By Andy Carvin (@acarvin)

On October 17-18 in Washington DC we held our first national PublicMediaCamp. I'm proud to say that it completely exceeded my expectations. Held in conjunction with PBS, American University's Center for Social Media and iStrategyLabs, PubCamp brought together more than 250 people from across the country, including bloggers, social media enthusiasts, techies and staff from around three dozen public media stations.

Following the model of BarCamp and PodCamp, PubCamp was organized, as it were, as an unconference. We encouraged participants to brainstorm session ideas on a wiki prior to the camp, but the schedule itself wasn't created until each morning's opening session. Anyone who wanted to lead a session had to announce it to the entire group; volunteers wrote down the session titles and gave them to me for placement on a paper chart mapping out which rooms and time slots were available. If you've never attended an unconference, it might come as a surprise that this method of event planning (or lack thereof) could actually work, but we ended up spawning more than 50 sessions over both days of the camp. Very few of these sessions were your typical conference PowerPoint presentation. in many cases, the session leader would make everyone rearrange the chairs in a circle so everyone could participate equally, which was heartening given the fact we tried to emphasize that attendees should see themselves as full-fledged participants rather than passive audience members.

The sessions themselves covered a range of issues, from strategies for stations to work with local bloggers to mobilizing volunteers during natural disasters. Many of the sessions managed to wrangle someone in the group to serve as official note taker; we've assembled these notes on the PubCamp wiki.

PubCamper John Proffitt put together this video capturing some of the scenes from PubCamp:

Continue reading "Reflections On PublicMediaCamp" >

By Mark Stencel

The NPR News staff is a chatty group, on-air and online -- as thousands of our Twitter followers and Facebook friends already know. Individual NPR journalists, from longtime host Scott Simon to new health blogger Scott Hensley, regularly muse online about their work and other subjects. Even the somewhat technical updates that our Digital Media staff posted on Twitter when we revamped NPR.org in July drew surprising interest and feedback.

Popular social media sites and services are great reporting tools. They help our journalists find and keep in contact with a wide range of sources. They also provide powerful ways to connect with our listeners and users and to share our journalism. But all of us at NPR News need to remember that, as journalists, we are just as responsible and accountable for what we say and do online as we are in other aspects of our lives.

Social media guidelines shared with the news staff on Thursday offer commonsense rules and reminders for those of us here who make use of these communication channels. Summarizing the guidance in an e-mail message, Senior Vice President for News Ellen Weiss urged the staff to "use social media for journalistic purposes and as a way to connect with the audience." Weiss also reminded our journalists -- including the engineering, operations and news administration staffs -- to avoid doing "anything online that will damage your credibility or the credibility of NPR."

Continue reading "Beats and Tweets: Journalistic Guidelines for the Facebook Era" >

By Robert Spier, Demian Perry and Daniel Jacobson

We have just released a new update to our NPR News iPhone app. (v1.2, if you're counting; we sure are!) It's ready for download from the iTunes Store. Here are some of the updates we've made to it:

Listen Live: Although NPR is not a radio station, we do "go live," over our member stations' broadcasts as well as from NPR.org, for major scheduled or unscheduled news events. With v1.2, we have now extended this capability to the iPhone; if NPR is in live coverage, you will receive a start-up alert inviting you to tune in. Down the line, we will improve the ways in which we notify iPhone app users about live coverage; we also anticipate presenting NPR Music live concerts.

A Better Audio Experience: v1.2 offers two improvements here: improved audio streaming in low bandwidth scenarios, and greater Playlist stability.

Sharing: We have added the ability for users to share, not just individual stories, but also many of the program episodes via email, Twitter and Facebook. We have also improved the Twitter share screens in particular.

Story Page & Images: We have improved the layout of individual story pages. And, if you enlarge any photo on a story page, you will now see an overlay presenting the full caption.

All in all, v1.2 offers a total of 32 improvements. Many of these are in response to your feedback via the NPR Facebook page, Twitter, other posts on this blog, iTunes reviews, etc. So, please, keep 'em coming -- we are already working on v1.3.

By Kinsey Wilson

The media landscape is changing at unprecedented speed. And news organizations everywhere are racing to keep up.

One way NPR tries to stay current is by connecting with people who are working at the forefront of technological change.

Usually, those are casual, behind-the-scenes encounters. But today, we've assembled an extraordinary group of technologists, entrepreneurs and innovators in San Francisco to spend the day thinking -- in public -- about NPR's future.

Continue reading "Thinking About NPR's Digital Future" >

By Kim Bryant

This post is the first in a series explaining the challenges we face in managing work requests, bug tracking and other operational processes. Specifically, I'll cover Jira, the tool that we selected to help with these challenges, as well as the ways we've configured it to suit our culture and needs.

Part of my job is figuring out how we can work more effectively, and one of the first areas we needed to tackle was our work request system. Our overarching goal when managing work requests is to allow Digital Media to easily separate the noise from the important stuff. You know that scene right after the crash in the first episode of Lost where Locke sees the equivalent of a redshirt wandering near an intermittently-spinning jet turbine, and the guy can't hear the specifics of Locke's yelled warning so he stops long enough to shout "What?!" and then fahWHOMP-- redshirt becomes strawberry jam and the engine explodes and a horrible situation just got worse? Here's a refresher:

We needed to stay off the path to experiencing our own redshirt schmear in the midst of premature labor, ineffective CPR, and lethal chunks of flaming metal shrapnel. Maybe ours wouldn't be as messy, but certainly no reprise of Beach Blanket Bingo.

Our ops demons and how we started taming them, after the jump.

Continue reading "Jira: 'Swapping Chaos for a Little Overhead' *" >

By Mark Stencel

Two of NPR's most ambitious multimedia projects -- "Planet Money" and "Climate Connections" -- collected prestigious awards for online journalism in the past week.

The Online News Association gave its annual award for topical reporting and blogging by a large news Web site to Planet Money. The Planet Money team was set up last year to produce a series of on-air and online reports, blog posts and podcasts that explained the global economy. No easy task -- especially given the international financial crisis that was unfolding as the project made its debut last fall.

"Planet Money provided a distinct value to a community of readers at a time when clear reporting on the financial crisis was just vital," the ONA judges said. "A lot of people were looking for and needed this information. The inaugural post that kicked off Planet Money was a feat of explanatory reporting. It stood out in an excellent field by the value it provided."

The ONA prize, announced late Saturday at the organization's Online Journalism Awards banquet in San Francisco, came days after NPR collected another significant honor -- this one from The National Academies here in Washington.

The National Academies is an influential scientific advisory organization comprising of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council. It gave its 2009 Communication Award for Internet journalism to NPR's online components of Climate Connections, a yearlong series developed in partnership with National Geographic to explain "how we are shaping climate" and "how climate is shaping us" -- subjects of considerable complexity and controversy. The Academies' prize for online journalism is one of four it awards each year with support from the W.M. Keck Foundation to recognize "excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering, and medicine to the general public."

"Singly, these are significant honors for NPR," Ellen Weiss, senior vice president for news and information, said in an e-mail to our staff on Monday afternoon. "We were competing with the best in our field -- including the New York Times and Wired. The awards illustrate the growing seamlessness between NPR News on the air and online, and they are a testament to the journalistic importance and integrity of our presence in the digital space."

Planet Money and Climate Connections both represented major efforts to provide serious, in-depth reporting on complicated and important issues -- both online and on the air. All of us at NPR are thrilled for the staff who worked so hard on both of these projects.

Mark Stencel is managing editor for digital news at NPR.