Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

Earlier today, NPR and its partners announced that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is awarding more than $1.3 million dollars to a consortium of public media organizations to expand our coverage of election 2008 across multiple platforms. The consortium, led by NPR and including American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, Capitol News Connection, KQED, PBS, PRX, PRI/Public Interactive and The NewsHour, will work together to produce election-related content and interactive tools available to the entire public broadcasting system.
“By pooling content produced locally and nationally — for radio, television, and online — we will discover new ways of doing business to better serve the public,” said NPR CEO Ken Stern in a note that went out today to the public radio system. “We are pleased to have succeeded in coming together to deliver on the commitments made at the 2007 Annual Meeting.”
“This grant underscores CPB’s support of innovative projects that move public radio and television into the digital future so they can help individuals better connect with their communities wherever they are,” added Pat Harrison, CPB President and CEO. “This ambitious project will provide us with new ways of looking at how we serve the public on existing and emerging media platforms.”
The basic premise of the project was built around a simple reality – many public broadcasters were planning to create on air content and interactive modules for their websites, but we didn’t have a structure in place to work together during the election cycle. Around a year ago, NPR and PBS began conversations around editorial partnerships for the election, including the creation of an interactive map that would work on both of our websites, as well as on the TV show NewsHour. While that conversation was taking place, I co-organized a group discussion at the February 2007 Integrated Media Association conference for public broadcasters to talk about the Election 2008 social media plans and how those activities might be replicable across the system.
The conversation kicked into high gear at NPR’s annual meeting last April, where you may recall I blogged about some of the ideas that were brewing among those of us present at the event. We organized breakout conversation in which we laid out what was at stake and how we might collaborate. It didn’t take long to realize that we had an opportunity that might quickly slip through our fingers if we couldn’t get our act together. We needed to pull together a SWAT team and get to work.
At the encouragement of CPB, we organized a May meeting at NPR laying out all the possible ways we might collaborate, and get that SWAT team going to pull together a plan. By the end of July, we submitted our plan to CPB, which today has been christened with this $1.36 million grant.
So what exactly are we doing? For one thing, we’re going to take all of the cool online election activities we’ve got planned for 2008 and we’re going to make them available as widgets, including:

• An interactive election map from NPR and The NewsHour;
  
• Localizable news modules from Public Radio International’s Public Interactive;
  
• A curated collection of election audio and social media content from PRX;
  
• Election-related video from PBS;
  
• An archive of broadcast materials covering New York-based presidential candidates from WNYC;
  
• A collaborative content initiative entitled “Global Perspectives on Election 2008″ from PRI;
  
• User-generated political commentaries curated by NPR;
  
• Capitol News Connection’s interactive ‘Ask Your Lawmaker’ widget, enabling citizens to directly question their lawmakers and listen to answers obtained by CNC journalists;
  
• Election simulations and thought-provoking interactive activities from American Public Media and KQED.

Some of these tools, like the NPR/NewsHour map and CNC’s Ask Your Lawmaker widget, are all ready up and running. Others, such as NPR’s user-generated political commentaries project, will be launching in the coming months. (You have no idea how excited I’m am about this one. We’re working like gangbusters to get this puppy launched – more soon.) In each case, the projects will exist wherever they originally resided, but they’ll have widgets, too, so stations can take these tools and localize them for their own uses. Some of the projects, like our user-generated commentaries, will be embeddable on blogs or wherever else you’d want to place them.
Meanwhile, underlying all of these projects will be an experimental social network – a “knowledge network” for public media entities to share election resources and data, find tutorials and best practices for utilizing these tools and other social media activities, and coordinate their election coverage. It’s basically an extranet for PBS and NPR stations, along with other public media partners. Last but not least, PBS will be creating curricular materials for some of these online modules so they can be used in classroom settings.
I am so glad to see this project announced publicly. I’ve been working on this for the better part of the last nine months, and it’s so gratifying to see so many entities across the public media system coming together to improve our election coverage, while providing the public with interactive tools to help them make a more informed decision when going into the ballot box. This year is going to be a total blast. -andy