Schiller on public radio's future

The team at Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Vivian Scihller, head of National Public Radio, about the nonprofit's "public media platform." Here's her description of it:

So the idea is: What if it wasn’t just NPR content, but a vast amount of public media content and data that could be available in a large — you know, sort of an API on steroids, a public media platform. Think about NPR content: all the content from the public radio stations, all the content from the other radio producers and distributors like PRI and APM and PRX, all the content from PBS. Now imagine all the content from the other new media players, all the new not-for-profits, like the ProPublicas of the world, and all the local, online journalism startups. And then you can go on and imagine data.

The full interview is here.

The electronic Times

The New York Times has added a couple new ways to read the paper online.

The first is Times Wire, which provides real-time updates of everything posted to the website. To keep readers from getting overwhelmed, the feed has a "your news" option that lets them include only those sections they want to hear from.

The Times has also launched Times Reader 2.0, a subscription service that's built on Adobe Air to create a more newspaper-ish experience when reading online. Dan Kennedy at Media Nation had this to say:

Times Reader really does offer a superior online reading experience. You're more likely actually to read the paper rather than just skip around. And it's a lot cheaper (we get the Sunday print edition delivered, so there's no extra charge for us) — not to mention more environmentally friendly — than the print edition.

Kennedy also said this:

But free is free. In addition, the Times Web edition is a livelier place, with more ads (perhaps that will change as Times Reader gains in acceptance), blogs and other extra content. In addition, if you're a blogger and you want to post something you see in Times Reader, you have to leave, access the Web edition and find the story again in order to grab the URL.

The Times Reader costs $3.45 a week.

There's more on the Times e-reader R&D shop at the Nieman Lab.

(h/ts LA Observed and Media Nation)