Tag Archives: NPR

Winners announced: Dart Awards for coverage of trauma

The winners of the 2011 Dart Awards, which recognise outstanding reporting that portrays traumatic events with accuracy, insight and sensitivity by US media outlets, have been announced.

The Boston Globe won for “A tormenting problem: An exploration of new-age bullying“, the Dallas Morning News for “Private battles“, NPR with the Center for Public Integrity for “Seeking justice in campus rapes“, and NPR with ProPublica for “Brain wars: How the military is failing its wounded“.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and WLRN reined honourable mentions.

Set up by Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1995, the award programme is open to teams with winning teams receiving a $5,000 cash prize.

On the Media: Andy Carvin and Twitter’s ‘new kind of journalism’

NPR’s On The Media show has Andy Carvin discussing how a ‘new kind of journalism’ has been created by social media reports from the Arab world. Carvin has been vetting sources and trying to verify individual tweets from the Middle East and North Africa since the recent uprisings began.

Listen using the embedded player below.

Full post on On The Media at this link

NPR’s audience, hour-by-hour, platform by platform

NPR has looked at the behaviour of its audiences across all platforms, charting how content is consumed hour-by-hour over the course of an average week.

Radio remains NPR’s strongest distribution platform, with an audience of around 2,500,000 average quarter hour listeners on weekday mornings at 7:00am. Peaks in broadcast figures follow commuter times, with another high of around 2,000,000 at 5:00pm. Online audiences peak in the early afternoon with around 75,000 average unique visitors at 2:00pm, falling off gradually over the course of the rest of the day. Note the dual axes for comparing radio and online audiences.

Metrics for mobile show that NPR readers favour the iPhone over Android, iPad or mobile web, and peak earlier in the day than the online browser figures, with a little more than 8,000 unique visits at around 8:00am.

Mashable: Are social networks becoming personal news wires?

To celebrate its five-year anniversary, Mashable is producing a series of posts on developments in social media. The latest looks at the impact of social networking on news consumption and the idea that social networks have become personal news wires.

Following a discussion of online “friends” evolving into our news editors, writer Vadim Lavrusik rounds-up some interesting ideas about ways to measure source credibility in the future for greater transparency online.

Though news is increasingly social and user-generated, the persistent fear is one of credibility and a flaw in measuring a curator’s knowledge on or interest in a topic. This problem could be improved by enabling users to develop more targeted news feeds on personalized topics of interest, but also by identifying specific sources and curators of information as more or less credible than others.

One idea he discusses, put forward by Andy Carvin a senior strategist at NPR,  would be to measure “who is knowledgeable” about a topic being shared.

This could also include sifting sources based on whether they are eye-witness to an event or are experts on the topic, both of which add value in their own way, he said. Such a model could then help establish a credibility index among users as sources, helping consumers better decide what information is credible.

See the full post here…

NPR publishes results of extensive survey on Facebook

News organisations and journalists wanting to make better use of Facebook to promote and share their work would do well to read NPR’s findings from its survey of more than 40,000 of its Facebook fans.

While NPR admits some of the responses will be skewed because the questions were asked via Facebook, the news organisation does have more than one million fans, so it must be doing something right.

Some important points:

  • “Users don’t think the number of ‘likes’ on a Facebook post will make them more likely to click it”;
  • “The vast majority (84 per cent) of NPR Facebook fans regularly read the links we post”;
  • NPR’s Facebook fans “are more inclined to consume NPR content on Facebook that other news sources”.

Full round-up of results at this link…

And if you fancy befriending Journalism.co.uk on Facebook, our fan page is at this link.

Music stops in the White House press room, Fox sits down first

The battle for a coveted front row seat in the White House press room is over, with Fox News claiming the chair.

Following the retirement of Helen Thomas in May, Associated Press moved to her centre-spot, freeing up its old space further along the front row.

National Public Radio, Bloomberg News and Fox all requested the special spot – but Fox was finally selected due to its “length of service and commitment to the White House television pool”, according to AFP.

NPR’s correspondent will now move up one row to Fox’s old second-row seat, next to Bloomberg News.

#FollowJourn: @acarvin/NPR social media strategist

#FollowJourn: Andy Carvin

Who? Social media strategist for National Public Radio.

What? Regularly blogs on social media developments at NPR; led its social media Obama inauguration coverage.

Where? @acarvin or AndyCarvin.com.

Contact? andycarvin [at] yahoo ( dot ) com.

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

NPR using Flickr to verify photos

(Via Cybersoc) National Public Radio is calling on its Flickr followers to identify individuals in a series of photos from a US senate meeting.

The idea reminded Journalism.co.uk of regional newspaper-style calls for information about old photos of sports teams etc in print. A clever way to get your community to help you out using a free tool too.

Advancing The Story: The role of the ombudsman in a cash-strapped newsroom

Advancing the story takes a look at the work of Alicia Shepard, ombudsman for National Public Radio (NPR).

While summing up Shepard’s approach to the role, the post raises an interesting point about transparency/the role of the ombudsman at a time of dwindling newsroom resources:

“It’s no doubt hard to justify spending money on an ombudsman when the newsroom budget is being slashed.  And it’s easy to dismiss an ombudsman’s defense of his value as simply self-interest. But there’s a difference between having citizens point out errors and flaws, and having an independent observer inside a news organization with ‘a hall pass and a platform,’ as New York Times executive editor Bill Keller describes an ombudsman,” writes ATS.

What price transparency? Or can readers pointing out corrections and clarifications be better used at a time of limited resources?

Full post at this link…

Nieman Journalism Lab: How NPR maximised its news archive

Nieman Journalism Lab reports on NPR’s ‘backstory’ project – a Twitter account, automatically fed, that updates with relevant archive content around current trends.

The code that powers it detects if lots of people suddenly start searching for a certain term and searches NPR’s archives for related stories, before posting a link to Twitter.

Full story at this link…