I spoke the problem of constructing stories that start in one place (i.e. Radio) and extend or even end on another (i.e. mobile).  Just tune into any breaking news story and you can see how there is a confusing interplay across multiple channels.  An event, such as the recent Boston bombing, or even the Iranian elections today, exist in many places at once; on television, radio, social media, websites, SMS and the list goes on.  But how do you proactively use these channels – and the special qualities of each – to manage a coherent, interactive, engaging, relevant story?

While part of the issue is our relative inexperience in managing news over the plethora of platforms and channels, there are a few that are taking on the challenge of creating a new type of story for a multi-platform world.  These are the new storytellers, documentary film makers, and artists that are expanding their craft by bending, breaking and remixing narratives over traditional, digital and ever emerging channels.

For me the start of these new narratives began with Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater War of the Worlds.  It was a radio story, but felt so real to the audience that mass panic set in among many of the listeners who believed the events were real.  This not only demonstrated the power of great storytelling over broadcast – perhaps the ultimate of what NPR calls “Driveway Moments” – but how a narrative actually had people driving to New Jersey to see if the aliens had actually landed.  Fast-forward to 2004 and the next leap forward was the series Lost, which broke out of the television format to continue the narrative arch, or the ‘mythology’ through multiple digital puzzles and hidden sites.  These are the foundations for what we are seeing today in multi-channel story-telling.

As I have thought more about the new narrative it is apparent that analytics must become an important tool for the story-tellers.  Rather than the old way of “more is better” as a proxy for quality (more audience = bigger success), the digital world allows story-tellers to hone their craft through nearly real-time feedback across multiple channels that can result in quick shifts, additions and changes to narratives depending on pockets of audience behavior and interests.

In my presentation, I choose to categorize how I am observing these story-tellers in three main buckets:

• The Hand-Off where narrative arcs start in one place, but are continued on other channels that exploit the characteristics of that platform, such as interactivity of the web, or social of Facebook.
• The Layering of information, each related to a central storyline, but different levels of information about that story.  The classic “For more information on this topic…” hand-off to a website is the ancestor of Layering.
• The Extension is related to both above, but it is where a narrative starts and ends on one platform, but elements of the storyline, or minor story lines are ‘extended’ for fuller explanation on other channels.

Great places to see stories that exhibit this kind of narrative, such as Hand-Off stories include the whole “Expanded Star Wars Universe” of movies, books, games, comic books, videos, fan fiction, conventions, etc.  (I saw the original, but have become more immersed through the eyes of my 11 year old son…the joy of Star Wars Legos)  Lost is still, for me, the most fully realized version of the Layered story, though NY Time’s Snowfall: Avalanche at Tunnel Creek is another beautiful example.  Finally, Frontline’s collaboration with Pro Publica, especially their A Perfect Terrorist, is a wonderful example of Extension story-telling.

However, story-tellers, as mentioned above, need analytic tools to help them tell those stories.  The bulk of my presentation was my thinking about how we need to shape metrics and analytic tools to help us understand how things are working across multiple platforms.  I sketched out some categories of metrics I would love to have in my portfolio, as well as discuss the “one customer ID” problem we all face.

The best thing about my somewhat meandering talk was that after the presentation (see below) I got loads of questions, thoughts and critiques of how analytics needs to evolve to help support this emerging type of story-telling.  I am along for the ride like everyone else and look forward to working on these thorny problems together.

Download (PDF, 1.87MB)

The day began with welcome notes from our hosts, the White House Office of Digital Strategy.  Representatives from NASA lamented that this day would already beat their record for the largest Hackathon held only a few weeks prior.  From there, each participant gave a brief introduction of who they are, the skill sets that they bring, and the any project ideas that they had.  The room included talent from local and federal government agencies, private industry, and even representatives of technology giants such as Facebook and Google.  Many had travelled across the country just to take part in the event.

I formed a team with Bryan Braun, a contractor with the White House Office of Digital Strategy, and Ben Damman, an entrepreneur from Minnesota to work on Petitions NewsLink.  Our goal was to display aggregate data about popularity of petitions over time by issue and allow the user to dig deeper by viewing related news from a point in time that is related to the most popular petitions within the selected issue.  Our hypothesis was that many petitions were formed in response to major news events.  One of most obvious examples would be a spike in submitted petitions in the “Firearms” issue category after the tragic shootings in Newtown, CT.

