My time there was, in a word, formational. I knew I wanted to make radio, but the thing was, I had absolutely no idea how. Radio was this thing that I loved — something I knew I wanted to be a part of — but its inner workings were still very much a mystery to me.

At CKDU, I met a ton of really smart, talented people who helped me learn. They showed me how to cut tape, and use a mixing board, and speak into a microphone without popping my Ps. They turned me onto new music, and new radio shows, and new people. They let me host the weekly countdown show (which came with the perk of having my name published in The Coast every week!). They let me experiment on the radio, making my own silly little This American Life rip-off show.

Though I’m no longer actively involved in campus/community radio, I still believe strongly in its mission. CKDU’s was (and still is):

to act as an alternative to public (CBC) and commercial radio stations. We offer programming that can not be found elsewhere on the airwaves in Halifax.

Why mention this? This week, Ryerson University (my alma mater and yes, current employer) held a referendum on creating a new campus radio station, to replace the now-defunct CKLN. The students overwhelmingly voted yes.

Congratulations to everyone who wanted this thing. Can’t wait to tune in.

[U]sers often don’t want the whole show. “Right now people often share an episode, but they’ll say, ‘Act 3!’ Or, ‘Fast-forward to this time!’” Lind told me. For users, he discovered, “the atomic element is the story, rather than the episode.” That might seem kind of obvious to web publishers, but it doesn’t necessarily fit with the narrative philosophy of the show — a handcrafted hour of storytelling, woven together by a common theme. “I think we’re sort of purists, in terms of wanting people to get the entire episode and to encourage them to listen to it as a whole,” Lind said.

Soon, each TAL story will have its own page, with its own URL and a full transcript.

CBC, please, start your photocopiers.

First off, on each episode page, in addition to the big PLAY button at the top, there are now play buttons for individual stories. No more shuttling through audio to get to that one story your friend told you about. Of course, we believe that the episodes are best heard as a whole, but we understand that sometimes you’re just after one particular act. So there’s that.

This is great. I’ve been preaching this kind of simple segmentation to my colleagues at CBC for a long while now. Yes, we work hard to create shows that often have themes running through them. Yes, we want our shows to be more than the sum of their parts. And yes, it can be a little painful to build a show up, then cut it back down into its component parts.

But arguing that radio shows “are best heard as a whole” and not offering individual stories sounds a bit like how AC/DC  refuses to sell individual tracks on iTunes, saying, “We don’t make singles, we make albums.”

This American Life‘s new offering makes their show so much more spreadable and sharable by fans.

The other day, a colleague and I were discussing CBC’s digital radio strategy. Particularly, the CBC’s approach to online sharability and spreadability. I offered the following exercise as an illustration of where we’re just not getting it right.

Compare and contrast the experience of the following:

1. Point a friend to a YouTube video you saw
2. Point a friend to an NPR news story you heard on the radio
3. Point a friend to a CBC story you heard on the radio

Let’s try this by writing a few imaginary email messages. First, pointing a friend to a YouTube video:

Hi, Tom.

Check out this video about marmosets: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oiLfTnrC40>. You’ll love it!

-dm

Next, pointing a friend to an NPR news story I heard on the radio:

Hi, Tom.

Check out this crazy NPR story about zombies: <http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/05/19/136465244/cdc-has-tips-for-zombie-apocalypse-and-other-disasters>. You’ll love it!

-dm

Finally, pointing a friend to a CBC story I heard on the radio:

Hi, Tom.

Check out this story about Fabian Manning. Go here: <http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/episode/2011/05/19/thursday-may-19-2011/> and then click on “Listen to Part 2″ and once it’s loaded, scroll to about the 16 minute and thirty second mark. You’ll love it!

-dm

See the problem here?

I’m not trying to pick on As it Happens here (honestly, I’m not). They’re just a convenient example of a magazine-style show with a bunch of different stories in it. They do lots of stories every day, and there’s a good chance I might want to send one story in particular to a friend. The majority of CBC Radio programs are in exactly the same boat.

Here’s the point: people want what they want when they want it. Offering easy access to individual stories (like TAL does, or how Quirks and Quarks offers a segmented podcast) helps people share and spread the stories they love. It helps create the conditions for virality.

There’s a technical challenge here. There’s a resource challenge here. And there’s a culture challenge here. You need the right publishing tools to make segmentation easy. You need a human being to actually do the segmentation. But most of all, you need a workforce that understands how informations is spread and shared online.

Comparing the spreadability of radio stories from NPR (with it’s relatively small budget) and CBC, we have some catching up to do. Why are we not breakup up all of our shows into pieces? Why can’t I embed a radio story on my blog in the same way I can embed a YouTube video? Shouldn’t we? Shouldn’t I be able to?

But here’s the thing: local and regional afternoon shows are completely different from Spark. Spark is a one-hour, pre-taped, weekly show. By comparison, local and regional afternoon shows are several hours long, and live, each and every single day of the week. I’ve worked on these shows, and they can be gruelling. So, the focus of my talk was how shows could prioritize their online efforts, given limited time and resources.

Here’s the theory: some online tools work particularly well in a realtime context, and some online tools work particularly well in an on-demand, time-shifty, random access context. The trick is choosing your tools wisely.

