FluPortal.org

A Review of FluPortal and Recommendations for the Future

by the FluPortal team:
Josh Andrews | Katherine Bidwell | Ken Mills | Rekha Murthy

Download .pdf version of this report

Table of Contents:
1. Summary
2. Technology and Design
3. Blogging and Curation
4. Outreach and Communication
5. Appendix

 

Summary

by Rekha Murthy

FluPortal was launched in early Fall 2009 as a content and technology resource for stations and other public media outlets covering the H1N1 flu pandemic. The project was funded by CPB and led by PRX in collaboration with NPR. The project’s main goal was to support a coordinated, informed, and timely public media response to what was expected to be a major health crisis in the United States and around the world. It was also intended to lay the groundwork for timely and effective deployment of future crisis-related public media coverage, both on-air and online. This document shares materials and lessons learned from the FluPortal project toward that end.

The Site

At the project’s core was the creation of a portal providing public media outlets a central access point for information related to the H1N1 pandemic. A publicly accessible website was determined to be the best way to satisfy this goal. FluPortal.org aggregated and curated technical tools and best practices, reputable government and non-government articles and resources about the pandemic, and relevant public media coverage. While the website was public, it was targeted to the needs of the public media community.

Within the public media community, we identified two important audiences for the project and shaped the site around their needs: 1) news directors, editors, reporters, and producers planning and covering local outbreaks of the swine flu, and 2) web managers tasked with updating station websites with pandemic information.

As a result, the website was organized into four main sections:

• For Station Websites — Aimed at station web managers, this page highlighted a collection of free web tools and online resources to support coverage of H1N1 on local station websites.
• Reporter and Producer Resources — Collected H1N1 information, links, and resources to assist public media editorial staffs in their pandemic coverage.
• Public Media Coverage — Cataloged H1N1 reporting by public media outlets throughout the system.
• FluPortal Blog — A running conversation of ideas, information, and trends related to public media coverage of swine flu. The blog regularly highlighted the work of reporters, editors, public health professionals, and technologists through interviews and guest posts.

We implemented on FluPortal many of the same widgets we were recommending to stations, including a display of the NPR API, a blend of government public health information feeds created with Yahoo Pipes, and a Delicious widget displaying the latest public media and other H1N1 links curated by the FluPortal team. Josh Andrews’ report provides greater detail on the process of designing and developing the site.

A cornerstone of the grant was the expectation that data related to swine flu — particularly numbers and locations of cases — would be gathered by the U.S. government and made freely available in structured form. The launch of Data.gov in Spring 2009 “to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government” encouraged this expectation. So we had initially envisioned a major role for FluPortal involving the collection, management, and visualization of H1N1 data.

However, extensive research at the project’s outset revealed few reputable datasets, and none at the national level. Some states and localities provided specific numbers of H1N1 cases, and a few projects such as HealthMap aggregated World Health Organization alerts, news reports, and personal accounts to provide a general picture of the pandemic. But a comprehensive, structured, and regularly updated dataset never became available. In fact, in July 2009, WHO announced that testing and counting individual cases was too burdensome for healthcare providers and not essential for the tracking of the pandemic. In August 2009, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped counting specific cases of H1N1 in favor of weekly estimates of influenza-like illness as reported by state health departments via a new nationwide surveillance system (more info on the CDC website). That became the only data FluPortal displayed, in the form of an interactive map developed by NPR, regularly updated by their multimedia team, and embeddable by stations on their websites.

Team

As with many websites, the structure of the core FluPortal team paralleled to some extent the structure of the website:

• Project manager: Rekha Murthy — Communicate with funder and project partners, plan project development and outreach, support team members as needed.
• Technical advisor, developer, and blogger: Josh Andrews — Develop and manage the WordPress site, write and maintain the For Station Websites technology tools section and the Public Media Coverage section, write occasional blog posts on tech tools for crisis coverage, assist station staff in implementing tools on their own websites.
• Blogger and editor: Katherine Bidwell — Manage the site’s content, especially the Blog and the Reporter and Program Resources section, establish blogging practices and blog daily, reach out to potential guest bloggers and interviewees, track news of the pandemic to determine direction of site and blog, create a curated feed of notable public media and other pandemic-related links using the Delicious bookmarking tool.
• Outreach coordinator: Ken Mills — Spread awareness of the site among public radio, public television, public health, and journalist and community organizations, gather feedback on the site from target users via email and phone interviews and guide team in implementing the feedback, attend industry conferences, organize weekly team meeting, assist in webinar planning.
• Everyone — Write blog posts, review each other’s work, share ideas for site content, contribute to Delicious feed, present at project webinars, spread the word about the site.

In addition to the core team were a few other light, occasional resources. These included grant management and administration by two senior staff, and and about 30 hours of technology resources (outside of Josh Andrews) to purchase domain names, communicate with PRX’s ISP to set up the WordPress instance, support Josh in maintenance and administration of the WordPress site, and set up the two webinars that were held.

Overall, we found that this team structure was well suited to the project’s needs and worked well for the individual members. Roles were clear, and any overlap proved fruitful; for example, Ken Mills, the outreach coordinator, assisted Katherine Bidwell, the blogger, in making contact with desired guest bloggers, and when his outreach efforts turned up interesting people he referred them to Katherine for a blog interview. The FluPortal team worked remotely, staying in touch using free or low-cost services including email, various instant messaging clients, Skype, Free Conference Call, Google Voice, and the occasional in-person meeting. Online, we used Google Docs and PBworks to collaborate and document our work. Please see the team members’ reports for additional areas of collaboration.

That said, there sometimes seemed to be one role missing: an H1N1 or health/science domain expert. The grant called for the site to curate existing data and information rather than identify new sources and new angles on the H1N1 pandemic. However, good curation relies on being able to evaluate content and sources for reliability and accuracy, especially in order to provide diverse material beyond government and major mainstream media like the New York Times. That in turn requires health and science expertise our team didn’t have.

Not only would such an expert have enhanced our ability to provide good information, they could also have improved outreach by knowing the major players — individuals and organizations — in the fields of health and science information. While NPR did provide some advisory support from its Health Desk and Multimedia teams, we would recommend a more regular/dedicated resource for future such projects. Health crises, like other crises, are prone to a flood of information, which can easily become dominated by redundancy and even misinformation. A site like FluPortal can play a stronger role in combating such tendencies by truth-squadding what’s circulating as well as surfacing deeper research and new content. So including a domain expert would also require a shift in mission for future projects. Please see Katherine’s report for more thoughts on this issue.

Capacity

All team members were part-time. The project manager dedicated an average of 10 hours per week, varying widely over the course of the project. The other team members each worked about 20 hours per week on the project. This was more than sufficient given the waning course of the flu; however, if the pandemic had become more serious, more time would have been needed for all roles. The key challenge for future crisis-related projects is creating a fixed resource structure for a dynamic situation. Crises from pandemics to natural disasters vary widely in duration and intensity. For H1N1, we had advance warning, and it developed slowly over the course of many months. While its course was not easily predicted, and turned out to be less extreme than feared, other kinds of crises could be even less predictable. Staffing agreements and structures need to account for this fact.

Another consideration is when to bring on various roles. We strongly recommend a phase of discovery and outreach to begin well before a site is launched. Advance outreach can identify real needs and desires from the target audience while simultaneously raising awareness and buy-in. While future teams should not hesitate to continuously improve and update a site after launch, we did learn that first impressions do count: people formulate their understanding of a site on their first visit. With that in mind, it’s far better to meet a substantial portion of user needs and expectations out of the gate, rather than promote a site too early and then try to attract attention for major improvements later on.

Gathering and Displaying Information

As the team members’ reports address in detail, much of the FluPortal project involved gathering and displaying information. In the absence of reliable national-level datasets (e.g., on swine flu cases or vaccine availability), information meant audio, video, text articles, and blog posts by and about reputable government, non-goverment, public media, and mainstream media sources.