In order to put this puzzle together, our team decided to utilize:

• Highcharts JS library for data visualization
• We The Entities API to perform textual and sentiment analysis on petition text.  This API was actually created just in advance of the Hackathon by a fellow participant and was under development throughout the day.
• New York Times Article Search API in order to search articles by keyword in particular sections

We also quickly learned that we needed a caching layer in order to perform aggregate look-ups on the data.  Ben took the role of creating this layer,  Bryan took the user interface role, and I took the role of communicating with the We The Entities and New York Times APIs.  By this time everyone had settled into teams and set down to work and the room was quiet.

My first thought had been to also utilize the New York Times Tags API in order to correlate We  The People issue categories with New York Times tags that could then be used to limit new results to only those most relevant.  After spending a good deal of time working through their API, however, I began to realize that the data set that was returned limited by tag became to limited when faced searching on a short window of dates.  With that work tossed aside, I began to focus more on a workable demo by our 4:30 demo time.  We agreed that our goal for the first demo was to have a broad resultset and not necessarily spend our time refining the searches further – that work could be saved for the next phase.  As our demo time approached we worked feverishly to finish up.

The demos showed us a broad set of projects that had been created given a small, but powerful, We The People API.  It included two WordPress plugins for embedding petitions, a data visualization that showed party affiliation of signers, mapping visualations, a type ahead tools.  Of particular interests to journalists was a tool created to import data directly into Google spreadsheets to allow non-technical users to analyze and chart data within a familiar toolset.  The full API gallery is available online.  Most projects include links to demos and/or source code.

Although the day is over, the work continues.  I have continued to refine the news API integration and have rewritten it to a lighter-weight JavaScript implementation.  The original Petitions NewsLink team is still communicating via GitHub to improve the project.  I would like to see the integration of other news sources and the refining of the date algorithms used for searching.  My interest has also been sparked to use available APIs to find out not just what caused petitions, but if petitions do spark action in congress.  A future project will likely be to use the Sunlight Foundation’s Capitol Words API to search for key terms from the petitions to see if they have been used within the Congressional record.

We look for the best solutions to the biggest problems in creating, distributing and improving news and information.  Our job is to find those journalists most able to apply innovation in digital media and get them what they need to implement.

I have the strong belief that our future growth and competitiveness in crowded global media markets depends on our capacity to innovate.  However, there are important reminders of why technology is secondary in the pursuit of our mission.  It is often that the technology outshines what is truly valued; the importance of having a compelling story that moves people.  I have the privilege of working alongside an amazing diversity of journalistic talent and was reminded of that fact when I received an email of a departing colleague, Robert Sivak who retired from VOA at the end of May.  I am reprinting his letter – lightly edited – with his permission because it is an important document to ensure that those in the nexus of journalism and technology stay connected to the values of this place.

To all my dear VOA colleagues, in the News and English Divisions, at the bureaus, in Language Services throughout the House, in IT and Facilities, across IBB and in the Director’s office:

After more than 36 years as a member of this remarkable institution, it’s time for me to move on to other pursuits and challenges, and I want to bid you all a very fond and grateful farewell.   I will miss VOA — and the hard-working journalists who make it tick — more than I can say.  My extended career here, working alongside so many of you, has been deeply rewarding.

From the day I arrived in 1976 as a fledgling Worldwide English intern, I’ve found purpose and passion in so many different corners of this enterprise: as a writer and newscaster with News Programs’ English regional news desks; a co-producer in WWE of several radio news magazines; a producer and feature reporter at VOA’s United Nations bureau and the New York “program center” (when it was nestled in the theater district at West 57th); a general assignment reporter at the West Coast bureau in LA in the early 80s; back in DC to co-produce a live 2-hour morning news magazine to Asia; a long and fascinating stint (1984-1998) as NEB’s food & ag reporter and host of a weekly half-hour radio ag show; the creator and original host/producer in 2000 of the half-hour science mag still running today as ‘Science World;’ an enriching 8-year tour on the 3rd floor leading a remarkable team of multi-media feature journalists, and for the past two+ years, as Central News’ science editor, urging on the Newsroom’s team of science and health reporters.

