Business magazine selects Alvarado as a Top Hispanic Influential

Joaquin Alvarado has been named one of the Top 100 Hispanic Influentials by HispanicBusiness magazine. Joaquin, American Public Media’s senior v.p. for digital innovation, was selected from among Hispanics of U.S. citizenship who have had recent and national impact, whose achievements inspire other Hispanics to similar endeavors, and who have promoted the advancement of Hispanics in the United States by their leadership, community involvement or professional achievements. "Innovation is key" to exerting a positive influence in the Hispanic community, Alvarado told the magazine, "because the Hispanic community and the minority communities in this country are oftentimes the early adopters of new technologies." Prior to his APM appointment, Alvarado was senior v.p. for diversity and innovation at CPB, as well as a founder of National Public Lightpath, advocating for a high-speed fiber optic network as the next generation of the Internet with public media, education and community leadership. (Image: APM)

Knight Foundation adds three tech thought leaders to board

Three new-media innovators have joined the Knight Foundation's board of trustees. The elections of Joichi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab; John Palfrey, professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society; and Chris Hughes, Facebook co-founder, "emphasized the importance of technology and media innovation on the delivery of news and information to communities," the foundation said in an announcement today (Oct. 25).

“The addition of these three seminal thinkers and key actors in the world of media innovation — in the search for how to inform communities in the digital age — is a giant leap forward for Knight," said Alberto Ibargüen, foundation president and a former board chairman of PBS. "They will challenge and help guide us to an even more entrepreneurial approach to media innovation and engagement of people in communities.”

Tips for tracking social media's impact in public radio newsrooms

As more public media stations adopt social media for news reporting and user engagement, their next and more difficult challenge is to analyze the success of these efforts. Kim Bui, social media specialist and community editor for Southern California Public Radio/KPCC, has developed an aggressive methodology for tracking the impact of the station's social media work, according to IMA blogger Amanda Hirsch, who interviewed Bui in a recent Q&A.

"We use metrics to back up a lot of decisions," Bui says. "We track as much as we can about how we use social media, using any method we can. We use Chartbeat, Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and software called Argyle Social to track almost everything we do socially - from the Twitter and Facebook widgets we put on the SCPR site to how far a particular story was taken socially." The process can be "painful" and time-consuming, she says, but also very helpful in demonstrating social media's potential to the newsroom.

Bui is a self-described journalism nerd and co-founder of #wjchat, the weekly Twitter chat for web journalists.