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.

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“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.

MP3 download

Go ahead. Listen:

It’s 55 minutes long, though. So maybe you’ll want to download it from MaximumFun.org. It’s a wide-ranging discussion, but ultimately, it’s about how to make stuff online that people will care about.

In particular, I found Jeff Olsen’s comments about unnecessarily consistent website design:

I think a lot of what we do is the opposite of what people try and do in terms of branding, of “We’re going to be consistent, you know, we’re going to look the same way in all these different places.” I mean, you won’t see the Adult Swim logo hardly on our site at all. [...] I think branding and consistency, weirdly, can fight what it takes to provide great entertainment.

This reminds me a lot of what Mark Ramsey had to say about NPR website design:

I don’t know why when I go visit a program website for NPR or wherever, I end up on npr.org/program, and the page looks just like every other program at NPR. What in the world is that? You mean to tell me that your program is virtually identical… that what’s important to me as a listener to this program is that it’s almost like every other one on NPR? That’s what you want to communicate to me?

Seriously. If you make stuff online, listen to this. It’s worth it.

I have a couple, specifically geared towards making money for CBC Radio, which faces a planned cut of $14.4-million from its budget, as part of a plan to make up a $171-million shortfall. Now, these ideas won’t necessarily save CBC, but they could generate some extra cash.

If you ask me, CBC Radio is missing out on some really simple ways to generate revenue online.

Yup, I think we should do that. Make money online. Because as Mark Ramsey said during his keynote at las year’s Public Radio Program Director’s Conference:

It’s a different world online. Don’t go online and create the expectation that this is going to be as non-commercial as offline. Because if you create that expectation you will be held to it. And you will be worse for it. You will be worse for it.

Here then, are three ways off the top of my head that CBC Radio can make some dough, online, right now.

1. Help sell books, take a cut

FACT: CBC Radio puts a lot of authors on air

FACT: Amazon and Indigo are in the business of selling books, and both have affiliate programs that’ll pay referring sites up to 8.5% commission

What could this mean for CBC Radio? Let’s take Canada Reads for example. We know that Canada Reads generates books sales: “sales of Michael Ondaatje’s In The Skin of A Lion increased by 80,000 in 2002, the year of its appearance on Canada Reads. Its publisher, Random House of Canada attributed much of this increase to Canada Reads.”

So, a nationwide bump of 80,000 books. Let’s (optimistically) say you could drive 10% of those books sales (8,000 units) through an affiliate link at cbc.ca/canadareads. The current Amazon price for In the Skin of a Lion is $15.33. So then:

8.5% of 8000 books at $15.33 = $10,424.40

Ten thousand bucks for sending a little traffic Amazon’s way? Consider that Canada Reads picks not just one, but five books every year, and you’ve got a halfway decent way to offset production costs for that show. Set up affiliate links on the Writers and Company and the Words at Large sites, and literary programming might just get a financial shot in the arm. Would a little “Buy at Amazon.ca” and/or “Buy at Indigo” link be that offensive?

2. Help sell music, take a cut

FACT: The CBC Radio 2 site has an incredibly helpful Playlists page that tells you what music was played at what time on what shows

FACT: There’s no way to actually buy any music from that Playlists page

Again, one revenue opportunity is affiliate links. Apple has an iTunes affiliate program that pays 5 cents per song. So write a script that scrapes the existing playlist data and generates iTunes affiliate links. I can’t say I have any idea how many 5-cent drops in the bucket you’d get, but I’m positive it’s more than zero, which is what the Playlist page is making now.

Also, why can’t I buy any music from CBCRadio3.com via iTunes, kicking some dough to both the indie artists and the broadcaster that helped me find them?

3. Sell some freaking podcast ads sponsorhips

Hundreds of thousands of CBC podcasts are downloaded weekly. Smart, connected Canadians listen to those podcasts. That’s a valuable audience, reachable for cheap.

Remember back in 2007 when CBC Radio started running “sponsorship messages” at the beginning of each podcast? Something like “The delivery of this podcast is sponsored by GM” or some such thing. Those messages brought in a large amount of money. They’ve since been replaced with promos for other CBC programs.

Personally, I certainly wouldn’t mind hearing podcast sponsorship messages again, so long as they were sufficiently separated from the editorial content of the shows, and especially if they helped keep shows on the air.

And the CBC could be smarter about how they sell those sponsorships. They could sell them on a show-by-show basis, not just the blanket-style GM ads that ran in 2007. For example, why not sell tech sponsorships on the Spark and Search Engine podcasts?

Also, if I wanted to sponsor a CBC Radio podcast, where would I go? Who would I talk to? I have no idea. Here’s a thought — why not use those 20-second bumpers at the beginning of each podcast to say “Your sponsorship message here!”

What do you think? Should CBC Radio’s online presence be as non-commercial as the radio service, or could you handle ideas like these being put into place to help keep shows on the air?

As you’ll see in the video, Davidson thinks that journalists are too reluctant to acknowledge their own ignorance when approaching complex stories. “The Giant Pool of Money,” on the other hand, felt like a learning process for Davidson and Blumberg as much as their listeners.

Well worth watching.