During my time here, VOA reporters chronicled historic events, from the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate to the US Bicentennial, the dawn of the Green Revolution, the Iran hostage crisis, the Reagan years, the space shuttle, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the fall of communism, the birth of the Internet, the advent of social media and mobile communications, and since 9/11, the battle against terrorism. During my time here, we’ve gone from manual typewriters to networked computers that (most of the time) let us edit text, audio and video and communicate with each other instantly around the globe. We’ve gone from a global network of shortwave radio transmitters to a complex of satellite-fed TV and radio affiliates, catering to audiences that find VOA on their smartphones.

Amazing.  And I’m sure even more remarkable changes are in store.

I know we all share a passion for what VOA has always been: a beacon of honest, balanced world news and illuminating stories about the American people and their ideas.  Even though I’m leaving, and despite the great challenges VOA is facing, I’m going to continue to believe in that mission. And I’m glad so many of you remain here, committed to support it.

I thank those of you with whom I’ve collaborated over the years for the professional respect, trust, pride and joy you’ve all shared with me.

Love and best wishes to everyone at VOA.  And good luck to each of you. 

Ciao!

Rob

Twitter Bootstrap is an open source HTML, CSS and Javascript framework. It was developed by Twitter engineers at their first Hackweek as a flexible and streamlined framework for all of their developers—replacing the tendency to build projects from scratch or from a variety of different frameworks.

Responsive CSS

Using Bootstrap’s fluid grid system makes your site scale-able to any device, big or small. If you’re just getting started with responsive CSS, poke around the bootstrap-responsive.css file to see how styles are changed based on screen size. The CSS uses @media queries to change the display based on screen size, like this:

@media (min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 979px) {
.class { your css here }
}

The Bootstrap examples have all of this CSS completed for you. If you’re already a pro at responsive CSS, downloading Bootstrap gives you source files to start from, which you can leave as is or manipulate.

Easy to Implement User Interface Components

It can be difficult to decide on user interface elements before you see them in action. With Bootstrap, much of the custom development time is eliminated, so you can experiment with different components without adding a ton of extra work.

For example, to add breadcrumbs as seen below,  simply create a list and add the class “breadcrumb” to the <ul> tag. To add a divider between the list items, add <span class=”divider”>/</span> before closing the <li> tag.

Instructions to add all of the components are clearly spelled out on Bootstrap’s GitHub.

Pretty CSS Forms

I love CSS, but I don’t love trying to make forms look pretty using CSS. Twitter Bootstrap read my mind with their default form styles in the base CSS. They are slightly more complicated than the breadcrumb example above, but use the same method of adding class names to indicate the function — and corresponding look — of the item.

For the VOA Pronunciation Guide, we started with the basic marketing site template, and customized the look and feel by editing the CSS. We added several Bootstrap components, including dropdowns, tabs, suggestive search, glyphicons, breadcrumbs, pagination, and buttons. Using Bootstrap helped us get the project off the ground quickly, without a lot of development resources.

To explore the VOA Pronunciation Guide further, visit pronounce.voanews.com.

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Thoughts? Feel free to post comments or questions in the section below or tweet us @BBGinnovate.

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The foregoing commentary does not constitute endorsement by the US Government, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, VOA, MBN, OCB, RFA, or RFE/RL of the information products or services discussed.

The ways to spot a strategic inflection point are, listen to your staff on the front-line, read the data from your market carefully and note any, “growing divergence, a dissonance if you will, between the strategy statements of (your) company and the strategy actions.”

The Office of Digital & Design Innovation was created to move ahead of our day-to-day news operations to spot the strategic inflection points in US international media.  We were created to work on possible solutions; to ‘get to the future faster’ and get those solutions into the hands of journalists.

