NPR visuals team blog→ Parsing complex social study data

2015-10-20 NPR’s #15girls project looks at the lives of 15 year old girls around the world. The reporting team was interested in using data from the World Values Survey (WVS) to help inform the reporting and produce a “by-the-numbers” piece. An …›

NPR visuals team blog→ How to be an intern at NPR Visuals (Apply now for Winter/Spring 2016!)

2015-10-14 We’re currently looking for interns for spring 2016! We want to see your best work. Here’s how. Cover letters All candidates must submit a cover letter. Your cover letter should be a statement of purpose. We’re interested in what you’re …›

NPR Storytelling→ Why so many people clicked play on this story’s audio from a congressional hearing

2015-09-30 When people visit NPR.org stories that include audio, few typically click “play” – only about 13 percent. But this piece by NPR’s Eyder Peralta? It got hundreds of thousands of views and about 62 percent of them resulted in a “play.”   …›

NPR Storytelling→ How to make scenes that breathe and move and WORK

2015-09-24 Thanks to an invitation from Storybench.org to write about NPR stories that “breathe life into a neighborhood scene,” I’ve been thinking about what distinguishes audio scenes that are, well … meh … from those that really sing.I cam …›

NPR Storytelling→ Public radio people told a story exclusively on Snapchat…

2015-09-10 Public radio people told a story exclusively on Snapchat … and lived to tell the tale!A couple of weeks ago, Alison MacAdam and I spent a day showing a new employee how a story comes together at NPR, from start to finish. It’s an extensive process …›

NPR Storytelling→ When should you reveal the big magical number?

2015-09-04 When you have a story that’s centered around a huge and surprising number, when do you reveal it?This piece by NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce illustrates how the answer could be different for audio and digital.  It’s about researchers who discovere …›

NPR Storytelling→ Building a neighborhood scene

2015-08-31 On Friday, August 28, two stories on Morning Edition achieved the same thing: They painted effective scenes of single, emblematic streets. The first street is in LA - in this diminutive piece by NPR’s Nathan Rott about Californians limiting their …›

NPR Storytelling→ How doodling can improve your audio story

2015-08-20 Here’s a handy trick from NPR’s Don Gonyea, who has endured more campaign airplanes, Iowa State Fairs, and overstuffed spin rooms than almost anyone. Don is nearly always on a tight deadline, and it turns out he sketches pictures like the doodle b …›

NPR Storytelling→ When you can’t get a story out of your head, write an explainer

2015-08-18 You’ve probably seen the photos: shockingly orange water cascading through Colorado’s Animas River, the contamination the result of an accident by the Environmental Protection Agency at a nearby mine. KUNC reporter Stephanie Paige Ogburn has been …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Work with us this summer!

2015-08-16 …›

NPR Storytelling→ How to tell a powerful story… in real timeAugust 14 is…

2015-08-10 How to tell a powerful story… in real timeAugust 14 is Melissa Block’s last day as host of All Things Considered. After 12 years “in the chair,” she leaves behind thousands of memorable moments. But none are more powerful than her stories from …›

NPR visuals team blog→ It’s time for you to discover your mission.

2015-08-10 I didn’t always have a mission. For the first seven years of my career, I worked in the software industry. The work was interesting, and I had a craft, for sure, but not a mission. All that changed when I quit my job to become a journalist. Our miss …›

NPR Storytelling→ Listen to the work of your colleagues

2015-08-07 From Sara Sarasohn, longtime NPR editor and producer, now editorial leader of NPR One:“When I stopped being a producer, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and figured that I had mixed more than a thousand reporter pieces. That is what taught me …›

NPR Storytelling→ Tell a small story in order to tell a large one*

2015-08-05 Compliments to Rachel Martin, Jordana Hochman and Connor Donevan at Weekend Edition for this great story last Sunday. They produced an 11-minute piece about two sisters who were stranded in the New Orleans Superdome with thousands of other people aft …›

NPR Storytelling→ One secret to good visual storytelling

2015-07-30 The NPR Visuals team has gotten raves for this story, produced by David Eads and Claire O’Neill in 2014. “Demolished,” about Chicago’s public housing projects, won the top award given out by the Society of News Designers.So why is “Demolis …›

NPR Storytelling→ Sense of place: Learning from “insiders” with outside perspective

2015-07-24 Why would anyone want to trade the comforts of British Columbia for a partially-destroyed, periodically war-torn, 7 mile-long enclave squeezed between Israel and the sea? NPR’s Emily Harris (with editing by Larry Kaplow) recently told the story of …›

NPR Storytelling→ No studio on the road? No problem

2015-07-21 Every radio producer and reporter knows you have to get creative when tracking while traveling. Our engineer, Kevin Wait, says you should try to recreate the studio environment as much as possible — find the quietest area and use something soft above …›

NPR visuals team blog→ How to apply for an internship at NPR Visuals

2015-07-20 We want to see your best work. Here’s how. (In case you missed it, applications are currently open for our fall internships.) Cover letters All candidates must submit a cover letter. Your cover letter should be a statement of purpose. We’re int …›

NPR visuals team blog→ What’s new in our first release version of the dailygraphics rig?

