Public Radio Exchange

PRX to launch Public Media Accelerator with $2.5 million investment from Knight Foundation

Jake posted on Thursday, December 8th, 2011 | Blog, Press Releases, Tech | 7 Comments

I have exciting news to share, for PRX and public media.

PRX has evolved considerably over the past several years, focusing our strategy on three areas: Content, Distribution, and Leadership/Innovation.

In Content we are seeing great success with The Moth Radio Hour and other signature programs; in Distribution the PRX content marketplace is thriving, Public Radio Remix is a growing national format, and our mobile apps for public media are taking off with This American Life, KCRW Music Mine, Public Radio Player and top station apps.

But it is in the third area of Leadership and Innovation – where projects like the Public Radio Talent Quest first emerged –  that I am bringing you news of a significant development we are announcing today: a new $2.5 million effort to spur innovation to advance public service media.

The press release below lays it out, and you can learn more at http://www.publicmediax.org and by following @publicmediax.

We will soon be recruiting advisory board members and mentors, and are interested in key partnerships and sponsors. More on that front coming soon.

Best,
Jake

==============

CAMBRIDGE, December 8, 2011 – A new effort will provide funding and expertise to entrepreneurial teams with innovative ideas for increasing the impact of public service media.

Called the Public Media Accelerator, the project will be launched and operated by PRX, and is supported by a $2.5 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Modeled on technology startup incubators, the Accelerator aims to strengthen public media’s essential role in meeting community information needs across new platforms and devices.

“Forty years ago, public broadcasting harnessed the technology of the time to engage audiences with high quality content that was otherwise inaccessible,” said Jake Shapiro, CEO of PRX. “We are expanding this vital service to include today’s pervasive and participatory media, particularly mobile.”

“Through funding more than 200 community information experiments, we’ve found that the models with the best success are nurtured through outside advice and expertise,” said Michael Maness, Knight Foundation’s vice president for journalism and media innovation. “We hope the Public Media Accelerator will bring public media’s quality journalism into more people’s lives, by using technology to expand its reach.”

The Public Media Accelerator will invest in both nonprofit and for-profit ventures, building apps, services and media products. It will showcase successful projects to additional funders and investors, and receive support through a partner and sponsor network.

The Public Media Accelerator will formally launch at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) conference in March in Austin and will name a director and advisory board early next year.

For more information and updates about the Public Media Accelerator visit http://publicmediax.org and follow @publicmediax on Twitter.

 

ABOUT PRX
PRX is an award-winning nonprofit public media company, harnessing innovative technology to bring significant stories to millions of people. PRX.org is public radio’s largest distribution marketplace, offering thousands of audio stories for broadcast and digital use. Listen to Public Radio Remix, our continuous stream of the best radio stories, on XM123, PublicRadioRemix.org, and a growing number of broadcast stations. Our apps for public media include This American Life, KCRW Music Mine, and Public Radio Player. Learn more at PRX.org.

ABOUT THE JOHN S. AND JAMES L. KNIGHT FOUNDATION
Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. The foundation believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit KnightFoundation.org.

IdeaLab post on “the developer gap”

Jake posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2011 | Blog, Tech | No Comments

As part of a Knight News Challenge invitation to write occasionally for the terrific MediaShift IdeaLab I’ve got a new blog post up: “Public Media Should Mind the Developer Gap“. This has been a frequent topic in conversations we have here at PRX and with our partners across public media, particularly as we’ve been building mobile apps and testing the limits of tech capacity at stations big and small.

Here are a few quotes, and you can find the full post here.

As public broadcasting goes through its own turbulent transition to a new Internet and mobile world, the technology talent gap is a risk that looms large. Yes, there are many other challenges: political and policy battles, business model pressures, cultural and structural obstacles, the need for strategic vision and leadership. And there are other recruitment needs across general management, content, fundraising. But the twin coins of the new digital realm are code and design, and with a few notable exceptions, public media is seriously lacking in both.

