saltzshaker - Tumblr blog

[saltzshaker]

Audio news round-up: Public radio rallies around diversity

Pop Up Archive newsletter, Oct 13, 2015

This week, we rounded up recent news from the radio and podcasting world. See what people have been writing — and podcasting — about topics like politics, diversity, and who's listening to broadcast vs. podcast audio.

Podcasting gets into the presidential race

Earlier this year, Marc Maron proved that podcasting could go presidential when he interviewed President Barack Obama in his "Cat Ranch" (aka Maron’s garage). This week, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton shows that she, too, is hip to what the kids are listening to by joining hosts Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton on the Another Round podcast from Buzzfeed Audio.

Clinton answers pressing questions like if can we expect Kanye as a future running mate, and whether she is actually a robot. (Her candid answer may surprise you.) Will other candidates follow the lead of Clinton and Obama and take to the podcasting circuit? Only time will tell. For now, you just owe it to yourself to listen to the brilliantly-titled interview: Madam Secretary, What's Good?

Changing the whiteness of the #PubRadioVoice: Public radio rallies around diversity  

Last week, radio wunderkind Stephanie Foo (This American Life, Snap Judgment) penned a manifesto for Transom.org: "What To Do If Your Workplace Is Too White.” In her piece, Foo outlines what newsrooms need to do to attract — and keep — minority voices in public media. Foo’s tips, like “Hire Editors of Color” and “Create A Safe Space — Even if it Means Swallowing Your Pride,” are much needed in an industry where the makers are 77% white, and audiences are close to 90% white. Also, there are illustrative gifs.

Elsewhere, Justin Ellis of Nieman Lab chats with Tasneem Raja, digital editor for NPR’s Code Switch unit. Raja talks about the approach she's taking with NPR’s first team exclusively covering issues of race, ethnicity and culture.

Raja makes the distinction between programming made for diverse audiences and programming made about diverse audiences: Code Switch isn’t meant to be “Race Studies 101.” Instead, Raja says, “our job is to talk to a broad audience that is not necessarily a white audience.”

Speaking of passing the mic to new voices...

In case you missed it, WNYC (New York Public Radio) has heard the cry for different stories on public radio: both winning teams of WNYC’s podcast accelerator contest aim to tell stories of diverse and minority populations:

“Gaydio producer/hosts Kathy Tu and Tobin Low described their show as “exactly what it sounds like” — a lighthearted biweekly magazine show about LGBTQ issues, with each episode based on a theme. The City producer/host Robin Amer said her investigative series about “the conflicts that drive every city” would be divided into seasons, each consisting of a single story from an American metropolis.”

Breaking news! 

The New York Times reported this week that WNYC is launching a new podcast division called WNYC Studios. Dean Cappello, WNYC’s executive vice president and chief content officer, says: “This is the way we will become a much, much bigger content company, period." The division is looking to raise $17M and developing pilot shows in partnership with Vice News, along with figures like author Roxane Gay, Jessica Williams of Comedy Central’s “Daily Show,” and comedian Sara Schaefer.

What separates terrestrial radio from podcasts?

Audience

On Current.org's podcast The Pub, radio researcher Fred Jacobs identifies two very different age demographics that are tuning into public radio content: millennials and baby boomers. In numbers, millennial listening still trails behind the 50+ age set, though it's steadily growing. Younger audiences are not only much more likely to listen on-demand through podcast apps, Jacobs says, but they're also listening for different reasons—more than boomers, younger listeners turn to public radio to learn.

Format 

Beyond public radio, the question arises, what is the relationship between radio listening and podcast listening as a whole? At Harvard's HUBWEEK panel, Radiotopia podcaster Benjamin Walker (Theory of Everything) went so far as to suggest that the relationship between podcasts and public radio is illusory to begin with: "In my opinion, the thread between public radio and podcasts doesn’t exist...There is something to this actual [podcast] medium itself. It’s different than radio. You can’t use the same tricks.”

Metrics

Broadcast radio and podcast listening are measured differently. On a16z Podcast's "Podcast about Podcasts," 99% Invisible host Roman Mars compares the metrics available for broadcast vs. podcasts. Mars argues that the real difference isn't the quality of data, but its standardization: "I always get kind of confused by the talk of how podcasts don't have good data. Because I worked in radio and we just sort of agreed on a lie together about what ratings meant."  Host Sonal Chokshi counters that because podcasts are digital, they offer the potential for more listening data that could offer insights to advertisers and publishers alike: "When you come from the web world...it's very frustrating to not be able to know [how many people are listening and when people dropped off]."

[saltzshaker]

Can personal taste power podcast discovery? How human curation helps audio discovery

Pop Up Archive newsletter, Nov 2, 2015

At Pop Up Archive, we spend a lot of time thinking about searchable audio. We’ve learned that nothing is more daunting than a blank search bar. When it comes to audio stories, we're picky about the voices we'll let yammer through our earbuds, yet we don’t always know what to look for. 

That’s where recommendations come in. The most exciting recommendations have a "right place, right time" serendipity.  What's the best way to model that discovery experience for thousands — even millions — of users?