For the Reporter and Program Resources section, information was selected that would help editorial staffs quickly get up to speed on the topic, with lists of major organizations and government agencies, fact sheets, and public media “explainer” reports. While FluPortal’s ability to provide local information was understandably limited, we did offer ideas and resources for approaching state and local coverage. The National Center for Media Engagement provided tips for engaging the local community as part of a coverage plan.

For the For Station Websites section, two major categories of information were included: 1) H1N1-related video, audio, widgets, badges, and other content that stations could embed on their own sites, and 2) a series of guides written by the FluPortal team to using various free web tools to add dynamic H1N1 information to station sites and enhance stations’ social media presences in service of keeping their communities informed and getting story ideas. Josh Andrews’ report goes into this section in more detail.

For the Public Media Coverage section, FluPortal addressed the ongoing public media system problem of knowledge sharing. System members — stations and other outlets — don’t easily know what other members are doing. The team searched for and invited submissions of stations’ H1N1 topic or “landing” web pages and posted them on FluPortal. In addition, the team bookmarked swine flu stories by public media outlets using the Delicious tool, and displayed those bookmarks as an RSS widget in this section. Later in the project, NPR and the FluPortal team worked with third-party content aggregator Daylife to create a custom, automated feed that displayed H1N1 stories pulled from about 30 public media station feeds.

For the FluPortal Blog, the team not only highlighted new additions and features on the other sections, it created original content by interviewing a wide range of public media and public health professionals on approaches to analyzing and covering the pandemic. Katherine Bidwell’s report describes the blogging criteria and process in greater detail.

Clearly, information organization and display was a major challenge for FluPortal, as it would be for any such future sites. The top issue was presenting large amounts of useful information in a way that was readable, navigable, and quickly accessed by people on deadlines. In his report, Ken Mills notes that information density was indeed an issue for some users of the site. Reporters on deadline don’t have time to sift through large amounts of information, and some felt the site was overwhelming. Josh Andrews reports on some of the ways the team addressed this in different site sections. FluPortal wanted to set itself apart from the surfeit of sites offering superficial and repetitive H1N1 information, but to do so effectively, additional design research and innovation is needed.

Another related issue was balancing static, “evergreen” information display with timely material. This arose most often with the blog, which is time-linear by design. However, many blog posts remain relevant now and for future use, despite being buried by newer posts. We tried to counteract the burial problem by linking to evergreen blog posts from the static sections of the site and from newer, related posts as well. In all, information organization for a site with elements of various time sensitivity is an interesting problem we’d encourage future projects to explore further.

Outreach and Measuring a Site’s Impact

It comes as no surprise that outreach is critical to a site’s success, especially if a site is created around a specific topic for a temporary duration. We began awareness-raising to the public media community as soon as the site launched, working with partner NPR and funder CPB plus mailing lists, direct email, and industry publications to get the word out. The CPB-funded National Center for Media Engagement was very effective in sending both public radio and public television stations to the site and encouraging webinar attendance. We held two webinars using GotoWebinar to explain the project and invite feedback and content submissions. The first webinar, in the early fall when the pandemic was on the rise, was much better attended than the second, in January 2010, when the flu had waned. Ken Mills attended two conferences which were essential opportunities to improve and assess awareness and attitudes toward the project. Ken made a large number of direct email and phone contacts as well — please see his report for more detail and recommendations.

One known challenge for all public media projects is the lack of an authoritative and comprehensive directory of public media staff. In the absence of this, an outreach role must be staffed with someone who already knows the public media system well, as Ken does. Our Appendix lists organizations in public radio and public television that can help get the word out to their members. We cannot emphasize enough the need for a centralized, current public media contact database. This would also enable better targeting of the people most likely to use and benefit from the project. FluPortal’s intended users were not necessarily program and news directors and general managers, who are easier to track down; they were editors, reporters, and website staffers who are less so.

In addition to public media, the team did extensive outreach to government agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Archives. We contacted non-government public health, science, community, and journalist groups including the World Health Organization, the Association for Healthcare Journalists, the Harvard School of Public Health, the Mayo Clinic, the Public Library of Science, United Way, and many more. Please see the Appendix.

As Ken discusses in his report, awareness raising isn’t enough. An effective outreach effort for FluPortal also involved one-on-one contacts to recommend specific sections of the site and invite feedback. These were accomplished by scheduling in-depth conversations with individuals at stations and other organizations. In the case of the technical tools and widgets, it involved recommending specific tools and supporting individual station web managers in the implementation of FluPortal’s offerings. By inviting interviews and guest posts for the blog, we also got across the message that FluPortal was sincere in its information- and advice-sharing missions.

Formal user testing was an area we steered clear of out of concern that this would turn the focus away from the site’s substantive content to feedback on aesthetics like color, graphics, and layout. Ultimately, however, design influences adoption nearly as much as content. For future projects, we would strongly recommend interviews that walk users through the site, crafted in a way that acknowledges the importance of design but gets into content issues as well. While we did conduct ongoing outreach and solicited feedback and regularly folded the results into site improvements, approaching this more systematically and earlier on could make the team’s focus clearer from the beginning. For example, we were unsure whether our public media bookmarks feed was getting noticed and used, or whether blog readers would like to see more story ideas, more government resources, or both. More site-focused user interviews might also have yielded ideas on how to better organize the abundance of information on the site.

For a site like FluPortal, measuring impact is complex. Unique visits is not sufficient, given the specificity — and therefore limited size — of the target audience. Indicators of the site’s reach and impact include:

• Google Analytics — visits, time on site, bounce rate
• Direct outreach efforts via email, phone calls, in-person conversations
• Webinar attendance
• Emails via the site’s Contact Us form
• Blog comments
• Mentions in media including other sites and blogs
• Mentions on and traffic referrals from Twitter
• Appearance of FluPortal widgets on station sites

A few findings: Average time on site was high at 4 minutes, a good indicator of engagement. The For Station Websites (technical tools) section got the most unique visits after the home page, with the Blog and Reporter Resources nearly tied in next place. FluPortal did get mentioned in various media, including the Current newsletter, the Center for Social Media’s blog, the Association of Health Care Journalists’ blog, Daylife’s blog, and the Nieman Foundation’s Guide to Covering Pandemic Flu. FluPortal.org and specific blog posts appeared regularly on Twitter, which was the top referring site after Google (the National Center for Media Engagement’s site came in third). Please see the team member reports for more detail on various additional indicators.

As for station participation in FluPortal, we found that direct contact was the most successful. Station, program, and non-pubmedia staff were responsive to direct outreach efforts. Some guest-blogged or agreed to be interviewed, presented at our webinars, and even shared their H1N1 landing-page stats with the team. We received a few dozen emails telling us about various H1N1 programs and initiatives at various stations. Our first webinar, held in October when the pandemic was still growing, was very well attended, with 75 attendees. See Ken Mills’ report for more detail.

In contrast, online participation was virtually nil: only a handful of blog comments, and only two signups to a Google Group that was made private to public media and public health professionals only. Some suggested that a FluPortal Facebook page or Twitter account would have encouraged more participation. We chose to avoid these so as not to cultivate an identity separate from stations’ own offerings, since the site was intended to support stations, not be a destination in itself. Getting public media people to communicate with one another without significant facilitation is a challenge not unique to FluPortal. One reason might be the limited time and resources with which many in this field operate. Having a dedicated outreach coordinator to make direct contact is essential in this situation. However, we’d recommend future projects continue to explore ways to encourage broader participation among our time-stretched public media community.

What Stations Want for FluPortal and Future Sites

Public radio and public television stations in the United States vary greatly, and so do their needs. It’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all service that everyone will want and use. Yet our active efforts to gather feedback and contributions did give us a general sense of what worked and what worked less, as well as a better understanding of the issues important to consider for future such projects. Please see the team members’ reports for additional insights.

