FluPortal.org

But there’s still lots of road ahead
[funkandjazz / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Today is FluPortal’s last day as an active H1N1 project. As of tomorrow, the National Center for Media Engagement will host the site as an archive. An archive, however, that remains useful into the future! Here’s how FluPortal can continue to inform your journalism — on flu and any other issue.

Many of the flu resources aimed at reporters are relevant to seasonal flu — and of course to a possible third wave of H1N1. FluPortal puts government info, scientific studies, and flu-reporting tips all in one place to save you time when you’re on deadline.

Also: all of FluPortal’s tech tips are applicable to reporting on any kind of crisis. In fact they’re relevant for reporting on any topic at all.

Have you been wanting to learn how to use Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious on your station site or in your newsroom? FluPortal can get you started (here, here, and here). You can also learn how to use social media to report and illustrate stories.

Would you like to host live chats on your site? Check out our guide to CoveritLive. Have you wondered how to display various RSS feeds? Here’s a quick tutorial on using Yahoo Pipes.

Finally, this blog also contains a good number of posts outlining “evergreen” flu and tech resources. You can search for posts that might interest you by scrolling through the blog, entering keywords in the search box, or using the category or archive links in the sidebar.

Thanks to your feedback and collaboration, we learned a lot, throughout the project, about how to improve FluPortal. We hope some of these lessons will be useful for any future “crisis portals” modelled on this site. You can read more about the FluPortal project — and recommendations for pubmedia crisis coverage — in our final report: “Crisis Coverage by Public Media: A Review of FluPortal and Recommendations for the Future.”

You can also find a brief introduction to FluPortal here.

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.

Snapshot of FluPortal’s Delicious bookmarks on 25 March

In looking back over the FluPortal project, I felt we probably hadn’t featured our Delicious bookmarks prominently enough. But whether or not we promoted them well, Delicious is a powerful tool. You might be interested to learn what we did with it — so that you can start using it yourself, either publicly on your station’s website or internally as a reporting tool.

Every morning after scanning for H1N1 news and leads, we’d use Delicious to bookmark the best reporting, press releases, studies, etc. These bookmarked pieces showed up on our Delicious page — and also in the box at the top of our “Reporter & Program Resources” page.

The main point, here, was to provide a one-stop shop of the best reliable news about H1N1. We spent time searching for it online to save you time. This required an editorial eye, but it ensured quality — something automated aggregators don’t always supply.

Some of the nitty gritty: We learned, partway through the project, to make prominent the source of each bookmarked piece — so that you could judge quickly that it was reputable. We also used a consistent stable of tags to label each piece — so that you could search for information by topic. Finally, we inserted a sentence or two from each piece that summarized its most important information — so that you could decide whether or not to click through.

To learn more about how we used Delicious for FluPortal, check out our final report. To learn how you can use Delicious on your station’s website — or in your reporting — try this FluPortal guide.

“The ultimate blogger’s kit”
[m-c / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

If you blog for a pubmedia station — or would like to start — here are a few tips we can recommend. They’re based on what we practiced and learned blogging here at FluPortal.

• Think hard about your blog’s purpose — develop a clear niche and voice.
• Don’t limit your posts to tight finished reporting. You can use your blog to report — by asking questions to solicit story ideas, leads, etc.
• Keep posts concise and scannable. If you don’t hook readers rapidly, they’ll move on.
• Establish a regular blogging schedule. This will let people know what to expect — and increases the chance that they’ll return to your blog.
• Look for leads everywhere online — not just in mainstream media. See our social-media guide for ideas.
• Make post titles literal and Googleable. In other words: use keywords that people are likely to enter in Google searches. This will increase the chance of someone landing on your blog.
• Break up long quotations into small chunks and write into and out of them.
• Use links as footnotes. They’re a really handy way to back up statements you make.
• OK, just use links a lot. Linking out is the generous thing to do. It will also encourage other bloggers to link back to you (which can increase your traffic).
• Attribute photographs, videos, etc. — with links. Use a consistent style for the attributions.
• Use a search box, tags, and categories to help readers find older posts.
• Decide on a commenting policy (and make that clear on the blog).
• Interact with commenters in the comments section — this can help develop a regular community on your blog.

To find details about some of these tips — and some of the difficulties we had with FluPortal’s blog — check out this section of FluPortal’s final report.

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.

[Flu.gov on Facebook]

Andrew Wilson was until recently Flu.gov’s new-media strategist. Several months ago, we described how he used social media to revamp the Flu.gov site when H1N1 hit and also to get information out to the public more efficiently. Now you can hear Wilson outline the process himself — and its effectiveness — in more detail in a final excerpt from FluPortal’s latest webinar. (Previous excerpts here, here, and here.)

Wilson explained that the online interest in H1N1 last spring was so significant (equal to or greater than current interest in Haiti) that it “posed lots of challenges [...] from a communications perspective.” It meant that Flu.gov had to reinvent itself and its outreach in the middle of the crisis.

Enter social media. Wilson used it to evaluate who was coming to the site and why. (Learn how he did it here.)

Armed with this information, Flu.gov redesigned its site, collaborated with other organizations working on flu, and improved its public outreach using social media like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flu.gov’s blog. The social-media outreach, Wilson said, has been key for two reasons: it increased Flu.gov’s responsiveness to news; and it made the information “as shareable as possible.” The end result: more information to more niche audiences more quickly.

Wilson also used social media to continue improving Flu.gov. At one point, for example, he noticed chatter on Twitter about a Canadian H1N1 vaccine recall. He was then able to explain on Flu.gov — and back on its Twitter channel — that the recall didn’t affect the U.S.

Here’s Wilson’s presentation — complete with helpful and interesting slides:

[FluPortal]

The full webinar is available here.

Last week, in our webinar on crisis reporting, FluPortal’s tech whiz Josh Andrews outlined some of the newest resources available on this site.

He highlighted our revamped “Reporter & Program Resources” page, where among other things you’ll find our curated list of the best H1N1 news articles; he laid out the new guides to web tools and social media available on our “For Station Websites” page; and he emphasized that we continue to offer H1N1 story angles regularly on our blog.

The new web tools Josh outlined include the Public Media H1N1 Widget. It automatically displays the latest H1N1 reporting from public media, and you can easily customize its size and appearance so that it fits the look of your website.

Josh also explained that you can use many of the tools available on FluPortal in other crisis reporting — or to enhance your coverage of any subject. Learn more in this clip from the webinar:

[FluPortal]

You can watch the full webinar here.

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.

FluPortal.org, a CPB-funded portal for H1N1 information, is hosting a webinar on

Thursday, January 28
11am PT / 2pm ET
Click here to register

Please join us for the latest H1N1 developments and best practices regarding health crisis coverage by public media, both on-air and online.

Public media stations and programs, community information groups, and bloggers have all made use of FluPortal’s resources and tools. The site is paving the way for future public media responses to crises, both health-related and otherwise. Our blog is a great way to stay informed, with coverage ideas, web tools, and guest features from public media and public health professionals.

Thursday’s presenters:

+ Josh Andrews, FluPortal team: What’s new on FluPortal.org

+ Joe Neel, NPR Health Editor: An update on swine flu in the US and upcoming NPR coverage plans

+ Lorna Benson, Minnesota Public Radio Healthcare Correspondent: A look at local and regional coverage of the pandemic

+ Andrew Wilson, Flu.gov former New Media Strategist: Using social media to get health crisis information to the public

+ Your questions and comments

The webinar is free of charge. Anyone working in public media, public health, or community outreach is invited to attend.

FluPortal is led by PRX in collaboration with NPR.

Questions? Ideas? Contact us.