For the past few years, NPR has been making a conscious effort to reinvent itself as a multiplatform force, investing a lot of money in training its people and acquiring new equipments. Allegiances aside, since I've already confessed I'm an NPR fan, I think there's no doubt they've succeeded.
If you have some time to spare, you may want to read about The Transformation of NPR, published at the end of last year by American Journalism Review, and then check the many examples where NPR meets or exceeds its goal "to get our [NPR's] stories and our storytelling and our journalism out to people wherever they are and in whatever form they want to experience it," as NPR Vice President for News, Ellen Weiss, puts it.
But if you don't have enough time, just check out today's story on Obama's trip to the Middle East. In just the summary page, NPR gives you the whole package: The story itself, compelling, well-researched and well-written, as NPR has us accustomed to, the Two-Way Blog with a video of Obama's speech, which you can watch in its entirety or just highlights of it (On the "New Beginning", On Moving Forward, and On Stereotypes), the transcript and the audio of the speech, a photo gallery, and a timeline of US Presidents and the Muslim World, from the 1940's until today.
Inside the link, you can also find the analysis of the speech on "Morning Edition", in case you missed it on your way to work, and other related articles.
And this is just one story. If you look at the rest of the website, you can find pretty much the whole range of multimedia services (except for Twitter)--Radio, podcasts, NPR social network, newsfeeds, mobile, newsletters and a gadget for the Google Desktop Sidebar that plays streams of NPR's programs and let's you listen to the NPR Hourly Newscast.
Just a decade ago, who would have thought that public radio would be at the forefront of embracing multimedia?
*Picture taken from NPR's website (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
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3 comments:
Hi! Yes, I really enjoyed looking at the pictures and reading the FULL TEXT of the speech from Obama's Cairo trip so far.
I guess now there's no clear distinction between print/tv/radio when we're ALL online and competing for the same eyeballs. But I am drawn to NPR because it has these various elements and it's easy to find and clear to navigate.
I agree -- whoulda thunk NPR would have pulled so much together to present comprehensive (i.e., multimedia) coverage? I can remember years ago when public broadcasting-type operations were considered jokes, largely for being deaf and unresponsive to public wants and changing times. Good for NPR that they've come full circle and in some sense bitten such critics in the backside.
Nice post! It made me want to know more about how are they doing in assigning stuff. I read the article you linked to, and one big issue by then was that people were doing the online stuff after doing what they were supposed to do for the radio shows. I would like to learn more about how do you reorganize your people if you want to make your outlet go mulktimedia...
I know about this magazine that, after going online, decided also to launch radio. And the radio has a web page, too. Would love to know the insight and compare it to NPR. I´m leaving you guys the link: http://www.paula.cl/
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