These days the competition for talent in media technology is fierce, from new ventures to mature enterprises. Public media should be the go-to place for aspiring and experienced technologists who believe in a public service mission, want to collaborate to build products, services and content for millions of people, and seek an alternative from the rapidly commercializing web. There should be natural alliances with open-source software communities, with leading nonprofit web giants Mozilla and Wikipedia, the growing number of web-based local news organizations, and the open/civic data movement.

To keep up with the latest from the PRX tech team make sure to check out the PRX Labs blog.

Tags: developer gap, knight, mediashift, technology

Exploring the Depths of KCRW Music Mine

Rekha posted on Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 | PRX Projects, Tech | No Comments

We’re still buzzing from the excitement of getting the KCRW Music Mine iPad app out into the wild. The app exemplifies our desire to bring public media to mobile and tablets in new and amazing ways. Mark Ramsey says it well in this review.

With the launch flurry settling down, we’ve had some time to reflect on how the app came about. It was quite a process. Head over to the PRX Labs blog for an interview with Matt MacDonald, PRX’s Director of Project Management, on the concept and design, where he says things like:

One goal for us was to encourage musical exploration and delight so some of our interaction decisions basically force you to try out music that you might not be familiar with. We made sure to encourage that by not adding features like search or sorting and filtering tools.

Read Exploring The Depths Of Music Mine on PRX Labs.

Mobile App Picks from the PRXperts

Emily posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 | Blog, PRX, PRX Projects, Tech | 1 Comment

We’re pretty into our phones over here at PRX. And that’s as it should be, I suppose, as many of us spend our days conceiving, coding and promoting mobile apps for public radio.

A couple months ago Radio Diaries producer Joe Richman — equipped with his first-ever iPhone — asked me what PRX’s favorite apps are. I put the question to my colleagues, and return with the following list of our favorite mobile apps.

Matt	John	Robert	Rekha	Jake	Chris	Farski	Kerri	Roman	Jones

Our big list of favorite apps:

Tags: Emily

PRX 3.12. New release, new goodies.

Emily posted on Thursday, March 31st, 2011 | Blog, Tech | 1 Comment

Since November 2008 when we rolled out the “new” PRX 3.0, our team of developers has been working hard to make the site faster, easier and more useful for everyone who uses it: that’s producers, stations and listeners, too. Last night we released PRX 3.12, which includes some exciting changes.

• The My PRX page (like an accounts dashboard) has been reorganized to help you find what you are looking for. And not only is the activity graph easier to read, but the data being reported is more accurate — thanks to complicated technical changes our Tech Director Andrew Kuklewicz will be documenting on our techie blog, PRX Labs.
• Group, station and PRX Network administrators can now add members in fewer steps from their Manage Members page.
• Audio processing has been improved along with error reporting for unprocessed audio.
• Illinois Public Media’s public radio station WILL will hitherto show up in search results as a station rather than the stop-search word for the future tense of the verb “to be.”
• And lastly (and more seriously), we are pleased to introduce some new sharing options for Facebook and Twitter. You can now share playable 30-second previews of PRX pieces on Facebook, and include PRX short URLs in Twitter updates. Consider these features a preview of the more advanced sharing options we’ll be rolling out soon — which will allow paid PRX producers to make their full pieces playable on Facebook, and embeddable on blogs and websites. Interested in trying out the advanced sharing options as a beta tester? Give us a holler.

Tags: Emily

PRX.org 3.11 released

Becca posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 | Blog, Tech | No Comments

On Friday night we released version 3.11 of PRX.org.

The biggest user-facing enhancement to PRX.org with this release is the addition of popup audio players to the pieces and playlists on the home page (and other pages) of our site.  This allows users to listen to audio right from the home page of the site and to keep the audio playing in the popup player while browsing other pages.  It is our first step in the creation of an embeddable widget audio player that we hope to make available to producers.  This would allow producers to embed their pieces on their own websites and promote them on social networks like Facebook.

There is also an exciting change behind the scenes.  In this release we’ve added support for single sign-on to PRX.org from our extended family of PRX.org apps.  For many PRX.org users this won’t change anything.  But station members using the Networks app to share content or the Billboard app to manage programming and schedule data can now have a single username for all of the sites.