The success of the For Station Websites section demonstrates the desire among stations for more easy-to-use technical resources. Not only was that section the most visited, dozens of station web managers told us they used that section extensively to build their own H1N1 landing pages. For the Public Media Coverage section, more than a dozen stations contacted us directly to let us know about website landing pages and broadcast specials, which we posted there. All four main sections had low bounce rates and high average visit durations, good signs of engagement with the material.

As noted repeatedly in this report, we confirmed our initial understanding that station staff at all levels are too busy to devote deep attention to a complex website. In other words, if people can’t understand a site’s purpose and offerings quickly, they will move on. Awareness of FluPortal.org was high among both public radio and public television people, though fewer had actually visited the site, and even fewer said they used it significantly. Generally, they correctly understood the site’s purpose, although one challenge from the outset was to make clear that FluPortal was not a destination for stations to link to, but rather a resource for them to make themselves online and on-air destinations for swine flu information. A few people did say that the breadth of the site’s mission and offerings was a turnoff, that they would have preferred a smaller, more focused offering.

Throughout the project’s duration, Ken Mills and the rest of the team asked station staff what kinds of content they most wanted to see. For example, we learned that while stations were somewhat less interested in knowing how other pubmedia stations were covering the pandemic, they were often more interested in story/angle ideas and feedback on their own work. Since many station people considered H1N1 to be a national and international story, frequently station people asked for ways to localize coverage. FluPortal addressed this by posting advice and ideas from station staff and other public media organizations.

The top concern of stations was the assurance that information posted on FluPortal.org was from a trusted source. This feedback led the team to post brief biographies on the About page so our identities and qualifications were known.

In our many discussions with public radio and public television program directors, general managers, news directors, and digital staff, an interesting picture emerged that can inform future crisis site efforts. The grant for FluPortal was based on an assumption — or aspiration — that public media stations view their mission as going beyond news gathering and broadcasting and into the role of conveners in their communities. WDET in Detroit is an example of such a station: it reached out to local healthcare providers and community groups and hosted community meetings about the swine flu pandemic. This was the kind of station we had in mind when we worked with the National Center for Media Engagement to share advice on community engagement and get the word out about FluPortal.

But many stations, particularly public television stations, don’t seek to be conveners. For them, could FluPortal still be useful? Yes. WAMU, a public radio station, is not a community convener but has a robust local news-gathering operation and website. Its team made ample use of FluPortal, particularly the web guides.

While many stations have designed their websites to be news and community information destinations, many simply post program schedules and contribution and contact information. This difference in approach is greatly influenced by the wide variance in financial and staff resources available to each station. While no website like FluPortal can fit every station’s needs, awareness of the differences can influence the site’s content and outreach strategy.

Key Successes, Challenges, and Open Questions

Was FluPortal ultimately a success? In many ways, yes. We set out to create a website that would invite wide and deep usage as well as discussion and feedback about future sites. In the process, we achieved a very good model upon which future sites can build. FluPortal showed what is possible with a small but dedicated team to aggregate materials and raise system awareness around a specific topic in a relatively short span of time. On the technology side, we found ways around the public media system’s lack of skilled technologists by focusing our technical guides on tools that non-technologists can implement, too. These guides were written specifically for H1N1 and crisis-related sites, but are also easily applied to many other kinds of websites. They were very well received by station web managers. Widgets by our team and NPR are of high quality and can be quickly repurposed for future needs.

Editorially, even without a reporting mandate, the FluPortal blog offered daily unique content pointing readers to a wide variety of angles and resources. Our outreach efforts raised awareness of the site and revealed a desire for such resources from some stations, though they also revealed real limits to stations’ abilities to deeply engage with such a site. Traffic was not as high as we would have liked, but NPR Health Editor Joe Neel noted it would likely have increased dramatically had the pandemic become more serious. As with nearly every public media project, FluPortal emphasized the need for an up-to-date, comprehensive directory of public media staff. A centralized public media announcement mechanism would also aid short-term sites like FluPortal in raising awareness quickly and in notifying stations when they’re ending.

The communication challenge also suggests the need for one destination site, a “CrisisPortal” perhaps, that stations know to turn to every time a major crisis occurs. Such a site would also address the issue of resource allocation. Crises are by nature impossible to predict, and as the pandemic started to wane, our team was challenged to find a new direction for the site for the duration of the grant period. If future sites are situation-specific, like FluPortal, we would strongly recommend a more flexible funding and resource model. Alternatively, a consolidated CrisisPortal could allow a dedicated team to distribute their efforts across situations in accordance with their shifting intensity.

We did anticipate the temporary nature of a pandemic by creating, where possible, materials with future applicability — the WordPress build, the technical guides, the blog best practices, as well as some of the posts themselves. We have also provided a list of government and non-government organizations that could be of use for pandemic flu and beyond. FluPortal’s post-pandemic relevance raises the importance of archiving the work created during such projects. We are grateful to the National Center of Media Engagement, which will host FluPortal.org as an archive indefinitely following the project’s conclusion on March 31, 2010.

Overall, FluPortal became a part of the growing discussions about crisis response both inside and outside of public media. Key players in these discussions are projects like the CPB-funded Station Action for Emergency Readiness (SAFER), Ushahidi, and CrisisCamp.

In the (somewhat) final analysis, does a site like FluPortal have a place in public media? We, and many of the stations we spoke with, think it does. This is particularly true if a central destination site is developed to avoid duplication of effort and information across crises. Such a site could be an important node in an overall effort to get the system to collaborate, to pool resources, and to exchange ideas and information. Crises come in many kinds and time frames. During many crises, the ability to activate public media’s deep and broad presence across the United States to put out quality, relevant information can be of tremendous value to our communities. This is what our public service mission is about.

Team Reports

The next sections of this document are reports by the individual team members: Josh Andrews on the technical aspects of the site, Katherine Bidwell on the editorial aspects, and Ken Mills on outreach.
 

FluPortal Technology and Design

by Josh Andrews

Overview

I joined the FluPortal team in the summer of 2009, at the early stages of the project. My initial focus was on the planning and development of the FluPortal.org website as well as curating the For Station Websites section of the site. After the launch of the project, I regularly contributed to the FluPortal blog, maintained and updated the website, and oversaw the online strategy and product management for the project.

Building FluPortal.org

The first phase of planning the website was to determine what content it would house. We gathered all the information, resources, documents, and digital content having to do with H1N1 that we could find. We also reviewed a number of media websites created in the wake of the initial outbreak of swine flu in the Spring of 2009. We created a “scratch pad” using Google Docs where team members could add content and catalog notes and links as we found them. We then went about editing and organizing this content. This initial organization of content informed our decisions on the page structure of the FluPortal website.

With the large amount of material available, the presentation and organization of information was a challenging part of constructing the website. To allow users to easily identify and navigate to the content they were looking for, we defined the main content pages by audience. Web managers would be drawn to For Station Websites and content producers would gravitate to the Reporter and Program Resources page. Throughout the project, the FluPortal team solicited input from members of the public media community. This feedback led to regular improvements in the categorization, organization, and display of the content on the site.

In designing the visual presentation of the FluPortal.org homepage, I used an online service called iPlotz to build a wireframe of the layout. iPlotz offers a basic, free version of the service (which we used) as well as a more advanced set of features available on a cost basis. We planned the layout of the wireframe to serve users with varying needs and topical interests (web managers, reporters, the public). We wanted the homepage to communicate to users a clear explanation of the project’s scope and goals as well as the breadth of content contained on the site. The wireframe for FluPortal.org’s homepage went through 3-4 iterations before the team was satisfied with the plan for the website. Reviewing the wireframes today shows that most of our original planned elements made it to the final product.

The WordPress Platform

The FluPortal website is built on the WordPress publishing platform. WordPress is a well-established open source blogging platform. Widely adopted by individuals and organizations alike, and its large user base provides an ample support community. The WordPress software is free and, for the FluPortal project, was installed on Public Radio Exchange servers by the PRX IT staff.

