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.

By Andy Carvin

Ever since the NPR API came out a year ago, we've toyed around with the idea of inviting local coders to NPR headquarters over pizza and beer to see what kinds of apps and mashups we could come up with together. It seemed like a fun idea, but we realized there was an opportunity for something even more powerful. What if we brought together all sorts of people interested in collaborating with public radio and public TV, to see what we could come up with, including digital tools, citizen journalism and other types community-centered initiatives?

As we talked with our colleagues across the public media system and beyond, it became clear we needed to host a really big camp - a national PublicMediaCamp, that is.

On the weekend of October 17th at American University's campus in Washington DC, NPR, PBS and the AU Center for Social Media will co-host a two-day event that we hope will serve as the kickoff for similar community collaboration events around the country. PublicMediaCamp is going to be organized as an unconference - an event without a rigid, top-down programmatic structure, with the sessions organized by the participants themselves. We're modeling it on other unconferences like Barcamp and Podcamp, which have successfully spawned similar volunteer-driven events around the world, as well as public media unconferences that have been hosted by Minnesota Public Radio and KUSP in Santa Cruz, CA.

All of these unconferences have one thing in common - giving all participants a chance to play a leadership role in the event's success, using tools like wikis and Twitter to plan the event. (Our Twitter hashtag is going to be #PubCamp, to keep it nice and brief.) And that's why we're modeling this event on unconferences. Public broadcasters are well-established pillars within their communities that have inspired a special bond with the public surrounding them. We've been very successful at organizing financial capital campaigns - particularly in the form of pledge drives - but there's still a lot more we can do when it comes to organizing social capital campaigns, in which local volunteers team up with public broadcasters because they've got specific skill sets that can strengthen stations and the community at large. And the only way we can explore the possibilities is to talk to each other, brainstorm and build things together.

Continue reading "PublicMediaCamp: Strengthening Public Broadcasting Through Community Collaboration" >

For a taste of what the new NPR.org is going to look like as of July 27, NPR's Scott Simon offers us a quick tour.

We are posting this unusual "editor's note" to give our NPR.org readers early notice that change is coming. When you visit on July 27, you'll see a brand new NPR.org. It will be brighter, lighter, faster, easier to use, easier to search and more fun to surf. We promise!

Now, we at NPR well know that our listeners and readers are different than other news "consumers." NPR people are loyal. You count on the consistency, quality and integrity of our news and programming every day and we appreciate that.

So we didn't change NPR.org lightly. We've listened to your suggestions - and a few complaints. And we've taken the first step to build a new NPR.org that is more, well, NPR-ish.

We want NPR.org to be your source for NPR news, analysis, arts & life stories and music that is always fresh and up-to-date, a source of unexpected delight and most important, a site that always upholds NPR's highest standards.

On the new site, it will be easier to combine listening and reading, to follow breaking news, to comment on our work and share it, and easier to find programming from your NPR station. Later this summer, we also plan to enhance our support for a variety of popular mobile platforms. Our goal is to make sure that anyone with a mobile device can enjoy NPR and our stations. We want NPR to be always on for you.

So please come back and check out the new site and let us know what you think.

Respectfully,

Kinsey Wilson, SVP & GM, NPR Digital Media
Dick Meyer, Executive Editor, NPR News

In case you haven't seen my tweets about it yet, Inauguration Report is now live. We've managed to create a variety of ways for you to share your inauguration experiences, from text messaging to an iPhone app. CBS News and American University are also helping us promote the project.

We've created a couple of Web pages you'll want to check out. First, visit NPR's Inauguration Report hub for details on how to participate; there's also a widget there, displaying reports as they come in to us. You can also check out InaugurationReport.com, which displays a giant map of all the reports that have been geotagged.

If you're coming to the inauguration or will be involved in events in your community, feel free to start posting dispatches now. We've already gotten hundreds of submissions via Twitter, and other content is coming in as well. We really want to hear from you if you're making your way to DC, whether it's the joy of the road trip or the frustration of traffic gridlock. And on January 20th, we hope to get a ton of submissions, assuming the networks don't come crashing down from the strain.

Special thanks to Dave Troy, Andrew Turner. Nathan Freitas and Sze Wong for their spectacular coding work; David Johnson and Dan Farber for joining us in the editorial collaboration; and Nancy Scola and Allison Fine for taking the lead in pulling together the Vote Report team, which directly lead to the creation of this project. We couldn't have done it without you.

-- Andy Carvin

The presidential inauguration is less than a month away and the NPR social media desk is kicking it into high-gear to figure out how we can get all of you involved in our inauguration coverage. We're also looking for some techies who can help make it happen.

After our successful VoteReport experiment last month, in which we work with bloggers around the country and invited the public to submit reports on their voting experiences, we're hoping to do something similar for the inauguration. Some of our partners in the VoteReport project, including Dave Troy of Twittervision and mapping guru Andrew Turner, are volunteering again to help re-purpose the VoteReport tools for the inauguration. We've also got some new folks involved, including American University journalism professor David Johnson, and I'm sure others will come on board in the coming days and weeks.

