FluPortal.org

Screenshot of the Public Media H1N1 Widget

Fluportal.org is one of a growing number of projects promoting collaboration and cooperation within the public media system. As the project wraps up, I wanted to highlight our Public Media H1N1 widget and what it can offer to future collaborations and crisis response efforts.

From the beginning, we wanted to find a way to catalog and display H1N1 coverage from across public media. By showing the breadth and diversity of public media coverage, we hoped to demonstrate the reach and value of the system. We not only wanted to post this content on FluPortal.org, but we felt stations would be interested in supplementing their own local coverage.

We were surprised to find that there was no way for us to get a detailed picture of news coverage and other programming from public media stations across the system. Our first solution was to use Delicious.com to hack together an RSS feed of public media coverage. While this system worked, it was dependent on our team manually searching, saving, and tagging H1N1 coverage. A more robust and automated solution needed to be built.

In partnership with NPR, we set out to create a platform for aggregating and syndicating public media content related to H1N1. The result is our Public Media H1N1 widget — a highly flexible tool that can be redeployed in future public media collaborations focused on a particular issue or crisis.

Working with NPR project manager Javaun Moradi (whose vision and hard work was invaluable to this project), we identified the scope and necessary functionality and decided to use Daylife, a provider of news aggregation services. Daylife’s technology crawls RSS and ATOM news feeds and identifies the major themes in all stories it finds. Daylife enabled us to quickly create an automated content feed for the H1N1 and filter by media source, in this case a list of over 40 public media stations and programs actively publishing coverage of the pandemic. (Note that Daylife can only scrape content from text-based RSS or Atom feeds, excluding audio-only sources and stations that do not offer feeds.)

By using the Daylife platform, we were able to create something quickly without expending a lot of developer resources. The stories collected by Daylife are delivered as a highly configurable Javascript widget and RSS feed available for stations to use on their websites. (Read more about it on Daylife’s blog.)

Public media is in need of more shared technology resources, and what we have built with the Public Media H1N1 widget will scale well and is available for use in future public media projects. With such a reusable infrastructure in place, our industry can respond very quickly to crises and create and syndicate automated feeds of public media coverage. We hope our work here will prove valuable for others and serve as a model for future development of shared tools and resources.

Stations using H1N1 embeddable media should take note that support for many of these tools will be ending with the project on March 31, 2010. Here are the details.

• NPR Flu Map — After March 31, the embed code will remain active but the NPR flu map will no longer be updated. We recommend stations make arrangements to remove this map from their website in the coming weeks.
• H1N1 Public Media Widget — During the month of April, this widget will continue to scrape public media sources for news stories related to H1N1. On May 1, 2010, NPR will shut off the Daylife feed that powers the widget. Stations should make arrangements to remove this widget from their website in the coming weeks.
• Yahoo Pipes Widgets — FluPortal created a number of widgets by inputting H1N1 related RSS feeds through Yahoo Pipes. After March 31, the widgets will no longer be supported. These widgets will remain active until May 1. Stations should make arrangements to remove them from their website in the coming weeks. Learn how to create similar widgets for your site in our guide to using Yahoo Pipes.

Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

Josh Andrews

I like to think that I’m in the same boat as a lot of public media web managers — I’m not a programmer by training. Sure, I’ve learned a good bit about coding over the years, but by no means am I the guy in the movie who hacks into the Pentagon’s mainframe. There are many stations in the public media system with someone just like me at the helm of the website — someone who wears more than one hat at the station (how about Web Manager/Morning Edition host). So nine months ago, when we were tasked with developing a web presence for this project, I often reminded myself to keep that type of station in mind.

In my section of the FluPortal final report, I detail how we approached the task of building and maintaining this website and shaped the project’s digital strategy.  As we prepare to wrap up the project next week, I wanted to take a moment to discuss one aspect of my work that may, hopefully, spark some further discussion about the evolution of the public media system’s online presence.

