Study: Social media building new connections in pubradio

The effectiveness of social media tools is hard to measure and such efforts don’t yet produce obvious financial rewards, but many pubradio stations are building new audience relationships with blogs, wikis, discussion boards and other participative online bells and whistles, according to a just-released study. The paper, titled “Public Radio’s Social Media Experiments: Risk, Opportunity, Challenge,” is sponsored by the Center for Social Media at Washington’s American University and the Public Radio Exchange. It represents one of the first efforts to track how and to what extent stations are incorporating social media tools into their websites. The resulting report isn’t meant to be a comprehensive picture of the system--its designers intentionally reached out to tech-savvy stations, said Jake Shapiro, PRX executive director. “It should be helpful to stations contemplating jumping further into social media experimentation,” he told Current. While such projects may not result in “easy-to-see increases in membership or dollars,” according to the paper, half of the survey respondents said the efforts had helped their stations connect with their communities. The study also outlines some loose recommendations based largely on interviews with staffers from four stations selected based on their “track record with social media”: Minnesota Public Radio, KQED in San Francisco, KUT in Austin and Chicago’s WBEZ.

APTS digital tv study

The Association of Public Television Stations reports that "older Americans are significantly more likely to receive their television signals over-the-air, and are therefore less prepared than the rest of the U.S. population to transition from analog to digital-only television in 20 months." The findings are from a new APTS study based on more than 10,000 phone calls earlier this year. The study also found that that only 17 percent of over-the-air viewers age 65 and older owned a digital TV.

APTS joins mobile DTV group

Public TV's lobbying group signed on to the Open Mobile Video Coalition, a consortium of broadcast station groups working to establish a mobile DTV standard, Broadcasting & Cable reports. MPH (Mobile-Pedestrian-Handheld), by Harris/LG, and Advanced-VSB, from Samsung/Rohde & Schwarz, are technologies competing to become the mobile DTV standard, which would allow broadcasters to use their DTV spectrum to beam content to mobile and handheld devices.

Michael Moore on TOTN in audio, video and web

When Lynn Neary interviewed filmmaker Michael Moore on Monday's Talk of the Nation, NPR Internet strategist Andy Carvin shot the interview on video and wrote about it on his personal blog. An edited version of the video and Carvin's behind-the-scenes blog entry is posted on Blog of the Nation. More video is also available on You Tube. "So we have air, web and video all combined and all open," writes blogger and NPR consultant Robert Paterson. He described the production as a "bit of history."