2015-07-17 Our dailygraphics rig has been around for more than a year and in that time we’ve used it to make hundreds of responsive rectangles of good internet, but we’ve never made it easy for others to use. The rig is heavily customized for our need …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Work with us this fall!

2015-07-16 Hey! Are you a student? Do you design? Develop? Love the web? …or… Do you make pictures? Want to learn to be a great photo editor? If so, we’d very much like to hear from you. You’ll spend the fall working on the visuals …›

RadioSutton→ PMDMC Did Little to Clarify the Future of Pledge Drives

2015-07-15 There were two sessions on the future of public radio pledge drives at last week's Public Radio Development and Marketing Conference In Washington, DC.  The conference was organized by Greater Public, the industry's trade group for fundraising and …›

RadioSutton→ Rethinking Public Radio Station Brands

2015-07-08 This week Public Radio Fundraising and Marketing professionals are meeting in Washington DC at the Public Media Marketing and Development Conference.  Public Radio branding is one of the big topics as NPR News stations try to figure out how to rem …›

NPR visuals team blog→ We’re hiring a designer!

2015-06-26 Love to design and code? Want to use your skills to make the world a better place? We’re a crew of visual journalists (developers, designers, photojournalists…lots of things) in the newsroom at NPR headquarters in sunny Washington, DC. …›

J-Lab RSS Feed→ When Engagement Really Worked

2015-06-24 Posted To: Ideas & Innovation > Blogically Thinking This article first appeared June 22, 2015 in Nieman Labs. Nowadays, we often seek to measure media engagement by social media activity, web metrics or attention minutes. But ther …›

J-Lab RSS Feed→ Navigating Law for Media Startups

2015-06-23 Posted To: Ideas & Innovation > Blogically Thinking This was first published March 10, 2015 on Mediashift. When I launched J-Lab in 2002, the best piece of advice I received was to have a lawyer draft a Memorandum of Understanding o …›

RadioSutton→ Should Public Radio Offer Incentives to Attract New Digital Listeners?

2015-06-09 The strategic use of incentives helps make public radio pledge drives more successful. They help boost the number of donations during key dayparts. They motivate some listeners to give at certain pledge levels and in ways that are beneficial to t …›

RadioSutton→ Promoting Digital Listening Like Your Survival Depends On It

2015-06-07 How would you promote your public radio station’s on-line stream if the station’s very existence depended on it?It’s not a hypothetical question.  Every public radio station faces that situation today as more of its listeners and donors spr …›

RadioSutton→ If Digital is the Future, Public Radio Needs to Promote it Better Now

2015-06-04 I just spent part of the last two days listening to 50 station breaks across 14 different large and medium market public radio stations. Every station is considered to be a top station in public radio and most are considered to be digitally savvy. …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Better, faster, more: recent improvements to our dailygraphics rig

2015-05-28 …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Better, faster, more: recent improvements to our dailygraphics rig

2015-05-27 …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Simplifying Map Production

2015-05-18 When news happens in locations that our audience may not know very well, a map seems like a natural thing to include as part of our coverage. But good maps take time.* In ArcMap, I’ll assemble the skeleton of my map with shapefiles from Natur …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Let’s Tesselate: Hexagons For Tile Grid Maps

2015-05-11 A hexagon tile grid, square tile grid and geographic choropleth map. Maps by Danny DeBelius and Alyson Hurt. As the saying goes, nothing is certain in this life but death, taxes and requests for geographic data to be represented on a map. For area …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Tech note: Connecting to an Amazon RDS database from a legacy EC2 server

2015-05-08 Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) is an excellent way to host databases. The service is affordable, low-maintenance, and self-contained. If you use the Amazon cloud, there are precious few reasons to maintain your own database server. At so …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Audio in the Browser: Horrors and Joys (Published At Source (source.opennews.org))

2015-04-30 Tyler Fisher of NPR on the past, present, and future of web audio …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Better, faster, more: recent improvements to our dailygraphics rig

2015-04-28 In the past couple weeks the Visuals team has consciously shifted resources to focus on the parts of our work that have the highest impact. As part of this reorganization the graphics team has grown from one (Graphics Editor Alyson Hurt) to two—t …›

RadioSutton→ The Well-Chosen Word Matters in Pledge Drives Too

2015-04-22 One of the big challenges during public radio pledge drives is avoiding clichés. They pop into the appeals of even the most experienced on-air pitchers. Fundraising fatigue will do that to you. Pledge drive clichés aren’t effective at persuadi …›

RadioSutton→ Shoter Pledge Drives… Again!

2015-04-21 Public radio is in another cycle of conducting shorter on-air pledge drives.   The latest cycle started at North Country Public Radio (NCPR) in upstate New York.  Last fall, NCPR produced what it called a Warp Drive, allowing it t …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Making small multiples maps with invar

2015-04-02 Mapping the spread of Wal-Mart For a recent story on the growth of Wal-Mart in urban areas we set out to map Wal-Marts across the US and over time. Due to limitations with our dataset, we only ended up mapping three cities. Here is the graphic we prod …›

NPR visuals team blog→ The Evolution of NPR’s Picture Stories (Published At Source (source.opennews.org))

2015-03-18 Behind the scenes on the iterative growth and change of our stories and formats …›