Realtime tools embrace what Nick Carr calls “Nowness.” What’s going on right this minute. Twitter is a realtime tool. Facebook is, in many modes, a realtime tool. Foursquare, Gowalla, and their ilk are realtime tools. On the other hand, podcasts are on-demand, time-shifty tools. A radio show website, updated once a day, is an on-demand, timy-shifty tool.

So, let’s map these tools onto radio.

Radio is “the immediate medium.” It’s fast. Live radio is full of “nowness.” Something big can happen, and you talk about it on the air right now. But live radio items can also have a long-ish shelf life. A feature interview with the mayor will still be interesting in a week, whereas your traffic and weather reports won’t.

So here’s the point I tried to make this afternoon: if, like most CBC radio afternoon shows, you have limited time and resources, be smart about which online tools you use. Use realtime tools for realtime information. Use time-shifty tools for time-shifty information.

I think realtime tools and live radio go really, really well together, and there are some terrific examples out there. CBC’s Here and Now, for example, or The Dave Ramsey Show. Tools like Twitter and Facebook are great for discussion, feedback, contests, questions, and overall, providing an additional layer on top of a live radio show.

Live radio show audiences (if that’s what we call them anymore) are passionate. They are intelligent. They want to help. They want to connect. If you ask me, as a public broadcaster, we have a responsibility to connect with them in as many ways as we can muster.

Postscript

As part of my talk, I tweeted:

Meeting w/ local @CBCRadio shows from across Canada right now. Tell me, what do they need to know about Twitter + live radio? ^dm

The responses are here and here, and worth reading.

[read now]

My big lesson at NPR was that it is too hard to try and change an entire system.

Best to find one or two vectors for change. I have found that a few stations and people will get it and they will discover the new and then spread it.

• From PBS.org in 2007: Meet the First Two Journalist- Programmers about Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark, both winners of Knight News Challenge scholarships
• From the Knight Foundation itself: 4th Programmer-Journalist Scholarship Winner Learns to ‘Think Like a Journalist’ about another Knight scholarship winner, Manya Gupta
• Mashable’s roundup of How Programmer/Journalists Are Changing the News

Just this past week, Jenny Carpenter sent me a link to a Guardian article: Will journalists of the future need to know how to code? From it:

Up until now, as a journalist you worked with information, researching facts and figures which then you passed on to the reader. However, in a digital world there are more platforms you can use to convey that information – think of maps or mobile applications, augmented reality. And to be able to do that you will have know how to code.

Now, I’m no programmer. Not a real one, anyway. Sure, I know enough HTML and CSS to tweak WordPress themes. I know a tiny little bit of PHP. Through school, I worked summers at a software company. And once upon a time, in the summer of 1998, I wrote a reasonably popular piece of (now-useless) Windows shareware in Visual Basic.

But really, I’m no programmer. Though I intend to become one.

–

“Why?” you ask?

I work in public radio, a business that’s experiencing a renaissance through digital technology, especially podcasts. There are lots of exciting things happening in places where the web meets the radio. Judging by the success of shows like Radiolab, and Planet Money, there’s an appetite for compelling stories told in new and interesting ways. A big part of that is happening online. For example, look at how simple yet compelling the Globe and Mail’s interactive map of Haiti is.

Companies like the CBC (my employer) need people who can build this kind of stuff. They need storytellers with programming chops, and programmers with storytelling chops.

I want to be one of those people.

So then, starting today, I’m embarking on a course of self-directed study. It’s my intention to become a sort of programmer-journalist, and I plan to blog about what I find here in this space. First step: learn Python.

I’d love to hear any thoughts or suggestions about where I should take this. Comments are most welcome.

A very, very cool project: This American Infographic.

My new years resolution is to make an infographic on every This American Life ever made. The idea is to expand and add context to the stories and information contained in the shows. Basically, anything I am curious about while listening to the pieces.

That’s a tall order, given that there are almost 15 years’ worth of episodes. Can’t wait to see more of these.

via @zuschlag, via For Me, For You

With Jesse Thorn from The Sound of Young America (runs 32:42)

With Jian Ghomeshi of Q (runs 41:42)

There are solid business reasons for making transcripts free. Sales have been dropping over the years. As people search for, discover and share content, offering free transcripts will boost the traffic to NPR.org, traffic that can be monetized with sponsorship. Finally, search engines like text. Many of our stories could not be found by the search engines because they did not have enough text. Now it will be easier for the search engines — and ultimately the users — to find and enjoy NPR’s stories.

On the Media from WYNC puts transcripts of all of its interviews online, and they’re extremely helpful. It’s something we’ve tried on Spark, and would like to do more of. And, as Julien Smith says, “the web is built around text, not sound.”

Update: My pal Rhiannon makes another excellent point:

i like when radio puts up transcripts. it’s really useful for me if i’m listening to something, say on a morning show (especially pre-coffee), and i’m like “wow! this would be great info for my/ someone else’s research!!” listening to the radio is great, but to be able to pass the info along to others (or save it for myself) who can use it at a later time is really useful from an academic’s perspective. i wish cbc did more of this all around.

Our idea was to treat content as a composition, and to treat the listeners as active participants in the listening experience.

If you haven’t heard The Wire (or the follow-up series, The Nerve) find a copy now and listen. If you can’t find a copy, email me and I can probably help.