To save time and resources on web development, we identified and acquired a premium WordPress theme from a reliable vendor. The theme license was purchased from the company Woo Themes at a cost of $125. The theme was chosen for its resemblance to our initial homepage wireframe and for the functionality it offered. After the theme was installed, I went about building the page structure of the website, calibrating the default WordPress settings, and populating the site with project specific content.

A graphic designer was hired to customize the visual elements of the theme as well as to design a project logo. I worked directly with the graphic designer to implement changes to the website’s style sheet.

The php code for the WordPress theme was customized to meet specific project needs, relocate content modules, and make the site more visually appealing. Customizations include:

• Website header — Height of header adjusted; custom logo inserted; email subscription option added to RSS button
• Website footer – Removed redundant page navigation
• Homepage – Removed default page layout below the main slider and added custom code to alter the display of blog excerpts and thumbnail photos.
• Blog – Customized text display settings to display full post content on blog page; changed photo display settings on blog page and individual posts; altered commenting display on blog page and individual posts
• Public Media Coverage page – Created a custom two-column page template to display necessary content (later revised back to a one column layout)
• Two plug-ins were employed on the site for additional functionality — cForms II contact form plug-in; All-in-One SEO for search engine optimization plug-in

While the use of a prebuilt theme did speed up development time overall, we found that the theme did have drawbacks and limitations. For example, we found the layout did little to encourage user comments and downplayed the ones that did come in. We improved what we could with the theme, but adapting any prebuilt template often involves compromises.

I recommend the continued use of WordPress for similar public media crisis response efforts. In addition to its low cost, WordPress can be deployed quickly and provides an easy-to-use interface for non-technical staff. A central managing organization should be identified to support these efforts and oversee web hosting and the use of WordPress MU (multiuser) to deploy new issue specific sites based on a shared or common web back-end.

To combat the trade-offs that come with using prebuilt website templates, a public media WordPress theme should be commissioned and built for future crisis response initiatives. This theme would be designed with the needs of local stations in mind and provide advanced functionality to accommodate multimedia content and social media integration. Having a public media WordPress theme on hand would avoid the process of identifying, licensing, and customizing a premium theme with every instance of crisis response. Many stations don’t have web development staff available and turnkey solutions designed for public media crisis response would make web resources more accessible to the public media system.

Some of this work towards a public media WordPress infrastructure is already in place. In 2009, WNET in New York partnered with Tierra Innovation, a web development group, to build an open source WordPress toolkit. The toolkit includes a number of supported plugins for Wordpress websites that offer features and functionality especially suited to public media outlets.

Such a toolkit should be expanded and combined with a public media website template (and, perhaps, a catalog of visual elements). This has the potential to provide an infrastructure for rapid website deployment options for local stations with minimal web development support.

A similar crisis-website project aimed at local governments has been launched on the Google Sites platform. Stanford University’s Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program coordinated the development of emergency response templates available for use on any Google Sites website. In its current stage of development, Google Sites is not powerful enough as a content management system for most public media stations, but this project highlights the potential of turnkey solutions for crisis response efforts.

Resources for Station Websites

The For Station Websites page on FluPortal.org houses a variety of online resources, embeddable digital content, and web tools to help local stations bolster their online coverage of the H1N1 pandemic. Much of this content was identified by the FluPortal team during the initial planning phase of the project. As I curated this section of the website, my goal was to expose local stations to a wide breadth of ready-made content modules as well as innovative approaches and tactics for using free web tools and social media platforms. I kept in mind that many web managers don’t consider themselves programmers or coders. I wanted to provide that audience with quality content that was easy to use and integrate into a station’s website. At the same time I hoped to provide gentle encouragement (along with detailed instructions) on how stations might stretch the limits of their comfort zones in web coverage.

The project’s digital tools included a variety of H1N1-related content, including RSS feeds, FAQs, widgets and badges, maps, and social media feeds. A number of public media stations actively used FluPortal’s digital offerings when building their H1N1 landing pages in anticipation of the second wave of the pandemic. We cataloged these landing pages on our Public Media Coverage page. The simplest contained widget placements; the more comprehensive combined local and national coverage of the pandemic.

FluPortal Guides

To encourage online innovation and experimentation at stations, I included three introductory guides to free web tools at the time of launching FluPortal.org. While these tools were not specific or limited to H1N1 coverage, I hoped that the pandemic would provide station staff an opportunity to try new approaches in building web services. I wrote introductory guides to the following services: the NPR API, Yahoo Pipes, and the Twitter API. Each one explained how a local station could get started using these tools, how that tactic could enhance its H1N1 coverage, and best practices to follow.

The guides were well received and soon became a growing part of our online offerings. We saw the guides as an opportunity to push stations forward and implement new technologies on their websites while also serving FluPortal’s overall goals. As the project continued, we expanded on the existing guides and introduced new services to the roster, including Facebook Connect, CoveritLive, and Delicious, along with a guide to using social media platforms in editorial reporting. (You can see all the FluPortal guides here.)

These guides should serve as a model for a larger clearinghouse on best practices for emerging social media tools and technologies for the public media system. Many public media stations have yet to embrace social media and emerging technologies and lack the resources or time to investigate each new platform. A public media oriented website or wiki could provide stations the needed introduction, information, and encouragement to begin experimenting. This service should encourage collaboration among public media organizations and the establishment of metrics to measure impact from new online tools.

Quick Start Menus

Following the initial launch of the FluPortal website, feedback from stations suggested that the volume of web tools was somewhat overwhelming. The number of options made it difficult for a station to know where to begin. The FluPortal team discussed possible solutions and formulated plans to create three Quick Start menus.

The idea behind the Quick Start menus was to offer tiered combinations of H1N1 web modules to meet the varied needs of public media stations. Depending on the time and technical resources stations had to devote to H1N1 coverage, the menus would provide a clear path to follow to identify the right content for online needs.

The levels were dubbed “Quick,” “Easy,” and “Go Big.” Quick was for organizations that just wanted a widget or two to place on the sidebars of their station websites to provide the latest national H1N1 news for their online audiences. Easy provided tips on bringing more comprehensive ready-made content to a local station website, including H1N1 FAQs, maps, and content modules. A station could populate an H1N1 landing page without devoting any local editorial time or staff to the project. Go Big was aimed at stations that were producing local editorial coverage of swine flu and were looking to highlight that work and integrate it with national news and multimedia content.

The three menu options became the main focus of the For Station Websites page and linked users to detailed instructions for implementation along with examples of how other public media stations had approached their online coverage. The remainder of the For Station Sites page was also reorganized by simplifying and reordering the categorization of the content.

NPR Flu Map

The FluPortal team worked with NPR on the production of a flu map. Launched in November of 2009, the embeddable map displays the prevalence of flu-like illness across the United States by region. The map’s source data comes from official CDC estimates of flu-like illness published weekly. The FluPortal staff worked with NPR’s data visualization team planning the scope of the project and provided feedback to NPR throughout numerous iterations of the final product during its development. When the map launched, it was placed on the FluPortal.org homepage, and we provided marketing support and system outreach on our blog and during our webinars.

Public Media H1N1 Widget

FluPortal played a more direct role in the planning and production of the Public Media H1N1 Widget, again in association with NPR. The JavaScript widget aggregates H1N1 editorial coverage from a large number of sources within the public media system. The widget provides a window into how local communities across the nation are addressing the threat of the swine flu pandemic.

The widget uses Daylife, a content syndication and curation service, to aggregate public media H1N1 content. NPR uses the Daylife service to power the topics.npr.org section of the NPR website. For the Public Media H1N1 Widget, Daylife scrapes content from a preselected list of station feeds and grabs articles with references to H1N1 (and related terms). The widget auto-updates with the latest stories and orders the content by publication date.

