News

Madalyn Painter from St. Louis Public Radio recently shared some impressive numbers around their digital audience growth over the past year for their website and audio streams.

Comparing this January to last, our number of unique visitors to the site has increased by 90 percent. Additionally, the number of people listening to our online streams has more than doubled.

NPR Digital Services announced Thursday the release of a new home page layout available to Core Publisher stations.

The new modular home page offers stations: 

• 3 column page layout
• More flexibility over home page layout
• Custom blocks for curated featured content
• Multiple ways to promote content and station initiatives
• The ability to preview changes before publishing

Here are the slides presented during Thursday's webinar:

Modular homepage0212

NPR’s Facebook page and its 2.3 million-like audience is made up of users from thousands of cities across the world. We wondered: what if we focused on just one city?

We reached a monumental milestone yesterday with the 50th live Core Publisher site -- WESM.

The station is also the second CP site on the Delmarva Peninsula. Check them out at wesm913.org.

Yesterday evening we were alerted to a failure within our network firmware impacting retrieval of NPR produced API stories. We have defined this error to affect only NPR stories updated between Friday and Monday. This issue did not affect any locally produced stories.

When NPR updates or deletes stories a command is sent to the API to retrieve the updated version or to delete the story from the Core Publisher database. This error caused by the firmware failure sent a delete command for all updates, which removed the stories from your site.

I’m happy to report that we’ve been able to negotiate a renewal to NPR's agreement with Associated Press that will allow AP photos to display with NPR-authored stories to all sites with station-level access to the NPR API, including all Core Publisher sites.

Please note -- these photos can only be used to illustrate the story they are assigned to and may not be used in other stories.

No action is required to take advantage of this new feature. Starting today, whenever an NPR story is pulled down from the API with an associated AP photograph, the photograph will display along with the story.

Please direct any questions to your client services manager or feel free to reach out to me directly at smiller@npr.org.

Arbitron's Total Audience Measurement service aims to measure listening to all forms of audio, across all platforms.

The underbody of Project Argo is now open to everyone.

As the project moves to a new phase after over a year of blogging at 12 member stations, the tools and best practices used by Argo were made available Wednesday on a new open source site.

The site -- ProjectArgo.org -- is home to a collection of tools developed by the Argo team and used by its pilot group of 12 member station pilots. Go there now and you can download any one of the WordPress themes and plugins created by Argo to use for your own topic-based news site or something else. You also have access to best practices, training videos and other guides for building a robust news blog.

There continues to be strong interest in NPR's Infinite Player experiment. We wrote in November that the purpose of the experiment is to create a one-button digital listening experience that reflects the simplicity of radio but takes advantage of digital innovations. There are three member station versions of the player -- KQED, Michigan Public Radio and KPLU -- which incorporate local content from those stations. 

We are pleased to announce that the Knight Foundation has awarded a $1.5M grant to NPR in support of its efforts to expand the digital news capacity of NPR and NPR Member Stations.

The grant will allow NPR Digital Services to work more intensively with stations and accelerate the training programs it has been developing with them over the past year and a half.