Public Radio Aims Local
Important Details: National Public Radio has re-launched its new national website, multiplying the amount of the its content and improving its immediacy. Importantly, it also re-imagined its national/local handoffs, connections that have been difficult for all legacy media companies to re-draw for the web.
“Radio is our core, our heart and soul. It’s where most of our audience is,” Vivian Schiller said in a recent interview. Schiller took over a CEO of National Public Radio last year, departing a position as general manager of NYTimes.com. “But we have to make sure that we serve the audience wherever they want it. This is an organization that’s in transformation into becoming a fully functional news content organization, not just a radio company. As part of that, we’ve been training our journalists to become multiplatform journalists, not only radio-not that radio is not important to our core.”
The new site is much more news-oriented, as compared to program guide-oriented. Program guides have long been the mainstay of many public radio web approaches — and still are locally in many cities. The NPR.org site has played catch-up with the rest of the web, however. It is now newsy and exploits its advantages, offering intuitive “listen,” “download,” and “transcript” options. It is marrying audio to text in a reader-friendly way. In addition, its video and interactive graphics features continue to grow. It is on the frontier of being truly multi-media, all in one place. (A good, guided tour, here, hosted by NPR’s Scott Simon.)
Search, too, has been an Achille’s heel of public radio. The site promises better results, now using Google to power its search of voluminous archives.
Schiller, though head of the national operation, sees local as the most challenging frontier: “That’s where a big void is happening in journalism now. It’s the worst at the local level. I’m worried about locals. It’s scary. It happens to be where the biggest crisis in journalism is happening….We can go market by market. We want to increase the output and platforms on which stations create content in local communities, with a focus on accountability journalism. In creating all this digital content, it’s not just to service NPR.org. We’re giving them [local stations] more digital content that they can pull down and use on their site. One of the major focuses of our digital initiative is to give stations the tools, the resources, the knowledge, and the infrastructure, so they can create a great experience in their communities. The [local] station presence is going to be much more visible on the redesign”.
Schiller’s predecessor, Ken Stern, had also embraced a more digital future for public radio. His push, though, foundered on the shoals on local concern that NPR would take away local listeners, and with that, local budget. While the new design emphasizes “find a station” at the top of the page, the jury will be out for awhile on local station reaction.
Several local stations are themselves plowing ahead into the next stage of web, however, on principles similar to NPR’s.
Minnesota Public Radio, at MPRNews.org, is one of them. MPR relaunced its own redesign within the last month. Like NPR’s it’s much more news-like, and newspaper-like, and adds new competition to the already-crowded online local news scene. Chris Worthington, MPR’s News and Information Program Director, tells Outsell that the creation of separate news and program sites is just a first step in a process of creating more robust, timely and multimedia news offerings.
Worthington is a former newspaper guy, having served as managing editor of the (Saint Paul) Pioneer Press. Curiously, another ex-newspaper exec, Kinsley Wilson, formerly top editor at USAToday, is now senior vice president and general manager, digital media, at NPR.
Implications: The local news and commerce landscape just keeps getting more crowded, even through the recession. Online local media is the new frontier. No one yet “owns” it, as newspaper, radio, TV and Yellow Pages thought they had long dominated their respective markets. So it’s wide open. More over, the nature of the web lets all kinds of players — text-, video- or audio-based — to re-define themselves in the new medium. It’s the corporate equivalent of moving to a new place and starting over again, using your assets, minimizing your deficiencies and re-defining your identity.
At first, public radio looks like something far different than other media. Consider the similarities, though:
- Going after the same readers: The one problem the web hasn’t solved: none of us have more time to take in the riches of news. In fact, the most recent Nielsen data (for May, 2009) shows that time on site had dropped for 17 of the top 30 US newspaper sites.
- Going after the same merchants: Sure, public radio “sells” sponsorships, but increasingly advertising and marketing budget lines are blurring, so all online media are going after similar “ad” targets. In addition, Yahoo’s recent sales tie-up with ATT, whose 5000 local salespeople will sell the same behaviorally-targeted ad products as are Newspaper Consortium members, shows how much old market lines are disappearing.
- National/local splits: Every medium — public radio, newspapers, commercial TV and radio — has its own war stories to tell about national/local conflict, how to divvy up pies of would-be readers/listeners and advertiser/sponsors. Each medium thinks its own woes are unique, but in fact, the re-defining of what’s national turf and what’s local turf is part and parcel of grasping the new medium. Whichever industries work out new satisfactory national/local relationships first will win in the marketplace. Non-public radio news execs would do well to pay attention to, and learn from, a May “Public Radio in the New Network Age” report.
- All-medium access: The redesigned NPR website builds on other recent public radio initiatives. Several for the iPhone and Blackberry (such as NPR Addict and the PRI app) are harnessing the power of the smartphones, as public radio sees the same opportunity print news companies do to move across platforms and access points.
Through those prisms, we can see that the re-emergent NPR, and its local reinventions, offer new challenges to local newspapers. Inevitably, they’ll also offer new co-opetition opportunites, as NPR, nationally and locally, interacts with and partners with established media.