We worked closely with the NPR product manager in the planning phases to determine the functionality and design requirements for the widget. The FluPortal team also curated the source list of public media feeds for the widget to scrape. We decided to focus on feeds from approximately 40 public media stations and producers that had shown a commitment to covering the H1N1 pandemic. We limited the number of source feeds to reduce the risk of stories unrelated to swine flu appearing in the widget (while Daylife is largely accurate in its ability to identify stories by search terms, it is an automated service and prone to occasionally mistakes). As the widget neared completion, the FluPortal team oversaw quality assurance and final design changes.

An important note: the Daylife widget is designed to be adapted to future crisis response initiatives. The code can easily be altered to produce a public media aggregation widget on any imaginable topic. In addition, the station source feeds can be expanded or reduced as needed. The only variable about future use of the widget is the continued relationship between Daylife and NPR.

A note on timing: Both widgets suffered from their late arrival to the project. The NPR flu map debuted in late November and the Public Media H1N1 Widget appeared in January of 2010. Development of both widgets began after FluPortal.org site launch, and by the time they were deployed the flu was on the wane and station uptake appears to have been low. It’s possible that had the pandemic continued to worsen, stations might have been more eager for these widgets and their late introduction to the site would not have mattered. Generally, however, we would recommend that major site features should be defined before launch when possible and deployed early on, when interest in the site is greatest. Grant timelines should take such needs into account. While both are high-quality online tools, they were underutilized by stations.

Another challenge with these two projects was a lack of metrics. Neither widget was equipped with any tracking code to indicate if and when it was embedded on station websites. We can only rely on anecdotal evidence about the usage of both of these tools, which is unfortunate given the hard work that went into them.

As the FluPortal grant period comes to a close, we are working with NPR to archive both the flu map and the Daylife widget and document the production of each. FluPortal will reach out to the public media system to communicate that the map and the widget will no longer be supported past the current flu season (the planned end date for support on the widget is May 11, 2010). For the Daylife widget, the javascript code will remain active and, as mentioned before, able to be deployed in other scenarios.
 

FluPortal Blogging and Curation

by Katherine Bidwell

Overview

When I joined the FluPortal team in mid-September 2009, Rekha and Josh had done the hard work of figuring out the structure of the site, had built up many of the resources on it, and had written some initial blog posts. They asked me to take charge of the blog, add actively to the Delicious bookmarks, and keep an editorial eye on the site as a whole.

The Blog

The Blog’s Initial Mandate
Rekha and Josh had already worked on initial ideas about the blog’s mission. Here’s the mandate they proposed in September:

Audience: The purpose of the blog (like that of the rest of the site) was to help pubmedia report on H1N1. So the audience was very specifically pubmedia reporters, news directors, and web managers — not the general public.

Topics for blog posts: The goal was to present five main things:

• Important government updates
• Interesting public-media coverage
• Web tools that stations could use on H1N1 pages
• Major H1N1 news stories
• Any FluPortal news (webinar dates, site improvements, etc.)

Minimal original reporting: The blog wasn’t a place for original reporting. If we interviewed people for posts, the point was to offer ideas — teases, really — that journalists could then report on in-depth themselves.

Posting frequency: The goal was to post one or (max) two posts a day so as not to inundate readers.

Guest posts: The premise was that we’d do most of the blogging ourselves but that we’d also recruit occasional “guest posts” from pubmedia staff and public-health or medical experts. (Details below.)

How the Blog Evolved
Josh and I were the primary bloggers, and Rekha and Ken contributed several posts as their schedules permitted.

Over time, we incorporated the initial goals and added a few other elements. This is how I’d now describe the blog: We aimed to be a source of inspiration for reporters looking for story leads and story angles. We also offered tech tips for reporters and web managers — tools they could use in reporting, in building an H1N1 web page, and in getting their stories and other information out to the public.

Here’s what we added to the initial five-point list of blogworthy topics:

• Photos and video from social media that reporters could use to illustrate stories or use as story leads
• (As H1N1 tapered off over the holidays:) generalized resources on crisis reporting that could be applied to H1N1 or other future crises

We tried to keep the tone of the blog informative, neutral, and not too formal.

How We Put Blog Posts Together: The Nuts and Bolts
How I Found Ideas for Posts: Every morning, I’d scour the news. These were my main news sources (it would be easy to draw up a comparable list for any future “crisis portal”):

• A Google News search for “swine flu h1n1″
• A Google search for pubmedia stories (until the DayLife widget launched at the end of January)
• NPR’s “Swine Flu: The Second Wave” page
• NPR’s health blog
• Flu.gov’s Facebook page
• Flu.gov’s Twitter stream
• Flu.gov’s newsroom
• H1N1 pages of various newspapers
• Various flu bloggers

Rekha, Josh, and Ken were also very helpful in forwarding many ideas and contacts they ran across during their own FluPortal work.

I also regularly scanned social-media sites like Flickr, Vimeo, and YouTube for clever user-generated content. (Details in FluPortal’s social-media guide.)

Illustrations: We aimed — almost without exception — to illustrate each post with some kind of photograph, logo, or video to give it color.

If a post was about an initiative from a pubmedia station, we included the station logo and, sometimes, a headshot of a particular staff member.

Example:
“Building an H1N1 Web Page with Limited Resources”

If a post was about a photograph or video, we maximized the photo/video to fit the width of the blog. This meant it was generally around 500 pixels wide, which gave it as much visibility as possible.

Examples:
“Photos You Can Use: More H1N1 Graffiti”
“Pictures of the 1976 Swine-Flu Outbreak”

For most other posts, we used creative-commons-licensed photos from Flickr that added visual punch and, if possible, humor or a small editorial twist. We made these “illustration” photos 300 pixels wide (or 300 tall if they were vertical photos) and wrapped text around them.

Examples:
“Shifts in the H1N1 Story”
“International Info on H1N1”

Attribution and links: We made sure to attribute photos and videos with links and in a stylistically consistent way. Most of the images we posted were creative-commons licensed — so we indicated that they were “cc” and that they were freely usable by journalists/stations. (A creative-commons license allows you to use photos/videos/writing/etc. freely with attribution.)

Example of one of our typical photo attributions (showing content and style):
[Orin Zebest / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]
See here how it appears in the post.

We used links throughout our posts, too, so that journalists could click through quickly to reports, news stories, studies, etc. if they were interested. We also used links as a form of footnotes — to back up statements we made.

Editing: We often ran post drafts by another member of the FluPortal team — especially if we felt a critical eye could help with tone or delicate editorial questions.

If a post contained quotes from an interview, we typically asked the source to check them. Our goal here — as we weren’t practicing investigative journalism — was to make sure we represented people’s views in ways they approved.

Updates: Occasionally we updated posts if we’d forgotten something, had made a mistake, or if new relevant info emerged. We always indicated that the update was an update (good blogging practice).

Example:
“Google’s Flu-Shot Locator”

Screenshot from post showing an update

Guest posts: For guest posts, we introduced each writer very briefly — in italics — and then gave the rest of the post over to their words.

Examples:
“WDET’s Ellcessor on Community Health Awareness”
“MPR’s Lorna Benson: Reporting on H1N1”

Searching the blog: One problem with a blog format is that, over time, older posts are buried and become hard to find. So we added month-based archives and eight “categories” to the sidebar — to help readers find posts. (The categories were: H1N1 data, ideas for covering H1N1, on-air, online, pubmedia coverage, social media, vaccine, and web tools.)

We also added a site-wide search box in November. This pulled results from the blog as well as the rest of the site. As of the end of February, we counted 121 unique searches (with 179 pageviews). Judging by the search terms, it looks like the FluPortal team made the majority of those 121 searches. (In other words: we frequently used the search box ourselves to locate old blog posts.)

We also made an effort, on the blog, to link back to older posts where relevant. And certain “evergreen” posts we featured more permanently on, say, the “Reporter and Program Resources” page.

