When I was a kid, I loved playing Trivial Pursuit. Unfortunately, my siblings did not.
I was often left to myself, reading and memorizing the questions. When I did rope someone into a game, I was assured not just of winning but also causing frustration that guaranteed I would be playing by myself for another six months.
All the facts and pieces of knowledge I've acquired during my young life have served mainly to impress (or annoy) friends over a drink at a bar. Think Cliff Clavin on Cheers.
But that's not the case in NPR's Audience Insight and Research. As an intern here, I can indulge my fascination with seemingly random bits of trivia as they apply to NPR listeners. I can direct my curiosity toward investigating what they do, what they think, what they own.
And the best part? It's actually valuable information.
Every year, AIR publishes profiles answering nearly every question employees might have about NPR listeners. Do they do home remodeling jobs themselves, or hire someone else to do them? Where do they get their medical insurance? What are their preferred clothing stores?
Lately, it's been my job to check this data to make sure we're getting the numbers right. These figures help NPR attract the right sponsors to support programming and guide producers and reporters in their coverage of news and culture. Knowing our audience goes a long way in keeping listeners and users tuned in to NPR and engaged with their communities.
That said, not all of my questions lead to something useful, but they're fun to research any way. For example, how many NPR listeners own cats, drink gin, AND listened to 80s pop music in the last six months?
Answer: not many. You know who you are....
Jamie Helgren is an intern in Audience Insight & Research
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Golden Rule of Analytics #1: traffic drops during the holidays. Those who follow news analytics know that it's a hard and fast rule that traffic peaks during election season and drops over the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. Why? Because the bulk of the audience to news sites is people goofing off at work.
Pageviews to npr.org from iOS devices
And all rules are meant to be broken. So, you see that non-mobile (a.k.a. desktop) traffic dropped over the break – dipping as low as 29% below the week after Thanksgiving as expected. But wait, what are those blue lines reaching up and to the right? That's right, iPhone usage grew 94% over the holidays and iPad traffic tripled during the same time. As if I needed actual statistical proof that I'm the only person left in North America without an iPad.
And this means that...? Before we shutter further development on npr.org and devote all our energies towards creating a Very Merry NPR iPad App, keep this in mind – there's scale to take into account. While a 345% growth in iPad page views represents about 350,000 more pageviews per week, a 29% drop in non-mobile traffic is more in the 5M range. On the other hand, the holiday burst in iTraffic says something really interesting about these new platforms: they're filling those moments in our lives that are (from a pure analytics perspective) unacceptably devoid of screen time. When you think about it that way, perhaps a Very Merry NPR iPad App isn't a totally insane idea.
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As a follow up to a post on mobile qualitative research, Jasper Lim reached out to me. Through this connection I learned about the conference on Market Research in the Mobile World. 2011 marked the second year of this conference. It should not surprise me that those on the cutting edge feel the need to splinter off from "traditional" research conferences at AAPOR, AMA, MRA but it is almost overwhelming to keep up. Nonetheless if you are up for the challenge, MRMW has kindly posted about 30 hours of video from its conference online, free to all. Enjoy here.
Lori Kaplan is the Director of Audience Insight & Research
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A screenshot of Mitt Romney's Iowa stump speech, with a Pop-Up Politics bubble animated in.
As the Republican presidential contenders make their final pitches to voters in Iowa, we hope you'll watch some of their speeches enhanced with our new, "Pop-Up Politics" treatment.
Just as VH1 used pop-up bubbles to give music videos another dimension, we're using bubbles — and sounds and animation — to give you a more contextual look at the messages being delivered to GOP voters.
The video animation project got started here at NPR after digital editors became fans of the pop-up series I did while at The Texas Tribune, an online startup in Austin. Before the 2009 launch of the Tribune, newly-hired reporters were asked to come up with a list of story ideas, and one of my ideas was not a "story" at all.
A month later, with the help of photographer Justin Dehn and animator Todd Wiseman, both of whom remain multimedia ninjas at the Tribune today, we debuted Texas stump speeches, interrupted by dozens of bubbles.
Digital Managing Editor Mark Stencel explained his reaction from here in D.C.: "As soon as I saw what you did in Texas I wanted to do a version for the presidential campaign — the perfect way to give people a chance to both hear from the candidates at length while also providing some context on the substance, the rhetoric and the stagecraft."
So we owe a hat tip to my former boss, the Tribune's Editor-in-Chief Evan Smith, who didn't love my first attempt at this non-traditional storytelling but embraced it anyway, gave it a platform, and supported it through a series of four animated speeches so the idea could catch on and be adapted by other newsrooms.
And adapted it, we did. The NPR designer-animators who worked on these, Nelson Hsu and Stephanie d'Otreppe, gave the videos their own, custom presentation so you can easily jump from video to video, and we have added yet another layer of context by having sources and more reading for various bubbles cycle underneath the videos as they are playing.
Further, we've made several considerations about how you are viewing the animation series, and on what devices. Given all the mobile devices and browsers out there, the team did a lot of work to simply make these available from wherever and whatever you're watching.
More videos are coming. When we were wrapping up the shooting phase of the project in mid-December, Newt Gingrich remained in the top tier of Iowa candidates. But in this volatile race, fortunes change faster than you can say Freddie Mac. So other candidates are in the works, and once there's a nominee, we'll be doing Pop-Up Politics for the general election campaign. Expect President Obama to get the pop-up treatment just like the other candidates.
Finally, the end credits on these videos don't include all the folks who played a part in making Pop-Up Politics possible. So a huge thanks to JoElla Straley for her research work, Adam Martin, whose tech skills are the reason the videos can be seen on mobile devices, and our team of editors — Debra Rosenberg, Erica Ryan, Greg Henderson and Keith Jenkins, who helped shepherd this project to launch.
Elise Hu is the digital editor of NPR's StateImpact effort, which focuses on government reporting in the states. Read more about it.
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The metro and streets of DC are quiet, but the restaurants are packed with holiday merrymakers. So it is the time of year that I think about getting out of town.
My kids are keen to head North . . . to the snow. I mentioned this wish to my family members living in Florida and I was greeted with blank stares followed by questions like, "Why would you want to do that?" I started to wonder if we are in our right mind or if there is something unique about my family.
Naturally I turned to Gfk MRI data to get a few US norms. It seems that listeners to public radio stations are more likely to take vacations – skiing, beach, national park. Given the audience's general interest in the world and typically higher levels of disposable income this finding is not shocking.
Now I want to be more specific because my risk-averse children are begging for a first-ever skiing adventure. A whopping 1.7% of NPR listeners took a cross-country or downhill skiing vacation last year and less than 1% of the US adult population has done the same. Of course some people do go skiing without taking a vacation. About 4% of NPR listeners went cross-country skiing and 6% downhill skiing last year. It looks like I have a small but mighty set of compatriots. Now on to packing the car with all of our toasty-winter clothes.
Happy Holidays from all of us here at Audience Insight & Research.
Lori Kaplan is the Director of Audience Insight & Research
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Researchers take pride in providing answers to questions and explaining why. In this case, I have the answer, but cannot explain the why. So it's time for me take a step back and ask for some wisdom, insights and best guesses from our readers.
The question was simple enough: which day of the week has the largest broadcast audience for NPR News stations? Back in the diary days, ratings geeks determined that Thursday had the highest ratings, but this bump was largely explained away because Thursday was also the first day of the week for the paper diary. The thinking went that on the first day, diarykeepers were more likely to be thorough about recording their radio listening and less so at the end of the week.
Today, Arbitron's Portable People Meter can side-step that potential bias as meter carriers can start carrying the meter any day of the week. After some quick digging in Arbitron's dataset, I determined that in PPM-measured markets, audience ratings for NPR News-Talk stations during the recent Spring 2011 survey (an average of 12 consecutive weeks) peaked on Tuesdays – admittedly by only a small 1-2% margin over the weekday average.
Why Tuesday? If the programming is almost the same for each weekday, why would ratings peak for NPR News stations on a Tuesday? That's the question that I cannot answer. And maybe in this case, there is no specific reason why.
I dug deeper and found more surprises. On the commercial side for News stations, ratings peaked on a Thursday, and curiously for all radio – commercial, public, FM & AM, HD and streaming, audience ratings peaked on Friday.
Got any ideas? Please add your comments below.
Ben Robins is the Research Manager for NPR Programming.
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I love digging in to GfK MRI's Survey of the American Consumer. This exhaustive study asks almost anything you might want to know about individuals' buying habits, attitudes, and media usage. The recent surveys have included an interesting question about media use. Respondents are asked to select attributes that describe the major types of media – TV, radio, Internet, magazines, and newspapers. Attributes include being a good source of learning, a good escape, relaxes me, and so on. Looking at how NPR listeners answer this question reveals the unique way that our listeners interact with radio versus television. NPR listeners don't listen to the radio any more than the average (index 97), but they have very different attitudes about it. NPR's audience is much more likely to describe radio as a good source of learning, trusted, makes me think, gives me good ideas, and keeps me informed. NPR listeners don't disregard TV completely, but they do watch less than the average American (index 70). They give TV a distinct place in their media mix – they turn to it specifically for entertainment, escape and relaxation.
Susan Leland is the Research Manager for NPR's Corporate Sponsorship and Development.
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Thanksgiving is almost here and at this time, one of the things I am most thankful for is pie, particularly pumpkin pie, but I'm not picky. Most of the time, I'm not a big fan of pie charts for presenting data, but they do seem appropriate for this time of year...
Image of pie chart courtesy of Lifeslittlemysteries.com
Or you can take a non-traditional approach to charting your favorite pies.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Susan Leland is the Research Manager for NPR's Corporate Sponsorship and Development
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A week ago we launched an experiment in personalized listening we've dubbed the Infinite Player. The idea was to create a continuous listening experience similar to radio that also takes into account users' individual tastes.
The audience response has far surpassed anything we'd hoped for and we'd like to thank everyone who has taken the time to try it out. We are grateful for your feedback. We've heard from people on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr and through the contact form on the player itself. It's even received a little press from Read Write Web and the Nieman Journalism Lab.
While the player is experimental — and still a little buggy — testers' responses have been overwhelmingly positive on the overall direction and experience. We were not sure how the public radio audience would respond to something like this; you've convinced us it is clearly worth developing further.
While we look into next steps for extending the player, here are notes on a few specific questions raised in the initial wave of feedback.
Many people have pointed out a bug in Google Chrome that stops the player from advancing to the next story. For anyone using Chrome, you'll have much better luck if you use the player in its own browser window. The problem occurs when the player is in a tab that's in the background. While we don't yet know the cause, we will try to fix this issue in a future version.
There have been many requests to make the player work in other browsers — particularly Firefox and IE — and to offer a mobile version. The reason it's out first in Chrome and Safari is because both of those browsers have native multimedia support that made it possible to build the player quickly. We'd like to expand the list of supported browsers going forward, including mobile browsers (which doesn't preclude the possibility of an app at some point). The player, unfortunately, does not currently work on mobile Safari (iPhone and iPad). We have had some luck getting it to work on a few Android devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S II. If you're an Android user you may want to gamble and try it to out.
Some people have expressed concern about the thumbs up / down buttons. The fear is that use of the buttons will so narrow the pool of stories that it will seriously degrade the experience, preventing important news stories, or stories outside a certain range of topics, from appearing in the player.
We've actually worked very hard to prevent this from happening. What we're ultimately going for is an experience that keeps users informed and surfaces stories that are fun to hear based on individual preferences, while also leaving room for serendipitous discovery. You always hear the newscast first, and it repeats hourly (same as on the radio). The stories that follow are influenced heavily by both your ratings and the judgement of editors at NPR. Use of the buttons will improve the player's ability to suggest stories you'll like, without creating an echo chamber.
As we continue working to refine the player, we will take into account the many feature enhancements users have suggested. Some of the most requested so far are social media sharing tools, volume control and access to listening history. We are also working with NPR stations to create more localized versions of the player. We currently have KQED, KPLU, Michigan Radio. In the near future we are hoping to add KPCC, KPBS, OPB and the Northwest News Network.
Thanks again for the the invaluable feedback. Please keep it coming!
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The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism recently released a new study on The Tablet Revolution and What it Means for the Future of News. The study highlights how much media consumption is changing for those who have adopted tablets. Most tablet owners use them every day and spend a big chunk of time on them — an average of 90 minutes a day.
What I found most surprising is the relative usage of apps vs. the "old fashioned" browser. Apps seem to get all the press for mobile devices but only 21% of tablet users consume news mostly through apps. Twice that number consume news mostly through the browser with the rest using both equally. Those who rely on apps, however, tend to be heavier news consumers. Pew describes them as "power users" – more active users of the tablet in general, read more in-depth articles, and more satisfied with their tablet news experience.
Click here for an infographic highlighting the study's key findings.
Susan Leland is the Research Manager for NPR's Corporate Sponsorship and Development.
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The NPR product team talks a lot about two ways people interact with audio: engaged listening and distracted listening. Engaged listening would be something like this:
There's listening and really not much of anything else going on (except perhaps looking for other things to listen to every now and then). We believe we've done a pretty solid job capturing this use case in our digital products. If finding and listening to audio is first and foremost in your mind, we offer tons of podcasts and program audio clips. You can queue these stories up on a playlist to run consecutively, or just hunt around individually to find the ones you want. You can even sync your playlist across browsers. All this requires a lot of the user's attention.
That model works very well for some people in some cases; but it's a far cry from the roots of radio in which the listener simply hits a button and listens. We've been referring to this second mode as distracted listening. Audio is playing in the background. You may be listening quite intently. But you're also doing other things, like driving, or the dishes.
The explosion of Internet-connected devices has created listening opportunities almost everywhere. Phones, tablets, computers, home stereos, car stereos, and TVs can all now connect to the Internet, vastly expanding the ways people find and listen to audio. Many of these new use cases lend themselves particularly well, if not exclusively, to this distracted listening model.
NPR and its member stations already offer some great options for this use case. The radio, of course, is the most obvious. NPR station streams are also available on desktop and mobile devices. But new platforms have created an opportunity to explore completely different approaches to distracted listening.
Today we are launching (in beta) an experiment we're calling the Infinite Player (works in recent versions of Safari and Chrome; registration required).
It's dead simple: you press a button and it plays. First you hear the latest NPR newscast. That's followed by stories we think you'll like from NPR's three main focus areas, news, arts and life, and music. The only controls are skip, pause and 30-second rewind.
We're calling it the Infinite Player because it will continue playing stories until you turn it off, just like the radio.
Taking a cue from popular products already using personalization (think Facebook, Zite, Flipboard, Pandora, YouTube's LeanBack), the player allows you to indicate whether you're interested in a particular story or not. If you are, we'll try to give you similar stories. If you're not, we'll do our best to find others you'll enjoy. The player should deliver the type of serendipitous experience you expect from NPR, with recommendations based on your input, NPR editors' judgment and story popularity.
The real value of the NPR experience is the local / national partnership with member stations. We are working with NPR Digital Services and a number of stations to release versions of the player that combine both local and NPR audio into a seamless experience. You can try out three of them here: KQED, Michigan Radio and KPLU.
Please keep in mind that the Infinite Player is an experiment. And it's in beta — at this time the player only works in Safari or Chrome (works best on Chrome in its own window). We'd love to hear your feedback on the experience, the content, the technology and anything else you want to share with us about the Infinite Player. Enjoy!
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If I took the call of every vendor that wanted to speak with me, I would not get any work done, but I made time last week to hear about mobile qualitative research.
NPR is interested in understanding how media behavior changes as a new media platform is introduced into a person's life. Of course some changes are long term and nuanced, but others happen nearly immediately. Once these changes become entrenched, we almost forget that we behaved any differently in the past — even those of us who grew up in an era of televisions with only three networks.
We've struggled to develop a method to understand the behaviors generated by these changes and the fleeting thoughts about them, right as they are happening. Mobile qualitative seems to offer possibilities to reach into those situations and create learning opportunities.
My first question: what is mobile qualitative? Well in the briefing I received from Rosalia Barnes, it is a method that synthesizes feedback from voicemails, texts, smartphone video and digital pictures all in one place. The moderator may probe periodically during the course of the engagement.
Given that listening to NPR and public radio content can happen anywhere and any time, this method opens up a world of opportunity with minimal researcher interaction effects. I would never ask a respondent to text while driving, but once she's parked, I would love to know more about the in-car experience. Did she hook up any new devices to hear a station? Did she listen to a station located outside of her immediate area? What would she have listened to if she didn't have that device?
Clearly we do not want to limit our research to those populations who have the latest mobile technology, but in some cases, when we're attempting to examine the bleeding edge of technology, this technique may be appropriate. And in the best case, we will uncover behaviors that allow us to provide an even better listener experience.