EARBUD.FM showcases podcast episodes handpicked by listeners

This week, NPR released a project that taps into the taste of thousands of podcast listeners. EARBUD.FM, a web app spearheaded by NPR’s Arts Desk and built by NPR’s Viz team, curates hundreds of episodes into a "friendly" podcast listening sampler.

Recommendations come courtesy of audio pros like On The Media host Brooke Gladstone and celebrities like Matthew Mcconaughey, but also from regular listeners like Connecticut mom Liz Matthews, who wrote in to an NPR listener survey last Spring. A small panel of power listeners from the audio industry (full disclosure: the panel included Pop Up Archive co-founder Anne Wootton) helped sift through the responses to pick the best gateway episodes to get people hooked on podcasts.

EARBUD.FM users can navigate audio picks by category, including standards like "Comedy" and more cheeky mood- and format-based categories like "Tug At My Heartstrings" and "Tell Me A Story." You can even sort audio by who recommended it, e.g. "Pro & Celebrity Picks." Users who aren't sure what they want can cycle through random picks with the "Show Me Another" button.

By including podcasts from non-NPR networks like Earwolf and Radiotopia, EARBUD.FM is a resource catered not just to NPR's existing listeners, but broader digital audiences — including, crucially, those who aren't listening to podcasts yet. As listening increasingly takes place away from the radio dial, NPR has the interest and expertise to position themselves as podcast evangelists and tastemakers.

Product Hunt Podcasts: upvote episodes from all time

The product recommendation platform Product Hunt takes a more populist approach to podcast curation with "Product Hunt Podcasts." Users submit and vote on podcast episodes every day. In the style of Reddit, the episodes with the most upvotes float to the top. Though hypothetically the podcast picks belong to every genre, the tech-heavy Product Hunt userbase shows bias toward technology and business podcasts.

Product Hunt's Podcasts interface also features podcast-related products, live chats with podcasters, and featured episodes. Even the recommendation format is experimental: in addition to daily lists of upvoted podcasts, Product Hunt curates a podcast feed with one audio pick each day.

Others have dabbled in the idea of providing recommendations in the podcast form itself. Most recently, Nick Quah (author of podcast industry newsletter Hot Pod) started a podcast recommendation feed of his own. Instead of full episodes, Quah highlights featured clips, accepting submissions from listeners. His first pick was submitted to Product Hunt last week, where you can read more about it.

Other things to note about these curatorial approaches to podcast recommendation:

Neither EARBUD.FM nor Product Hunt Podcasts link to external listening apps. Instead, they offer in-browser listening via a persistent player docked at the bottom of the page. This means discovery is limited to the content already featured — you can't go browsing an index of thousands of shows.

Both privilege "evergreen content," or audio that's relevant but was created in the past.

Both treat podcast episodes as the essential units of listening, bucking the precedent of show-level subscriptions set by apps like iTunes Podcasts and Stitcher.

Though Product Hunt and NPR have different editorial processes for which podcasts are highlighted, both leverage the insights of the listening masses to create discovery experiences for diverse audiences.

For listeners, it's exciting to see platforms like EARBUD.FM and Product Hunt focus on podcast discovery. From the aggregate of these recommendations, we're collecting meaningful data to power recommendations at scale in the same way that Spotify recommends music through Discover Weekly playlists, or Netflix recommends different TV shows based on each user.

At Pop Up Archive and Audiosear.ch, we're interested in how we can use recommendations to categorize aspects of "taste" and turn them into a layer of data to recommend audio from an index of thousands of podcasts, catered to different listener preferences. The tastemaker pages on Audiosear.ch are a start — stay tuned as we grow and categorize recommendations in new ways.

[saltzshaker]

A year after Serial, where do podcasts stand?

Pop Up Archive newsletter, Dec 15, 2015

On December 7, The Tow Center of Digital Journalism released the first ever Guide to Podcasting. The Guide, written by Vanessa Quirk, integrated perspectives from a group of 29 industry leaders that ranged from Steve Wilson from the Podcasts team at Apple to indie podcasters like Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore Podcast.

Coming in at over 15,000 words (plus a glossary and citations), the guide offers much to sift through when it comes to the still nascent business of podcasting. Read what struck us as the most compelling takeaways from the report.

The unique promise of podcasts within media and advertising 

Quirk points out the ways in which podcasting is not just an awkward cousin to radio, but taps into key trends relevant to the future of all media. As publishers scramble to adapt their content for mobile consumption, the majority of podcast listening already occurs on mobile devices — a full 63% of Libsyn podcast listening occurred on smartphones in 2014, with room to grow as Android makes podcasts more accessible by including them in an upcoming release of Google Play.

The other trend is audio advertising. Between traffic-skewing bots and ad-blocker technology, the display ads that publishers of written content depend on are vulnerable sources of revenue in today's media landscape. In contrast, since podcast ads are heard, not seen, those same ad-blockers don't (yet?) apply. Further, since many ads — most notably Gimlet Media's — are host-read, and produced in-house, they're often perceived as being more engaging and persuasive to audiences, and thus more valuable to advertisers.