And while our office was only established 18 months ago, we have been able to, in partnership with the rest of US international media, to accelerate a number of solutions.  Most notably:

• Identifying the need to expand our mobile investments to reach new audiences in places like Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America; especially riding a wave of new mobile web users that has increased our digital mobile audience from 800,000 to close to nine million a month.
• Helping to chart a clear path forward in optimizing our content experiences to a range of consumer devices through a progressive Responsive-Adaptive approach that will focus on digital content performance so that we may better serve audiences around the globe.
• Expanding up our efforts to reach new audiences on new platforms through a successful digital syndication program that have resulted in partnerships with iTunes, YouTube, Google, SoundCloud further increasing our by nearly million new users.
• Building new mobile-ready, low-bandwidth channels with our language service newsrooms for Africa (Mali1), China (ePub) and the Middle East (SyriaStories, Middle East Voices).

 While these projects have been successful, they are only the beginning.  ODDI has just begun to work.  Looking ahead, we see several strategic inflection points:

• mWomen – As of 2010, 21% fewer women than men owned a mobile phone in low- to middle-income countries. This suggests a gender gap of 300 million women without access to this potentially life-enhancing tool.  We believe that the market will spot this gap and start targeting women and we need to be ready to offer credible and relevant services for women.
• The Youth Bulge/Next Generation Storytelling – Of the 1.2 billion people globally aged 15–24, around 1 billion live in developing countries.  The new norm in our global markets is a median age of 22.  These young audiences want  to participate in creating, shaping and distributing information.  In response, we have to develop new participatory storytelling tools that enable us to partner with audiences to tell even more relevant, accurate and insightful stories .
• Multi-Language Content – Today news is no longer a silo-ed local event relevant to only a small geographic region.  The Arab Spring, Chinese investment in Africa, Russian elections, the many varieties of terrorism, sovereign debt crisis…all of these cross boundaries, borders and languages.  There is an acceleration in the accuracy of machine translation that will enable multilingual journalism in both text and audio.  Newsrooms need capabilities to ‘translate at the speed of news’, but within modest budgets.
• Big Data & Journalistic Insights – There are streams of data pouring off of every piece of digital content.  If you have not structured it properly; don’t have the right tools and skills assembled to manage it and have not prepared your culture to appreciate those insights it is…well as useful as brick life vest.  Newsrooms need smarter data practices and Agency leadership need to understand need a global perspective of our publishing across all digital channels.

The future is incredibly bright.  Personally, I have not felt this hopeful about our ability to continually improve how we cover and publish the news.   And never as hopeful about the talent that is interested in working on these problems, both internal staff and contractors as well as external partners.   ODDI has the tools, mission and opportunity to more than ever find solutions to the biggest problems in creating, distributing and improving news and information within the BBG.

The job of ODDI is to find those journalists most able to apply innovation in digital media and get them what they need to push us forward.

Streaming Media East, a conference that took place in New York City on 5/21-22 brought together some of the strongest minds in the media industry to walk through emerging trends that are disrupting the very nature of the television screen as well as the pathways to get to those screens, wherever they may be. Below are some of the big takeaways from the conference:

No Silver Bullets
If you were hoping that 2013 would be the year that we saw device and platform fragmentation wither and die, keep dreaming. MLB reported that they see thousands of unique Android device models hit their services everyday. You were able to get a sense of how fragmented the industry is by just visiting the conference Streaming Pavilion where you could lose yourself in the line of 50 leading hardware devices and platforms (and, no, they did not have the new Xbox One there). As you can see in the chart below, globally there are no clear platform winners for digital delivery. Even digital powerhouses like Google have seen low sales on their Google TV device (1,000,000 active units, world wide) and Roku has only recently hit the 5,000,000 units sold mark. The smart move for media companies is to try to target specific regions or demographics and cherry pick platform development that are the best fit.

Source: NPD DisplaySearch Quarterly Smart TV Usage Study, April 2013

It’s Gotta Just Work
If you want your digital media delivery to be taken as seriously as a traditional television network, then your apps, whether on a phone or over-the-top box, need to work flawlessly. Users expect things to ‘just work’ (just like that good, old fashioned TV set) and meeting that demand may mean that you have to scale back on features that can slow performance down. Damon Phillips of ESPN spoke about starting simple and the care the digital team takes to eliminate buffering when delivering video assets to the user. Additionally,  there was a lot of conversation around making the most of the team that you have by focusing in and taking care to develop great performing apps on key platforms instead of trying to get on as many platforms as you can.  Again, you’re better off having a lite, optimized app on one platform that users enjoy using than a handful of apps that don’t feel native to the platform they are on and are not prime time.

