Todd Mundt

We've been hosting a series of conversations about audio innovation over the past few weeks, including webinars with Andy Bowers of Slate and Roman Mars, creator of 99% Invisible. Earlier this week, I spoke with Dean Cappello, the Chief Content Officer of WNYC/New York Public Radio. I wanted his perspective as someone who has years of experience producing audio, as well as overseeing the work of others, including successful shows like Here's the Thing, Radiolab, Studio 360, and On the Media.

If you missed the webinar, you can watch it here. But if you don't have an hour, here are my takeaways from the conversation with Cappello; the paraphrasing is my own.

Fostering new ideas from concept to reality brings rewards, but it's not without risk.

We talked to Dean Cappello, Chief Content Officer and Senior Vice President of Programming at WNYC about how the station has become a leader in innovative storytelling on multiple platforms. 

This is NPR has a post about the secret sauce that makes a great call-in radio show, based on best practices at NPR’s Talk of the Nation, WBUR’s On Point, and NHPR’s The Exchange. Among the ingredients:

We're adding new functionality to Core Publisher so your shares to Twitter appear in the new Cards format. Cards allows Twitter to display your content in a rich media environment - with a photo, for instance. It's a more compelling experience and we're excited to make the stories you publish in CP work with cards.

We’ve been fairly generous in our shout-outs about the Michigan Radio Guide to Ballot Proposals. It’s a simple story: voters faced six different proposals to make changes to the Michigan Constitution, the largest number in any single Michigan election in about 35 years.

Tuesday was the big day for the Battleground blog, our experiment to aggregate coverage from a small group of stations across the country into a single live feed. We already know and believe that stations produce exceptionally good reporting, even inside the breaking news pressure cooker. We also know and believe that some of this content is relevant to a national audience.

So before we went all in on a system-wide effort, we wanted to test a few things on a smaller scale: 

Have you heard about Battleground? We'll be aggregating reporting on important races and initiatives from NPR Member Stations, and making it available in an experimental live-blog on election night. Click here for more details.

Now... here's the latest on Battleground from the Newsroom at NPR in Boston:

First of all, please note that 1) Teresa is not faking that phone call, and 2) Eric is happy to be here.

News Directors, Managers, Program Directors: Signing up for high quality digital news training is a no-brainer! But just in case, four reasons why you should do it now: