NPR Furthers Their Digital Conversation

NPR held a “Digital Think In” in San Francisco on Saturday. Designed to get the conversation flowing around where NPR should be going with it’s technological future. I’ll let Tim Leberecht describe it (from cnet.com):

The Think In will explore five main topics that are significant to NPR’s ecosystem and its future: social media and connection to the audience, the organization’s national network of more than 800 stations, the potential of its open API, expansion of platforms, and its diversified revenue model. After an NPR overview and an opening session, participants will break out into small groups to develop concepts that NPR can incorporate into its organizational roadmap.

Check out this select list of participants (from SiliconBeat):

Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist; Reid Hoffman, Chairman and co-Founder of LinkedIn; Roger McNamee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners; Chris Beard, Chief Innovation Officer of Mozilla; Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist and creator of Google News; and Sue Gardner, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation, among many others.

That’s and interesting list, but it becomes even more interesting the deeper it gets. Such as:

Richard Jalichandra – President and CEO of Technorati Media

Merlin Mann – 43 Folders, You Look Nice Today, Inbox Zero

Toni Schneider – CEO, Automattic (the WordPress guys)

There were a lot more (maybe too many for a one day affair?), many of them based in social media. NPR is going to be covering their own confab over the next week, so there should be some juicy information from this soon.

But think about it this way. NPR is pretty much the king of podcasting. Mind you, most of it is downloadable versions of their regularly broadcasted content, but not all of it. NPR has several shows that are only in podcast form. These guys may not be on the cutting edge of podcasting, but they are a major player in the field, and have been doing it with more regard to the public benefit than the money it could bring in.

But who else but NPR would spend the money on something like this? Is there another radio broadcaster that spends as much on actual content generation than NPR? Is there another radio broadcaster that generates as much content (a conversation for another day)?

NPR does what it does well. It produces high quality news and audio programming for radio, and turns that into highly successful podcasts. What they don’t do well is create a social environment for the listeners, other than reading a few letters on the air, or taking calls on Car Talk. NPR does have a social network, but have you seen it? It’s pretty awful, and completely centered around the user donating money to a member station. Really, if you are going to have social features on your website (comments, forums, networking, anything the user interacts with) you should have a plan and a reason for it to be there, make it interesting, and allow it to serve the user, not just the point of origin.

So maybe NPR needs a conference like this more than I originally believed. And from their dime, we may get some good info along the way.

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