Have you ever wondered what it's like to be at NPR on election night? Here's your chance to find out.

On Tuesday, Nov. 6, NPR's social media desk will host around two dozen of you at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. We're looking for people from across the political spectrum — bloggers, Twitter users, Tumblrs, Redditors, etc. — who plan to cover election night on their own. It'll be a chance to hang out with fellow political geeks and NPR staff, as well as an opportunity to experience election night at NPR in person. We'll supply the food and the wifi, too.

If you're interested in applying, please fill out this form. We'll make our selections over the next couple of weeks on a rolling basis, so the sooner you apply, the better.

After several weeks of work and several years of planning, we are now live with a new commenting system on NPR.org. Please forgive a few glitches today and over the next few days as we migrate comments.

In August we sent many of you a survey to many of you, asking your thoughts and opinions regarding commenting on NPR.org. We had a great response: over 6,000 of you took the time to tell us what you thought. The feedback was very valuable. We've used it to help guide some key decisions in this process.

Now that Disqus is live, here are some of the commenting enhancements you will find:

• Comment discussions can now threaded, making it easier to follow along. You can now reply directly to each others' comments.
• By default, comments will be sorted by comment quality, allowing you to read the best comments first. You can change your default to sort by newest or oldest instead.
• When we surveyed our users about moderation, a majority of you believed that all comments should be moderated prior to publication. We will be doing that across the news areas of our site. Other areas of our site, such as music and books, will not be reviewed prior to posting, but only reviewed after users have flagged the comments.
• You will have the ability to edit and delete your own comments, and use basic HTML formatting in your posts.

We also want to highlight a few frequently asked questions about the transition:

• Your existing login will work with the new commenting system.
• Comments that you have made over the last four years will be migrated to the new system and accessible to you and other readers of the site.
• Your first and last name is no longer required to create an account (though we do prefer it!). If you do provide your name, it will be displayed when you make a comment. If you don't provide your name, just your username (formerly called a nickname) will be displayed.
• Please be aware that comments made on the new Disqus platform may be searchable on public search engines.
• Commenting on NPR means an account will be created for you with Disqus.com and your comments and user profile will be available on the Disqus platform. If this makes you uncomfortable, we understand. You have the ability to delete your past comments, and we can help you delete your account as well.

Visit our Community FAQ for more detail.

We want to thank you for being an active member of the NPR community. Have any questions? Ask below!

Throughout the last four years of the NPR Community, we have endeavored to encourage a conversation of which we can all be proud. And throughout the last four years, we have been happy with the quality of comments on NPR.org, especially when compared to other news outlets with very active communities.

We know we could always take steps to encourage even better quality comments and an even better conversation. So building off of our recently announced changes to our tools and platform, we are also making changes to our moderation experience across the site.

We asked this question in our recent NPR audience survey:

How quickly should we handle moderation when comments are made on an NPR site?

• 37.5% of respondents selected: Comments should appear instantly. Only problem comments should be moderated.
• 50.8% of respondents selected: Comments should be moderated before they appear, even if this causes a short delay.
• 11.7% of respondents selected: Comments on news stories should be moderated more heavily than other kinds of comments.

Relevant selections from our open ended questions on the survey:

"I am looking for intelligent, moderated comments without any of the Internet "chaff" which adds nothing."

"I prefer sites where comments are at least usually thoughtful and free of "trolls" or hateful speech. Usually this requires more moderation by the host site, but allowing readers to vote comments up or down helps elevate better comments to the forefront. Also, I appreciate having the opportunity to report offensive comments. Even if that function is not used often, I think it serves as a kind of deterrent for troublemakers."

"Filtering out unwanted commentors; being able to request a moderator step in to screen out "trojan" commenters — although I would have preferred to have a moderator up front."

"Thoughtful, well-moderated comments and easy-to-follow threads."

"Comments are moderated. This is a difficult, but essential task."

We were surprised to see a full majority of our respondents actually call for more moderation throughout our comment threads. We have always been very careful to balance our desire for an open community with our need to encourage a civil conversation with great quality comments. As we said two years ago when we last expanded our moderation system, we want to make the threads a comfortable place for everyone to participate. We also want to make sure the comment threads provide great content for our audience to read.

In response to this user survey and our ongoing efforts to encourage even better quality comments on our site, we have made the decision to implement full moderation prior to posting on many areas of NPR.org. Your comments will go through moderation before being posted on our news stories and several of our blogs. Your comments on our arts and life, books, music, and many other blog stories will be posted without delay, and only moderated if flagged as inappropriate.

Switching to Disqus will give us a number of other features that we think will improve the conversation on our site. Comments will be threaded, and users will be able to reply to another user's comment directly. Comments will have three sorting options: newest, oldest, and "best," which algorithmically surfaces comments of high quality based on user input and several other input factors.

We are are constantly trying to improve your experience on NPR's website. We have reviewed our Discussion Rules, and will work closely with our moderators as we expand the number of comments that they review before they are published. We expect that all comments in the news areas of the site will be published after a short delay, but not more than 15 minutes.

Our discussion rules are staying largely the same, but we will be making the section on personal attacks a bit more clear. We still will not tolerate users on any of our articles attacking other members of the community, or private citizens who find themselves covered in a news story. As always, we'll give you wider latitude when it comes to criticizing public figures or institutions, but we still ask you to be civil. We know for the most part our users follow these conventions.

We've also reviewed your questions from our last post, and we have several answers:

Mikie Mouser asked about security holes within Disqus. We reviewed his specific complaint, and are pleased to report that Disqus has closed this particular flaw with their latest version, and that is the version we will be implementing. We will keep an eye on this moving forward, and we always invite you to bring up your concerns.

Lynn S asked if comments would be available to Google. Right now, we have no plans to index the comments, but as we've always reminded you in the privacy policy, we do encourage you to remember that all information you do share with the NPR community could become public.

Several people asked who did we survey - we sent our survey out to the subscribers of newsletter at NPR called "NPR Products and Services." We did this because we wanted to reach a larger audience than our listener panel usually includes, and people who specifically have accounts on NPR.org.

Mark I asked many questions about the migration, and I will attempt to answer them all. We are planning to migrate all of the comments (current and past), avatars, first name, last name, and nickname (to be renamed to username for less confusion). Report abuse will still exist, but the functionality will change slightly and users will be able to up-vote and down-vote comments in the thread. The favorites you specified on your profile will still be there, but we are not migrating "friends," "walls," or community groups. There will be an option to follow other users within Disqus, but since the functionality is not a one-for-one match with what we have now, we decided not to migrate existing friend relationships. Finally, your NPR account will have the comments associated with an account on Disqus, but would not become a fully featured "Disqus" account that you would be able to use to login to other enabled websites unless you took additional action on Disqus' website.

Let us know what other questions you have! We welcome your feedback on these changes.

You've asked, and we've (finally) responded: In about a month's time, NPR.org will be migrating to a new commenting platform.

NPR is excited to offer our users additional tools to participate in online story commenting and discussion. The new commenting tool, provided by Disqus, will address many of your requests for upgrades to our system, including threaded discussions, permalinked comments, and accessibility from mobile devices.

Many of you indicated that you've never heard of Disqus, so we want to give you the opportunity to become more familiar with its tools and how commenting will work. We also hope that you let us know if you have any suggestions for the new system.

Earlier in August we sent out a survey to more than 200,000 NPR users to get feedback on the commenting and community features currently in use on NPR.org. At last count, 6,040 of you had responded! 84.3 percent of the respondents told us they don't want to have to create a new login and password, and 26.4 percent told us they want access to past comments they've made on NPR.org. We're happy to report that we'll be able to do both of those things. In addition, if you've created a username and password with Disqus, you'll be able to use that to comment on NPR.org.

The vast majority of respondents indicated that they use other communities (Facebook!) to share and comment on NPR stories. We think that's great — the new commenting platform will offer the ability to easily share on your social networks of choice. And because 37.4 percent of participants thought organization of comments in a threaded layout would make it easier to follow conversations, that will also be a key feature of the new Disqus platform.

Stay tuned for future innovation. We see a growing interest in comment quality, including a request for comments curated by NPR, and an interest in stories that incorporate user comments, so even more reasons for you to participate in discussions on NPR.org!

If you'd like to participate in future surveys about comments or other website or digital product designs, please sign up. We would love to hear from you.

You may have noticed that there is not much to notice on this blog lately. In the lyrics of Lucinda Williams, "Well it's over – I know it – but I can't let go."

The NPR Audience Insight & Research team began this blog as an experiment in research transparency. I do not see its end as a failure. When the blog was at its best, we shared new techniques and findings from bleeding edge research.

Perhaps we are victims of our own success. Internally, we have experienced increased demand for our time, skills and attention. We have completed some juicy work over the last year. However, much of our work is proprietary and we've been challenged to find paths to share the work in this forum.

We will continue to search for ways to share our work with you, and there will be two locations to find those posts. For digital-related research, you can turn to Inside NPR. For all other research, we will post on This is NPR.

All the best from the research-geeks (meant lovingly) at NPR!

Lori Kaplan is the Director of Audience Insight & Research.

NPR

Today we're proud to announce the launch of our Planet Money iPhone app, which represents a new direction in our mobile strategy.

You can find many of the features of the app in Caitlin Kenny's blog post this morning or you can download it for free from iTunes and try if for yourself.

We chose Planet Money as NPR's first program-specific app because of its importance to our editorial mission and because of its popularity. Since 2008, Planet Money has challenged the notion that complex economic issues can only be understood by economists. Now, the Planet Money team is challenging our notions about what makes a good app, and together we've come up with a design and a number of features that we're looking to incorporate into our other mobile applications in the near future.

The Planet Money app is also an opportunity for us to learn about how to better serve the fanatically loyal audiences that coalesce around a particular program. As Caitlin pointed out this morning, the app was developed with substantial input from our audience, and we hope that you'll continue to help us improve the app now that it's live. Although this is our first step in the world of program-specific apps, it's a big one. Please take a moment to comment and let us know what you think.

We're making a major upgrade today to all of NPR's slideshows. Our slideshows are now iOS-friendly and available in our API.

Previously, NPR.org slideshows played in Flash, which iPhones and iPads couldn't display. The lack of API distribution also made these slideshows unavailable to our mobile apps and member station sites. In late fall, we began to change our production. We created a new slideshow experience in our NPR Music live event pages, which included a new player and distribution process.

In today's move, we expand the use of that technology to all of NPR.org. We are upgrading more than 2,000 slideshows: those from news stories, music stories and our Picture Show blog.

These slideshows include more than 30,000 images. If you browse NPR.org on your iPad, you can now view all of these images, swipe between images and tap for captions. We've improved the slideshows' buttons and behaviors for a better experience — wherever you seeing them. We plan to display slideshows across many more NPR platforms in the future.

If you use the NPR API, you can access many of these images.

More than 13,000 images, including more than 3,000 NPR images, are available to local station sites immediately. NPR's Digital Services division, which works with local stations, already has NPR.org slideshows flowing into the Core Publisher platform and plans to optimize the experience further in the future.

For all API users, more than 8,000 images are now available.

To find details about using slideshows from the API, read the second half of this previous Inside NPR.org blog post, under "Collections." Every story that has a slideshow should have a collection marked as type "slideshow." An update to the earlier post is that the output is available in NPRML and now JSON.

Keep in mind NPR slideshows use images from a wide variety of sources, and we don't have rights to distribute all of our images. But we continue to work toward as much distribution as possible.

NPR on Flipboard.

Flipboard

At NPR, we've always taken great pride in those "driveway moments" that listeners tell us about. You know, those occasions when you sit in your driveway with the car running for a few minutes, just so you can finish listening to the story or interview that captured your attention.

With NPR and local station streams available on virtually every mobile and tablet platform these days, those "driveway moments" can happen just about anywhere.

And today, there's another opportunity to explore NPR. We have teamed up with social news magazine Flipboard to make NPR available in its iPad and iPhone apps. Flipboard says it plans to be available on Android devices as well in the coming months.

On Flipboard, you can now get NPR's latest News, Business, Arts & Life and Music news and features, along with the remarkably intimate interviews from Terry Gross and Fresh Air. You can listen while you continue to 'flip' and read. To ensure NPR is always easily accessible in your Flipboard experience, simply tap the '+Add' button within the NPR sections. Then, every time you open the app, the latest content from NPR will be there.

NPR is part of the launch of Flipboard's new in-app audio player. Flipboard now includes content from Public Radio International (producers of programs such as This American Life and To The Point) and music sharing service Soundcloud.

Our partnership with Flipboard represents a commitment to be the leader in news and cultural coverage that touches the lives of Americans, no matter how they tune in. With that goal in mind, you can expect to see and hear programming from NPR and member stations continue to be available where and when it's convenient for you.

To get started, download NPR in Flipboard and let us know what you think.

Reports on the media habits of Millennials, those "digital natives", have given some the impression that young people never read newspapers. However, survey evidence stubbornly insists that they do.

For instance, the recent Pew State of the News Media study notes that 23% of people aged 18-24 reported reading a newspaper yesterday. As a Millennial myself, I was slightly skeptical. Were these 18-24 year olds just confused about what a newspaper is? Further evidence confirms the existence of young people looking to print: The New York Times reports that 10% of its hard copy subscribers are aged 18-24, which is on par with the 9% of this age cohort who subscribe digitally.

NPR Research has access to GfK MRI's nationwide data, collected through extensive in-person surveys, which indicates that newspaper readership is even more widespread among young adults than these statistics suggest. I looked up the exact question respondents were asked in this survey so I could be sure that Millennials were not mistaking "noticing a pile of newspapers at Starbucks" for "reading a newspaper." It turns out that survey respondents were asked to cite newspapers they had read or looked into, on printed paper. They were specifically reminded that neither electronic copies nor the newspaper's website count as printed paper. Neither does a tablet or mobile device. Still, most Millennials insist that they read newspapers!

Source: GfK MRI Doublebase 2011

Millennials keep pace with total US adults until it comes to comparing the number of heavy readers. Less than a quarter of Millennials (22%) are reading newspapers at least every other day, compared to 40% of adults overall. However 52% of them are getting their hands (and eyes) on a newspaper at least once a month and up to fourteen times a month.

Heavy newspaper readers (groups I and II) are 75% more likely than light/non readers (groups IV and V) to hold a graduate degree. Heavy readers are also more than twice as likely to be considered "Influentials," meaning people who participate in three or more public engagement activities every year (such as writing a letter to an elected official, running for public office, or attending a public meeting). These young adults are keyed into civic life and, in a crowded media marketplace, apparently prioritize carving out time to read a print newspaper.

As we have seen in the video, "Baby Thinks Magazine Is a Broken iPad," the next generation may need some instruction in print media appreciation. However, evidence points to the fact that, while they may prefer their digital devices, most Millennials know how to turn a physical printed page, and I will raise my morning coffee and paper to that.

Katy Pape is an intern with Audience Insight & Research.

The Pew Research Center recently released their annual update on the State of the News Media.

Not surprisingly, the main theme is the continuing shift of news consumption to digital, particularly mobile, platforms. Americans are rapidly adopting smart phones and tablets and using them to access news content. Radio news did slightly increase audience and revenue (both up 1%), but most of radio's revenue growth was in digital platforms – a 15% increase in online and mobile. Pew reports that: "As many as 38% percent of Americans now listen to audio on digital devices each week, and that is projected to double by 2015, while interest in traditional radio...is on the decline."

The big frontier for digital audio consumption is the car. Pew notes that two-thirds of traditional radio listening occurs away from home, much of that in cars. But, increasingly people are using cell phones to listen to online-only radio in their cars –11% in 2011, up from 6% in 2010. This behavior is most common among young people – 19% of 18-24 year olds streamed Pandora in their cars in the previous month. Car manufacturers will be making it even easier to stream audio in-car by installing technology to access the internet in automobiles (e.g. Ford's SYNC AppLink which will include NPR News). Taken together, it is clear that the in-car listening experience will be changing substantially in the coming years.

For more details on the trends in all sectors of the news media, read the Pew Research Center's report, The State of the News Media 2012.

Susan Leland is the Research Manager for NPR's Corporate Sponsorship and Development.

Arbitron and Edison Research just released the 2012 edition of The Infinite Dial study. This marks the 14^th year and 20^th report in the series that "provide estimates of emerging digital platforms and their impact on media landscape."

Not surprisingly, this year the report focused energy on the precipitous increase in usage of mobile technology and social media. However, I was a bit surprised, to hear the contention that digital platforms are not eroding radio listening. Over 90% of persons age 12 or older do listen to radio on a weekly basis, but the amount of time spent listening to radio has been diminishing over time.

Arbitron's Bedroom Project, research from 2007 conducted by Jacobs Media, highlighted the absence of radios in younger potential listeners' homes. This ethnography was an early view into changing media patterns. A review of Arbitron's own data shows that time spent listening to radio has largely been on the decline since the mid 1980's. Competition time and attention has only increased since the advent of mobile devices. A recent emarketer graph reinforces this point:

In the end, every piece of content must present value to the listener to keep him or her tuned in.

Lori Kaplan is the Director of Audience Insight & Research.

When you visit the NPR.org home page today, you may see a set of local-news headlines from your NPR Member station. We're beginning a month-long experiment to gauge your interest in these headlines and explore how we might better connect you digitally to your local station.

Thirteen NPR Member stations are participating in this experiment: Michigan Radio, KPLU, KQED, KUT, Oregon Public Broadcasting, Boise State Public Radio, WBUR, WNYC, WAMU, WHYY, WFIU, KPCC, and North Country Public Radio. If you live or work in their areas, you're likely to see their headlines on our home page, just below our main national headlines.

NPR Digital Services

This picture shows an example of what you may see. NPR Digital Services, which works closely with Member stations, has posted an in-depth account of the experiment here.

At the end of the experiment, we'll evaluate your responses and determine how to move ahead. In the meantime, you can let us know what you think through the Inside NPR.org contact form.

Update on April 19: We've hit the end of our one-month test and have removed the local-headlines experiment from the NPR.org homepage. Thank you to every one of our viewers who clicked and gave feedback. Next, we're going to review the results of the experiment (both nationally and locally), see which parts worked and which parts didn't, and decide how to move ahead.

2011 was an exceptional year for news. Events overseas brought about dramatic change, such as the Arab Spring, the Tsunami in Japan, and the death of Bin Laden and Gaddafi. On the domestic side, there was the Giffords shooting in Arizona and seemingly multiple political battles and stalemates in the US Congress.

2011 was also arguably a transformational year in the way that people access the latest on major news events. Facebook feeds and Twitter updates have become a new competitor with more traditional news outlets. Still, traditional media such as television and radio remain the dominant source for the latest news and information. This week-by-week chart for 2011 shows how Arbitron's PPM measured the changes in Average Quarter-hour listening levels for NPR Newsmagazine stations in the top 25 markets. Not all major news events led to peaks in radio listening levels, but the year-high for NPR member stations stemmed around the Tsunami in Japan and the death of Bin Laden.

Ben Robins is the Research Manager for NPR Programming.

NPR's newly issued and updated ethics guidelines have a lot to say about being a journalist in the era of Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and any number of other social media channels that our staff uses every day.

But less seems to have changed over the past couple of decades than you might expect. National correspondent Pam Fessler recently unearthed a one-page "netiquette" guide handed out to NPR staff in 1994, when the company first offered most employees at-work Internet access. The handout appears to be from an hourlong introduction to this new communication tool called email.

The document lists nine common-sense tips, SUCH AS NOT TYPING IN UPPERCASE. A few other points that stand the test of time:

"Be brief."

"Be careful with humor and sarcasm."

"Don't overreact to spelling errors."

The most relevant items in the 1994 guide, especially for employees at a national news organization like this one, are the first two on the page:

"Be careful what you say."

"Your message reflects upon you and NPR."

Those clear simple statements come remarkably close to summarizing what we advised our staff 15 years later, in 2009, when NPR issued its first guidelines for another new form of digital communication — social media. And the two-part message in both documents echo throughout the updated guidelines that NPR just released: Take advantage of these powerful resources to do your work, but don't forget that you represent our organization, especially if you are an editorial employee.

Sharing and social media have become deeply embedded in how NPR does business. These channels are among the ways our journalists cover their beats, cultivate sources and communicate with listeners and readers. They are vital listening posts that help us monitor events around the globe — from Haiti to Homs. Social media conveys our news coverage and our cultural coverage and helps promote our work and our mission. And, most recently, social media has become a recruiting tool for new employees — for us as well as other friends across public media.

In fact, social media is now fully woven into our new ethics guidelines precisely because it is so woven into how NPR operates and communicates, both as a newsroom and as a media company. (You also can read a summary and standalone compilation of the guidelines that specifically relate to social media, if that's the part that's most of interest.)

We tried to avoid being overly prescriptive about disclaimers or RT'ing policies for Twitter and the like. Instead we trust our journalists to be journalists, and to identify themselves as such when they use social media for reporting purposes. And we emphasize that our guidelines are a "living document," intended to evolve along with the technology. And the technology has already evolved quickly.

The overall message to our editorial staff is unchanged: Social media services offer powerful ways to do our work and extend the reach of our journalism. As in all aspects of our lives, we need to conduct ourselves online as journalists and remember that what we say and how we act will reflect on NPR.

Oh, and be brief, be careful with humor and sarcasm and don't overreact to spelling errorrs.

Mark Stencel is NPR's managing editor for digital news. He welcomes your feedback in the comments with this article or on Twitter: @markstencel

Before I fell into data analysis in graduate school, I never considered myself to be a "numbers person." High school Algebra was a blast, but in college I gravitated toward language and writing. English boasts an abundance of expressive synonyms, and I reveled in the sometimes subtle differences among them.

As a master's student in library and information science, I felt as if I were betraying books and words by focusing on research, but I soon discovered it wasn't all about numbers. Many surveys – including those we do at NPR – utilize open-ended questions to capture sentiments beyond the simplified "agree" or "disagree" statements. Such questions offer respondents a chance to explain their thoughts or reactions in greater detail, and often lead researchers to approach a subject from an angle they hadn't considered.

Nevertheless, even when we ask you to share your thoughts in your own words, we eventually have to assign your responses numerical values that can be compiled and analyzed. This presents a challenge for the researchers, because those spectacular synonyms I mentioned earlier can mean different things to different people. Trying to confidently interpret a respondent's understanding of those words can be a slippery slope. Can I assume "entertaining" and "amusing" mean pretty much the same thing to most people? Or is "amusing" more similar to "funny"? Because I wouldn't say "funny" and "entertaining" carry the same connotation.

I'll stop there, before it becomes more obvious how much I enjoy reading my desktop thesaurus. But I hope you can see my point. While we're interested in teasing out nuances in individual listeners' thoughts on NPR-related topics, we also want to know how they're connected on a broader level.

That means I get the best of both worlds when I dive into survey responses. First, I can peek into listeners' minds and gain closer insight into what they think and why. And then I get to play with my calculator.

I love being a nerd.

Jamie Helgren is an intern in Audience Insight & Research

Today we are excited to announce the launch of NPR Music for iPad, a multimedia music magazine we hope will delight music lovers of all tastes and styles. The app is designed to showcase the best music content from NPR and NPR stations. This includes live concerts, exclusive first listens, original reporting and commentary. It also features quick access to over 100 NPR station streams through a persistent radio feature. The app takes advantage of the rich visual interface and tactile navigation of the iPad to present an integrated blend of text, images, audio and video.

NPR

Users of the existing NPR News app for iPad and NPR Music app for iPhone will notice some familiar conventions, as well as a variety of new features. These include favorites and a smart, graphical playlist.

Favorites and the playlist complement each other: favorites (represented by the traditional heart symbol) are for storing station streams and stories or songs you may want to quickly return to again and again; the playlist is your listening queue, which you can now see and interact with intuitively by swiping items into and out of the queue. You can also reorder them by dragging items from one spot to another with the "sticky" bar at the top of each tile.

NPR

To help users get the most from NPR's rich archive of content, the app will surface stories we think you'll like. In the right column on story pages we'll show you other stories you might want to see based on the one you're already looking at. Just below the playlist, the app will offer you stories you may like based, in part, on the items you have in your iPad iTunes library (see image above).

NPR stations have some of the best music content available anywhere and one of the app's greatest strengths is its expanded stations section. It's simple to locate stations you already enjoy and add them to your favorites list. Users can also easily find new stations to try based on genre, or via a featured stations section near the top.

NPR

NPR Music for iPad is part of our larger effort to deliver NPR Music's amazing — and often exclusive — content to users as widely as possible. We recently launched a browser-based live events platform for music that invites users to watch a live performance and participate in a simultaneous live chat that works on mobile, tablet and web browsers (including Android). We universally include some music content in our news products as well, such as the NPR mobile web site and NPR News Android app.

A great opportunity to try the new app's live video streaming capability will be on March 7 at 10 p.m. ET, when The Shins play live their forthcoming album Port of Morrow in New York at an event celebrating the album release and the launch of NPR Music for iPad. The app will also feature extensive coverage later in March from Austin's SXSW music festival. The app is AirPlay enabled so you can watch any of the videos on a bigger screen if you have an Apple TV.

We hope you enjoy the app. You can download it directly from iTunes here.

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

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

Google Analytics

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.

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

A screenshot of Mitt Romney's Iowa stump speech, with a Pop-Up Politics bubble animated in.

NPR

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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:

Library of Congress

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.

Library of Congress

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).

NPR Infinite Player

NPR

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!

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

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:

• Proposed enhancements to music events like our Tiny Desk Concerts
• Techniques to make Web pages load in the browser faster
• Ways to deepen NPR's relationship with the audience and community, enabling listeners to tell their own stories
• New training material for our own staff to use
• Prototyping a reduced-clutter experience for financial supporters of member stations

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.

Angell Williams/COLIN MONTEATH

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.

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.