Tag Archives: new media

NPR’s ‘Radio Bookmark’: the future of news radio in the Internet age?

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National Public radio I’m an off-and-on supporter of National Public Radio, I admit it. I’m a fair-weather donor to NPR, depending on how much I’m tuning in. There have been periods when I commute with the car when I listen to NPR a lot, and then there are times when I ride the bus to work and I pass the time with my iPod set to shuffle.

Lately, I’ve been driving to work more, thanks to a parking space in the building that’s too inviting not to take advantage. So, I’ve been listening to “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” more again.

During the run-up to the election, I was a complete news junkie, and also tuned in at the office, streaming my local NPR station, KCFR‘s news programming all day via the Web.

So when the most recent pledge drive came around in October, I was easily enticed to give more support than I ever have. Instead of the minimum of $50 that I’d usually donate, I committed $120 on my credit card just so I could get the premium they offered for that level of support: A Radio Bookmark.

The Radio Bookmark allows me to save stories on NPR to hear them again later. It lets me leave the car instead of sitting in the driveway or a parking lot (or, in some cases, on the shoulder of the road), riveted to my seat and listening until the end of a fascinating report.
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DenverPost.com’s DNC coverage and APAs at the convention

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Check out the widget above. What’s a widget?

Widgets are cool, portable little online features that you can put onto websites easily by just copying a little bit of code into your page. I’m helping to get the word out about The Denver Post‘s widget for coverage of the Democratic National Convention, coming up in a little over a week here in Denver.

It’s a simple way for sites to include syndicated content from outside sources, contained within a defined box or space. Think of all the different elements on a MyYahoo or iGoogle home page – those individual boxes of content are all widgets on the page.
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Are newspapers finally embracing the Web?

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Leave it to a former rockcrit — and a McClatchy employee (the company just cut 10% of its workforce nationally) — to come up with an eloquent essay on the decline of the newspaper industry and the ascension of the Internet.

Online people, myself included, have been saying for years that the Web should be first in news priority, and that journalists shouldn’t think that they work for newsPAPER companies, but instead NEWS companies. Maybe, coming from an august writer like Leonard Pitts, a world-class columnist at the Miami Herald, this idea will start to sink in with those of you who still have ink in your veins.

He sounds like speeches and conversations I heard going on a decade ago, but better late than never, I say:

We still tend to regard our websites as ancillary to our primary mission of producing newspapers. But I submit that our primary mission is to report and comment upon the news and that it is the newspaper itself that has become ancillary.

So maybe we should regard the Internet not as an extra thing we do, but as the core thing we do.

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Listening to oldies when they were new

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“Time-shifting” is a new media term for the ability of technology to allow us to consume media — whether it’s video or music or text — at any time. The most obvious example is people recording TV shows on the DVRs to watch later, at their leisure.

You can hear a teleseminar via podcast any time after the fact (for instance, on a plane flight to SF, which is when I listened to a class on my iPod).

And this morning, I’ve been both time- and PLACE-shifting, by listening to an archival re-broadcast of Casey Kasem‘s “American Top 40” radio show, which was originally broadcast on April 14, 1973. It’s kind of spooky because it’s very possible I was listening to Casey Kasem’s affable voice that Sunday morning, and yet here I am, “tuned in” to hear the show all over again, in a San Francisco hotel room but hearing a stream from Denver oldies radio station KOOL105. All I need is the newscasts and commercials of the time, and I’m a 15-year-old kid all over again. Continue reading →

1968 redux

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aarp 1968 section

As a card-carrying baby boomer (I guess officially, with my AARP membership!), I was 10 when most of 1968 happened. It was a pivotal year, no doubt — though in my consciousness, ’69 left a deeper impact.

AARP magazine does a fine job of using the Web as a story-telling device to revisit the year. This online special section kicks ass over the print edition’s article and timeline. No offense to the mag; its layout is really good and compelling to flip through. But the online version, with its audio clips of interviews, slideshow, interactive timeline, trivia quiz, “AARP Radio” and all the articles and reader reminiscences (and invitation for audiences to submit their memories), is a pleasure to experience.

Recommended reading/viewing for nostalgic boomers as well as anyone interested in the history of our country. This photo above, from the timeline, is a good reminder that with an unpopular war being waged and a lame duck president in office, Richard Milhouse Nixon took the presidency away from the Democrats. That’s one of the darker legacies that 1968 left us.