One of my responsibilities on the project was to curate the selection of web tools available on our For Station Sites page. As I approached the task, I wanted to offer an abundance of easy-to-use embeddable media —  items like widgets and maps, badges and news feeds that took little time and effort. But I also wanted to encourage web managers to try some new approaches and a few new tools. With this in mind, I included three introductory guides to the NPR API (a powerful tool underutilized by too many stations), the Twitter API, and Yahoo Pipes. Most everyone coming to this website has heard of these tools, but I know what it’s like to oversee a station website and how day-to-day demands and deadlines too often interfere with opportunities for experimentation. We knew many stations were planning to update their websites with H1N1 pandemic information and I thought this could provide a good excuse for web managers to try out a few new tricks.

After the launch of the site, we heard some positive feedback on the guides and decided to expand the roster to include Facebook Connect, CoveritLive, Delicious, and a guide to using social media in editorial coverage. (All the FluPortal guides are collected here.) These guides are in no way meant to be a full user manual on any topic. Instead, I hoped to familiarize stations with the potential that these tools offer, provide some tips on getting started, and include a preliminary set of best practices. While this project has focused on covering H1N1, the hope was that stations would try these tools and then integrate them as a  regular part of their online presence.

I believe the public media system could benefit by building and maintaining a central warehouse of similar guides, best practices, and other resources related to emerging web technologies. While some large-market stations are moving fast to adapt to the digital future, we risk leaving behind large numbers of local stations which lack the resources to stay on the cutting edge. In this tough economic climate, we risk growing into a system of digital haves and have-nots. Providing an online space for public media web managers to learn, share, and experiment would help combat this trend. What are your thoughts? What kind of collaboration and knowledge sharing do you think would prove most helpful for local stations, large and small?

I have been thinking about systems and tools that could assist public media stations plan and launch websites in crisis scenarios. This website, FluPortal.org, is built on Wordpress, and I have been wondering whether a centrally hosted Wordpress MU installation could serve as a public media publishing platform when stations need a website up and running in a matter of hours. So I was intrigued when we came across a project using Google Sites to assist local governments to rapidly deploy websites in emergency situations.

Local governments face many of the same resource limitations that public media outlets do — namely too few web developers and IT infrastructures unable to handle large surges in traffic. The government of Santa Clara County, home to California’s Silicon Valley, ran into trouble with its website when H1N1 first emerged. The County’s website was overwhelmed by visitors searching for swine flu information and it quickly collapsed under the strain. The Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program at Stanford University (the school is located in the County) offered its assistance and helped the County publish its H1N1 pages on the Google Sites platform. Google Sites is basically a hosted wiki that allows users to build websites without any html or coding experience. And with Google’s redundant server infrastructure, sites hosted on the platform should be able to handle any large spikes in traffic.

The new Santa Clara County presence on Google Sites was a stable, straightforward warehouse of H1N1 information, but the default templates provided by Google made it somewhat difficult to navigate. Santa Clara officials and the Stanford team saw a need to create a custom template to meet the needs of communicating large amounts of information and improve the user experience.

The Stanford team contacted Bolt|Peters, a San Francisco design firm, to help construct custom templates to serve the emergency response needs of local governments like Santa Clara County. The results are two Google Sites templates — one for public health scenarios and another for more general emergency needs. You can read about the details and approach that went into the planning of these templates on the Bolt|Peters website.

Google Sites public health template

These templates have been made available for anyone to use on Google Sites. They could be a good option for public media outlets that need to get a site up fast when a crisis hits. It took me less than 5 minutes to launch this test site and place the FluPortal logo in the header. The templates provide a visual layout and page structure as well as plenty of pre-populated content and links that local stations can edit and customize as they see fit.

It must be said that Google Sites has a number of limitations (to name a few: limited html control and no CSS editing), but I am impressed with these emergency templates and by the ability to get a website up and running in a matter of minutes. I’m not entirely convinced that Google Sites can serve as a crisis response platform for public media at large, but the work by Bolt|Peters and the Stanford SIE team highlights important elements of crisis communication and preparedness that we should all be thinking about.