Among the things we've got in mind:

Inauguration '09 citizen journalism iPhone app. Dave and his colleagues created an awesome iPhone app for VoteReport that allowed users to post audio and text reports online and have them plotted on maps, using the iPhone's GPS capability. We're thinking of adding on to this app so that it could also allow users to attach inauguration-related photos or perhaps even short video clips. One idea that was also suggested was to allow an iPhone user to save their reports on their phone and post them later, in case AT&T's data networks are jammed on January 20th. We're also thinking of giving users the ability to submit their email and phone number so NPR reporters can contact them in case we want to use their audio in one of our stories.

Mobcasting. During VoteReport, Dave set up a bank of telephone lines that allowed users to call in and record a voicemail about their voting experiences and have it posted for all to hear online. Given that not everyone participating in inauguration festivities will have iPhones, we want to do what we can to make sure that any phone line could be used by you to file a report from the field.

Twitter and tags. Many of our VoteReport participants used Twitter as their primary method of sending in reports, and we expect that to be the case for the inauguration. We're planning to track all Tweets that are tagged either #dctrip09 (for people road-tripping to DC) or #inaug09 (for Inauguration Day itself). We'll then be able to display all the tweets as they come in. People can also use these tags when they upload to sites like Flickr, YouTube, etc, so we can aggregate that content as well. (Though you shouldn't use the # sign when tagging on Flickr or YouTube - that's just a quirk of tagging on Twitter.) Of course, we'll have to encourage people to use those tags in order for them to work, so we'll need your help getting the word out.

Texting. For people who want to send a text message but don't have Twitter, we hope to have an SMS shortcode available. Fingers crossed.

Maps, maps, maps. Thanks to the hard work of Andrew, Dave and others during VoteReport, we managed to pull together some pretty snazzy maps of all of this user-generated content as it came in. We plan to do the same for the inauguration, particularly in the week leading up to it, so we can track content submissions from people all over the country as they make their way to DC. One thing I'm hoping we can pull off is tapping into all those users with iPhones, since the GPS capability will make it possible to plot each person's route, see how far they've traveled and explore what they've uploaded. For January 20th itself, we're thinking about setting up a hyperlocal map of DC itself, so you can observe everyone's submissions over the course of the day, no matter where they happen to be around the National Mall. This might be the toughest thing to do in the project, particularly for content that's not submitted with GPS metadata. (Using zip codes as geolocators, for example, won't work to well when zoomed in at the street level.) So we may put together a series of DC-specific tags (#ellipse, #washmonument, #lincolnmemorial, #airandspace, etc) to make it easier to identify who's doing what where. Journalism students from American University will also be volunteering to cover the inauguration throughout the city, so we'll be highlighting their activities on the map as well.

Of course, all of this is going to be one big, messy experiment, particularly given the fact that many mobile network providers are forecasting serious congestion and possible outages due to the huge numbers of people using their phones simultaneously. Nonetheless, we think it's worth the effort, given how many people are planning to be involved in the inauguration. There are going to be lots of stories to tell that week, and we want to give you the tools to help share those stories.

Lastly, we'd love your help building this project. We don't have many resources to pull this off, and everyone is volunteering their time to do this. Dave and Andrew are tech geniuses, for sure, but they can't do it alone given the limited time between now and January 20th. So we're looking for some techies who can back them up. Our biggest need is for iPhone app developers who can help them repurpose the VoteReport app and get it in the App Store as soon as possible, so people will be able to install it prior to their roadtrips to DC. We'll also need some Rails, Google Maps and Javascript gurus. If you're interested in helping, please post a comment below and describe what skills you can bring to the table, and we'll be in touch with you soon. If you're on Twitter, you can also send me a note at @acarvin.

As for everyone else reading this post, we'd love your feedback. Does this seem like a worthwhile effort? Is there anything you liked or disliked about VoteReport that we should take into consideration? Are there any specific features or requirements we should try to work into the project? Please let us know what you think.

-- Andy Carvin

I had a long conversation with a colleague of mine about how easily comment threads can go sour. She said every community manager begins with a pleasant view of their online preserve, a view that values democracy, free speech and an open market place of ideas.

Then, after countless episodes of rants, name calling and non sequiturs (it's people like you who will soon have us living in a Nazi wonderland ruled over by a leader who makes Hitler look like a caring social worker), your ideals are dashed.

Where do these meandering, senseless rants come from? Trolls, people who say just about anything to get a rise out of others. Don't get me wrong, I think for the most part, we have a very strong let-the-community-sort-itself-out ethos. We welcome pointed comments from all points of view. We just ask that they also be constructive and substantive.

Trolls, however, are community members without convictions, arguing a point just to see the other person go red. They turn perfectly interesting threads into festering cesspools of resentment.

