PRX in the News

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.
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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.”

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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.

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.

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.

Boston Globe on PRX

http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2008/04/11/cambridge_nonprofit_wins_macarthur_award/

Cambridge nonprofit wins MacArthur award

By Clea Simon, Globe Correspondent | April 11, 2008

The Cambridge-based Public Radio Exchange will receive one of eight 2008 MacArthur Awards for Creative and Effective Institutions, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced yesterday. PRX, as the Cambridge nonprofit is called, serves as an Internet clearinghouse for radio producers and public radio stations. It provides access to new voices and makes it easier for producers and stations to connect and license one another's work using an online base that handles everything from sampling shows to licensing.

"It's a huge honor and a great endorsement," says Jake Shapiro, PRX's executive director. "We are trying to be a leader in what public broadcasting is doing, to be pioneers, and this is a huge boost to that role."

The prizes, up to $500,000, are given to nonprofits that are driving significant change on a modest budget, according to the foundation. The winners, from six nations, will be honored June 12 at the foundation's headquarters in Chicago. The seven other recipients for this year's awards are: Tlachinollan, Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña, in Mexico; Philadelphia's Juvenile Law Center; Kazan Human Rights Center in the Republic of Tatarstan, Russian Federation; Legal Defence and Assistance Project in Lagos, Nigeria; Chicago's Project Match; Sangath in Goa, India; and Tany Meva Foundation in Madagascar.

"We pick these winners from across all of our program interests," says Elspeth A. Revere, vice president of the general program at the MacArthur Foundation. "One of our interests for close to 30 years has been public media."

The foundation has previously supported PRX with two grants, viewing the small nonprofit as "an ingenious model of harnessing technology to bring more diverse, high-quality content into radio."

PRX, which was launched in 2002, allows aspiring producers, stations, and individuals to sample and critique a variety of programs at prx.org. The organization has made more than 20,000 programs from approximately 1,000 producers available on the site since its inception, says Shapiro. PRX also helped organize last year's Public Radio Talent Quest.

For PRX, the MacArthur award will bring growth and stability. The organization plans to put aside half of the expected award of $500,000 as a capital reserve. "We'll be investing in our future," says Shapiro, "which is very difficult for nonprofits to do."

Approximately $150,000 will go toward technology. This will include updating and expanding the Internet platform that makes the program exchange possible.

"We have thousands of pieces on the site," says Shapiro. "You might want to do [a playlist] of favorite environmental stories or rainy-day pieces. If I'm working at a radio station, I might be more able to find programs I can then use."

The remaining $100,000 will launch a content fund. This will offer money to revise or update public radio programs, which Shapiro calls "reversioning." A small grant from this fund, for example, could help a producer digitize or re-edit radio programs to make them accessible to more stations. It could also help producers adapt audio from film or television documentaries, making them viable as radio shows or podcasts.

"It's a neat way for us to do more of what we want to do," says Shapiro, "which is not just distribute for radio broadcasts, but for a range of platforms to reach into the world."

© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Essay on Talent Quest in Current

With a big helping hand from John Barth PRX Executive Director Jake Shapiro wrote a piece for Current, the public broadcasting publication, taking a look back at the Talent Quest for some lessons learned:

Nearly two years ago CPB issued an intriguing challenge called “The Public Radio Talent Quest”: find three new on-air hosts and develop pilot shows that showcase their talent.

PRX proposed an online contest, inviting anyone to submit a two minute audio audition and giving the audience a voice in choosing the winners. Basically it would be This American Idol.

We had two main goals: (a) find truly exciting new hosts for public radio and (b) create an open, participatory way for public radio to identify and nurture talent—with help from listeners.

Last spring we launched PublicRadioQuest.com, an online audio contest application combined with a social network (built by PRX developers on the open-source Drupal platform). The online community has grown to more than 20,000 members, with a talent pool of hundreds of aspiring hosts from all across the country.

We took a calculated risk that the way to find outstanding individuals is to throw the doors wide open, attract the broadest and most diverse group possible, and encourage public participation throughout.

Ultimately it was a risk that paid off—as you can hear in the strikingly original pilots from our winners Al Letson, Rebecca Watson and Glynn Washington (all now available on PRX.org)—but for the organizers as well as the contestants it was an adventure every step of the way.

So what makes a great host? Of course, all the usual qualities have to be there: A host has to be engaging, empathic, interesting, knowledgeable, compelling. But anyone who hires people knows that there is a difference between highly competent performers and those with a special something else. You know it when you hear their spark, that secret sauce, the thing that makes you lean in closer to the radio.

It is also a judgment call, and no matter how many criteria or scorecards you create, everyone has a highly personal take on the elusive quality that we called “hostiness.”

