NPR Digital Services

Audience Lifecycle - Do new users return?

Michelle Bellettiere — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 17:17:11 +0000

Last month we launched our project to understand the public media audience lifecycle by using better segmentation. This month we are looking into one of those segments to gain insight into whether our new users are returning to become loyal users. The key to growing our digital audience is attracting new users to our sites.

How to add your station text identifier branding in NPR One

Janeen Williamson — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 13:09:02 +0000

There are 3 main areas where station branding can be found in NPR One: text identifiers, logo, and "hello" audio elements. We have recently updated Stationconnect to include an NPR One section, which will enable you to easily update your station information for the app. Learn where you can find your text identifiers in the app and instructions on how to edit your text identifiers below.

NPR One Text Identifiers

How to add your station "hello" audio branding into NPR One

Janeen Williamson — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 12:17:03 +0000

There are 3 main areas where station branding can be found in NPR One: text identifiers, logo, and "hello" audio elements. We have recently updated Stationconnect to include an NPR One section, which will enable you to easily update your station information for the app. Learn where your "hello" audio branding will be heard in the app, how to prepare your audio, and instructions on how to upload your "hello" audio branding below.

NPR One "Hello" Audio Branding

How will my station brand be represented in NPR One?

Janeen Williamson — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 04:05:33 +0000

There are 3 main areas where station branding can be found in NPR One: text identifiers, logo, and "hello" audio elements. We have recently updated Stationconnect to include an NPR One section, which will enable you to easily update your station information for the app. Please find these branding element areas outlined below.

How to add your station logo into NPR One

Janeen Williamson & Jeff Burke — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:59:20 +0000

There are 3 main areas where station branding can be found in NPR One: text identifiers, logo, and "hello" audio elements. We have recently updated Stationconnect to include an NPR One section, which will enable you to easily update your station information for the app. Learn where you can find your logo in the app, how to prepare your logo, and instructions on how to upload your logo below.

NPR One Station Logos

Your logo can be found in several prominent areas in NPR One.

How Breaking News Handbooks Guide Member Stations

Ki-Min Sung — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 18:52:41 +0000

Mass shootings, wildfires, floods and super storms are just some of the crises that have become regular news. Many public radio newsrooms prepare for such events by creating a breaking news handbook that outlines the chain of command, level of emergency, job duties, contact information and other essentials that take the guesswork out of the crisis.

A Peek Inside Emilie Ritter Saunders' Digital Life

Kasia Podbielski — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 17:52:50 +0000

People involved in public media share how they wade through the digital news deluge. This month we spoke with Boise State Public Radio Digital Content Coordinator Emilie Ritter Saunders.

Breaking News Webinar Recaps, Spotlights on VPR, WHYY & WSKG and How to Use the Quotable Tool

Kasia Podbielski — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 17:51:23 +0000

Happy summer, all. We have a lot to share with you this month, including recaps of recent webinars on breaking news coverage for lean newsrooms, how to use the new Quotable social media tool, and spotlights on work at VPR, WHYY and WSKG.

Make Stories More Shareable on Social Media With 'Quotable' Images

Melody Kramer — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 13:10:46 +0000

How do you make an audio story travel even further on the web, which is a mostly-visual medium?

It’s a difficult question, and one that we struggle with on NPR’s Social Media Desk. Often, our audio pieces aren’t published with a photo we can use on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. So we started thinking: what would an image look like for a radio story? How could we make an image to help producers and reporters make their pieces more shareable?

We decided to experiment with letting the words speak for themselves -- by turning the best quotes and facts from a piece into a visual image that could be uploaded to social media and shared alongside a link to a piece. We call them "quotables," and it looks like this in action:

Adding an image to a tweet produces on average a 35 percent boost in retweets, according to a study from Twitter. Adding an image to a Facebook post, we found, has driven similar results. As we began turning our facts and quotes into images, shares, likes and pageviews on many NPR stories all went up.

This is because, we realized, people really like to share facts and compelling quotes with their friends -- and in a Twitter stream or Facebook newsfeed, images tend to stand out. We are hardly the only ones doing this. Buzzfeed’s True Facts Twitter feed spits out random facts that they discover from around the web. Another fact account, called UberFacts, has almost 7 million followers.

But there are a few best practices to think about when making images out of selected facts and quotes from your stories:

You can make pictures of facts or quotes as many times as you want on Twitter, but there is a limit on Facebook. After extensive testing, we realized that posting a quotable more than three times a week on Facebook has an adverse effect -- and people stop sharing and clicking. But on Twitter, which moves much more quickly, it is harder to overuse these images.

Include the link to your story in the caption of the Facebook post or in the tweet you send. Make sure to write a caption for the photo you upload to Facebook, just as you would a regular photo. That’s also where you should link to your piece. Both the caption and the link will travel with the image when people share it, leading to more people coming to your stories.

Think about what people might want to share. That’s the bit you want to pluck out for your image. Pick out the most compelling quote or fact from the interview, but keep it short. Shorter is better -- we’ve experimented with both short and long quotes and shorter quotes or facts are easier to digest and share. We’ve also found that editorial content works really well -- much more than marketing content. Using the images for both editorial and marketing content confuses people -- and they are less likely to share the quote or fact.

You can use just about anything to make these images for your pieces. You can even make these in something as simple as Microsoft Paint. For a start, here are 14 tools collected by Buffer that you can use to edit images for social media.

How Lean Newsrooms Cover Breaking News

Ki-Min Sung — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 21:14:36 +0000

Size is often considered an impediment to covering breaking news, but several newsrooms are using their resources strategically to provide information for the breaking news audience in times of crisis. In this webinar with West Virginia Public Broadcasting reporter Ashton Marra and KUNC digital media manager Jim Hill, we see key attributes of lean newsrooms that cover breaking news well.