“The atomic element is the story”: This American Life navigates a future that goes beyond broadcast » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism
The episode versus the story
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"...TAL’s website and mobile apps have long been organized like the broadcast. You can download the whole episode from iTunes or stream it from the show’s website or mobile apps.
But users often don’t want the whole show. “Right now people often share an episode, but they’ll say, ‘Act 3!’ Or, ‘Fast-forward to this time!’” Lind told me. For users, he discovered, “the atomic element is the story, rather than the episode.” That might seem kind of obvious to web publishers, but it doesn’t necessarily fit with the narrative philosophy of the show — a handcrafted hour of storytelling, woven together by a common theme. “I think we’re sort of purists, in terms of wanting people to get the entire episode and to encourage them to listen to it as a whole,” Lind said.
Lind is assembling a UX team to make the TAL website more user-focused. Individual stories recently got their own play buttons, and soon they will be broken out into discrete posts, each with a dedicated URL and share buttons — a similar approach to the one taken by, say, WNYC’s On the Media. Every story will get full transcripts, a first for TAL, in part to improve search-engine optimization. (The only textual content that accompanies the show’s stories at the moment are radio-style promos, purposely spare and titillating but practically invisible to Google.)
TAL has hired a Boston company called 3Play Media to convert all 437 hours of its radio content into text, dating back to the show’s 1995 debut. The company makes software that transcribes speech automatically, but a team of humans has to review each one for quality control (and make editorial decisions: Should we remove Ira Glass‘ um’s and ah’s or transcribe them?).
Radio is an art form as much as a medium. Doesn’t a transcript ruin some of the magic? Aren’t the producers worried people will read, not listen to, the stories they’ve labored to tell? The staff is going to have to get over it, Lind said, and that includes a certain bespectacled host. Lind said the benefits of the updates will far outweigh the drawbacks. “I think that for every person who comes and just reads…there’s going to be 10 more people who find the audio because of it.”
The team is also working to add richer metadata to stories, with tags for locations, people, era, topic, and mood. So you might search for “mood: angsty; topic: love; decade: 90s” and find, for example, Episode 42: “Get Over It!” (And a lot of other stories, too; this is TAL, after all.) TAL is working with 3Play to design a custom XML format for categorizing its content.
In mid-May, the TAL site added an optional registration system, which allows listeners to build playlists and mark their favorite episodes. It also allows the show to keep a closer eye on who’s using the site and how. Lind said about 2,300 people had registered with the site as of last week, a modest number in his estimation; the TAL website gets about 40,000 visits per day...."