This is about us making a really conscious effort to raise our game in everything we do, telling better stories and telling them in more creative ways.” We’ve got to tell more amazing stories in more amazing ways. “We can’t take audience for granted on any platform. “For us to succeed in public radio and public media, we’ve got to be better than we’ve ever been,” Turpin said. Some projects may go back to the lab, to podcasts, to shows. The Storytelling Lab is an experiment in itself, and the whole process is iterative. ![]() Following this two-week sprint, the individual will present the project to the panel and at a brown bag to the entire newsroom. This could involve reporting, engineering, and mixing an audio story, or developing and building an app or website. Inevitably, there will be multiple projects happening simultaneously in the future.Īs senior producer and resident polymath, May will support the employee and his or her project from idea to proof of concept. Right now, there will be one project in the lab at a time. ![]() Turpin says they don’t want one employee’s absence to cause more work for others. To prevent work from piling up, NPR has put aside funds for backfill in the newsroom. This person will forgo his or her daily duties and responsibilities for the duration of the lab session. A volunteer panel comprised of individuals across the newsroom will then review all of the pitches and select one person to work in the lab for two weeks. ![]() In the LabĪccording to Turpin, anybody at NPR (with the focus being on those in the newsroom) can pitch an idea to the lab. “What I like about the NPR model is that it’s so focused on giving people in the newsroom a chance to do new things,” he said. A former public radio reporter himself, May will work closely with staff members who are selected for the lab, developing a close relationship with the editorial coaching and development team and applying lessons from the lab to the daily grind in NPR’s newsroom. May, the Lab’s new senior producer, comes to NPR from The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and will be responsible for coordinating the Storytelling Lab. Michael May will lead NPR’s Storytelling Lab. Chris Turpin, NPR’s vice president of news programming and operations, took this idea and tweaked it to address what the organization sees as its current challenge: the development of its storytelling model. Inspired by venture capital models, like those on the television show “Shark Tank,” the Lab’s origins begin with Matt Thompson, former director of vertical initiatives at NPR, who wrote a paper calling for a year of experimentation in the art of storytelling. Technically, the NPR Storytelling Lab is a launchpad for innovation within the organization. The lab provides an opportunity for NPR employees to pitch, pursue and develop passion projects away from the pressures of their day-to-day responsibilities. With its new Storytelling Lab, NPR has created a designated space to think about and experiment with the act of storytelling not just in radio or podcasts, but across all platforms. ![]() Consider the parody of Serial on Saturday Night Live, President Barack Obama’s appearance on WTF with Marc Maron, or the rise of podcast networks and companies, like Gimlet Media. In fact, podcasts are no longer a niche medium they’ve become part of the mainstream media. Since those early days, the podcast landscape has expanded and evolved beyond numbers alone.
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