Nieman Journalism Lab |
| Emerson College student paper completes a fully responsive, mobile-friendly redesign Posted: 10 Apr 2012 11:58 AM PDT
The Berkeley Beacon, Emerson College’s 65-year-old independent student newspaper, mirrors a lot of professional newspapers: Its funding is in jeopardy; editors are (happily) overworked; the editorial board pisses off people in power. But the Beacon is ahead of most professional media in another respect: Its new HTML5 website is responsive — meaning the same code gets reflowed into new shapes depending on the size of the reading device. The site is now fully mobile-friendly, the editors announced today, making it perhaps the first student newspaper in America with a responsive design. Take note of the custom web fonts, abundance of white space, and large photos (which, by the way, grow and shrink responsively as you resize the browser window). Article pages are designed to let the reader focus on reading. How many professional newspaper sites can claim that? It’s no coincidence the Beacon site looks a lot like BostonGlobe.com, whose launch in September 2011 made waves in both the design and journalism worlds. Editor-in-chief Alexander C. Kaufman, a junior, and web editor Ryan Catalani, a freshman who designed and built the site, studied the Globe’s new design carefully. “We realized the best sites were the ones that best replicated the print experience,” Kaufman told me. “We’re just a small, scrappy weekly, but we’ve always really strived to…emulate a broadsheet tone and a broadsheet mentality.” Contributing to the site’s spareness is the fact that it lacks any advertising, which Kaufman said is temporary. The previous design was built on College Publisher, a turnkey content-management system and ad platform. Until now, College Publisher sold display ads and shared the revenue; Beacon staff focused on selling ads for its weekly print edition. Kaufman said they are also wrestling with how to present ads without destroying the zen of the design. “I don’t want to disrupt the reader experience just to be generating a lot of money,” he said. “Maybe once our traffic levels are really, really steady and people are just automatically going there all the time, we might do more and more ads. I would rather have something closer to BostonGlobe.com than Boston.com.” He is referring to the Globe’s bifurcated model, which we’ve covered here before. BostonGlobe.com is a paid-subscriber-only site and features very little advertising. Boston.com, on the other hand, is free and features tons of ads. Diversified revenue is more important for the Beacon now than ever. For two decades, the Beacon had enjoyed an 8 percent slice of the university’s student activities fund — it was guaranteed in the student constitution. But last semester — after years of tension between Beacon reporters and the student leaders they covered — Emerson’s student body ratified a revised constitution that removed the funding protection. (The paper covered the change extensively.) Kaufman said the site received a big traffic spike during its coverage of the constitutional changes, hitting about 11,660 pageviews and 3,000 unique visitors the week of the student referendum. Traffic slowed during winter break but ultimately returned to higher levels than before the site’s November 2011 relaunch. Good-looking, well-built college newspaper sites aren’t as common as one might hope — not least because the planning necessary for a lengthy project like a redesign can be hard to accomplish with constant leadership turnover.
But Kaufman said presentation is important, especially at a college focused on the visual and performing arts. “People at Emerson really care about image,” he said. (Emerson is “dedicated exclusively to communication and the arts in a liberal arts context.”) “To get people at Emerson to take our writing seriously, and to take seriously the journalism that we produce, we…needed to present it well,” he said. Kaufman’s tenure as editor ends this semester, concluding three years at the paper. He takes an internship with TheWrap.com this summer in Los Angeles. |
| Meet the most popular woman at NPR’s Fresh Air (and it’s not Terry Gross) Posted: 10 Apr 2012 07:00 AM PDT
Terry Gross knows radio. Her 45-minute interviews with newsmakers and cultural icons are great radio. WHYY’s Fresh Air, which turns 25 this year, reaches about 5 million listeners per week on NPR. But Terry Gross does not know social media. She readily admits it. And until she hired Melody Joy Kramer, Fresh Air’s web presence was, well, stale. The Twitter account auto-tweeted headlines from an RSS feed. Audio was posted online with dreadfully unshareable one-paragraph summaries. “We’re so obsessed with producing our radio show, that until we hired Melody, we did our best to ignore our website and had no social media presence,” Gross told me. “She quickly made us aware of what we’d been missing.” Kramer had given up a coveted writing gig at NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! — where she also managed Carl Kassel’s Facebook page and shared in a Peabody Award (not sure which one is cooler) — to take the job as Fresh Air’s first (and, still, only) web producer in January 2010.
