Highlights from public media websites: Classical music
In this post, I'm highlighting four classical music home pages that do a nice job presenting their service. Compared to the public media news highlights, which need a significant amount of local content, a good music services appear to depend on ease-of-use and live streams, with local features and events an added bonus. The four sites I picked this time are mostly dedicated classical music sites, I found the multi-format or joint-licensee sites a little too overwhelming with competing promos and content, which made it difficult to quickly find playlists and streaming audio. I don't think it's impossible to bring the different worlds together, but I also wonder if these four sites offer a better model and service to their visitors.WDAV (Davidson, NC)
In the page header, WDAV has a flash widget that offers the current playlist (with a little "buy it" button, a feature adopted by a few other stations) and a flash-based audio stream. The 4-item gallery below (which has a lively animation to it -- seen in progress in this screenshot) is pretty nice.
WBJC (Baltimore, MD)
WBJC features the current playlist on their home page, done very nicely. Although currently empty, I like the live events listings too, with options for today, 7- and 14- days. Links to live streams are prominent (although I wonder if the typical user cares about iTunes vs WMP). The navigation is also very simple and straightforward, just 5 links.
WETA-FM (Washington, DC)
I really like the set of "quick tabs" with the current song and links to the most relevant parts of the site. WETA has also done a good job bringing pledge and support features into the page (the quick pledge form is also a nice touch before subjecting the would-be-donor to the horrors of convio..)
KUAT / Arizona Public Media
I highlighted Arizona Public Media's earlier for their news coverage, and now with their classical site, which is nicely assembled with featured content and local information. I really like that they offer a 192kbps MP3 stream for especially picky classical listeners.
Highlights from public media websites: Local News
Continuing with my analysis of public media station websites, this time I'm going to look at good examples of local news on the home page. I would guess (and would love to see real statistics about user behavior) local news stories are probably one of the biggest draws to a station's site (and provides good feedback about what visitors are interested in, giving stations a better connection to the community). On the home page, one of the biggest challenges for a news-concious station is striking a balance between the news output, featured content, and outreach. You can also browse the full gallery of public media websites.WBUR (Boston, MA)
WBUR has a lot of things going for it -- a large (and devoted) community, significant local and national production capacity, and some tech-savvy people on the back-end. WBUR uses the NPR API to pull in national content, mixed with local content and productions, as well as web-original material ("HubBub"). Besides a well laid-out page (and good typography), I like the section headers which provide context (and make it easier to do curated sets of content).
KPCC | Southern California Public Radio
KPCC has a lot of local content and does a great job highlighting it, between the local and state coverage, in-depth reporting, and KPCC blogs, all featured on the front page. Like WBUR, there is a content block devoted to most viewed stories, which is a great way to expose recently popular content without sacrificing space.
WXXI (Rochester, NY)
Unlike WBUR and KPCC, most stations probably can't support such a singular vision especially when their identity is fragmented over multiple outlets. WXXI, in my opinion, does a good job balancing the television and promotional material with a simple, brief news sidebar. I like WXXI's two-tiered approach to news; lead stories are published with iconography and a brief blurb, while other reporting is posted with just a title. I'm also curious to see how Argo content produced by the InnovationTrail project will feature as that project grows. Digging into the site, they split the two tiers between locally hosted material and the Public NewsRoom service (I wonder how that is working out for them..).
Arizona Public Media
Like WXXI, APM also has to balance the challenges of being a joint-licensee, but as a state-wide network. Arizona clearly has significant local news gathering capacity and is able to feature a wide variety of news and featured content on the home page. The distinct sections should make it easier to support in-depth reporting or curated content as needed.
WKSU (Kent, OH)
I like WKSU's center column, with a lead story and the days other news prominently featured and the older features sliding down the page. Separating news and features removes some tension between reporting and promotion.
Vermont Public Radio
The VPR home page is simple and to the point -- categorized headlines with a couple areas for call-out items. While I'd like to see longer blurbs, I think this website works and provides a quick, at-a-glance view of state news without distracting elements.
Highlights from public television websites
When creating the comprehensive gallery of station website (and wrote about in my last post), I wanted to encourage a conversation about what makes a good public media websites (c.f. this XKCD comic about university websites). In this first analysis post (which is highly subjective and incomplete), I will draw out some highlights from a quick pass of public television home pages (a radio run-down will come later -- the television corpus is significantly smaller and easier to digest). In general, the sites I liked the most had a mix of good design aesthetic, highlighted local content, and had some element of current-ness (I had the good fortune of capturing television websites on August 31, the night of President Obama's press conference on Iraq, which gives some insight into how connected the website is to programming, outreach, and communication plans.) You can see all the public television station websites in the gallery, and add your own tags and ratings if you register. [EDIT: Also check out my other posts in this series, including a how+why for the technically inclined. ]Georgia Public Broadcasting
I really liked GPB's schedule and events sidebar on the home page, but they also emphasized local news programming and social media.
KBYU (Provo, UT)
KBYU has an elegant site (with a penchant for rounded corners), with a very nice scheduling widget on their home page and nice promotional spots.
KCET (Los Angeles, CA)
Again, KCET offers a good combination of promotion and programming at the top of their home page, followed by almost exclusively local content (not surprising, in light of the tension between PBS and KCET)
KLRU (Austin, TX)
KLRU has a very clean website, and probably the clearest and most useful notice about pre-empted programming for the Presidential address.
WTCI (Chattanooga, TN)
WTCI has perhaps the clearest support section on their home page, including "Volunteer Opportunities".
Milwaukee Public Television
Finally, although MPTV has put a lot of information on their home page, it doesn't feel overwhelming. The schedule widget emphasizes their different digital channels pretty clearly.
A gallery of public media organization websites
Last night's topic for #pubmedia chat on twitter was station websites. Because I happen to have a list of public radio stations metadata (gathered from both NPR's station finder API and the PTFP Public Radio Coverage 2004 report, supplemented with FCC and Arbitron data), I thought it'd be interesting to quickly toss the results into a image gallery and see and compare the different sites. In about 40 minutes, I had a very basic, very ugly gallery up, and today I've relaunched it as a Ruby on Rails application still in development at http://stations.publicmediatech.com/. Because of the peculiarities of the data sources, there is some repetition of station websites (the data from PTFP is transmitter-based, so translators, state-wide networks, and other entities count as unique organizations) as well as a very broad definition of public media (including college, community and low power radio). The dataset is also missing a large swath of television-only broadcasters, although I hope to get a dataset shortly. My ideas for the future of the interface revolve mainly around making the sites more discoverable, including:Public Media Camp Boston
I have the great fortune to be involved in planning the Boston spin-off of Public Media Camp with a number of people from the Boston media community. It is an interesting process and has probably taught me more about media policy, institutional politics, and event planning than I'd ever want to know, but a couple key things stand out:- Distributed communication is a challenge, fraught with false starts and misunderstandings. While this is certainly a social problem, there isn't much technology out there to help manage event planning sanely. Nothing beats a face-to-face meeting.
- Money is both the hard part and the easy part.
- Back-channels are essential.