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 …›

RadioSutton→ Audience 98: Enduring Insights or Now Useless Information?

2014-11-21 Yesterday's keynote speech at the Public Radio Super Regional meeting was by Paul Jacobs. He's a radio researcher, radio web app developer, and the incoming Board Chair of Greater Public -- the trade association for fundraising, development, and market …›

RadioSutton→ Is Local News the New Classical Music?

2014-11-19 Digital News Guru Ken Doctor presented the opening session today at the public radio Super-Regional meeting in Las Vegas.  His premise.  Local news presents a great opportunity for public radio.His logic. There is great potential in the digit …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Three interesting code snippets from NPR’s Election Party

2014-11-17 NPR’s Election Party app has a lot of moving parts. It displays live election results from the Associated Press, ingests posts from our Tumblr liveblog, bakes out visualizations of our data, and presents all of this in a slideshow that, on election …›

PRPD News for Programmers→ Hoban, Abramovitz to Fill PRPD Board Positions

2014-11-14 Matt AbramovitzJon HobanTwo PRPD board positions vacated by recent resignations were filled today by Matt Abramovitz, PD at WQXR, New York and Jon Hoban, Chief Content Officer at KJZZ, Phoenix.   They will assume their seats immediately and will s …›

PRPD News for Programmers→ Greater Public Announces New Board Leadership

2014-11-14 Starting January 1, Paul Jacobs (Jacobs Media) will assume the chair of the Greater Public board of directors.  Connie Walker (WUNC) will be secretary and Norm Silverstein (WXXI) will assume the treasurer post. …›

J-Lab RSS Feed→ The Story Behind the Geezer Grants

2014-11-13 Posted To: Ideas & Innovation > Blogically Thinking Masters Mediapreneurs and the J-Lab were featured in three MediaShift articles: J-Lab’s Jan Schaffer Reflects Back on 20 Years of Journalism Innovation; J-Lab Launche …›

PRPD News for Programmers→ Sample clocks for fundraising with the new Morning Edition

2014-11-11 Editor note:  This is a companion piece to an earlier post about fundraising with the new clocks. It may be shocking to realize that the new newsmagazine clocks for NPR start on Monday.   While many stations are busy planning their regul …›

PRPD News for Programmers→ AIR to Expand Localore Projects

2014-11-05 The Association of Independents in Radio (AIR) has received funding to expand three of its Localore projects - Curious City, iSeeChange and Sonic Trace.  The funding will allow producers of those projects (located at Chicago Public Media, KVNF, Pa …›

PRPD News for Programmers→ Joyce Mac to CPB

2014-11-04 Continuing the changes at NPR, Joyce MacDonald has accepted the position of VP of Journalism at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  According to a note to the NPR Areps from Jarl Mohn:"In this role, Joyce will be able to amplify what she has …›