Interactive TV Ain’t Easy
There have been endless critiques of the Huffington Post interactive TV effort, Huffington Post Live, but it’s impossible to deny that from workflow and scale perspective, the folks at HuffPo are pushing the limits of innovation. Tim McDonald was on hand from HuffPo to discuss the work that is involved to deliver programming for 12 hours a day, every day. One of the biggest parts of the effort is the search to find, as Tim calls them, ‘contributors that have skin in the game.’ The community managers at HuffPo are not looking for your standard talking head…they are looking for folk who are passionate and normally do not have a major media platform to voice their opinions on. Finding these people requires a good deal of trolling for experts in the HuffPo forums and also searching through the high volume of user ‘auditions’ that come through the site. Once guests are identified, HuffPo employees then train the guests on how to make use of the Google Hangout or Skype conferencing interfaces, and go over things like mic controls and lighting. Even though there are some bumps, it is astounding how much of the HuffPo Live experience goes off without a hitch.

Forget What You Think You Know
If you read digital strategy blogs, you can be lulled into submission when experts start to talk about ‘engagement on the second screen’ (meaning mobile devices used while watching a traditional TV set) and the benefits of personalization. But the conversations at Streaming Media East were more forward looking, providing new ways to look at these emerging themes. First up, there were brain twisting conversations about what makes a ‘second screen’ in the first place. A user may start watching a show on a mobile device on their commute home from work (acting as a first screen here), but on entering the home, the viewer may throw the programming to an over-the-top box like Apple TV. Now, the mobile device becomes the second screen and is ready to be used for engagement instead of straight consumption. The challenge is there for content producers to create exciting experiences around this sort of functionality transition. In the case of personalization, we normally thing about specific content sent to your device based on what media orgs know about you through analysis of your past viewing behaviors. You see this all the time in the ‘you might also like’ list of recommended clips on any video asset page you visit. However, we are entering a time when device capabilities can help transmit more data about who you are and what your likes are than your past viewing habits. Apps like Google Now can make use of the accelerometer in phones to learn how much you travel, if you like to bike vs. walk, your favorite places to get coffee, etc. Content can be delivered around these themes (example: travel, sports) based on intelligence gleamed from your normal behavior. Of course, someone in your org will request that the personalized recommendations work across all platforms, which is a daunting task. Mobile analytics experts at Flurry recently reported that developers who want to reach 90% of the market of active devices need to actually write for 331 unique models. That’s a lot of developer overtime.

This is a magical time for publishers as they are able to reach viewers with personalized content and on devices that didn’t seem possible before. Publishers are bound to feel like they’re already behind in distributing to all platforms and services, but the smart move would be to take a deep breath and find the most relevant audiences, see how they are consuming content and deliver to those places first. In short, prioritize, prioritize, prioritize.

HuffPost Labs

Mission:

According to Arianna Huffington in an interview with Poynter columnist Steve Myers in 2011, the overall mission of the Huffington Post is “is building community around news, information and entertainment, inviting the audience to participate in the conversation and interact with each other.”

While the HuffPost Labs website doesn’t explicitly state it’s mission on their website, it seems that their projects do reflect the overall mission of HuffingtonPost.com.  They’re self-described as “currently hard at working redefining the future of mobile cloud traffic via APIs and data hubs. #sorandom,” followed by “NOW HIRING: FULLTIME GROWTH HACKER NINJA INTERN!!!”

Operations:

The HuffPost Labs’ team consists of Matthew Conlen, Brandon Diamond, Andrew Sass and Conor White-Sullivan.  A small, but creative team, their website is probably the most amusing of all the Lab websites.  The team of developers went mega-retro and have a site full of old school animated .gifs, ugly fonts highlighted by ugly colors, set to the soundtrack of a Hawaii Five-0 .midi soundtrack.

