Tamar Charney, Program Director at Michigan Radio, recently agreed to share a little about her station’s experience of being part of the Core Publisher Pilot and how it’s transformed their approach to their web site and web strategy.
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When Michigan Radio signed onto the Core Publisher Project, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. For the past few years we’ve been working on our website and initially we thought we were doing okay. But then stations like WBUR revamped their websites and started to see large growth. The scales fell from my eyes and it dawned on me that we were not using our website effectively. But we didn’t know what to do to improve our website given the resources we had. So we signed on.
Now frankly, when we got involved we had hopes it might help us build a site like WBUR. To our surprise, one of the first steps of the pilot was not to teach us about new tools that would make our website awesome or show us designs that would make our website awesome, but to teach our news director and myself about the needs of the web audience and about how to manage organizational change.
We quickly learned was that we needed to completely change how we approached our website and how we produce the content that populates the page.
Slapping radio stories up on the web like we had been doing was not working and would probably never work. Thinking of our website as a companion to our radio station or as a brochure was not working and would probably never work.
So in working with NPR Digital Services, we began a journey of learning how to alter our news production cycles to serve both radio and web. NPR Digital held webinars with our journalists, regular weekly phone meetings with our two designated curators of our web-news, and regular discussions with me. Our journalists learned how to write for the web, and we learned how to use images, headlines and text formatting to catch the eye of web readers. We learned about tricks such as lists and repackaging content that enabled us to do more with the content we have. And we learned how social media is an important component of our web journalism strategy.
Most importantly, we began the process of organizational change to start thinking about our website as another distribution platform for our journalism — a distribution platform that might one day have an audience that knows us not as a radio station, but as on online news source.
In tandem the pilot project has been creating the technical tools with which we can do this.
In the past, our website has been designed based on the personal likes and dislikes of our designers and staff. In this pilot, it has been more data driven with user testing and features designed with an audience in mind.
So when I think about the Core Publisher Pilot, it is much more than a pilot project to build a new web design for the station and roll out some new tools. It has been a process of organizational change that we are still undergoing, it has been a training project, and it has been an audience research project. To this end we now effectively have a web consultancy group at our disposal.
And we now have a website that our journalists are proud of and one that is seeing audience growth.
Tamar Charney
Program Director, Michigan Radio
Tags: change, digital news, editorial, experience, feedback, Michigan Radio, strategy, Tamar Charney