What is the Local Stories Project? In a nutshell, it’s a collaborative project between NPR Digital Services and stations. We take local public media stories, make them shareable and deliver them to the people who care most about them. The result: huge spikes in traffic to member station sites, hundreds of shares and localized community-focused comment threads.
We started this project in 2011 as a Facebook experiment with one station. Since then we’ve added 17 stations. Now we’re inviting all interested public media stations to apply for the next round. Learn more about the application process here.
Here at NPR Digital Services we've conducted a study to determine the 9 types of local content that cause the most engagement and sharing. Go here for background on the study including results.
If you're one of the many member stations covering Hurricane Sandy, or "Frankenstorm," here are some types of stories that will keep your digital storm coverage relevant and your local community informed.
Humans have always wanted to share certain types of information with other humans. The social delivery of news — whether it's through e-mail, online communities or in person — is not anything new.
What is new is the continued explosion of Facebook (it's closing in on a billion active users). Facebook has provided us with the power to share like never before, which is why stations need to think about social like they never have before.
A piece by Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab highlights how NPR Digital Services and NPR.org are experimenting through partnerships with member stations. The story references two recent projects -- our experiment with KPLU to geotarget content on NPR's Facebook page and a new test that displays local headlines of 13 member stations on the NPR.org home page.
Following the success of an experiment in which we geotargeted local KPLU content on the NPR Facebook page, we have submitted a Knight Foundation News Challenge proposal for a tool that will enable us to expand the test.
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?
The question arose after identifying a somewhat obscure Facebook feature that allows anyone with a Facebook page to customize posts by location. This means, for example, that you can post a story about Boston and modify it so that only users in Boston will see it in their Facebook feed.
Last October NPR Digital Services and Digital Media used this tool to launch an experiment with member station KPLU, in which we shared selected KPLU.org content on NPR's Facebook page, but only for the eyes of the Seattle region (KPLU's market). Four months into this experiment, we’ve made some unexpected discoveries around Facebook communities and the power of localization on a national platform.
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.