As the H1N1 pandemic emerged in the spring of 2009, many media organizations — both commercial and non-profit — were facing immense financial pressures. “Unpopular Science,” an article that appeared in The Nation last summer, argues that the economic crisis of journalism threatens the quantity and quality of science and health coverage.

It’s no secret the newspaper industry is hemorrhaging staff writers and slashing coverage as its business model collapses in the face of declining readership and advertising revenues. But less recognized is how this trend is killing off a breed of journalistic specialists that we need now more than ever–science writers…who are uniquely trained for the most difficult stories, those with a complex technical component that are nevertheless critical to politics and society… [E]ven in places where you’d expect it to hold out the longest, science journalism is declining.

Does this argument extend to public media? Public radio and television have long prided themselves on providing science and health reporting that contains substance – not the gee-whiz info-tainment reporting that pervades commercial media. But public media has not been immune to the economic downturn. National producers and local stations alike have been forced to cut staff and reduce spending. But is this hurting our science and health coverage?

Bill Hammack is a professor of engineering at the University of Illinois and a frequent public radio contributor – both at his local station WILL in Urbana, and to national programs like Marketplace. Hammack agrees that fewer dollars to go around has the potential to lessen science and health coverage. “I see the Nation article as pretty accurate. It’s a case of hard numbers. There’s often only one science reporter at any news organization. If that position gets cut – there goes your science coverage.”

But Hammack doesn’t see it happening yet, and thinks public media science and health reporting will weather the economic storm. He points to the continued commitment from NPR to an active and robust science desk as well as audience demand for — and interest in — scientific news and ideas. It’s much harder to cut programming the audience values. “Public radio and television audiences value reflection and analysis. They desire context. That’s exactly why science reporting by public broadcasters is so strong when compared to commercial media.”

Connie Walker, the General Manager at WUNC in Chapel Hill, is also cautiously optimistic for public media science and health reporting. Walker mentioned that loyal listener support during the recession is a public media positive that commercial media can’t share in. “Corporate underwriting is down here, but our listeners have really showed great support during our pledge drives.”

WUNC has a full time health reporter on staff and, until recently, the position was funded by a foundation grant. When the economy went south, the funding was pulled and the station had a decision to make. WUNC kept the health reporter position and folded the cost into their general operating budget.

Walker says, “We maintained the science coverage because we feel it is a valuable part of our service and something our listeners have come to expect.” WUNC’s listening area includes a number of universities in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina. “We not only have an audience that is interested in science, but also local stories to cover.”

Although the station has been able to maintain its science coverage, it hasn’t been easy. Due to general budgetary pressures, the station has deferred filling a number of open positions and had to trim overall spending. Walker says, “We’re more fortunate than most, but the staff is feeling it. We’re asking them to do more with less.”

Have you noticed any decrease in the quality or quantity of public media science and health coverage? Does it remain a part of your station’s local coverage?  Let us know in the comments.

Food aid distribution in Haiti (David Schaper/NPR)

As a reporter for NPR, David Schaper has done his fair share of crisis coverage. He was in Mississippi during Katrina, covered Midwest floods, and reported from towns leveled by tornados. But nothing prepared him for the scenes he witnessed during two weeks in Haiti. I spoke to Schaper earlier this week about his experiences reporting on the earthquake recovery efforts and what lessons can be gleaned for public media crisis planning.

Based out of NPR’s Chicago bureau, Schaper was part of a second wave of reporters, arriving in Haiti two weeks after the earthquake struck to relieve staff that had been in place since the first days. He had been following the news from Haiti, but had not expected to cover the story. With just a few days to get ready for the assignment, Schaper did his best to prepare himself — emotionally and professionally — for the conditions in and around the Haitian capital. “I knew I would be faced with immense human suffering, but you have to be able to separate what’s sad and what’s really a story for the news.”

Schaper hit the ground running and was filing news spots from Haiti the day of his arrival. The challenge of getting his work done in a disaster zone was made easier by the NPR production and operations staff.  “The reporters and producers who were there before me and ops staff back in Washington did a fantastic job in dealing with the complex logistics that made the NPR coverage possible.” A makeshift production office had been set up in hotel that had suffered minor quake damage. Schaper described it as “the best you could expect under the difficult circumstances.” The NPR team had shelter, power (with intermittent interruptions), and fairly reliable internet connectivity via satellite phones.

