listeners” on twitter; we can scale up our presence as our audience grows and as staffing allows.

How does this twitter plan fit our Media Strategy? It advances a couple of our goals: increasing interaction with our audience, and increasing the transparency of our organization.

How will we know if it’s working? We’ll look for the following easily measured results: more local followers on twitter; more followers talking directly to us, answering our questions, but also asking us about other stuff (for instance, when will we get the first customer service question on twitter? the first “I gave you money, where’s my coffee mug?”); and growth in visits to our main web sites.

How often will we evaluate and potentially adjust our plan? Weekly. We aren’t going to try this for a year and then produce a Powerpoint.

In summary, our approach to a social media opportunity is not that much different from anything else we do. It involves a plan, an accounting of costs and benefits, goals and regular review.

But the first piece is more general and broad – a statement of principles, if you will. I’m publishing my second draft here for your thoughts and comments. Some of you are in public media and have been thinking about this, or you’ve developed your own plans. I’d love your input.

We’ll be talking with our board about it this week.

LOUISVILLE PUBLIC MEDIA
Transformation

Radio is likely to continue to play an important role as an entertainment and information medium for some time to come, but in the past decade, the Internet has also become an important source of news, information, opinion, and outlet for personal expression for our listeners. And the younger listeners who are entering the public media demographic view the Internet is a primary source of information, entertainment and engagement; their media habits include little traditional radio listening, even though they consume a lot of audio and video, including content produced by public media, on the Internet.

Louisville Public Media’s response to this transformation is to transform itself. Our commitment to producing excellent content designed for our radio audience is stronger than ever. But we’ll thoughtfully and prudently invest in new technologies and platforms that help us to further our overall goal of serving our audience and making a significant contribution to the community.

The Fundamentals

Service to our audience comes first; technology second.
Our primary business has never been technology – the transmission of radio waves, the ownership of towers; it is service to the community. Radio is and has been the best means for us to offer our quality content to a mass audience. As new technologies become available, public media is presented with an array of new tools to serve its current audience better; those tools can also expand the available audience for public media, increasing our service to the community and our impact.

As we expand to new platforms, relationship-building and community-building remain our core values.
“Old” media or “New,” it’s all Social Media. Radio began life in the center of the living room and family listening, and even now, although many in our audience listen to us privately, through headphones or in their cars, there is a wealth of conversation that takes place at cafes, workplaces, dinner tables, as people talk about what they “heard on NPR.” New technologies open new pathways 1) for us to engage with our audience more directly than ever before, and 2) for our listeners to interact with people who share their concerns and values all over the world.

Building bridges that connect our listeners to each other, and allow them to exchange ideas and opinions, is part of the mandate of this public media organization.

Strategy

1) Use new and emerging platforms to reach our audience with compelling content that represents the diversity of the community.

We will carefully consider technological developments and new platforms to discover opportunities that align most thoroughly with our mission and values. We will prudently invest in technologies and platforms that meet the test, and rigorously assess their performance.

We create a wealth of news, music and other cultural content every day. We will take advantage of new platforms of distribution to reach a larger portion of our addressable audience with this content. We’ll also create low-cost, high-impact content designed to make the most advantageous use of chosen platforms, including, perhaps, content which will allow us to improve service to specific segments of our audience.

2) Use new technologies to increase the quality and depth of interaction our audience has with us.

We need to make sure we’re always listening to our community – whether someone is responding to a story, suggesting a song or an artist or offering criticism. Everyone in our organization needs to be listening… from Membership to our talk show producers, on-air hosts, management, and the News department. This feedback may come directly to us, but often it won’t. We need to “listen” to what our audience says about us on twitter, Facebook, in the newspaper, or word-of-mouth in the community, so we can respond appropriately, and most important, so we can learn. In the same fashion, we should use new technologies like twitter and Facebook to communicate with our audience, in a manner consistent with our Core Values.

3) Use new technologies to make our journalism more transparent to our audience, and to welcome audience participation in the creative of authorative journalism.

In an era when trust in institutions of journalism is at an all-time low, trust in public media is strong. But we’re not entirely immune to the discontent that is causing some citizens to give up on traditional media. We’ll continue to build trust as we accurately report the news; but we’ll also build trust by being as transparent as we can about our reporting and editorial decisionmaking. Tools like blogs allow us to explain more thoroughly our processes to those who are interested; the web is a great place to offer access to the source materials our journalists use as they work on their stories, from documents to unedited interviews. We should “open” our news process to our audience, to the extent that this is possible.

We should explore citizen journalism and forms of audience participation in journalism. Some in our audience will want to contribute stories, too. We should experiment with ways to encourage this form of expression. It may not have the same authority as professional journalism, but this shouldn’t prevent us from exploring ways in which our audience can contribute content, and the appropriate venues for that content.

