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PRX is on the move

The beautiful green-certified building in which we had our office since last spring was bought, so we're on the move again.

Change is good -- we get to continue our quest to occupy every non-cube farm office space in Harvard Square.

For August we are at the Signet Society house even closer to the T and amazing burritos. And we get to work in a library with writings from famous alumni on the walls, like Teddy Roosevelt and Conan O'Brien.

We'll move into new "permanent" office space a few blocks away in September.

P.S. We're still here for you!

The PRX help desk is still available while we're in our temporary space. In order for us to know that you called, leave a message at extension 118 and we'll call you back.

Ford grant to SRG for PRX technology, content, and capacity-building

As posted to the Station Resource Group list:

User-focused technology, new investments in content, and key steps toward sustainable, independent operation are the focus of a new Ford Foundation grant to SRG in support of PRX: The Public Radio Exchange. Ford’s $250,000, one year investment supplements the Foundation’s ongoing support of PRX as part of five-year, $50 million initiative in public media. Here’s what we will do:

Technology

In addition to ongoing upgrades to the core PRX web site and technical platform, Ford support will help us:

· Expand the PRX member directory into a searchable skills database, helping connect content creators for freelance and production opportunities

· Make use of user experience, so that station staff, producers, and listeners will be able to create their own playlists of audio pieces on PRX, helping curate and organize collections of works for use online and for broadcast

· Integrate web delivery of content with our broadcast-centered work and streamline the ability of stations and other site operators to integrate on-demand content geared towards local or issue-based themes.

Content

$50,000 of Ford’s support will go to PRX’s Content Venture Fund, joining an initial $100,000 investment by the MacArthur Foundation earlier this year. The Fund enhances the existing PRX marketplace with new incentives for content creators. It also establishes a dedicated funding pool that PRX will bring to other public media funders as a matching opportunity for projects that would otherwise be too small or difficult to fund, such as “reversioning” archival works for digital distribution or providing royalty advances for completing new works..

Organizational Capacity and Sustainability

Ford funds will be used for two key steps towards PRX’s independent future:

· First, PRX will work to increase the use of, and revenue from, its many services. A new business development position will spearhead a series of initiatives that are tied to existing services and new capacities of PRX 3.0, with the aim of generating transactions and activity that result in both sustainable direct revenue and mission-driven distribution and access goals.

· PRX is establishing its own board to govern, support, and help lead its growth and bring a wider circle of perspectives to its work – 6 to 8 national leaders from public broadcasting, technology, business and nonprofit sectors. We will also convene facilitated advisory meetings that bring together stakeholders and representatives from key user groups and constituencies and review and update PRX’s multi-year business plan.

This new grant is an affirmation of the terrific work and innovative efforts of the PRX team and the forward –looking commitment of the Station Resource Group in nurturing this ever-evolving project. Congratulations to all!

Tom Thomas
Terry Clifford
Co-CEOs, Station Resource Group

Current Article on Talent Quest Winners

Current has a new feature about the Public Radio Talent Quest winners. Here is a highlight:

“We’re not saying to any one of the three, ‘Here’s a bunch of money — go launch a program in the next six months,’” said Kathy Merritt, CPB’s director of program investments in radio. “We’re going to give all the people involved time to look at the concepts and make sure they’re matched to their personalities and what they want to do, then figure out how they will produce the programs."

...The next batch of programs from the Talent Quest winners will be available for broadcast later this year or in early 2009, Merritt said. At the end of the year’s grant term, CPB will decide whether to back one or more as a full-scale nationally distributed series.

“The next phase is taking that inspiration and turning it into a viable program that isn’t just about solely fitting into a public radio schedule, but also taps into the online and participatory element that brought it about in the first place,” said Jake Shapiro, PRX executive director.

Click here for the whole article.

CPB Funds Two Public Radio Talent Quest Winners

In spring 2007 we began the quest for the newest public radio talent. Anyone could submit a two-minute audio entry demonstrating "hostiness." After four rounds and 1,400+ entries from all over the country, three winners were chosen to develop show pilots.

CPB has decided to fund two of our winners! Al Letson and Glynn Washington will each get a year's worth of funding to produce new episodes of their shows.

Check out the official press release and follow these links to hear the pilots that got Al and Glynn their CPB honors.

For more on each show head over to these sites:
Glynn's Snap Judgment Radio
Al's State of the Re:Union

Stay tuned for more fantastic radio!

Thanks to everyone who brought hostiness to our contest, especially our third winner, Rebecca Watson, and our semi-finalists.

Ye Moderne Photography

Have you ever wanted a backstage press pass to the concerts of some of the biggest rock and roll stars? When you were eleven? With your dad? . . . Do you call your dark room your "soul"? Yes? Yes? Yes? If you liked the Tintype photographer piece, this may interest you, too: this week it's Wanted: Dreamjob ... Rock 'n Roll Photographer from producer Mary Rose Madden.

Photo of Iggy Pop copyright Sam Holden.

Check photographer Sam Holden's website here to view more of his work.

Listen now: download, subscribe, review.

New YouthCast Host

Hello all! I'm Chantel, the new host for YouthCast. I'm a newbie to blogging so I'll have to get used to this. I'm sure many of you are hip to the blog scene...Any suggestions to help get me adjusted? Come on, don't be stingy; feel free to share. I'm excited about this new journey.

You can email me at chantel(at)prx(dot)org.

