Portland Bike Art Pic by PortlandGround.com

Recently Josh Catone wrote an article on Mashable entitled ‘Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media.’ In it he points out how NPR has been adjusting and preparing for the coming digital landscape that will affect news media – radio, TV and newspapers. To avoid the fate of other news media, NPR has embraced the triangulation of local content, social media [in its true form] and ubiquitous access.

Local: Catone quotes new NPR CEO Vivian Schiller – “To me, local is the big play, because local commercial radio has abandoned the local market. Local newspapers are withering or sometimes dying. The big national media companies, including excellent ones like The New York Times, cannot afford to be covering every single community. So that leaves a big, gaping hole to serve Americans’ local coverage,” she told mediabistro.com in April.

The Social Web: Catone points out that “NPR’s Twitter account has over 780,000 followers, making it one of the top 25 on the social network (and third among news organizations behind only the New York Times and CNN). Their Facebook Page has over 400,000 fans.”

The tools now available for social web activity give news media of all stripes a way to connect, communicate and share information with their audience, attracting new listeners and retaining existing ones. NPR has taken this all the way with blogs, podcasts and mobile apps. Here in Portland, OPB Music is one of the few stations that focuses on local music and music from the Pacific Northwest. Given Portland’s rich and diverse music population there is never a shortage of great new music yet you will be hard pressed to find it on any local commercial stations. And as the audience for music fractures and spreads far and wide across the internet, online radio will be the biggest winner.

Even the face of music concerts is changing – as bands perform house parties or shows in other spontaneous locations local mainstream media should be jumping all over it working with local bloggers to bring access to live streams or reviews. Yet so far they haven’t, it’s been left to local alternative outlets such as OPB Music or local alternative newspapers like the Willamette Week or the Portland Mercury to cover. Even the New York Times has belatedly jumped in on local music activities with an article entitled ‘Indie Rockers, 90210.’

There appears to be no end to the bleeding for local mainstream radio and TV – revenues are set to plunge 15% according to this report. On the other hand NPR’s audience continues to grow. They had 23.6 million people tuning in weekly at the end of ‘08.

In a strange twist, in what I presume is a response to the obvious downturn in advertising revenues, Portland radio station 94.7FM KNRK recently laid off one of its more popular radio personalities, Tara Dublin. Byron Beck a local reporter, and himself the victim of layoffs at the Willamette Week, broke the news. It appears that Dublin does have a local fan base – her ‘Save Tara’ Facebook page is garnering support from her fans. Those fans are complaining that 94.7 won’t let them leave comments in support of Dublin on the station’s forums. If true, that is bad social web practice. There is also the opposite view – Save Tara? Save Us From Not Having Tara on the Air – that is not as negative as it sounds; people are pointing out that if commercial radio continues its decline why would Dublin want to go down with the ship? This is the social web in action – people listening and joining the conversation; NPR understands this and embraces it.

Mobile Ubiquity: It is not just the success of the very popular iPhone that now gives people far-ranging mobile internet access from handheld devices, but the new, faster iPhone S does make it even easier and is a significant driver of mobile web traffic. RIM’s Blackberry, the Google Android device and the new Palm Pre are all in the race to be the web access mobile device of choice too.

Catone mentions Happn.in a new site that tracks trends locally on Twitter in 52 different metro areas around the world. This is a very useful tool and as Twitter search begins to be a popular way for people to find trending events and news, hyper-local will be incredibly important – searching for local events and news at the zipcode level is getting easier and easier. All local media outlets need to take note.

Related articles:

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Authenticity and Authority on the Social Web
Hyper-Local News and Portland’s Hillsdale District