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 …›

J-Lab RSS Feed→ Law for Media Startups – New Entrepreneurship Guide

2015-03-04 Posted To: Press Releases For immediate release Noon, March. 4, 2015 Contact: Jan Schaffer jans@j-lab.org   J-Lab partners with CUNY to create e-guide   Washington, D.C.– “Law f …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Switching to OAuth in the App Template

2015-03-02 Suyeon Son and David Eads re-worked the authentication mechanism for accessing Google Spreadsheets with the NPR Visuals App Template. This is a significant change for App Template users. Here’s why we did it and how it works. Most App Template devel …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Multivariate testing: Learning what works from your users at scale

2015-02-26 Multivariate and AB testing are generally used to iterate on products over time. But what do you do when your product is always different, like the visual stories we tell? For the past year, NPR Visuals has been iterating on a story format for pictur …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Work with us this summer!

2015-02-19 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 summer working on the visual …›

RadioSutton→ The Impact of Sustaining givers on Public Radio Fnd Drives

2015-02-17 The movement to monthly sustaining givers has been good for many public radio stations, improving annual donor retention and monthly cash flow. The impact on fund drives is less clear.There's not a lot of readily available national data on the subject, …›

RadioSutton→ It’s Taking More Leverage to Generate Pledge Drive Contributions

2015-02-12 Our last post covered how it is getting more difficult to generate contributions during public radio pledge drives. We introduced the idea of public radio pledge drive Leverage.  (Pleverage?)Leverage is the weight of the incentives offered to gen …›

J-Lab RSS Feed→ Four Diverse Media Startups Win Encore Entrepreneur Funding

2015-02-05 Posted To: Press Releases For immediate release Feb. 5, 2015 Contact: Jan Schaffer jans@j-lab.org Washington, D.C. – Four media startups proposed by entrepreneurs over 50 have been selected to receiv …›

RadioSutton→ RadioSutton 2015-02-03 02:52:00

2015-02-03 It’s getting harder to generate contributions through public radio pledge drives.  Most stations are still getting good overall results, but the cost of getting those results is going up.Sometimes the cost is more on-air fundraising. It is tak …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Baking Chart Data Into Your Page

2015-01-28 Do you use our dailygraphics rig to create and deploy small charts? We’ve introduced a new feature: The latest version of copytext.py (0.1.8) allows users to inject serialized JSON from a Google Spreadsheet onto their page with one line of templa …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Putting Radio On The Television

2015-01-22 For election night 2014, we wanted to do something different. We guessed that the dedicated wonks — the ones who want to drill down into detailed data and maps — would probably go to sources like the New York Times or Washington Post. Rather than …›

PRPD News for Programmers→ The Official PRPD Transition

2014-12-31 As I leave the office for the last time as PRPD President, just want to thank you all for 8 great years in that job and over 36 wonderful years in public radio.  PRPD is now in the capable hands of Jody Evans... and, of course, the PRPD board.My o …›

PRPD News for Programmers→ PRPD Office Move in Progress

2014-12-26 As the year end approaches, PRPD files and records are "in the mail" from Hamilton, NY to Asheville, NC - the new World HQ of PRPD.  Jody Evans is now on board and officially becomes new PRPD President next week - Thursday, January 1, 2015.As of J …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Responsive Graphics In Core Publisher With Pym.js

2014-12-19 Editor’s Note: Core Publisher is a content management system that staff at many NPR member stations use to maintain their websites. This post is written for that audience, but may be useful for users of other CMSes. Over time, many member statio …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Improving User Engagement Through Subtle Changes: Updating the Book Concierge

2014-12-12 The NPR year-end 2013 Book Concierge was a big hit. Instead of writing a bunch of lists, the books team solicited over 200 short reviews by critics and staff and put them into a single, beautiful website designed to make discovering great books fun. Re …›

PRPD News for Programmers→ Nielsen: Milennials DO Listen to Radio

2014-12-11 A new Nielsen report, THE MEN, THE MYTHS, THE LEGENDS: WHY MILLENNIAL “DUDES” MIGHT BE MORE RECEPTIVE TO MARKETING THAN WE THOUGHT reports that:Millennial men are also heavy music listeners. Eighty-eight percent of all Millennial males in …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Book Concierge Update

2014-12-08 …›

PRPD News for Programmers→ Thompson to Atlantic, Wilson to NY Times

2014-12-04 More news about NPR staff (current and former) this week.  Matt Thompson1) Matt Thompson will be leaving NPR to become Deputy Editor of The Atlantic. Matt was NPR's Director of Vertical Initiatives  (and Mischief).  Among his many accomp …›

PRPD News for Programmers→ Total Radio Cume Up, TSL Down

2014-12-04 Nielsen's latest Total Audience Report, December 2014 shows that radio cume rose year to year for the 3rd quarter.  All Access reports:"...radio's overall number of 2+ users was up to 258,734,000 in Q3 2014 versus 257,420,000 in Q3 2013. TSL, howe …›

PRPD News for Programmers→ Baldwin’s Podcast Returns

2014-12-01 Photo: WNYC/Mary Ellen Matthews"Here's The Thing", a weekly podcast series hosted by Alec Baldwin has returned.  The WNYC produced show posted its first in the latest series last week. According to All Access, the latest (3rd) season will be relea …›