We sensed a tension at the heart of the project: Were we looking for fresh talent that breaks new ground for public radio, or for great hosts who fit right into the mix alongside Terry and Robert and Ira and Krista and other established voices? What would be more likely to succeed on the air today and tomorrow? What expansions of sound would help public radio grow and reach new audiences?

Fortunately we had a remarkable team and group of judges to help debate and deliberate, and thousands of people weighed in online with their own thoughts about the future of public radio.

You know that anxious feeling when you throw a party and no one comes? We truly had no idea what to expect when we started accepting submissions for the contest’s first round. Would we get 50 entries? 250? Would they all be lousy? After all, we were asking a lot from participants: Tell us who you are in two minutes or less, create an account and upload a digital audio file to a website, even if you have never worked a mic before.

With promotional help from stations, good press coverage, a viral word-of-mouth campaign in the blogosphere and the incentives of pilot funding and public radio “stardom,” we ended up with more than 1,400 first-round entries.

We clearly had tapped into something extraordinary. In the contestants’ passion and the online community’s enthusiastic online comments,– we could hear people were thrilled that public radio was inviting them in—this time, not for their financial support but for their ideas, creativity and talent.

Entries came from all 50 states, from teenagers and senior citizens, professionals and amateurs, indie producers and station staff, podcasters, public radio fans, contest junkies and a legion of Ira Glass acolytes.

As you might expect, their quality followed a bell curve. We got a few truly wacky and off-the-wall entries (search the site for “Garrison Keillor is Going to Die”), a lot of mostly mediocre attempts in the middle, and a few hundred truly entertaining and compelling entries that made you want to listen again.

We decided early on that audience participation would truly count: Online public votes would determine one of the contestants advancing to each round, including one of the final three winners. In the end, more than 120,000 votes were cast (more than in the Fox contest to which state would be the site of The Simpsons’ town of Springfield!).

For ideas about how to vet the hosts, we consulted with producers of national shows and program directors. The initial 2-minute audio entries were extremely revealing, but how would we test hosting skills in a virtual and very public setting?

The skill tests eventually included a live script read (try pronouncing Inca emperor “Atahualpa” with no time to prepare), a free-association exercise, composing a 60-second billboard and conducting a classic host-guest interview. These kinds of tests normally are conducted in a windowless room somewhere, but the Talent Quest posted all entries on the site for tens of thousands of people to hear, comment and rate. Feeling a little sweaty?

At the same time, we struggled with the nature of the online experience. Should we allow or encourage contestants to post their photos? Should we allow them to blog about the competition, or would it unfairly sway votes or judges’ opinions? Does it matter if they responded to comments about their entries? After all, this is radio. Shouldn’t we tolerate or even prefer people who remain disembodied voices in the dark?

The answers came naturally. The site itself became an online community where contestants and voters established their own rules of engagement and styles of communication. Contestants commented on each other’s entries (partly to promote their own); people with their own blogs wrote about the process and linked to pages on the site; entire discussions launched on topics such as “your worst job ever.” For the most part,we simply stayed out of the way, reading everything the partipants wrote, only occasionally stepping in to nudge things back on track.

In today’s media, even public radio hosts have to be more than voices in the ether. The surge in online video, the sharing of photos, the searchability of text, the instant feedback of forums—there are many great opportunities for engagement we couldn’t pass up.

Once we had narrowed the field to the final ten contestants, we asked them to blog about their contest experience, chronicling the process and rounding out their own personal stories. Al, Rebecca, Glynn, April, Chuck, Anne, Chris, Bee, Carrie, and Komal became more than usernames and audio files. These were fascinating folks on the verge of a potential career break.

We were biting our nails along with everyone else as the votes came in and the stakes got higher. The judges’ conference calls in the early rounds were relaxed and congenial, but they became more tense and impassioned as we debated varying visions for the public radio sound each contestant represented.

Each deadline had genuine drama and hardship. (Tip: don’t set contest deadlines at midnight unless you are ready to answer technical questions by e-mail in the wee hours.) And there was real joy when we called the three final winners to say had each won $10,000, a chance to produce a pilot show, and a plane ticket to the PRPD, where they’d appear onstage in a gala event.

A few weeks ago we submitted the three final pilots to CPB, which will decide soon whether to give them further funding. The PublicRadioQuest.com site, the talent database, and the community of voters and participants remain an active resource that we are integrating into the broader PRX services.

We invite stations and others to get in touch if you are interested in using the technology or the talent pool for your own needs.

Public radio has a unique opportunity to tap into the talents of its audience, and we’re seeing more ambitious experiments in that vein, such as PRX, Radio Open Source, Public Insight Journalism and Vocalo.org.

The Public Radio Talent Quest gave us a glimpse of what a much more open system might look like, and it sounds profoundly encouraging. Please come judge for yourself: The pilots are on PRX and all the original entries are still available on PublicRadioQuest.com.