Today it’s one of the fastest-growing public-radio shows on the web. Kramer, 27, slowly and single-handedly built a huge following by approaching the job as a digital native, a citizen of the community she wanted to reach. She figured out how to turn radio stories into conversations. The @nprfreshair account, managed solely by @mkramer, has 70,000 followers (up from 3,800 before she started), neck-and-neck with the venerable This American Life. Fresh Air’s much-celebrated Tumblr has attracted more than 60,000 followers since she created it a year-and-a-half ago. Kramer’s even a bona fide Babe of NPR. Her entry into that pantheon is among the most liked and reblogged (far more than that of her boss). What is Kramer’s secret? How can we be so popular? Apparently, there is no secret, or at least she pretends there isn’t one. Kramer is anti-strategy. She does what feels right, not what “social-media optimization” tells her to do. “I think I just know how to talk to people,” Kramer told me. “I enjoy working here. I enjoy reading the books on the show, I watch the movies, I am a fan as much as I am an employee. I’m passing things along because I enjoy them,” Kramer said.
She dislikes the Olympian detachment of so many “institutional” Twitter accounts. @nprfreshair tweets are usually written in the first person. She is irreverent. She makes fun of social media while being really good at it. Sometimes she tweets 20 times in an hour; sometimes she’ll get busy and ignore Twitter for half the day. “No one’s looking over my shoulder and saying, ‘Oh, make sure you talk about this, make sure you use these buzzwords, make sure you get in this keyword’,” she said. “I had initial meetings with them at first, where we kind of had to say, you know, this is a different medium. This isn’t the radio. It can be a little looser.” “I can't say that I give her much direction,” Gross said. “I actually rely on her to tell me what direction she thinks we should head in.” In April 2010, Gross told The Atlantic’s John Hudson:
Actually, I learned Gross does have a secret Twitter account. You would never know it’s hers if you stumbled on it. (Kramer won’t give it up. Sorry.) Kramer said her boss occasionally needs Twitter as a research tool like any other. “Like we had David Carr on the show, and he’s a prolific tweeter, and part of the research on David Carr is looking at David Carr’s Twitter feed. If you miss that angle on David Carr, you miss part of the way that you’re going to interview David Carr.” Most of Kramer’s job is not social media — she views that as kind of a side project — but writing. She writes everything for the website. Every headline, link, teaser, and caption is hers. She prepares magazine-style writethrus and highlights of every interview, not transcripts. There’s plenty of material. She’s writing about yoga one day, India another day, Louis C.K. another. In one week alone Gross interviewed Matthew Weiner, Rachel Maddow, and Paul McCartney. (The job does amazing things for her pub trivia career, she says.)
Every guest and topic drives the day’s conversation on social media. As Kramer transcribes interviews, every nugget that catches her ear is a chance for a new piece of content, a tiny treasure on the Tumblr. There was an animated GIF of a younger McCartney doing magic, a fan video of “Let It Be” on ukulele, a great pull quote from the interview. “She really gets Tumblr culture, and rather than simply broadcasting NPR Fresh Air’s sensibility to a Tumblr audience, she is an active participant in that culture,” said Mark Coatney, a Tumblr employee whose job is to work with journalists. “When a big media company comes to your space, and shows that they love it and understand it as much as you do, that’s incredibly powerful,” Coatney said. Case in point: Kramer’s Tumblr post promoting an interview with Aziz Ansari. One animated GIF of Tom Haverford doing that funny face he makes, one line: “Will he get Terry Gross to say tatties again?” ( The Tumblr was nominated for a Shorty Award, by the way — up against Kim Jong-Il Looking At Things and The Obama Jog — but lost out last month to We Are The 99 Percent. Kramer makes a point to engage with listeners directly. “People write in and say, ‘We’re so glad this is a person,’” Kramer said. Tumblr users can “ask her anything” — Can I come watch your Paul McCartney interview? Why am I having trouble with the podcast on iTunes? — and she’ll post the answer. She monitors four screens at her desk to keep up. “When I worked at Wait Wait, every week we taped in front of a live studio audience, and I had the audience directly in front of me, and if the joke that I wrote failed, I knew it immediately. It’s really nice to have the kind of instantaneous feedback that the social-media networks provide,” Kramer said.
“Because 14 of us in an office — we’re in a way removed from the people who listen to the show. … So it’s a way to connect with people who want to engage with the show, and it’s also a way for the show to feel engaged with the audience.” Gross said the show is getting a return on that investment. “I’m confident that as a result of the social media presence she's established, we've expanded the number of people in their twenties who podcast our program. So many people who grew up with computers and iPods never made radio-listening a habit, and podcasts are the only way they're ever likely to hear our show,” she said. Apple’s iTunes named Fresh Air the best audio podcast of 2011. “Mel refuses to take any credit for this, but I think so many people who podcast us found us through the work she does,” Gross said. Fresh Air developed a loyal following by producing great content for years. It could be that Kramer found a latent community of listeners, waiting to be engaged. Kramer is just the only one doing it. “The thing that I worry about is that I think the social-media accounts for Fresh Air are very tied to me,” Kramer said. “I would like to see more voices on here, so, you know, if I were to ever leave the show the social media wouldn’t falter.” Sounds suspiciously strategic. Photo of Melody Joy Kramer by Sam Briger. |
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