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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.

Go Geo!

We've always known that independent producer Geo Beach is a force of nature, and now you can see that for yourself on his new History Channel Show "Tougher In Alaska".

Geo was one of the first producers to join PRX back in September 2003, and he's been a great source of ideas and tough love about what we're trying to do here at PRX.

Geo even managed to get his PRX profile into an article about the show:

At 6 feet 3 inches and 225 pounds, Beach rather resembles a nightclub bouncer you’d hate to provoke on a Saturday night. But after listening to his thoughtful essays on public radio [www.prx.org/user/geo], I decided he’s more like a genuine (and burlier) version of deejay “Chris in the Morning” (John Corbett) on “Northern Exposure.” Apparently the series’ producers thought so as well.

Read more background on the show here.

Thanks Geo, we'll be watching!

School Bus

This week it's School Bus from third grade teacher David Green, and third grader, Hannah. Check out the whole series of School Scenes.

Image by Christian et Cie.

Listen now: download, subscribe, review.

New York Times on PRX

PRX gets a mention in the New York Times piece on public radio's hunt for new talent and new audiences.

Public radio “had an enormous surge in listening over about a 10-year period from the mid ’90s up through about 2003, principally driven by a huge response to public radio’s news and information programming,” said Tom Thomas, co-chief executive officer of the Station Resource Group, a public radio consortium. But since 2003 “the audience has essentially been flat,” he said.

To address this, the consortium recently received a Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant to identify ways to get the audience growing again, and “Everything is on the table,” Mr. Thomas said.

Last year some 1,400 people entered the Public Radio Talent Quest, an online search for new hosts run by the Public Radio Exchange, a Web site, prx.org, where independent radio producers market their content. None of the three winners — a science blogger, a slam poet and a nonprofit executive who is a storyteller — reflect that typical public radio sound, said Jake Shapiro, the exchange’s executive director.

Mmmm, Weirds.

Jesse Thorn of Sound of Young America and CPB have helped us expand our supply of MacArthur award congratulatory snacks.

Thanks to Jesse we can now watch "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" while enjoying jack mackerel, fried pork skins, rubber grapes, and Weirds (a tangy candy from Pakistan, crafted from titanium dioxide, carnuba wax, and dextrose -- in other words, delicious).

And, we conquered this tower of sweets sent to us from CPB!

Thanks, CPB and SOYA! You really made our day.

UPDATE: Jesse Thorn writes:

"Let it be shouted to the heavens: THAT JESSE THORN IS A CLASS ACT.

JUST LIKE HIS PALS AT THE CPB, NPR and PRX."

Hereby shouted!

Finding a Room

This week we're going behind the scenes of the news story: it's Finding a Room from the World Vision Report and Will Everett.

Image by Erin Landry.

Listen now: download, subscribe, review.

GPRX on Youth Media Reporter

Generation PRX Coordinator Jones Franzel was interviewed for Youth Media Reporter's first podcast and for "Making Networking Work for Youth Media."

Looking to join a youth media network? Jones presents this advice in the article: "When possible, selecting a neutral organizer or leader, whether a funder or intermediary youth media organization, can take away perceived competitiveness or benefit among participating members. Generation PRX, an online youth radio exchange, aims to do just that by connecting a variety of youth radio producers virtually from across the country. 'People can trust that we're really motivated by promoting the entire field,' Franzel said."

Youth Media Reporter is a bi-monthly professional online journal that focuses on developing and sustaining the youth media field.

CPB Congratulates PRX on MacArthur Award

http://www.cpb.org/pressroom/release.php?prn=643

For Immediate Release April 11, 2008

Corporation for Public Broadcasting Congratulates the Public Radio Exchange on its MacArthur Foundation Award

Washington, D.C. -- The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) congratulates the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) for receiving a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.

Established by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions recognizes and invests in small, emerging nonprofit organizations around the world that demonstrate exceptional creativity and effectiveness.

The MacArthur Foundation announced PRX was one of eight organizations in six countries to receive the award "by gathering and distributing new programming and using technological innovation to expand content choices, PRX is leading public radio to become more interactive, diverse and democratic."

"PRX has transformed the way content creators deliver their product to the public radio marketplace," said Pat Harrison, CPB president and CEO. "PRX has developed a unique service that has led public broadcasting along the pathway to emerging media and opened a pipeline of innovation that benefits stations and listeners. It's fitting that they've been recognized for their creativity and leadership."

About PRX: The Public Radio Exchange is an online marketplace for distribution, review and licensing of public radio programming. PRX is also a growing social network and community of listeners, producers and stations collaborating to reshape public radio. The mission of PRX is to create more opportunities for diverse programming of exceptional quality, interest and importance to reach more listeners.

About CPB: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a private, nonprofit corporation created by Congress in 1967, is the steward of the federal government's investment in public broadcasting. It helps support the operations of more than 1,000 locally-owned and -operated public television and radio stations nationwide, and is the largest single source of funding for research, technology, and program development for public radio, television, and related online services.

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