How I Spent My Stimulus

PRXers Katherine and Genevieve recently clued me in to How I Spent My Stimulus, a fascinating look at how Americans of every age and economic bracket are viewing and using the big check from Uncle Sam. From new kittens, to a used Glock, to diapers to credit card debt, it paints a pretty interesting picture. I considered submitting my own.

How did I use my stimulus? Well . . . today is my last day at PRX.

I've loved my three years here, and it wasn't an easy decision to make: but I'm leaving to devote more time to my writing. (As I've been explaining to flabbergasted friends, I'll be that jerk.) I've been writing stories, diary entries and poetry since I was six, but I've never really considered doing anything with the results. At one point, my big plan was to gather all of the writing I'd ever done, seal it up in a plastic box, and bury it in the backyard of my childhood home, to be discovered two hundred years from now to sudden fame and accolades (!). While the romance of this idea still holds some appeal, I've decided it may be time to try a slightly more proactive tack with my work. Like, I don't know, agents, publishing houses. Worst case scenario, I can always bury it in the yard.

It has truly been a pleasure meeting and working with you all. I will miss watching all the pieces come in, the updated list of reviews, and every new license that said to me "Hey neat, this PRX thing is working. Somewhere, someone is pumping their fist right now." I hope you don't mind that I envisioned you doing that.

I'll miss the homepage updates, your friendly and clever emails, Zeitfunk and the podcast: occasionally answering my cell phone with "PRX, this is Adrianne." But mostly, I'll miss my amazing, hilarious and supportive coworkers and friends at PRX. You won't find a more pleasant, intelligent gathering of people anywhere.

. . . And hey, I hear they're hiring.

More on The School Scenes Project

As we were getting the most recent podcast ready to post, I emailed producer (and third grade teacher) David Green. I asked him about how the audio he posted was originally used, and what that project was like.

Regarding the project, I was inspired to do the School Scenes project by a site-specific audio tour I listened to at a performance art festival in Chicago about four years ago. The artist had a table set up in the lobby of the theater and was passing out portable CD players to people. You had to go to specific locations – the theater lobby, the mailbox at the corner of the street outside – while listening to certain tracks. The audio consisted of personal stories, reflections and questions to the listener. I loved the tour. It was simultaneously private and public, both a shared and individual experience: Standing in a crowded theater lobby, listening to a story which nobody else could hear, and then noticing somebody across the lobby with headphones on, listening too, but at a different point in the story than me. Or, sitting in the café listening to the recorded ambient sound of a café, while also hearing the actual noise of the café too.

Anyway, I often take experiences like this and think about how I might translate them to the world of eight and nine-year olds.

Over the course of the school year, the third graders wrote and recorded their school memory stories, each tied to a specific, physical location on campus.

For the premier, we had about seventy third-graders and parents gather at school, all with portable CD players or iPods. The program told them where to go and which track to listen to in a given location. After my introduction, everybody scattered to the seventeen different locations, spending about an hour taking their own route through the tour.

What I absolutely loved was that I could wander into the first grade classroom where there might be ten people, all silent, lost in their own headphone world, but all listening to exactly the same story, but not quite at the same time.

NPR's Next Generation PRX

We're big fans of Doug Mitchell and his work at NPR with Next Generation, and it's great to see it get some more well-deserved attention by Mark Glaser at PBS's Media Shift. As Mark mentions PRX has been working with Next Gen, and we're hoping to find more ways to connect more directly with our youth-radio project Generation PRX.

Not surprisingly, those twentysomethings have also pushed NPR further into the digital realm, creating an eye-catching blog and using Public Radio Exchange (PRX), an online marketplace for radio reports, to get wider distribution for their work. ... PRX, an online exchange for radio producers and programmers, has played an important role in giving wider exposure to the young radio journalists. Jake Shapiro, executive editor of PRX, told me there are about 128 NextGen stories up at PRX, and they’ve been licensed more than 60 times by stations that ran the content.

“We made a concerted push to help get NextGen pieces on PRX, partly because too few of them saw the light of day on NPR programs and they are excellent pieces that stations have found lots of opportunities to air,” Shapiro said via email. “We also see great alignment between NextGen’s goals and PRX’s mission to help surface new voices and cultivate new talent…There’s a lot more that we could do together as part of a vital pipeline for new and diverse talent in public radio/media.”

Read the full piece here.

Current on PRX

Current has posted a long look at PRX in the wake of the MacArthur Award news, along with a nice sidebar linking to previous coverage and some highlights like Generation PRX and our Zeitfunk awards, which Current memorably describes as "a kitschy trophy topped with a shiny martial-arts practitioner frozen in mid-roundhouse kick".

PRX launched in September 2003, the fruit of a brainstorm between SRG and independent producer Jay Allison. The idea was to use the Web to give station and independent producers a more convenient way to share work, while developing a deep catalog of pieces old and new.
....
The concept was “long tail” before Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson coined the term, says Jake Shapiro, PRX’s executive director since its inception. PRX recognized that “there was tremendous value in aggregating and making accessible some of the programs that have garnered so much energy, investment and work, rather than having them be ephemeral productions that air once or twice.”

...

Jeff Hansen, p.d. of KUOW/KXOT, praises PRX for its ease of use and for its promotion of independent producers, whom he believes public radio must support as “the next generation” of talent.

By empowering producers to handle their own distribution, he says, PRX may even be “the future of program distribution.” “What sense does it make to distribute someone else’s content, when that someone else can distribute themselves?” he says. “Why incur the cost of the middleman anymore, now that you have PRX?”

You can see the full Current coverage here.

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