But these are difficult times and NPR has acted prudently to protect its financial position, going forward. The NPR roster of programs has sprawled in the past five years, and some recent investments haven’t paid off in terms of station carriage and listening. This doesn’t mean that the programs were bad, or that the staff lacked talent. But any wise steward of resources will, as quickly and painlessly as possible, end or retool the experiments that don’t work. And in an economic downturn, it makes double sense to focus on the core services.

Day to Day and News and Notes will end early next year. More than 60 people will leave NPR, including a few of the most well-known voices of NPR programs over the decades, a couple of whom I’ve heard, in one capacity or another, since I began listening to public radio at the age of 13.

Local stations around the country have also cut positions and there will be many more such announcements over the coming year. Each job loss represents a talented human being who is being turned loose into a falling economy. This is all quite painful, but let’s hope that the pain we experience now is a downpayment on the future growth and success of NPR and public media.

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.

Interestingly, NPR makes special note of NPR staff who are part of the community, an attempt to foster communication between staff and listeners.

NPR’s entry into social media is low key, but it looks to be a nice implementation and there’s room to grow prudently.

Wilson is the Executive Editor of USA Today. Before that, he was the editor of USAToday.com, and he played a key role in USA Today’s much-talked-about web site relaunch last year.

He replaces Maria Thomas, who left to join Etsy earlier this year, ultimately becoming COO.

• * Transcript of Newshour interview with Kinsey Wilson (2005)

It’s exceptionally good, written with the tone you’d expect from someone who is a visionary, and yet approves of ending what some saw as a visionary experiment.

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.

The cost of this experiment was considerable, on the scale of a traditional radio program, and that created great pressure to achieve the traditional results – primarily, significant station carriage to justify the expense. That’s not precisely the result of “an old way of thinking.” It might be that it’s the result of executing on a scale that ensured that BPP’s web/social media success couldn’t sustain it.

As Haarsager notes, he and others at NPR have learned a lot from this experiment, and there are still plenty of questions to answer about how a news program might derive its life from the web.

NPR has also learned that, while a major expenditure of cash couldn’t make this program successful on the radio, the expenditure of almost nothing garnered a social network of thousands of fans – a big success (how much did NPR spend on Facebook and twitter? basically nothing).

How might they approach such an experiment again? Perhaps with a budget and expectations more carefully tailored to ensure success on the web. That’s one way to do it, and there are others.

This subject has all kinds of layers… from a large successful network built on risks, that some think won’t take risks anymore, to a board that mainly represents traditional radio stations (where the money and audience is right now), to the Innovator’s Dilemma, to demographics, to NPR’s great success with podcasting, etc. Simple it ain’t.

Frankly, there’s more here than any of us can easily synthesize. That’s where a lot of voices is a good thing. Here’s Haarsager; here’s Paterson; here’s Proffitt… and this is just scratching the surface. If you’re interested in the subject, read as many perspectives as you can.

Simple rules never get at the complexity of this stuff, but I’ve come up with a simple rule anyway, and you can take it or leave it as you see fit:

Those of us inside public media, as well as those of us who listen to it, need to encourage and expect NPR to innovate and embrace the future, even when it scares a few among us. We also need to expect that NPR will invest as carefully and thoughtfully as it can in these ventures, and create the conditions that will lead to success.

• * Unprecedented flexibility for anyone, from a blogger in Pittsburgh to KQED in San Francisco, to generate highly specific content searches of the NPR archive (going back to 1995) and port the results to a webpage or an application.
• * A number of stations also have their archives inside the system, too. So queries can also include (or not) results from those stations.
• * If more stations are allowed to contribute their content metadata to the API, the search query delivers better and more complete results, encompassing more of the output of the entire public radio system.
• * 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.

Those points are big but that last point is BIG.

The average public radio listener visits her public radio station web site twice a MONTH.

Yes, we’re all working to add value to our sites and increase visits; we must continue to do this. (We’re busting ass on this at Louisville Public Media’s three stations and we’re seeing some great results – details to be revealed in a few months.) But when that content appears on other platforms, that’s when we’ll have a much bigger audience for what we do.

Back to that average public radio listener: she may visit publicstation.org only twice a month, but she reads a set a 10 favorite blogs twice a day. If even one of those blogs uses the API to “curate” a selection of your stories, or installs a widget like this one, guess how much you’ve increased the potential of listeners discovering your content? And clicking over to your web site to read more?

There’s more to be said about other benefits of this… but this is what makes me very excited about what NPR’s Digital team has done… what NPR management has approved.

A technical fog can descend over stories like this, but it shouldn’t. This is a BIG deal.

10am UPDATE: It’s now live. Here’s Daniel Jacobson’s post.

This is a pretty big deal… a signal of openness from NPR, a willingness to let developers have access to NPR’s content, and the beginning of what could be some really cool stuff.

What is an API? Here’s a definition only a developer could love. Here’s my somewhat mangled definition: API is an Application Programming Interface. It’s a set of tools developers can use to access parts of one web site and integrate it with another site or application. Examples? Those applications you add to your Facebook page, those cool applications that plot everything from crime data to photos on Google Maps.

NPR promises a gallery to showcase widgets when the API launches; the blog includes a link to Reverbiage, which plots NPR stories on a world map. That’s a widget I’d love to display on one of WFPL‘s News pages. There’s also a nice iPhone app from Axiom Stack. Probably the best thing about an API is that developers anywhere with good ideas can build applications that can organize and present NPR’s content in all kinds of interesting ways.

An API was one of the least sexy recommendations of the Digital Distribution Consortium – remember that? The group was hard at work two years ago at this time, trying to find ways to present a more coherent way to present public radio online.

Some of the DDC recommendations were fought over, some ignored. But, hey, NPR is about to give us, and developers everywhere, the opportunity to create new tools that add value to NPR’s (and our own) content.

Great to see this kind of information sharing!

Inside NPR.org is one of the collected blogs in my public media “master feed,” which aggregates many public media blogs (I’m always looking to add to it.) The rss feed is here.

Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, writes in his blog that he worked hard to recruit Maria for the Etsy job.

Looking good, Maria… best of luck!