We've talked about what to do with them. We've stepped in and asked posters to stop breaking the discussion rules. We've blocked scads of comments, and even a few community accounts. Eventually, we came to the obvious conclusion that the only thing that will move this conversation forward is to ask the community to ignore them.

So, here's a new community rule: Do not "feed" the trolls. We encourage community members to report abuse by trolls. But we also ask that you not engage with trolls in the comment threads. Reacting to their provocations is exactly what they want.

If we see you feeding a troll, we will remove both the troll's comments and your responses.

I messaged with a few community members about implementing this new rule and the reaction was mostly positive. But everyone had one question: How do you define a troll?

I think I've already given some definition to the concept of a troll. But community member Peter Wilbur added a bit more: "I think of it," he wrote in an e-mail, "as someone who doesn't engage others in a discussion, who posts irrelevant comments, or who goes off on the same rant no matter the topic."

In some ways, a troll is like the person at the party who's a little too drunk and picks a fight with everyone. He (or she) is the one who makes things so hostile that everyone avoids a gathering as soon as they see him on the guest list.

Our oft-stated principle is that we want the NPR.org community to be home to a civil conversation that avoids insults, vulgarities and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. We ask for first and last names during the registration process because we want users to remember that behind our funny avatars and strong views are real human beings.

Trolls tend to hide behind the anonymity of the Internet to make community interactions less human. So, from now on, let's ignore them.

-- Eyder Peralta

If you're planning to make the trip to the nation's capital to watch President-elect Obama take the oath, we'd like to hear about your plans. No matter if you're coming by car, by foot, by boat or plane -- we want your story. If your inauguration trip has particularly special meaning for you or your community, tell us that, too.

Tell us your plans in the comment area below, or e-mail us at homework@npr.org. We may even contact you to find out more!

Note: This post was originally published on Dec. 19 and then republished on Nov. 3 so that comments could remain open beyond the normal seven-day limit.

A few weeks ago I did a Web chat on whether the government should bail out the Detroit auto business. That 35-minute exercise continues to pay dividends to our listeners on the air. NPR has one of the smartest audiences in America. But, until now, I didn't appreciate what an extraordinary resource they are for reporters like me.

Not only was the chat interesting, but we got over 100 comments. Many of the comments were from people who either had connections to the auto business or actually worked in the industry. (Nothing like talking to people who actually know what you're trying to report on.) :-) So after we did the Web chat, I began contacting some of the people who had commented.

Within a day, I was able to put together a radio story entirely based on sources from the Web chat. These were terrific sources with lots of knowledge whom I would have never been able to find by old reporting methods, like calling around. I also read some of the comments on All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation.

Now, I'm moving on to a story about car dealerships. One of the people who commented on the Web chat runs an advertising company whose clients include hundreds of dealerships. He's putting me in touch with some of his clients, some of whom, I imagine, will also soon be on the air.

In short, the Web chat has been a great way to find new sources and also get in touch with the people who ultimately support our work: the listeners.

-- Frank Langfitt, NPR Labor/Workplace Correspondent

There is something new on NPR.org today.

Starting now, it will be easier for you to talk to us, for us to talk to you and for you all to talk to each other. We are making it possible for anyone who registers with us to comment on a story and to create a profile page where many interesting things can happen. We are providing a forum for infinite conversations on NPR.org. Our hopes are high. We hope the conversations will be smart and generous of spirit. We hope the adventure is exciting, fun, helpful and informative. This is important for the NPR community.

That last phrase -- "important for the NPR community" -- is not phony baloney corporate rhetoric, I promise.

The NPR community is a real thing; it is made up of the people who work here, the people who work at member stations, the people who listen to NPR on the radio, the people who use NPR.org and the people who support NPR. And many in that community think of ourselves as "NPR people." Few other American news organizations inspire such allegiance, have a real community and have "people." NPR does and it is vitally important to our health and growth to be able to talk to each other more and more openly.

NPR is late to this game, to be blunt. Many big news operations have had open comments and other "social media" functions for quite awhile. Some of you are grizzled veterans of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and online news commenting; for some this will be new. NPR has been cautious because we want to do it right; we want the comments and the conversations to be useful, friendly and civil; we want NPR employees to participate and talk about their work. We needed the right tools and the right philosophy to come together. Now it has.

NPR is a non-profit. We are not launching the project to get more "hits" that will make more money. We are doing it because it is the respectful thing to do for the NPR community. We expect to get story ideas, tips, insights into the world we cover, tough criticism and even the occasional compliment. We want to share more of the news we gather and the stories we tell with you. And we want to do all this in the NPR style -- with both dignity and self-deprecating lightness.

We won't hit the social media ball out of the park on the first swing. But we encourage you to create a profile and let us know what you like and don't like. We apologize in advance for any bugs you encounter. Also be sure to take a look at some of the more specific rules of the road. And if you don't like to do this stuff in public, here's my e-mail: editorial.director@npr.org.

--Dick Meyer