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.
If you do creative work that lives online, you owe it to yourself to listen to this episode of Jesse Thorn’s excellent The Sound of Young America. It’s a panel discussion with Jesse, Merlin Mann (of 43Folders.com), Mike and Matt Chapman (of HomestarRunner.com), and Jeff Olsen (of Adult Swim).
Go ahead. Listen:
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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.
Via Robert Paterson’s weblog, a great video of NPR’s Adam Davidson, explaining how they approached the incredibly complicated subject of the housing crisis for This American Life’s The Giant Pool of Money and the Planet Money podcast:
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.