Examples of “evergreen” posts linked to from the “Resources” page:
“Terminology: H1N1 v. Swine Flu”
“H1N1 v. Swine Flu: The Rematch”

How We Approached Each Type of Blog Post
1. Important government updates: We offered links to government press releases, transcripts, audio, video, etc. We also tried to pull particularly interesting quotes or ideas — to save busy reporters some time (as some of the government material was pretty dense and time-consuming to wade through).

Examples:
“Sebelius: Assessing the Federal Response to H1N1”
“WHO: We Didn’t Hype the H1N1 Pandemic”
“National Influenza Vaccine Week: 10-16 Jan”

2. Interesting public-media coverage: We avoided just pointing to coverage and instead tried to highlight informative aspects of whatever we featured — the hows and whys of it.

Examples:
“WILL’s Lessons Learned from H1N1 Coverage”
“Building an H1N1 Page with Limited Resources”
“How MPR Has Approached Reporting on H1N1”
“Joe Neel: on NPR’s H1N1 Coverage”
“A Global View of Flu from PRI’s The World”
“WFCR’s Regional Special on H1N1”
“How WBUR’s Sacha Pfeiffer Reports on H1N1”

3. Web tools that stations could use on H1N1 pages: This was largely Josh’s domain. As he added resources to the “For Station Resources” page, he typically also featured them in a blog posts.

Examples:
“New Widget Displays PubMedia H1N1 Coverage”
“Use CoveritLive for Real-Time Conversations”

4. News stories: Of the initial five goals for post topics, the “major H1N1 news stories” category was the only one that didn’t translate easily to the blog. Here’s why: Most major H1N1 news was already being reported extensively by mainstream and public media. It made no sense to waste a day’s post on information that journalists would already have in spades.

So here’s how I approached heavily-reported news: I bookmarked some of the better reporting in Delicious. (See section on Delicious below.) But I rarely blogged about the pieces.

Instead, for newsy blog posts, I tried to highlight underreported studies, smaller original angles, nuggets from government releases that might have gone unnoticed, clarifications of the confusing and ever-shifting H1N1 data, and unusual sources of news/info. All stuff that was out there, important, and ripe for the picking — but not yet really expanded on by pubmedia reporters.

Examples of posts about studies:
“Why Many Older People Are Protected Against H1N1”
“A New Way to Create Flu Vaccines”
“Four New H1N1 Studies”

Examples of posts about angles:
“Was H1N1 Info Communicated Well to the Public?”
“Flu.gov: Using Social Media to Boost Outreach”
“The Story Behind Facebook Flu Fighters”
“How Effective Are Flu Vaccines?”

Examples of posts about nuggets of government info:
“National Influenza Vaccine Week: 10-16 Jan”
“H1N1 Timeline from Flu.gov”

Examples of posts trying to illuminate the H1N1 data:
“H1N1 v. Swine Flu: The Rematch”
“Comparing Mortality Data for H1N1 and Seasonal Flu”
“Google Flu Trends Map”

Examples of posts highlighting sources of news and information that reporters might not yet have been aware of:
“Mayo Clinic: A Source of Public-Health Information”
“Assessing H1N1 Blogs”
“H1N1 Video and Audio PSAs in 12 Languages”
“CDC Media Briefing Transcripts”

5. FluPortal news: We used the blog to spread the word about FluPortal news (e.g., about upcoming webinars or new elements of the website).

Examples:
“New Resources and Tools on FluPortal”
“Jan 28 Webinar: FluPortal.org and Crisis Coverage”
“New NPR Flu Map Available from NPR”

6. Photos and video from social media: Flickr, Vimeo, and YouTube occasionally yielded smart user-generated content. (FluPortal’s social-media guide explains how we searched and filtered the massive amount of UGC: http://www.fluportal.org/enrich-your-reporting-with-social-media-leads-and-content/.)

Certain flu blogs were useful in pointing to good news and information about H1N1, but the blogosphere didn’t offer many interesting first-person accounts from flu sufferers.

When we found good UGC, we posted it on the blog — so that journalists could use it to illustrate stories or to generate story or guest ideas.

Examples:
“Photos You Can Use: Swine-Flu Street Art”
“Reporting on Cultural Responses to H1N1”
“H1N1 PSA Videos for Your Website”

In addition to offering up UGC that journalists could use, we wrote several posts explaining how they could go about finding it themselves.

Examples:
“Enrich Your H1N1 Reporting by Using Social Media”
“Find H1N1 Photos for Your Website”

We weren’t able to assess whether pubmedia journalists were using the UGC we found — or whether they were looking for any themselves.

Katie Donnelly, the associate research director of American University’s Center for Social Media, felt that FluPortal should have solicited UGC directly on the site (both crowdsourced information and first-person accounts). Details in this blog post. Something to consider for future “crisis portals.”

7. Generalized resources on crisis reporting: In January, as H1N1 became less of a story, we started thinking about generalizing the lessons of FluPortal for possible future crisis projects. We tried to reflect in blog posts some of that thinking about crisis coverage.

Examples:
“Two Approaches to Integrating Social Media”
“A Guide to Reporting on Crises”
“Crisis Response in Haiti”

Blog Comments
Very few blog readers commented on our posts. We’re not sure why. Site analytics show that people were reading the blog, but for some reason they weren’t commenting.

At first we thought this might be because our blog template didn’t make it clear enough where/how to comment. So partway through the project, we added an obvious link at the bottom of each post saying “comment on this post.” This change didn’t have any effect.

Katie Donnelly, associate research director at American University’s Center for Social Media, told us that in her experience, pubmedia people simply don’t often comment on blogs. She’s not entirely sure why. (Read more here.) We did try offering a Google Group as an alternative place for pubmedia staff to communicate, but only two people signed up.

Bookmarking Using Delicious

We used Delicious.com to collect good articles, audio, and video about H1N1. Delicious allows you to bookmark and tag any web page — and offer up your bookmarks to the public.

The point of the bookmarks — like that of FluPortal generally — was to provide the best available swine-flu information to journalists and web managers working on H1N1. Our collection of bookmarks was assembled with an editorial eye; automated aggregators cannot filter for quality.

We displayed the bookmarks directly on FluPortal’s “Reporter and Program Resources” page and of course in our account on Delicious. Journalists/stations could also subscribe to the RSS feed of the bookmarks.

Throughout the project, we boomarked H1N1 information from mainstream media, public media, public-health agencies and organizations, and even social media.

Once the Daylife widget launched (at the end of January, 2010), it collected pubmedia coverage automatically. We therefore stopped bookmarking pubmedia pieces in Delicious unless the content was especially interesting.

Feedback from stations (solicited by Ken partway through the project) suggested that people weren’t using the Delicious bookmarks as actively as we’d hoped. One person also asked Ken whether the bookmarked pieces were from “trusted sources.” In response, we featured the bookmarks more conspicuously on the “Reporter and Program Resources” page — and tried to explain their utility more clearly. We also changed the way we displayed the bookmarks — to show prominently their reliable source (e.g., NPR, New York Times, etc.).

Unfortunately we don’t have any stats showing how many people looked at/used the Delicious bookmarks (and none, either, showing how many people subscribed to the RSS feed). Future “crisis portal” projects might set up a way to measure this.

Site As a Whole

Goals and Revisions
We revised and edited the site as a whole throughout the life of the project. These were our main goals:

• Make the site look better
• Improve the site’s organization
• Continue adding resources
• Create and add our own guides (to web tools and social media)
• Change the emphasis of the homepage to reflect changes in the H1N1 story
• Improve transparency (about the project and its staff)

This was an ongoing process of tightening/changing language, improving formatting, adding images to break up text, adding links, reorganizing pages, and adding pages.

