Bloggasm

For my latest Harvard’s Nieman Lab article, I profile StateImpact, NPR’s attempt to take the resources of a national news organization and apply them at a local level, utilizing data-driven tools:

Billed as “station-based journalism covering the effect of government actions within every state,” StateImpact essentially takes the extensive resources of a national news organization and applies them to the local level. For its initial iteration, NPR member stations from around the country sent in applications, and from those eight were chosen to receive grants. The grants, in part, funded the hiring of two reporters for each state: one for broadcast and another for the web. NPR also hired a team of project managers, designers, and programmers to work at its D.C. headquarters; this team collaborates directly with each of the participating states to create platforms and other tools to mine deeper into a given topic. Because every state differs in its most important issues, each participating team focuses on a particular topic. The Pennsylvania StateImpact reporters, as you may have guessed, focus on energy, with a concentration on the impact of drilling. Three of the states (Florida, Indiana, and Ohio) cover education while the remaining ones (Idaho, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Texas) report on issues ranging from the local economy to state budgets.

So what is Digital Services? Public Interactive, a NPR operation housed in Boston, became NPR Digital Services about six months ago, when Bob Kempf, an alum of Boston Globe’s Boston.com, Gatehouse, and Ottoway Community digital operations. It is now staffed by 21 people. If the new initiative is fully funded, it will grow to 42 staffers and serve as the nerve center for public radio’s digital future.

It’s intended to be a full-service center, rooted in technology and branching out to wider, collective, and collaborative, deal-making. It starts with robust content management system, built on Drupal 7, and expands from there. “We’ll include research, analytics, training, product marketing, design, API development, business development, and network operations,” NPR digital head (and former USA Today editor-in-chief) Kinsey Wilson says. “It’s a complex choreography of talents.”

The newsonomics of the next-gen NPR network

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This past weekend I went to see Ira Glass speak at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium. During his speech, he specifically addressed NPR’s alleged liberal bias and conservative attempts to defund it. I wrote a piece about his defense of NPR for Mediaite:

The host cited a study from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) that found if you simply count the guests on public radio shows, they break down into 60 percent Republicans and 40 percent Democrats. “That’s regardless of whether if Republicans or Democrats are in the White House or Congress,” he elaborated. Glass also referenced a study from Pew that monitored 50 major news outlets to see how each covered Obama’s first 100 days in office. “It found that 28 percent of the stories on NPR were positive about Obama versus 37 percent in the media generally; 52 percent of NPR’s stories were neutral or mixed versus 40 percent in the media overall; 21 percent of the stories were negative about Obama versus 23 percent in general. So bias at NPR would lean more toward neutrality.”

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Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald has rarely been one to avoid responding directly to his right wing critics. He’s been on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on multiple occasions and has even appeared on Michael Savage’s show. As an opinionated pundit, he believes that people like him should be willing to face off with others in public forums that are not always friendly to their views, and he finds those that avoid doing so “cowardly and irresponsible.”

So when National Public Radio’s ombud, Alicia Shepard, refused to come on his Salon radio show to address his criticisms, he decided to write about it. Shepard wrote a column in June defending NPR’s tendency to refrain from referring to enhanced interrogation techniques as “torture,” and Greenwald followed it with a paragraph-by-paragraph rebuttal the day after. Shortly after his response was posted, he asked a Salon intern to reach out to Shepard to see if she would speak to him for his online radio show. According to Greenwald, an NPR spokesperson said that the ombud was out for the week and would get back to him Monday. Salon’s intern said that when she spoke to Shepard on Monday she refused to go on the show because she didn’t “want to get into a shouting match.” (I reached out to NPR for comment this morning. A representative responded that he would try to get someone to speak to me on the record. I’ll update this post if I receive a response)

“I think Shepard has an obligation to engage NPR listeners when it comes to controverisial issues surrounding NPR,” Greenwald told me in a phone interview this morning. “Even that original column that she wrote was due in part to the fact that I had written about NPR’s practice of not calling interrogation techniques torture, and that’s what caused her to get so many emails in the first place and respond. So I felt like it was clear that my blog was sort of the centerplace where a lot of NPR listeners were voicing these complaints, so it was a natural place for her to go in order to have this discussion to address these issues interactively rather than the one way monologue.”

But doesn’t a person have the right to refuse an interview? After all, some have refused to go on shows like the O’Reilly Factor because they felt like they wouldn’t be given a fair platform to present their views, and many that have gone on such shows have come out regretting it. Greenwald seemed to agree that there are certain circumstances in which it would be practical to turn down an interview request, but he said that when you opine on controversial topics you should make a reasonable effort to respond and engage with your critics or those you criticize.

“That doesn’t mean you have to go and confront every single person,” he said. “If you’re inundated with requests I think it’s fair to pick and choose based on audience size and other factors, but it was pretty clear that I was the primary critic in this regard. I played a large role in spawning the controversy in the first place. I think it was pretty cowardly and irresponsible for her not to being willing to address it.”

Greenwald said that he has conducted over 100 radio interviews for Salon Radio, and not one has degenerated into a “shouting match,” so he finds that excuse without merit. I suggested that perhaps Shepard felt that she had addressed the criticisms against NPR and readdressing them in an interview would seem redundant.

“I thought that her column left a lot of questions unresolved and unanswered,” he replied. “You can write a column addressing critics and be pretty thorough and address all the arguments, where you won’t satisfy your critics but at least you would have answered them, whereas I felt like her defense of NPR’s policy left open more questions than it answered. So I thought that it made sense to try to explore those questions with her.”

Greenwald said he still hopes to have Shepard on the show, and there has been at least some conversation via email with an NPR representative about that possibility.

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An email I just received:

Hello,
I know this is really peculiar but I was writing to ask the source of a David Sedaris quote you had on your Twitter, I think? I was at an Ira Glass lecture a few months back and he played a Sedaris reading with the quote, “I love you, I love you, but I don’t know how to love you, It is a mantra we learn one day and use regularly for the rest of our lives…” toward the end of it. I’ve read and heard a lot of Sedaris’s work but had never come across that particular essay and the quote has been running through my mind ever since. I got fed up scanning through his books (and I can’t find my copy of his first book, anyway) so I googled it, and your page was the only thing that came up.

Anyways, if you know what I’m talking about, that would be great, a huge moment of clarity, and quite the testament the internet as an information source.

Thanks,
Daniel Dreiberg

This is what I wrote back:

Hey Daniel,

The exact same thing happened to me. I went to see Ira Glass in Charlottesville VA and heard that quote and couldn’t get it out of my head. Unfortunately I think it was just one of his diary entries that he read on NPR before he was super famous and he never collected it anywhere. It’s a shame too, because though I remember the first part of the quote I couldn’t remember the entire thing. Do you remember it all?

–simon

Back in July I published a piece at Bloggasm arguing that the episode of This American Life called “The Giant Pool of Money” — where the show spent an entire hour recounting the steps leading up to the mortgage meltdown — was a form of journalism called “Explainer Journalism.” The episode, like most episodes from This American Life, was absolutely brilliant.

Well, this week they had a follow-up hour long special that attempts to explain the financial crisis as it currently stands. Go download it while it’s still free.