Media in the New Millennium

Posted by Lisa Greim

National Public Radio affiliates like to talk about “driveway moments” – when an NPR story is so compelling, you have to stay in your car until it finishes.

Truth is, driveway moments are a big pain in the ass, especially when your kids (or co-workers) are staring at you, wondering why you’re still sitting there  10 minutes after you arrived.

NPR.org relaunched Monday with a more newsy focus, and I like it. Instead of forcing users to hunt for stories within programs, the site brings the stories out front. It will be updated throughout the day.

I’m a storyteller. I like to tell, read and hear stories. This, for example, is a great story: Ari Shapiro skulking around D.C. with novelist David Baldacci. Don’t read the text – it’s missing some of the best quotes. It’s quintessentially NPR: wild sound of a motorcade going by while Baldacci notes that the windows of the presidential limo, a.k.a. “The Beast,” are as thick as a phone book and don’t roll down.

Baldacci cracks up as he talks about a public park so well known as a meeting place for operatives that kids on his son’s Little League team call it “the spy park.”

The audio has texture, personality, and a feeling that you’re somewhere besides your breakfast nook. Listen – then go back to the Web page for photos and an excerpt from Baldacci’s latest book, First Family.

It’s not only a good story, it makes me want to do something I’ve never done before: read a David Baldacci crime novel.

Vivian Schiller, who left the New York Times’ digital division to become CEO of Washington, D.C.-based NPR, spearheaded the change. She told her old paper that the Web site will flip “from being a companion to radio to being a news destination in its own right,” using NPR’s reputation for solid journalism to attract readers as well as listeners.

NPR is particularly interested in capturing more eyeballs and ears at midday, when people are at work and more able to click than tune in. Eventually they hope to be able to offer whole programs to download.

I like both the companion and the destination concepts. Unlike television, we listen to radio while we do other things. It’s hard to write down a book title while driving, and frustrating to get out of the shower and catch the last 15 seconds of an interview that you really wanted to hear. So a time-shifted, annotated version of what you heard driving home is really cool.

Radio is linear, the Web is, well, webby. Radio is time-constrained, the Web is not. Online you can hear what you missed, read the text and click related links. You can listen to the whole interview, not just the best five minutes (on NPR) or 15 seconds (anyplace else).

Radio – good radio – gets into your head like nothing else. I’ve gone to the NPR site to get a recipe, see a photo or hear a song, but most often I just had to listen to something one more time, like the story of the Giant Pool of Money, or the StoryCorps segment where the kid with Asperger’s syndrome asks his mom if she’s sorry she had him, or Laura Rothenberg’s “My So-Called Lungs,” a radio diary recorded from a hospital bed while waiting for a lung transplant.

Detractors fear that a move to multimedia will dilute the impact of NPR’s broadcast programming, according to the Times. Some local stations worry that fundraising will suffer. Au contraire! As a public radio supporter, it has irked me for years that there’s no magic switch to turn off the begathon as soon as you donate.

I will happily give more money to Colorado Public Radio if I can get the programming without the groveling.

Share on Facebook