We worked on this as a team. Feedback from Ken and Rekha’s outreach helped us figure out what needed improving. Two specific examples: We reworked significantly the presentation of information on the “For Station Websites” and “Reporter and Program Resources” pages — to make it more accessible. And we added staff bios on the “About” page.

Josh took care of the more complicated code changes and kept the “Public Media Coverage” page up-to-date (refreshing the features and adding to the list of H1N1 landing pages). He also wrote FluPortal’s technical guides.) I contributed the social-media guide and worked on overall site wording, organization, and consistency.

Some General Practices We Followed
We adopted NPR’s standard of using the terms H1N1 and swine flu interchangeably. (See details of NPR’s decision here.)

We tried to make sure that the links to resources were descriptive — so that people could decide quickly whether it was worth their time to click through. If the name of an organization/article/etc. wasn’t descriptive enough by itself, we wrote up a brief additional explanation.

The links we included on the “Reporter and Program Resources” page came primarily from reliable government, public-health, medical, and media sources. We also added links to some of the “evergreen” posts from our own blog.

The Future

The division of responsibilities within the FluPortal team seemed to work easily and well. Because the four of us were in different places, we used email, IM, and conference calls to communicate.

Four hours a day was just about the right amount of time for the blogger/editor job. If H1N1 had turned into a bigger story, and/or if it had made sense to publish more posts per day, four hours might not have been enough.

A Question About the Blog’s Purpose: Do Reporters Want Story Leads?
If CPB pursues similar projects in the future, answers to the following questions would help steer the blog: Do pubmedia reporters actually want story leads? Are they helpful?

These are important questions because FluPortal’s goal was to help improve reporting on H1N1. Much of the pubmedia swine-flu coverage understandably focused on vaccines, but there were other interesting stories out there that perhaps were underreported. Was this because stations were understaffed? Because they had no specialized health/science reporters? If so, it would be instructive to know how/whether story leads could help.

If it turns out that story leads really are useful to reporters, it would be great if the blogger could do some of his/her own reporting. Not to produce fully reported stories — but to flesh out interesting leads just enough to be more of a tease for pubmedia reporters.

I found the no-reporting restriction to be the most challenging part of the FluPortal blogger job. It seemed to limit the utility and originality of the blog.

Should the Blogger be an Expert on the Crisis Topic?
If at least one person on the FluPortal team had been a health/science reporter, it would have made collecting reputable resources much faster initially. A health reporter would have started with a working knowledge of trustworthy online and offline sources. S/he would likely also have been more skilled at identifying new resources and material for the blog.

For future projects, it would be ideal if one person on the project team — ideally the blogger — were experienced on the relevant beat. I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary, though, as we were able, relatively quickly, to get up to speed on flu.

I do feel that the blogger, even if not a topic expert, does need to be an experienced journalist. It’s easy to spread misinformation on any story; easier still during a crisis because of time pressures. The blogger/editor job requires someone who can distinguish valid sources of information, discern interesting story angles and sources, and write blog posts that may be steering other journalists. A critical editorial eye is key.

Should Future Crisis Projects Use Social Media More Extensively?
We used (and talked about) social media fairly extensively on FluPortal. We didn’t, however, set up Facebook, Twitter, or other similar accounts — largely because FluPortal was aimed at pubmedia, and FB/Twitter seemed too publicly oriented.

Should future projects reconsider this?

One particular social-media tool arrived too late for FluPortal but could be useful to future projects: Delicious now offers a way to send out bookmarks automatically via Twitter. Had this feature existed when FluPortal began, it would have been another useful way to distribute the information we were collecting.

Katie Donnelly — associate research director at American University’s Center for Social Media — feels that future projects could benefit from more crowdsourced information, more first-person accounts, and more ways for station staff to connect with one another. (Details of her critique here.)

What Should Happen to the FluPortal.org Website?
Rather than dismantling the FluPortal.org site to create a more general “CrisisPortal,” why not leave FluPortal.org as is — as an archive — and essentially “copy and paste” it to create a separate CrisisPortal?

Creating a separate generic CrisisPortal wouldn’t be any more work than dismantling FluPortal and re-building it as a CrisisPortal.

Keeping FluPortal online as an archive would serve two goals: it would be a permanent record of CPB’s project; and it would preserve information that could be very useful during a third wave of H1N1 or a future flu pandemic.

Creating a separate CrisisPortal would be easy to do using FluPortal as a model. It could start with (and improve on) FluPortal’s template for site structure and layout. It could even adopt generic versions of many of FluPortal’s tech/social-media guides — which could be useful during any kind of crisis. CrisisPortal could exist either as a permanently generic site, or it could itself be a model to be “copied and pasted” to create other crisis-specific sites (e.g., EarthquakePortal).
 

FluPortal Outreach and Communication

by Ken Mills

Overview

I began my outreach work on behalf of FluPortal.org in mid-October 2009. At that time, H1N1 infections and deaths were continuing to rise. Vaccine was in short supply and deliveries were often late. H1N1 news was a priority for almost all news media.

Because the project was already in motion, my first priority was to assess current perceptions and usage. To me, outreach works best when it combines “push” and “pull” – listening is as important as talking.

At the beginning of a project, I often rely on feedback from a loose network of trusted public broadcasting veterans. Most of these observers wish to remain anonymous and they extend the same courtesy to me when they ask for my take on their projects.

My informal group for FluPortal.org included the head of a major public radio organization, a program director at one of the most listened-to NPR News stations in the nation, a news director who has led several system-wide initiatives and a researcher with over 30 years of public broadcasting experience. I asked each observer to visit FluPortal.org. Here are some of the things I learned:

• Though almost all of the observers had heard of FluPortal.org, many were confused about the mission of the project. Observers sometimes expected FluPortal.org to be a source for news about H1N1.
• The observers praised the design and comprehensive assembly of material found on the site. Some expressed concern that the layout of the site was “too dense.”
• A couple of observers said there was no groundswell of station need for the project. One person said it seemed like “CPB’s reaction to the crisis of the week.”

With this baseline feedback, I contacted people who had already been in contact with FluPortal.org and people who attended the October 7, 2009, webinar. From these contacts I learned a sizeable number of public radio and public TV stations made immediate use of FluPortal.org tools and resources to establish landing pages on their websites.

Next, I widened the circle of outgoing contacts to include representatives of other public radio and public TV stations, community information outlets, groups involved with health care advocacy and journalism, and infectious disease bloggers.

At public radio stations I most often was in contact with web managers, news directors and reporters. At public TV stations I most typically spoke with web managers and outreach coordinators.

At all points in the process, I reported what I was hearing to others on the FluPortal.org team. The team held weekly conference calls. We discussed site design, direction of the project, ideas for blog posts and the larger trends in the H1N1 pandemic.

Over the subsequent months, the incidence of new H1N1 infections and deaths declined. My outreach work evolved from advocating awareness and use of FluPortal.org to analysis of coverage trends and identification of station and public media needs.

Based on conversations over the course of the project, I’ve found that public media awareness of the FluPortal.org was quite high. I was in contact with roughly 100 public radio station folks by telephone and e-mail and at the Western States Public Radio Conference in November 2009. Based on these contacts, I estimate that approximately 90 percent of the radio station people I communicated with were aware of FluPortal.org. I estimate that 25 percent of those people who were aware of FluPortal.org had visited the site.

I was also in contact with roughly 60 public television station folks by telephone and e-mail and at the NETA PBS Conference in January 2010. Based on these contacts, I estimate that approximately 60 percent of the television station people were aware of FluPortal.org and about 20 percent had been to the site.

My outreach also included contact with health information community groups, professional journalism organizations including the Association of Health Care Journalists and influential infectious disease bloggers.

