PRPD News for Programmers→ Leadership Reorg at NPR

2014-10-06 Mayer new NPR COOWilson out at NPRIn a message to their areps NPR announced a major reorganization of its top leadership.  Loren Mayer will now be NPR's Chief Operating Officer.  She was formerly Senior Vice President of Strategy.Leaving NPR …›

PRPD News for Programmers→ Webinars Scheduled Re: NPR Clock Changes

2014-09-29 With changes to the NPR news magazine clocks set to begin on November 17, PRPD and other organizations will be holding webinars to aid stations in planning the transition.  Tomorrow (9/30) PRNDI is offering the  webinar outlined belowNext wee …›

RadioSutton→ Observations on NPR One

2014-09-16 The slogan for the NPR One app is “Public Radio Made Personal. The purpose of the app is to help the user create a more customized listening experience.  Stories can be skipped. A recommendation engine personalizes the line-up of offer …›

RadioSutton→ The Increasing Importance of Station Branding in the Digital Space

2014-09-09 Well, the blog unintentionally ended up on hiatus for almost 10 months as I launched Emodus Research to study the emotional connections public radio listeners have with NPR and with their stations.That research is yielding some fascinating insight …›

NPR visuals team blog→ How to Setup the NPR App Template for You and Your News Org

2014-09-08 Just a few of the apps we have made with the app template. Photo by Emily Bogle. On the NPR Visuals Team, we make a point to open source and publish as much of the code we write as we can. That includes open sourcing code like the app template, which …›

NPR visuals team blog→ A reusable data processing workflow

2014-09-02 Correction (September 2, 2014 8:55pm EDT): We originally stated that the script should combine data from multiple American Community Survey population estimates. This methodology is not valid. This post and the accompanying source code have been update …›

J-Lab RSS Feed→ 2014 J-Lab/AEJMC Breakfast

2014-08-07 Posted To: Workshops & Training > Summits Event Date: Aug. 7, 2014 …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Work In Public! (Or, why you really should consider being NPR’s Knight-Mozilla fellow!)

2014-08-07 Visual journalism experts. David Sweeney/NPR. It’s joy to work in public media. Folks here do amazing journalism, and are awesome to work with. Why? The non-commercial relationship between us and our audience. We’re not selling them anything. …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Everything our app template does: July 2014 edition

2014-07-29 The NPR News Apps team, before its merger with the Multimedia team to form Visuals, made an early commitment to building client-side news applications, or static sites. The team made this choice for many reasons — performance, reliability and cost am …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Be our fall intern!

2014-06-26 .embed-container {position: relative; padding-bottom: 100%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;} .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; } Why aren’t we f …›

NPR visuals team blog→ How we work

2014-06-04 Geballte Energie: James Brown, Februar 1973, Musikhalle Hamburg by Heinrich Klaffs We wrote this for the newsroom. It’s changed some since we first distributed it internally, and, like our other processes, will change much more as we learn by doing …›

NPR visuals team blog→ All About The Dailygraphics Rig From NPR (Published At Source (source.opennews.org))

2014-06-03 A Q&A with Alyson Hurt and Christopher Groskopf …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Managing Instagram Photo Call-Outs

2014-05-29 At NPR, we regularly ask our audience to submit photos on a certain theme related to a series or particular story. We wanted a way to streamline these callouts on Instagram using the hashtag we’ve assigned, so we turned to IFTTT. IFTTT is a websit …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Creating And Deploying Small-Scale Projects

2014-05-27 In addition to big, long-term projects, the NPR Visuals team also produces short-turnaround charts and tables for daily stories. Our dailygraphics rig, newly open-sourced, offers a workflow and some automated machinery for creating, deploying and embed …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Responsive Charts With D3 And Pym.js

2014-05-19 Infographics are a challenge to present in a responsive website (or, really, any context where the container could be any width). Left: A chart designed for the website at desktop size, saved as a flat image.Right: The same image scaled down for mobil …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Making Data Tables Responsive

2014-05-09 Left: A data table on a desktop-sized screen.Right: The same table on a small screen, too wide for the viewport. The Problem Data tables with multiple columns are great on desktop screens, but don’t work as well at mobile sizes, where the table …›

NPR visuals team blog→ How We Built Borderland Out Of A Spreadsheet

2014-04-23 Since the NPR News Apps team merged with the Multimedia team, now known as the Visuals team, we’ve been working on different types of projects. Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt was the first real “Visuals” project, and since then, we&rsqu …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Introducing copytext.py: your words are data too

2014-04-21 Most of our work lives outside of NPR’s content management system. This has many upsides, but it complicates the editing process. We can hardly expect every veteran journalist to put aside their beat in order to learn how to do their writing in …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Introducing Pym.js (Published At Source (source.opennews.org))

2014-04-15 NPR’s Visuals team breaks down Pym, a new responsive-iframe library and the first project launched from the OpenNews Code Convening. …›

NPR visuals team blog→ We’re hiring a picture editor

2014-02-20 Love photography? Obsessed with the web? Do you find magic in the mundane? The visuals team is looking for a News Picture Editor to work with us at NPR headquarters in Washington, DC. It’s a new and important role, fit for an experienced edito …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Be our summer intern!

