Idea Lab | Brian Abelson
Phillip Smith tested the speed of various news sites using tools from GTmetrix. NPR and USA Today absolutely smoke their competitors, Smith writes, while the Chicago Tribune has "one of the slowest sites on the Internet."
NPR Director of Engineering Irakli Nadareishvili tells Smith that one of NPR's philosophies is "Speed is a Feature. Our tech team has been investing heavy effort in getting great page load-times.” Smith made a teeth-grinding video of a Tribune page loading.
She had noticed that when NPR hit “rough patches” — say, the firing of the news analyst Juan Williams and failed attempts by Republicans to bar federal funding to the organization — “there was no efficient way to activate our most loyal fans.” Nor was there a way to attract new fans. “We had not spent time studying the psychology of it all,” she said.
NPR's Generation Listen page nods toward psychology, telling young people, "we want to hang out — whether in cyberspace, over the air, or through events — and exchange ideas and smart conversation." (more...)
NPR's social media product manager Kate Myers and business partnerships director Lily Ladd talked and answered questions for 90 minutes this morning about their organization's approach to social media and engagement. (more...)
NPR is launching an ad campaign in four cities. Ads on billboards, trains, in print and online in Dallas, Indianapolis, San Diego and Orlando tell people that NPR stations will meet them at the intersections of their interests -- no matter how offbeat those nexuses may seem.
As news organizations experiment more with social networking sites, many are realizing that social media has to be an integral part of how we gather news, tell stories and develop beats.
NPR’s new global health and development beat is a … Read more
NPR
Monique Hanson will start as NPR's chief development officer in October, filling the last position left vacant since a turbulent period in late 2010 and early 2011, when three of the nonprofit's top executives left.
Hanson will oversee "major and planned giving, and foundation grants, which taken together are NPR's third largest source of revenue," according to NPR. She'll work with the NPR Foundation, which holds most of Joan Kroc's $230 million endowment.
Hanson has spent the last several years raising money for the YMCA, which NPR notes is a $5 billion organization."She was specifically brought on board to dramatically enhance contributed revenue and reposition the national corporate and foundation profile," NPR says in a news release.
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NPR
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has granted NPR $1.5 million to help launch a "major journalism initiative to deepen coverage of race, ethnicity and culture, and to capture the issues that define an increasingly diverse America." The team will be assembled this autumn, NPR and CPB announced at UNITY's annual convention Thursday.
The project will be overseen by Ellen McDonnell, NPR's executive editor of news programming. An NPR spokesperson says the project team will be comprised of six people, including correspondent Karen Grigsby Bates (already on the diversity beat at NPR) and an editor, Luis Clemens. On Thursday, NPR posted four job openings related to the new project, advertising for a correspondent/blogger, a news reporter, an apprentice reporter and an apprentice journalist. Matt Thompson, a former member of Poynter's National Advisory Board and the project manager for NPR's Project Argo, will manage the buildout of the digital platform for this project, too.
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Shafi worked as a "translator, occasional reporter and all-round 'fixer'" for NPR in Kabul before moving to Washington, D.C., for an internship, Schumacher-Matos writes. Shafi borrowed some descriptions of an execution he'd witnessed from a 2001 piece by Jason Burke. After an NPR reader noticed the similarities, Shafi's editor Greg Myre confronted him. The intern "didn't see what the problem was," Schumacher-Matos writes.
According to the internal report, he told Myre, "Yeah, I just needed to jog my memory. I wasn't taking notes (at the execution). I took a couple of lines from his [Burke's] piece."
Shafi was following standard operating procedures in Afghan journalism, Schumacher-Matos writes: "Other experts in Afghanistan have confirmed to me that it is common practice among Afghan journalists and researchers to copy and paste material they think is accurate." Shafi's mentor Quil Lawrence tells him Shafi "did so well so quickly that we didn't check that he had the basics." (more...)
NPR
NPR has deleted a story from its website, an intern's first-person account of witnessing a public execution in Kabul, after learning that parts of it were plagiarized from someone else's story published in 2001. An editor's note now holds the place of the story on NPR.org, though it can still be found online. (Here's a screenshot in case it's deleted.)
Late Monday night, this message was sent on behalf of Margaret Low Smith, NPR's senior VP for news:
Earlier today, we published and distributed a story by Ahmad Shafi recounting his experience witnessing a public execution in Kabul in 1998. Since the story was published, it has come to our attention that portions of the piece were copied from a story by Jason Burke, published by the London Review of Books in March 2001. We have "unpublished" the piece by Ahmad Shafi and ask that all stations remove the story from their websites, as well.
Shafi is an NPR intern. He came to DC after working for us in our Kabul bureau as a producer and fixer. We deeply regret this incident. ...
Jason Burke is a British journalist; Shafi says in his account that he was working for a female British journalist when he saw the execution. Burke said he sat high in the stands of the football stadium where the execution occurred, while Shafi says he saw the execution from the field.
Shafi writes that a recent public execution reminded him of the one in 1998. Portions of his account of the execution are word-for-word copies of Jason Burke's account; other parts are slightly rewritten. According to NPR spokeswoman Anna Christopher, Shafi was at the execution:
What happened is fairly simple: an intern made a mistake. English is not Shafi’s first language; it’s one of five he speaks. In writing about this execution he witnessed in 1998, he went looking for a better way to describe what he remembered seeing. When asked about the similar passages by our editors, he was completely upfront and honest, and deeply contrite.
Current.org | Current.org
"This American Life" host Ira Glass and Eric Nuzum, NPR's vice president of programming, are engaged in the public-radio version of a cage match (impassioned, but civil) about "Car Talk." Glass says NPR stations should not air reruns of the show in its current time slot once the hosts retire in September.
"A show that’s 100 percent reruns doesn’t fit with our mission as public broadcasters," he writes. By distributing and airing reruns in the same time slot, NPR and its stations are missing an opportunity to expose listeners to an up-and-coming show:
For all of public radio’s successes, the part of our mission we’ve always neglected the most is innovation. Our biggest shows —All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Marketplace, Fresh Air, A Prairie Home Companion — are decades old. The average age of our listeners keeps creeping upward. At 53, I am one of the younger public radio stars. My show has been on the air 17 years.
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