Over the course of the project I noticed these attributes of usage:

• Public radio and TV station officials praised the purpose, design and turnkey tools provided by FluPortal.org. Several stations’ representatives said they were able to quickly implement H1N1 information and implement local landing pages.
• Station representatives frequently said that the volume of information and the number of items on the site were overwhelming. Many stations stated they had limited resources and this prevented them from pursuing H1N1 coverage or landing pages.
• I observed less use of resources in the early months of the project by reporters from public radio and TV stations. These factors were observed:
  • A significant number of public radio stations and most public TV stations considered the H1N1 pandemic to be a national story, not a local story. Only a handful of public radio stations employ reporters who are dedicated to the coverage of health and medical news.
  • H1N1 coverage most often focused on two angles: rates of infections and deaths and the supply and shortage of vaccine. Beyond these two angles there was little enterprise or long-form reporting.
• Though radio reporters who had used FluPortal.org praised the comprehensive resources found on the site, several observers felt the physical presentation of items inhibited their quick facts when they were on deadline.
• There is no consensus among public radio and TV stations about the role of their websites and current news. Many stations don’t believe they are in the “news business.” There are a growing number of public radio station websites that have evolved from being “virtual program guides” to become destination news and information portals. These stations typically made ample use of FluPortal.org tools and resources. Some public TV stations have aggressive local outreach. These stations typically made use of FluPortal.org tools. Since very few public TV stations broadcast local news programming, there was little demand for reporter resources by TV stations.
• There appears to be only moderate station interest in media engagement (e.g., community engagement) activities, particularly by public radio stations. The most common reason cited was the lack of resources. Also, some station managers are resistant to the role of convening their local communities around current events and issues. They consider their broadcasting and online services to be their core services.

Use of Feedback

Considerable portions of my outreach efforts involved getting feedback and putting it to use to make FluPortal.org more effective for users. I am impressed by the willingness of public radio and public TV professionals to provide useful perspective and helpful advice.

A few of the many people who have been particularly helpful are Tanya Ott (WBHM-FM), Dale Berenc (KETC-TV), Andrew Phelps (WBUR-FM), Tina Hauser (Wisconsin Public Television), Mark Nelson (Vegas Public TV) and Tripp Summer (KLCC-FM).

These specific actions resulted from the feedback:

• Because reporters had expressed the need for easy-to-access facts and stats, reporter resources were reorganized to highlight items that were most useful to meet immediate news deadlines.
• Because public radio and TV representatives cited their limited resources for online initiatives, FluPortal.org provided examples of how stations of all sizes were providing portals for flu information with a minimum of time and cost. FluPortal.org provided turnkey solutions with “Quick,” “Easy” and “Go Big” resource templates.
• As the number of H1N1 infections and deaths declined in the later months of the project, FluPortal.org provided useful “arc of the story” perspective and coverage ideas.

Webinars

FluPortal.org conducted two webinars. The first was held on October 7, 2009, and the second was held on January 28, 2010. Chart One shows the number of attendees and types of organizations they represented:

Interest in the webinars was driven, in part, by the urgency of the H1N1 story. In October 2009 the flu was daily breaking news. By late January 2010 many observers felt H1N1 threat was over. Attendance at webinar #1 by PBS officials and public TV station representatives was a result, in part, of aggressive promotion by the National Center for Media Engagement (NCME).

Conferences

I attended two public broadcasting conferences on behalf of FluPortal.org: Western State Public Radio (WSPR) in November 2009 in Portland, Oregon, and the National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) in January 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

• At WSPR, I observed a growing trend among public radio stations: making station websites high-value, must-read news and information sources to increase traffic and value. The rationale for this strategy is to enhance online brand identity and leverage the “NPR News position” in a media environment where other providers are cutting back. Since few public radio stations have the resources to build news sites on their own, aggregate news portals such as FluPortal.org can fill a growing need for content, turnkey tools and resources.
• At NETA, FluPortal.org was publicly praised in an early session. Mark Nelson, Outreach Coordinator for Vegas Public TV said: “I am so glad that FluPortal is here because it is such a tremendous resource. I visited the site a couple of months ago and we have made extensive use of it. I recommend it to your station. It is ‘one stop shopping’ for H1N1 information – you need look no further.”

I also observed that public TV stations are very concerned about low traffic to their websites. Several stations said the number of discreet visitors to their sites was below 5,000 per month. Some public TV stations reported they were limiting outreach and media engagement activities because off layoffs.

Lessons Learned

• Elements of the FluPortal.org site that seemed to work best:
  • The “Quick,” “Easy” and “Go Big” resource templates because they offered avenues for H1N1 coverage to public media shops of all sizes and budgets.
  • The FluPortal.org blog because it provided context for the other material found on the site.
  • Reporter Resources, after changes were made to prioritize most-needed resources because most reporters using the site were on deadline.
• If time had permitted, it would have been helpful to beta test certain aspects of the site. Because FluPortal.org was launched so quickly, changes in design and content were needed. Feedback from users and other observers was vital to improving the value of the site. But, in a perfect world, beta testing would likely have identified aspects of the site that needed to be revised.
• Because stations voluntarily choose to use resources and tools provided by FluPortal.org, it is impossible to compile a complete list of all users.
• The FluPortal.org blog was important because it kept the site fresh and in touch with the evolving H1N1 story.
• Experience demonstrated the best places and ways to publicize FluPortal.org. For instance, the PRNDI bulletin broad Newslink was enormously effective to reach reporters and news directors.

Best Practices and Future Thoughts

• Know the true needs and capabilities of stations to use resources and tools provided by a project. There may have been assumptions prior to the launch of FluPortal.org that most public radio and public TV stations had the staff, resources and desire to provide aggressive local H1N1 information. But, only some public radio stations, typically news stations, and even fewer public TV stations, were interested.
• Talk with station web masters, news directors and reporters from stations of all sizes when preparing a project for launch. Beta testing and earlier feedback would have eliminated some of the trial and error we experienced with FluPortal.org.
• Make certain that messages used to promote the project address the actual needs and capabilities of the stations. FluPortal.org could have crafted early campaign messages to address the misperception of the site as a news source.
• Develop a target list of stations that are most likely to have the capability and interest to create landing pages, provide local news coverage and/or mount meaningful outreach efforts.
• Use examples of stations making use of the project resources and tools as a way demonstrate best practices in action. FluPortal’s blog and Public Media Coverage pages provided helpful ideas for stations of all sizes.
• Be realistic about the interest and ability of stations to conduct major media engagement activities. From what I observed, many public radio stations consider public events to be outside of their core service. Public TV stations are reporting cutbacks in outreach staff and resources.
• Be open to big questions about the design and mission of a project. For instance, FluPortal.org was designed to provide an “editorially neutral” menu of tools and resources – a “curator” role. But, even curators make editorial decisions by the information they include and manner of presentation.
• FluPortal.org users, particularly reporters, frequently asked for story ideas and feedback on stories they had produced. Though we always tried to provide useful feedback, FluPortal.org might have been more effective had it suggested cross station and cross platform collaborations and provided an editorial “convening” function. Future projects might specify these approaches.

 

Appendix: Non-PubMedia Organization Contact List

U.S. Government and U.N. Agencies

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Department of Health and Human Services
Flu.gov (collaboration of CDC, HHS, and other agencies)
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
National Archives
World Health Organization

News and Media Organizations

Association of Health Care Journalists
Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University
ITVS Interactive
Media Bistro
National Association of Science Writers
Online News Association
Poynter Institute
Radio & Television News Directors Association
Society of Professional Journalists
Center for Independent Media
MinnPost
ProPublica
The Nonprofit Road
The Texas Tribune
Public Insight Network
National Center for Media Engagement
Station Action for Emergency Readiness (SAFER) project
Health News Florida
Kaiser Health News
Science and Development Network
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
American University’s Center for Social Media

Health and Community Organizations

AidMatrix
National Association of Free Clinics
Inclusive Preparedness Center
Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy
Mayo Clinic
American Medical Association
American Red Cross
United Way America
US Conference of Mayors
Harvard School of Public Health
Children’s Hospital (Boston)