We must tap into the knowledge reservoir of our audience. American Public Media’s Public Insight Network harnesses this knowledge to improve the quality of professional journalism. It’s a social media approach to professional journalism that preserves (and enhances) the quality of the product our audience has come to expect, while welcoming useful contributions from the audience. This should be a top priority.

4) We must develop appropriate metrics to measure our impact on the community and to guide our investment decisions.

Just as certain technologies won’t advance our goals of increased service, quality interaction and greater transparency, some opportunities will meet these goals and not yet not be sustainable. And in many cases, we don’t have enough information to measure the impact of our services on new platforms. We’ll work with others in our industry to develop benchmarks for our new initiatives.

Andy Carvin has composed an excellent essay that’s well worth your time, arguing for engagement and authenticity on twitter: more live (or semi-live) conversation, less automated publishing.

WFPL News went live this morning with its twitter feed. The core of our service will include some automation: newsroom stories are getting pumped to twitter as they get published on the site. But when I vetted our plan with Andy this morning, he pointed out the #5 priority on my list (“directly engage the audience on twitter”) and encouraged me to move it up closer to #1 (that automated feed).

Twitter is about conversation. I’ve been in the twitter community since January 2007; it began as a presence app, designed so you could update your status for your friends. But that broadcast model was very quickly challenged, especially once twitter took off. People started talking to each other – not private chats (although those are possible with twitter) but public conversations.

I’ve always compared it to shouting across a crowded bar to a friend: what you’re saying is for your friend, but you don’t mind others hearing it. And perhaps a couple other friends, or total strangers, will chime in. That’s twitter. It’s conversations… or as Marshall Kirkpatrick said (on twitter) last night, “… rapid, short, synchronous and public conversations.”

Alright, so using twitter is all about conversation and engagement. If you need more convincing, read Carvin’s post again.

It’s also about authenticity, transparency – the most basic concepts that should govern how we engage with our audience on any platform, web, on-air, whatever. And on this subject of authenticity, one of the keys to success here is getting the “voice” right.

Program directors think about this all the time in the context of their on-air sound; it’s part of the core values of our services. Well, if you’re a program director, your job is getting bigger; you are now (or should be) program director of the web, of the podcasts, of the extra streams, of the HD multicast, etc. What are the qualities of heart, mind and craft of your station? How do they translate to every facet of your outreach? And how does each service bearing your brand reflect and build upon those core values?

At Louisville Public Media (as is the case at most public stations), we try to answer every email, letter and phone call we get. We’re gracious when praised; concerned and ready to learn when we get criticism. We tell our audience that every listener is important and we try to live that.

How do we live it on twitter? Map the principles to the new platform. Every user who “follows” us gets followed back. Everyone who sends a direct message to us via twitter will get a response. Everyone who “shouts across the bar to us” will get a response. Since we respect the intelligence of our audience and value their input, we’ll develop ways to encourage input from our twitter audience. And we’ll speak to them in much the same tone we use on the air – an intelligent, thoughtful, sometimes humorous voice.

We have to, not because we’ve swallowed a pill that makes us all sweaty whenever someone brings up branding. It’s much simpler than that: so far, nearly every non-public media person who has followed us is from Louisville. These people aren’t like our listeners. They are our listeners.

We’ll go slow. I expect I’ll engage this little online community in much the same way that I try to engage them when I’m on air or at a public event, and I expect we’ll expand the experiment to include other on-air personalities who want to get in on the fun.

If anything interesting happens, I’ll let you know.

We saw the power of KPBS News during the California wildfires, in the effective ways they used a variety of new tools, including Twitter… but what do you do when your city of license isn’t on fire?

Ken George at WBUR has turned the lights back on at WBUR’s twitter account and wrote yesterday (thanks, acarvin, for pointing me to it) about what the station twitter account should be.

I remain uncertain — to the point of apprehension — about what I should “Tweet” about. Do you want WBUR news updates? Irreverent musings? Programming information? Personal trivia? Shout-outs to my peeps? A running chronology of my day?

Early comments indicate people want a combination of all of the above.

I flipped the switch on WFPL’s twitter account today, and when I suggested to Andy Carvin that I’d emphasize the newsfeed over (but not to the exclusion of) the interactive element, he suggested I re-think that. And he’s right – twitter is more about conversation and engagement and less marketing, promotion and station bullhorn.

Anyway, I’ll write more about our plan for twitter later.

The Public Radio Partnership began with the unification of three Louisville public radio stations. The name for that new organization was all about them, and rightly so. Mergers are difficult, time-consuming, internalized processes. Now, years later, the merger is history, a success, and it’s time for a new vision.

The new name represents a vital organization looking outward to its community – an organization committed to serving its listeners, enriching their lives, empowering them, in an era when local commercial broadcasters have disappeared behind the corporate curtain, behind the voice-track.

Names are symbolic, but symbols carry power and intent. Congratulations to the entire staff of Louisville Public Media on this important step forward. On March 10, I’ll be proud to join you.