Podcast Interview with ManagingRights.com

Bob Weber and PRX Executive Director Jake Shapiro were on a panel together a month or so ago at the MIT Enterprise Forum and Bob subsequently interviewed Jake for the ManagingRights.com podcast. It's a good short snapshot of the who/what/why of PRX with a focus on the rights and licensing aspects of PRX.

You can stream or download the MP3 here.

Read more about Bob and his work with ManagingRights here.

Public Media Election Collaboration Announcement

CPB awards $1.3 million to Public Media Election Collaboration

CPB is granting $1,368,540 to a consortium of public media organizations to support multi-platform, system-wide public media coverage of Election 2008. National Public Radio will manage the grant on behalf of the public media organizations that have come together on this comprehensive effort. These include: American Public Media, Capitol News Connection, KQED, NPR, PBS, Public Radio Exchange, Public Radio International/Public Interactive and The NewsHour. The project will also enlist the talents and resources of public radio and television stations and independent producers nationwide.

“On behalf of all the partners, we deeply appreciate CPB’s leadership and support for this unprecedented collaboration,” says NPR’s CEO, Ken Stern. “By pooling content produced locally and nationally -- for radio, television, and online -- we will discover new ways of doing business to better serve the public. We are pleased to have succeeded in coming together to deliver on the commitments made at the 2007 Annual Meeting.”

In addition to enhancing public service, CPB sees the project as a model that can inform the future of public media.

“This grant underscores CPB’s support of innovative projects that move public radio and television into the digital future so they can help individuals better connect with their communities wherever they are,” says Pat Harrison, CPB President and CEO. “This ambitious project will provide us with new ways of looking at how we serve the public on existing and emerging media platforms.”

Among the tangible benefits for the audience are new opportunities for civic engagement through user-contributed content and discussion, and easier access to the complete pool of quality local and national public media content. To accomplish this, NPR and the major partners will develop a decentralized collection of Web 2.0 initiatives that provide the following array of resources to participating networks and stations:

- An interactive election map from NPR and The NewsHour;
- Localizable news modules from Public Radio International’s Public Interactive;
- A curated collection of election audio and social media content from PRX;
- Election-related video from PBS;
- An archive of broadcast materials covering New York-based presidential candidates from WNYC;
- A collaborative content initiative entitled “Global Perspectives on Election 2008” from PRI;
- User-generated political commentaries curated by NPR;
- Capitol News Connection’s interactive ‘Ask Your Lawmaker’ web widget that enables citizens to directly question their lawmakers and listen to answers obtained by CNC journalists;
- Election simulations and thought-provoking interactive activities from APM and KQED.

In addition, PBS is creating an educational campaign and teaching materials related to election modules, to be made available through project partner and station sites, and promoted to educators across the country.

“This collaboration demonstrates the power of public television and public radio working together,” said PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger. “When we align our strengths, the American public reaps the benefits of access to a broader range of information they can trust and new ways to connect with today’s important issues.”

To facilitate communication and cooperation among public broadcasters, the infrastructure will include a “knowledge network” that serves as a centralized discussion space to share experiences, ideas and best practices.

Benefits to stations and the system include:
- Greater access to content and resources;
- Emphasis on customization and localization;
- A collaborative workspace;
- A proof-of-concept model that can serve as a foundation for further collaboration.

To learn more about the collaboration and how you can participate, watch for upcoming listserv postings, station interconnects, web-based seminars, and presentations at public media conferences. Information on accessing the knowledge network will be coming soon.

PRX in Ford Foundation Report

PRX is a grantee in the Ford Foundation's 5-year "Global Perspectives in a Digital Age: Strengthening Public Media" initiative.

The foundation put out a report on "The Public Square in a Digital Age" that includes a section on public radio and PRX.

You listen to National Public Radio. You tune in to Public Broadcasting Service stations. But does Public Radio Exchange ring a bell? PRX, a clearinghouse for archived quality programming, is part of a new wave of public service media that has arisen in response to rapid technological change and segmenting audiences.

Talent Quest winner Rebecca in Boston Globe

The Boston Globe profiles Rebecca Watson, one of the three winners of the PRX Public Radio Talent Quest.

Just making it this far "is quite an achievement," says Jake Shapiro, the executive director of the Cambridge-based Public Radio Exchange, which ran the contest. "We had over 1,400 entries."

Watson, Shapiro explains, was a long shot, particularly in the contest's early rounds, which combined open voting with judging by public-radio professionals. "She was the one that made it all the way through most improbably," Shapiro says. "She was a popular pick. She wasn't one of the judges' picks. What I think is part of [Watson's] success is that she earned the judges' respect."

You can hear all three pilots from Rebecca, Al and Glynn on the Public Radio Talent Question website, and they are also available on PRX for anyone to listen, rate and review and for public radio stations to license for broadcast.

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