Haiti is a poor nation to begin with and Schaper pointed to the difficulty of discerning which of the conditions he witnessed were a direct result of the earthquake and which ones were merely the local standard. Schaper informed me that Port-au-Prince is one of the largest cities in the world without a sewer system, and sanitation issues that arose after the quake have to be traced further back than January 12^th.

Schaper says his time in Haiti reinforced his belief that public broadcasters can be a lifeline for local communities during crisis situations and he urges local stations to review their emergency response plans. “What public radio does best — provide depth and context to a story — becomes even more important during a crisis.” Schaper urges reporters to remember that emergencies often mean dealing with the unexpected and less-than-ideal conditions. “Who are your emergency contacts in local and state governments? What are your contingency plans if the power goes out or the transmitter goes down? That kind of preparation creates opportunities to make a difference during a crisis.”

You can listen to David Schaper’s reports from Haiti on the NPR website.

Two links caught our attention this week that could be of interest to stations covering H1N1. While these examples are not directly related to swine flu, they may inspire you to try new approaches in your coverage.  

WNYC’s audience submitted economic indicators

The first is Crowdsourcing: A Field Guide from WNYC. Crowdsourcing entails soliciting your audience to help collect, curate, and vet information around a specific topic or issue. WNYC has been experimenting with crowdsourcing for the last few years, most notably on the Brian Lehrer Show (recently, the program asked the audience to contribute examples of the recession’s impact for their Uncommon Economic Indicators project). The guide provides case studies on how to implement crowdsourcing at your station, along with tips on where it fits in your existing editorial process and standards. There’s a useful 10 point quick-guide that rounds up the big takeaways from the field guide.

While the recent snowstorms in the Washington DC area don’t reach the crisis threshold, it’s fair to say they had a major impact on the region. The Washington Post is using the Ushahidi platform (which we mentioned in our round-up of responses to the earthquake in Haiti) to map the impact of the storm. The map provides an online tool that allows the audience to highlight locations still buried from the storm — impassable streets and sidewalks, cars buried, and power outages. But they also encourage folks to map opportunities to help in the dig out — snow blowers available or a shovel to share.

Getting to know emerging tools and techniques during more routine scenarios will allow public media outlets to respond more effectively when and if a crisis hits.

FluPortal and NPR have teamed up to produce a new widget that aggregates public media H1N1 coverage. The widget provides local perspectives on the swine flu pandemic from public media outlets across the country. Stations (and the public) are welcome to embed this widget on their websites and blogs.

The widget is powered by Daylife, a content syndication and curation service, which is used for the topics.npr.org section of the NPR website. For this widget, Daylife scrapes content feeds from public media outlets and auto-updates the widget to display the latest stories related to the H1N1 pandemic.

There are a number of configurable display and style settings in the new widget. Learn more about the new public media H1N1 widget and get the embed code. The FluPortal team will be happy to assist configuring the widget to meet the needs of your station website — just contact us if you would like some help.

[Unitied Nations / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

The earthquake in Haiti last week was a sudden, devastating blow to a nation already under considerable strain. Relief efforts launched immediately to save lives and deliver care and supplies to the survivors.

The needs and concerns of the Haiti relief efforts are obviously quite different from the issues faced by communities with large numbers of H1N1 cases. While our efforts on this website — curating web tools, tips for using social media, and aggregating resources for reporters — are done with an eye to covering the H1N1 pandemic, one of the goals of the FluPortal project is to advance public media infrastructures and capabilities for crisis response more generally.

Over the last week, we have seen an impressive number of Haiti-related online and social media initiatives that provide some valuable lessons public media can take away as we continue the conversation of preparedness and how local stations and content producers can play a valuable role during a crisis situation. Here are a few of the trends and highlights.