Project—From Lab to Production:

Presumably focusing on tools that serve the news aggregation model, the first project out of the HuffPost Labs (fall 2012) was HuffPost Highlights.  This tool “feeds quotes and passages readers have copied into a searchable web page”.  According to Ariana Huffington, HuffPost readers copy and share quotes from HuffPost via Twitter, Facebook, or email over 40,000 times a day.

More Projects:

In December 2012, the HuffPost Labs team “released the first version of HackerUnion.org our way of giving back to the tech community in New York and around the world.”  HackerUnion.org is a community of developers and designers “who have something to add to the broader group” in order to create a go-to source for the industry in New York to encourage job growth, career growth and creativity.

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Thoughts? Feel free to post comments or questions in the section below or tweet us @BBGinnovate.

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(Thank you to Rob Bole for his contributions to this post.)

(The foregoing commentary does not constitute endorsement by the US Government, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, VOA, MBN, OCB, RFA, or RFE/RL of the information products or services discussed.)

Northwestern University Knight Lab

Mission:

They recently revamped their branding strategy to better communicate their mission.  According to their blog, “Northwestern University Knight Lab is shorter and friendlier than our previous name and it comes with a tagline to help us better communicate our mission: Advancing news media innovation through exploration and experimentation.”

Operations:

The Knight Lab is self-described as “a team of technologists, journalists, designers and educators working to advance media innovation through exploration and experimentation.”  They even repainted their office to match their updated orange logo design (see photo here).

They have two Fellows who have been “hard at work on the Lab’s new visual identity and branding” and they also have “an army of hacker-journalist students” hard at work on other tasks.  In fact, as of March 2013, they have “a student who tweets for (them), a number of them who write, and quite a few who commit code and develop projects.”  Over the summer, they plan on hiring a “research intern who will contribute to our business development and product design research efforts.”  As their plans and projects mature, they plan to share their “’living’ style guide as well as our content strategy and product development process documentation as a collection of resources for all,” they note on their blog, “We hope that publishing these guides and documentation will be useful for web-making teams everywhere.”

Project—From Lab to Production:

TimelineJS is perhaps the most well known of all the Knight Lab projects currently.  ODDI’s Brian Williamson documented how he uses it and then updated the post when HuffPo used it to document the timeline of the Boston Marathon bombings.  The TimelineJS Twitter account also is pretty active posting and RT’ing different uses of the technology.

The Knight Lab blog documents the evolution of production to different uses by journalists.  On March 21, 2012, Knight Lab discussed a new tool that they were developing to fit different needs that was built by Zach Wise (who joined the Northwestern University faculty from the New York Times).  It seems that Wise’s main goal was to create a tool that was easy to use, used open-source software, had simple coding, was able to incorporate a number of social media platforms, and looked nice to the user in order to explain events that happen over a set period of time.  To gain interest, the Knight Lab offered assistance to “publishers with compelling story ideas for timelines can get free help in building timelines from a team of Medill students working with Wise.”

About one month later, the Knight Lab noted that journalists had adopted the new technology. “Twitter feedback made it clear that Timeline’s developer and Medill faculty member Zach Wise had created something particularly useful,” Ryan Graff posts on the Knight Lab blog, “Visits to KnightLabTimeline.com also surged, peaking at 13,332 on March 29 (2012) before settling into a steady rate of about 1,400 visits a day.”

Two and a half months later, Knight Lab changed its name from Timeline to TimelineJS, which is “a move that makes the product easier to market and gives a nod to the technology’s JavaScript roots.”  And in addition to “Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and SoundCloud”, Wise also worked with the Knight Lab to incorporate “content from Wikipedia, Instagram, and Storify.”  New additions also include nearly a double in the number of supported languages and a newly developed WordPress plugin.

By September, 2012, TimelineJS had been deployed over 1,500 times and included new features such as: 25 supported languages (including Arabic and Chinese), an embed generator, and other customization options (size, font, and map style).

More Projects:

The Lab is still just under two years old, but has developed quite a portfolio of projects.  During that time, they “produced one stable product, deployed seven systems and 32 prototypes,” according to their website.  They also revised their blog, which is responsively designed for use across laptops, tablets and mobiles.

