Connecting Journalists and Technologists

Connecting Journalists and Technologists — In the Public Interest

January 6th, 2010 · Comments

WNYC Guest Post by John Keefe

Senior Executive Producer for News, WNYC Radio

Sixty-five years ago, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia read milk prices to New Yorkers on our airwaves. Today, WNYC’s audience reports to us the price of milk in their neighborhoods — with surprising results.

While we’ve been “crowdsourcing” on our call-in shows for decades, this new decade has fresh possibilities for citizen participation, data-based journalism and news exploration. Add our audience of more than 1 million listeners weekly and a newsroom of talented journalists … and the possibilities are huge.

Yet our abilities are limited. That’s where you come in.

We want to connect New York technologists with our journalists to build new ways of finding, telling and exploring the important stories about our city — and to make public radio more public than ever through audience participation and digital media.

At the moment, we’re developing new tools for our journalists, eyeing rich data sets to cross and display, and dreaming up new ways to connect New Yorkers to their city and each other. And everything we’re learning, we’re sharing with our public radio colleagues across the nation.

If non-profit news innovation in the public interest interests you, please let us know. We are contemplating meetups and developer contests, creating rich partnerships with talented people and groups, and signing contracts to help build tools for our national morning show, The Takeaway and other public radio stations thanks to support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

We hope you’ll connect with us.

Editor’s Note: View the announcement John made at the January NY Tech Meetup in the video below:

Watch live streaming video from nytechmeetup at livestream.com

Tags: WNYC

ldny

I am a loyal WNYC member and long-time NPR devotee, but... you lost me when I got to this part: "...and signing contracts to help build tools for our national morning show, The Takeaway..." I HATE THE TAKEAWAY! It's the kind of banal morning drivel that I expect from everyone else, NOT from WNYC! The only tool The Takeaway needs is a sledgehammer - to destroy itself with. More intelligent hosts that actually give interesting topics and guests a chance to speak for more than a split second before interrupting them (i.e. more Brian Lehrer) and less John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji - who may be fine human beings, but are horrible hosts. If I wanted to hear chit-chat and mindless banter, I'd switch to commercial radio.

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