2014-02-18 Why aren’t we flying? Because getting there is half the fun. You know that. (Visuals en route to NICAR 2013.) Hey! Are you a student? Do you design? Develop? Love the web? …or… Do you make pictures? Want to learn to be …›

PBS Ombudsman→ Tensions Over Pensions

2014-02-14 Hold the presses, if there are any of them left operating. Late this afternoon, just after this column was written, member-station WNET in New York and PBS issued a statement resolving the controversy that is discussed below. The joint statement... …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Making Remote Work Work (Published At Source (source.opennews.org))

2014-02-13 Tips and tricks for being an effective remote developer. …›

PBS Ombudsman→ The Mailbag: More on ‘MAKERS’ and Other Stuff

2014-02-12 Today's ombudsman's mailbag is a brief follow-up to the last one that was devoted to what I described as "a pre-emptive strike" by critics of some individuals slated to be profiled in six new one-hour documentaries that will be part... …›

Recording Not By The Book

Tight budgets, technological advances, and the impulse to experiment are leading some producers to record “not by the book.” Does it work?

PBS Ombudsman→ The Mailbag: A Pre-Emptive Strike on More ‘Makers’

2014-01-23 When you make an announcement before a group of reporters at the semi-annual Television Critics Association conference, you are likely to get some publicity. Among the announcements made by PBS at this year's gathering in Pasadena was news that six... …›

PBS Ombudsman→ The Mailbag: A Letter from Bill Moyers

2014-01-22 This edition of the mailbag contains just one letter. It is a response from Bill Moyers to the Ombudsman's Column posted on Jan. 9. That column dealt with a couple of issues surrounding the Jan. 3 presentation of the weekly... …›

PBS Ombudsman→ The Mailbag: A Lot More on Downton; a Little More on Moyers

2014-01-15 As has happened before, when something we think of as sort of contemporary — a gay kiss, a loved one lost to a fatal car accident, a rape — unfolds amid the gentility of Downton Abbey, some viewers object. I... …›

PBS Ombudsman→ The Mailbag: A Downton Downer and Other Things

2014-01-13 Despite on-screen warnings by PBS at the beginning of last Sunday's edition of Downton Abbey that the segment was rated TV-14 and "The following drama contains scenes which may not be suitable for all audiences. Viewer discretion is advised," many... …›

PBS Ombudsman→ Over the Air or Off the Air?

2014-01-09 The powers that be at PBS were dancing in the aisles earlier this week (I didn't really see this but it was undoubtedly in the minimum-physical-contact, please; we're British style) when it was reported that the season four debut of... …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Animation With Filmstrips

2014-01-08 This post is cross-posted with our friends at Source. Animated gifs have immediate visual impact — from space cats to artistic cinemagraphs. For NPR’s “Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt” project, we wanted to experiment with using l …›

NPR visuals team blog→ We’re hiring a web developer

2014-01-06 Love to code? Want to use your skills to make the world a better place? The visuals team (formerly known as news applications) is a crew of developers, designers, photojournalists and videographers in the newsroom at NPR headquarters in sunny Washing …›

NPR visuals team blog→ How And Why Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration Rocks (Published At Source (source.opennews.org))

2014-01-02 Case Study: The UX process behind the 'Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt' project, written for Source. …›

PBS Ombudsman→ Different Strokes From Different Folks

2013-12-19 It is still sort of holiday-quiet in the ombudsman's mailbox, but one critical letter from a viewer in Miami raises an editorial issue that I seldom get asked about — a comparison between NPR (radio) and PBS (television) coverage of... …›

RadioSutton→ Does Public Radio Have a Leadership Inferiority Complex?

2013-12-13 One of the more perplexing situations in public radio is the failure of NPR to find and develop strong executive leadership from within the public radio system. It appears that that is unlikely to change as the NPR Board selects its next CEO.  N …›

PBS Ombudsman→ The Mailbag: The Holiday Spirit Is on Hold

2013-12-13 The leader of North Korea had his uncle executed and a mentally-unbalanced sign-language fraud managed to stand next to President Obama in South Africa, but it's been relatively quiet these past two weeks for the ombudsman; no big controversies and... …›

NPR visuals team blog→ The Book Concierge: Bringing Together Two Teams, Nine Reporters, And Over 200 Books

2013-12-10 This post is cross-posted with our friends at Source. We started the Book Concierge with the NPR Books team about four weeks back in early November. I worked alongside Danny Debelius, Jeremy Bowers and Chris Groskopf. The project centered on Books’ …›

NPR visuals team blog→ Collaborating On The T-Shirt Project (Published At Source (source.opennews.org))

2013-12-02 Interview: Brian Boyer talks with Source about the Planet Money / NPR Visuals project 'Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt.' …›

PBS Ombudsman→ The Mailbag: Bye-Bye Bobbleheads and Lots of Other Stuff

2013-11-21 The ombudsman's mailbag has become quite stuffed in the past week or two, and in the past few days in particular, because of lots of email from people upset about a short video offering from PBS Digital Studios that was... …›