We hope you enjoy the enhancements!

bandwidth conundrum

Jake posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 | Blog, Tech | 3 Comments

We keep our tech team way too busy for them to blog about the incredible work they’re doing every day, but I’m glad when they find moments to advise producers and stations on questions that come up. Here’s one from today that Robert and Andrew jumped on when a PRX producer with a WordPress site asked for advice on preparing for a potential big spike in traffic from being featured on a major national show.

The question:

Subject: Re: Bandwidth Conundrum
From: Ian Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 2:19 PM
To: PRX

Hi Andrew and Robert,

Our current monthly bandwidth is pretty low, around 1.7GB out of an 1000GB limit. Our package includes 100GB of storage and we’re using about 57GB currently (the majority of our videos are hosted by Vimeo/Youtube and embedded to lessen our footprint.)

Our concern is the traffic spike we’re expecting with the launch of our new season, particularly when a segment of our show will air nationally.

Even though our usage is low at the moment with that type of exposure and all the content we have available for streaming (audio and video podcasts, short video documentaries, etc.), we’re afraid we could easily eat up our 1000GB (at which point it’s .50 per GB used.) In your experience does that seem likely or are we worried about the sky falling?

and the response:

Subject: Re: Bandwidth Conundrum
From: Andrew Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 3:08 PM
To: Ian

I would like to be optimistic that you will have the kind of success that will require some changes to handle a large number of concurrent users.

It also is pretty easy to chew up bandwidth if you are serving media files, so I agree, there is a real possibility of using up your TB of bandwidth if you get a hit on your hands.

There are several things to worry about here. › Continue reading

PRX Upgrade: The Highlights

Genevieve posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 | Blog, Tech | No Comments

Our tech team has been hard at work taking your suggestions and turning them into new features and improvements on PRX.org.

Welcome PRX 3.9, with an updated piece page designed to help stations find what they need more quickly and a friendlier, faster way to upload audio through the browser.

Plus, 3.9 has more than sixty other enhancements and bug fixes, including more visible membership information.

Thanks for your suggestions and for using PRX!

-The PRX Team

Becca, Andrew and Matt of the PRX Tech Team

New Piece Page

A few highlights:

• Essential piece information including the audio player, length, timing, cues, news holes, production date and content advisories above the fold
• Other pieces in the series, plus related pieces, right below the audio player
• A more concise piece summary, plus a producer contact button next to the photo
• Carriage reports on both the piece page and My PRX

---

New Browser Uploader

Our new browser uploader lets you select and upload all your files for a piece at once.

Whoa! A new audio player

Matt posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 | Blog, Tech | 1 Comment

Hi all,

It’s about time for another upgrade to PRX.org and this one is wicked awesome as we say in New England. Our newest tech wizard Becca has spent the past few weeks developing a brand new audio player for our piece pages that makes them easier to listen to, more secure and generally just makes the page a heck of a lot nicer to look at. We also worked on a number of other fixes, enhancements and all around goodness including:

• Fixes to notifications and tracking of piece listens
• Piece page long description fixes
• Administrative changes to how comments are handled
• A few language changes to that clear up some confusion
• A total of 37 changes and tickets were resolved in this release

We’re in the planning stages for additional improvements to the piece page so stay tuned for those.

-matt

Quick, Fast, Rapid, Speedy and Swift – Introducing PRX.org version 3.5

Matt posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 | Blog, Tech | 3 Comments

We’ve been listening and once again our Tech Director Andrew and Developer Dan have worked their magic to improve the performance of PRX.org. A big undertaking was researching, designing and implementing a complete Data Warehouse, which isn’t a trivial task, to speed up a number of the areas of the site that we use for providing reports and analytics back to listeners, producers and stations.

Another area that we paid close attention to was improving search. Search is a big, difficult topic, Google spends vast amounts of money on the problem. We’re not Google but we do the best we can with our search tool Solr. We spent time tweaking the user interface so results are easier to scan, improved people searching results (NOTE: We’re still finishing up indexing all the people on the site so results might be inconsistent over the next day or so.), and overall made 20+ changes to the search system.

We’re already in the development phase of PRX.org 3.6 which has over 30 new features, improvements to old ones and regular old bug fixes. So keep in touch and let us know how we can help.

Matt