Lori Kaplan is the Director of Audience Insight & Research
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Inspired by old-school skunkworks, Google's 20-percent-time policy and, most directly, RSA's animation of a talk by Dan Pink about employee motivation, NPR Digital Media staff members recently jumped into Serendipity Days for the second time.
The goal of the Serendipity exercise is to "tap the creative ideas of the overall team and create a vehicle for getting small, cool projects/research explored." Put another way, we sought the quality of serendipity: "the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident."
Our first sessions took place in May; with a few logistical issues smoothed out and even broader participation, we met again in the last days of September.
The rules are Outback Steakhouse simple: take one-and-a-half-working days to investigate whatever you feel like investigating. You may work alone, or in a small team. Give a three-minute presentation on what you found, and leave a link in the wiki to any artifacts: design comps, wireframes, functioning software prototypes. Can't get something to work? That's good, too: fail fast.
Were we motivated? Youbetcha! At least one colleague took his project home with him and had his prototype running by the next morning.
Come presentation time, many of us had difficulty condensing findings into a three-minute talk. A handy countdown timer kept us on schedule. Presentations themselves included working code, videos, flow charts, HTML with CSS, tables of data and photos of whiteboards(!).
In the demo/presentation sessions from May and September, several themes emerged. These ranged from professional development to interest in new technologies, like the MongoDB database, a popular entry in the NoSQL sweepstakes.
Another theme that emerged was exploring new ways to respond more nimbly to fast-moving news events with liveblogging tools and new approaches to presenting breaking news. Several people presented ideas to improve the quality and reliability of the tools that NPR uses to produce digital content: turbocharged automated tests, a revision control system for stories and a better way to manage the multitude of pieces that appear on the home page.
A sample of other ideas explored include:
Again, on the technical and software development side, there was a lot of interest in growing the linkages between the information embedded in NPR's digital content (and social media presence) and the larger digital world.
We pushed toward both ends of the structured/unstructured data axis. On the structured end, team members researched Linked Data and the Resource Description Framework. On the other end, our colleagues mined data from Twitter feeds, for instance, plotting NPR mentions across the planet on a world map. As software developers, this is really energizing — this is right in our team's wheelhouse.
Even more exciting (and a little bit mystifying, since not all of us are designers) were two presentations that involved responsive web design. Mobile and other portable devices continue to explode the received wisdom about page dimensions, and it's critical for us to keep up.
And, yes, there were some failures. More than once we heard, "this tool really doesn't work," or, "I was too ambitious and didn't accomplish what I had hoped." September's session introduced a special recognition for these pioneers, the Penguin award, (a concept from Randy Pausch's Last Lecture) named to honor the bold first bird in the flock who jumps off the ice floe (knowing that he risks being eaten by a leopard seal).
The last event in our 48-hour festival of creative mayhem is a brief retrospective: What worked well? What worked not so well? Retrospectives are a technique we depend on to keep our development process agile, to make sure that all the instruments in our toolbox remain sharp until we use them the next time.
Some of May's innovations are already being incorporated into active development projects. Late Friday afternoon, yet another Serendipity Days project was being demonstrated for an editor. It's likely to appear on NPR.org in the near future.
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NPR has launched a new app for the Google TV platform. The app — featured in the Google TV Spotlight Gallery (video only works in Chrome) — makes it easy for users to watch NPR's best video and multimedia slideshows on a big screen.
We've made great strides in the past few years expanding our ability to tell compelling multimedia stories. NPR now has an award-winning team of visual journalists in-house. Their work spans all genres — from hard news, to music, to food. NPR.org even has a photo blog, the Picture Show, and, earlier this month, NPR Music won an Emmy for a video feature called Project Song.
Naturally, the NPR app on Google TV contains videos from NPR Music and its station partners, including Tiny Desk Concerts, studio sessions and live concerts. It also has a selection we're calling "Radio Pictures." Covering a variety of topics, it contains videos, audio slideshows and even a few animated reports.
If you're interested in the nuts and bolts, Google TV provides helpful templates for quickly creating a channel. For our app, NPR's design and user experience folks heavily customized the look and feel of the channel. Our development team coded all the necessary CSS and powered the app with calls from the NPR API.
It's new territory for us and we'd love to hear what you think about the app. Pass along any comments — positive or otherwise — you might have to our product team via our contact form.
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