According to their ‘About’ section on their website, their first year, they “developed several prototypes and tools, including: TimelineJS, Local Angle, Local Circle, PrintF, and SoundCite” and several other items under Social Loupe, “which includes prototypes of TweetCast Your Vote, TwxRay and Hashtagger.”

For a much more detailed set of featured projects, check out their projects site.  In 2013, they have three projects listed for continued development: Social Loupe (“experiments and ideas realized into technology which seeks to find meaning and utility in social media data”), Reporters’ Notebook (products geared toward “information gathering, data management, recording and correlating information found in online data repositories, virtual beat reporting, and more”), and The Publishers’ Toolbox (“tools and services intended to help with content publishing and aid in faster and easier web development around storytelling”).

They also recently held a 3-day hackathon which produced some really interesting results.

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Thoughts? Feel free to post comments or questions in the section below or tweet us @BBGinnovate.

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(Thank you to Rob Bole for his contributions to this post.)

(The foregoing commentary does not constitute endorsement by the US Government, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, VOA, MBN, OCB, RFA, or RFE/RL of the information products or services discussed.)

The Radio y TV Marti application is the first out the gate available now on Android and Apple IOS tablet and mobile devices. They’ll soon be followed by Alhurra, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia too — joining Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s apps that are already on the market.

The applications are available on Android mobile phones and tablets, as well as for the Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. We’re also working on a Symbian version focused on African countries/languages, where the Nokia operating system is still popular within the market.

The app features include:

• Ability for producers to send out push alerts through Pangea for breaking news (on platforms that support push notifications).
• Bandwidth consumption optimization.  When the app first starts, the user will be notified about the possibility to turn-off the loading of images.
• Psiphon proxy integration for content delivery in closed internet countries (available only on Android only, IOS doesn’t allow proxies).
• Support for content assets served out of the core CMS:
  • Video
  • Audio
  • Live streaming audio (for services offering this)
  • Text stories
  • Photos
• Allow background downloading and offline access to content.
• Locally stored user generated content (audio, video, photos, texts).
• Support continuous play as a background app (on platforms that support multi-tasking and continuous play in the background on platforms that support it).
• Support for the landscape and portrait orientation, as well as design changes for right-to-left reading for Arabic language services, and support for core touch gestures including pinch to close, swipe left and right navigation through sections and stories (on platforms that support touch interactions).
• Sharing of all the content (articles, audio clips, videos, photo galleries) on Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte and by Email. (On Android Operating system, any other installed sharing application is integrated too.)
• 
  User generated content submission built into the application so the audience can send pictures/audio/video/text directly to the CMS from the app.
• Customizable navigation categories/tab bar order for iOS.  This is to allow the user to customize the the number of articles shown within the section at home view and to customize the auto-refresh of data after application start.
• Full featured audio player – seeking, volume, play/pause, playback time/remaining time for listening to full programs/audio clips and news casts.
• Customize the article categories shown on home screen and its order.
• Search for articles within the app integrated across all assets based on asset metadata.
• Apple TV OTA streaming is supported, DLNA streaming is supported for DLNA enabled Android phones and TVs.

We’re working with RFERL and the Pangea team to merge and upgrade the mobile app platform, we’re moving to a single code base for all the applications on the services fed out of our core CMS. This allows for web producers to manage their website, mobile website and mobile apps all in one interface for each of the platforms.

Web browser users are a larger overall audience…

This is just one new product we’re working on to help spread our content and information around the world. One of our next major projects is building the CMS in a fully-responsive and progressively enhanced format optimized for mobile- and performance-first. It may seem like duplication but these projects can be complementary products as the audiences for both can be very different from a contextual and usage perspective, as research indicates app users tend to consume content longer, deeper and more frequently, but they’re a smaller and more passionate group.

Mobile web users are quick content grazers, they come from social media, search engines and other quick visits, but they’re a much larger group

…But mobile app users are more rabid, frequent and deep news consumers. (Pew Report, 2012)

Serving both these audiences is important for BBG audiences, but this just two mobile/tablet products we’re building, with many more in the works — including tools focused on low bandwidth and offline tools like eBooks, iBooks, PDF, and traditional cellular tools like SMS, MMS and voice communications like IVR.