• Twitter — In the hours after the earthquake, Twitter reminded us of its power to provide information channels when most other means of communication are down. Many news organizations are using the new Twitter Lists functionality to curate feeds originating from within the affected areas of Haiti. Examples include NPR, the New York Times, and CNN. And a quick search of Twitter returns the latest tweets using using the hashtag #haiti. Media outlets with an existing presence on Twitter were able to utilize the platform to enhance their coverage.
• Flickr — Some of the first images we saw of the destruction caused by the earthquake were found on Flickr. Additionally, Flickr’s API is being used to provide a photo search engine for missing persons. And, as we have highlighted here on FluPortal.org, the photo sharing service can be a great source for Creative Commons licensed images to use on your station’s website.
• Mobile giving — In the first week since the earthquake, over $20 million has been given via text message donations. Mobile donation opportunities via SMS short codes have received extensive media promotion, and the numbers of donations continue to increase. Consumers embracing this type of giving has obvious implications for future crisis response planning (not to mention the business models of non-profits everywhere).
• Crisis Camps — The realm of public media makers continue to expand as tech savvy volunteers come together to build social media tools to meet the specific needs of a crisis situation. Over the weekend, Crisis Camps were held in a number of cities and they produced valuable initiatives that have the potential to make a real difference in Haiti in the days and weeks ahead.
• Ushahidi — The crisis visualization platform launched a Haiti website that allows individuals (both within and outside of Haiti) to report emergency incidents and crisis information via web and SMS. The goal is to connect response teams and aid worker with those in immediate need.
• Google Response Page — Google is providing a number of tools that utilize the power of their existing applications and infrastructure. Individuals can donate to Haiti relief efforts via Google Checkout, make free calls to Haiti using Google Voice, and view updated satellite imagery of Haiti via Google Earth. In addition, they have launched a People Finder widget to assist those searching for loved ones in Haiti.

There are themes here that public media outlets can consider in their general crisis planning. Information — the ability to gather and move accurate news and information within and outside of a crisis zone.  Technology — what kinds of tools are at your disposal (online, mobile, social media)  that can be utilized in emergencies? And inclusiveness — people outside a crisis want to help those affected. How can we facilitate and channel that goodwill, both financially and in active, constructive ways?

Moving forward, FluPortal will continue to monitor the Haiti response situation and engage those involved to continue the discussion about public media and crisis response.

Last fall, we took a look at how news organizations were approaching the question what to call the new influenza pandemic — “swine flu” or “H1N1”? Nine months into the outbreak, it’s time to revisit this debate, and this time we’re taking it to the streets — the virtual streets of Google search terms. Using Google Insights for Search, we can see how “H1N1” and “swine flu” have been trending over the last year.

And by a clear margin, swine flu is the winner and champion. Last April, when the outbreak first appeared in Mexico and the United States, “swine flu” dominated the public consciousness, news reports, and our Google searches. The huge volume of these early searches gives “swine flu” a substantial victory in total number of searches over time.

But by the chart below, you can see that “H1N1” picked up the pace and essentially pulled even once the initial wave of “swine flu” searches died down. And in recent months, as the second wave of the pandemic lessened, “H1N1″ is occasionally the more popular search term.

There are also geographic differences in the popularity of the two search terms. Below are maps for “swine flu” in red and “H1N1″ in blue. The darker the color, the more common the search. Between April 09 and January 2010, West Virgina, Utah and Maine produced the most searches for “swine flu”. During the same period, the upper Midwest led the way with the most “H1N1” searches.

Another interesting set of data to look at is the differences in related search terms. “Swine flu” searches have been more often associated to finding information about the symptoms. “H1N1″ searches, on the other hand, are more likely to be about vaccine information.

This kind of search data can provide an interesting window into both the rhetorical trends of media and how we talk about the pandemic. Perhaps we tend to use “H1N1” in more medical and scientific contexts –- the research, the pandemic data, and the vaccine. In contrast, “swine flu” may have been the choice in describing the illness, its traits, and the experiences of those who caught the flu.

You can do your own search term analysis at Google Insights for Search.