Current (https://current.org/tag/web/page/7/)
Sonic Trace seeks to record stories from southern California’s Latino immigrant communities, documenting the many and varied paths they take to get to the City of Angels.
PBS is jumping into the “over-the-top” video-streaming space with a pair of deals to distribute public TV programs through apps on Roku boxes and Xbox Live.
Spot.us, the crowdfunding website allowing journalists to raise funds for their reporting projects, has been hit by a sharp decline in usage since its acquisition by American Public Media, which has been making changes intended to revamp its business model and protect the site’s journalistic integrity in the world of online pitch funding.
Next Avenue — the online magazine for Americans aged 50 years and older created by Twin Cities Public Television — is now sharing its content with RLTV, a cable and online network for seniors. The agreement, announced Jan. 2, marks the beginning of a targeted syndication push, said Next Avenue Executive Director Judy Diaz. “We’re investing a lot in content, not just in money but in the time it takes to create the pieces,” she said. The plan is a win-win, expanding Next Avenue’s content distribution while raising revenue, Diaz said.
When the popular Internet music-streaming service Spotify launches its improved Follow feature in early 2013, KCRW in Los Angeles will be the platform’s sole featured user from terrestrial radio.
For the first major election since NPR Digital Services introduced digital publishing software designed to bolster stations’ online news operations, developers in the Boston-based unit built a platform for local outlets to share and spotlight each other’s election night coverage. Battleground, a live blog that aggregated Election Day tweets and news reports from 11 stations in nine states, was barely promoted on NPR.org, but 33 stations plugged it into on their own websites — often adjacent to their local news blogs. Live blogging commenced on Battleground at 4:00 p.m. EST Nov. 6 and wound down shortly after midnight. The 144 posts took a variety of media formats: live tweets from the headquarters of Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, a YouTube video interview with retiring Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Barney Frank and audio of a robocall falsely instructing Florida voters that they could wait to cast their ballots the next day.
From exploring underground tunnels to tracking the evolution of the Chicago accent, Curious City is an unconventional spin on community-based public media reporting.
CPB’s American Graduate initiative has set its sights on targeting dropouts, but another project in public media, Ed Zed Omega, is zeroing in on “rise-outs” — students who are excited to learn but feel that high school is failing to meet their needs.
With Earthquake, an e-book and companion iTunes U course, KQED and the California Academy of Sciences shook up a new approach to multimedia collaboration.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – At a forum of leading public media professionals, participants expressed mixed feelings about whether public media can, or should, replace newspapers as primary gatherers of news. At the fourth Public Media Futures forum, held Thursday at Bloomberg’s offices in San Francisco, more than two dozen public media professionals debated whether the industry’s non-broadcast capabilities are robust enough to allow it to fill the role of a daily newspaper. In some respects, public broadcasting websites have already moved into the up-to-the-minute newsgathering space. Kinsey Wilson, executive v.p. and chief content officer at NPR, said NPR.org functions much like a newspaper website, with breaking news, a story flow that shifts multiple times a day and large quantities of original content apart from radio pieces rewritten for the Web.
An infusion of CPB funding is allowing the Independent Television Service to add more features to OVEE, the online engagement tool that ITVS calls “the world’s first fully functional social screening platform.”
With their new website up, KPLU journalists scrutinized usage and found clues pointing to stories that work online.
Roman Mars is a hard man to find on the radio.
Only ten terrestrial stations regularly broadcast his Public Radio Exchange–distributed program 99% Invisible, a weekly show that explores the world of design…
But go online, and Mars is a superstar.
An online-only documentary project from WGBH is channeling the Olympic spirit toward a major sporting event that receives scant media coverage yet is of great interest to under-served audiences.
NPR is stepping up its efforts to innovate in digital news by expanding staff and hiring Brian Boyer, a programmer who created interactive web presentations for the Chicago Tribune.
The CPB Board of Directors approved a supplementary grant of $575,000 June 14 to the Independent Television Service for completion of its Online Video Engagement Experience (OVEE), a digital platform that allows moderated interactive online screenings of video content streamed through PBS.org. CPB had backed development of the technology in 2010 with $954,000. The additional funding will support development of technical capabilities to run OVEE on mobile devices and stream live events, such as debates and town-hall meetings — enhancements requested by all five OVEE pilot stations. CPB management presented the grant request to the board at its June 4 meeting, but approval was postponed after Chair Bruce Ramer questioned whether the corporation should take an ownership stake in innovative projects such as OVEE (Current, June 11). The board agreed to take more time to consider the grant and delayed the vote.
On the afternoon of June 24, Wisconsin Public Radio will air a new recording of the great composer’s Goldberg Variations. The broadcast presentation wouldn’t be especially unusual, except that listeners who visit a special website, opengoldberg.wpr.org, will be able to view a score of the work as it plays…
An Auto-Tuned video of the late PBS icon Fred Rogers is going viral, with more than 700,000 views as of Friday (June 8) afternoon. The three-minute video was remixed by Symphony of Science’s John Boswell for PBS Digital Studios. “When we discovered video mash-up artist John D. Boswell, aka melodysheep, on YouTube,” the PBS studio said in a statement, “we immediately wanted to work together. Turns out that he is a huge Mister Rogers Neighborhood fan, and was thrilled at the chance to pay tribute to one of our heroes.” It’s the first in a series of PBS icon remixes.
On Sunday, June 10, L.A. Theatre Works debuts a radio docudrama about the federal court case that overturned the referendum that banned same-sex marriage in California. Director Rob Reiner assembled an all-star cast to perform 8, which was written by Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. Brad Pitt plays Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court for Northern California; Martin Sheen and George Clooney portray the lawyers who joined forces to argue for gay rights — Ted Olson and David Boies, respectively. Olson and Boies had been combatants in arguing Bush v. Gore before the U.S. Supreme Court, so their alliance in the Perry case added a twist to the case and the dramatization. Kevin Bacon plays the lead attorney for Prop 8’s proponents.
… Building and maintaining a meaningful social media presence requires a significant investment of time — and it’s not always easy to measure the return on that investment. What does social media success look like, anyway? Is it when you reach 1,000 followers? 10,000? …