These apps would not be possible without the indomitable spirit of ODDI’s Borana Kostro and Rebecca Lundregan, who have worked tirelessly to customize, train and test these apps, as well as the support of each of our language services for their hard work translating and providing feedback. They’re built on the foundation of work done from RFERL and their amazing team. We’re also blessed to have the support of our QA team Alena Simakova, in Prague, and our newest team members, Danish Ahmed and Son Tran, in DC helping us move this project forward faster.

Go ahead and download the Marti Noticias apps now on Apple IOS or Android.

New York Times Research & Development Lab

Mission:

New York Time’s R&D Lab is self-described as working “to innovate around new technologies, anticipating consumer behaviors and building new interfaces for news.”  Since 2006, it has “developed prototypes that illustrate trends in media, technology and communication” with the leadership of Michael Zimbalist. This includes “research on eReader technology and tablet computing, on personal privacy and data usage, on ambient, ubiquitous computing and on large-scale data visualizations.”

They’ve also created a spin off called the New York Times R&D Ventures.  Many of their activities tend to be based around, literally, finding new ways of exposing their audience to NYT news feeds.  For example, one project discussed by the Nieman Journalism Lab (but not listed as a featured project on the NYT R&D Lab website) is an advertising product called Ricochet.  The article describes Richochet as a tool where “companies can create custom links to New York Times stories they select; the links take readers to a version of the story where the ads on the page are all for the company,”—aka, a different means of targeted advertising. “Companies select which stories they want to be associated with, then figure out the ways they want to deliver it: tweet, Facebook post, newsletter, or more.”

Operations:

As discussed in the next section, the Lab operates a living room test area to test out new tools to provide custom news across all devices.  Another key part of their operations is customer feedback via the New York Times Insight Lab, where readers “can provide feedback directly to The New York Times through regular surveys, participate in ongoing discussions and learn about new Times projects.”

More about operations at the lab: http://vimeo.com/4630706

It seems that tours are possible of their operations, but are largely reserved for advertisers.

Project—From Lab to Production:

Probably one of the better-known projects recently is that of the “Times Reader, Surface Edition”.  Going off of Microsoft’s Surface development, the technology would allow users to tap open images or paragraphs (including a virtual keyboard to allow for one to type comments) to view on a living room or office table.  Nieman Journalism Lab called it “the kitchen table of the future” in this article.

Here’s a video demo of the “Times Reader, Surface Edition”.

In fact, in 2009, the Lab set up a prototyped living room of the future in one corner of their office.

With this, they strived to create a lab-controlled environment to test Internet-enabled HDTVs in the setting they’re likely to be used.  While the content is not meant for long-form journalism, the NYT hopes that an increase in the use of multimedia will make the tool more enticing.  They’re also exploring the idea of “air mice” and custom remotes so that surfing can be done from the sofa.

More Projects:

• Custom Times: Provides a means for a seamless transition across multiple platforms.  It is an “experience that anticipates the user’s needs across devices and environments.”
• News.me: “News.me is a different kind of social news experience that shows you not just what your friends are sharing, but what they are reading as well.”
• OpenPaths: “openpaths.cc is an encrypted, user-contributed database for the personal location data files recorded by iOS devices. Users can securely store and manage their personal location data, and grant researchers access to portions of that data as they choose.”
• Reveal Project: “By using a special semi-reflective glass surface, the users of the mirror are able to see both a normal reflection of the real world as well as overlaid, high-contrast graphics.” The Lab calls this “augmented reflection”.
• Compendium: Compendium is “a tool that invites readers to use New York Times articles, images, videos and quotations to tell their own stories.”
• Cascade: “This first-of-its-kind tool links browsing behavior on a site to sharing activity to construct a detailed picture of how information propagates through the social media space.”

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Thoughts? Feel free to post comments or questions in the section below or tweet us @BBGinnovate.

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(Thank you to Rob Bole for his contributions to this post.)

(The foregoing commentary does not constitute endorsement by the US Government, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, VOA, MBN, OCB, RFA, or RFE/RL of the information products or services discussed.)