Different shows operate with different business philosophies

Quirk identifies three different "operating philosophies" of podcast shows, each with different goals:  

"Those that follow a 'universal' philosophy hope to get their podcasts heard by as many people as possible (and thus logically rely on advertising as an important revenue stream). Examples include: This American Life, New York Public Radio, Intelligence Squared

Those that follow a 'premium' model attempt to convert listeners into recurring, loyal patrons via bonus offerings. Examples include: Gimlet Media, Earwolf (Howl), Slate (Slate Plus), 99% Invisible

Those that follow a 'value-added' model use their podcasts as a means of enhancing both the consumer experience and the brand (and so revenue is not the primary goal). Examples include: BuzzFeed, Audible, Panoply (podcasts add value to publishing partners). "

Podcasts are still experimenting with different revenue streams

The report also identifies a number of sources of revenue for podcasts. These sources include direct support — i.e. listener donations and pledge drive engagement — and foundation support, such as the Knight Foundation's investment in the Radiotopia network. Some shows, like The Heart and Welcome to Night Vale (pictured left), are also turning to live events for extra revenue.

Podcasting companies like Midroll and Gimlet are also experimenting with membership models that offer extra content under paid subscription plans. Quirk points to the audiobook platform Audible as the one company that is entirely subscription-based. The biggest money-makers for podcasts are still advertising and sponsorship. Podcasts from 99% Invisible to WTF with Marc Maron read direct-response ads during their podcasts, encouraging users to enter promo codes. There's more business to be had attracting big brand advertisers to podcasting, such as the Ford ads on Gimlet show StartUp. However, these kinds of advertisers tend to want fine-grained metrics on who their ad is reaching: metrics that podcasting arguably can't yet provide.

Podcast metrics: good enough or woefully limited?

This question matters because the key revenue stream supporting podcasts is advertising. Can better data help make podcasts a better sell to advertisers? According to Quirk, two camps have emerged:

"One maintains that the tools of radio (surveys, extrapolations, etc.) are sufficient for podcasting measurement. The other wishes to push podcasting technology far enough to exploit the medium’s full digital potential—to the point that everything is “point to point measured,” in the words of Sarah van Mosel." Others, like Matt Lieber of Gimlet Media, think that what podcasting needs is a third party to oversee podcast data. Similar to how Nielsen ratings are used to measure television viewership, this would provide an industry standard that would have more legitimacy to advertisers.

Does podcasting have a branding problem?

More than 10 years after its creation, why do some still think of podcasting as being in an "early adopter phase?" Clea Conner Chang, the director of marketing for Intelligence Squared, suggests that it's not just the technology that people are slow to adopt, but the podcast brand:

People say, 'What’s a podcast? How do I get a podcast?' It has an inherent branding problem. … It’s just radio on demand. You can hear your favorite show any time, and they just don’t realize how it works yet, how convenient it is. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that streaming video became something with mass appeal, and this is streaming audio. It still hasn’t made that association. … Podcasting is on this precipice of being something understood by the masses—it’s not there yet.

Reaching the masses means reaching all age groups, which is still a struggle for podcasting: "A Midroll white paper shows that 67 percent of podcast listeners are 18–34 (to compare, only 30.2 percent of radio listeners fall in this demographic).The podcasting audience skews toward the under-40s, a generation for whom the concept of on-demand content makes sense."

The growth of podcasts remains slow and steady

For all of the podcast buzz of the last year, it turns out that the wildly popular Serial podcast wasn't a magic bullet to podcast adoption, which continues to grow slowly and steadily — with the percent of the US population who've listened to a podcast rising from 30% in 2014 to 33% in 2015.

As Quirk writes: "While Serial generated much media attention, it did not prompt a spike in podcast audience growth, which has remained steady for years. However, Serial did result in increased interest from advertisers and publishers looking to enter this space."

Read the full Guide to Podcasting from the Tow Center

[saltzshaker]

Voices of Black History: Past and Present

Pop Up Archive newsletter, Feb 10, 2016

From archival audio holdings to the daily podcasts we index at Audiosear.ch, Pop Up Archive works with some of the most important voices of the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. In honor of Black History Month, we've collected audio that traces issues like discrimination, feminism, and education in African American communities throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.  

Social Criticism: James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates You'll find several seminal recordings of African American writer and social critic James Baldwin (pictured left) in Pop Up's public archive. From the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, the Pacifica Radio Archives, and Illinois Public Media, hear intimate, civil rights-era conversations with man who wrote, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." Echoes of Baldwin's rhetoric have been noted in the writings of social critic Ta-Nehisi Coates (pictured right). In addition to reviving the debate around reparations for American slavery with an incendiary 2014 cover story in The Atlantic, last year Coates topped the New York Times Bestseller list with his book Between the World and Me. Written as a letter to his son, the book examines what it means to be black in America today. In multiple podcast interviews last year, Coates took his arguments to the mic: Hear him on Another Round, Longform, and Backstory.

Feminism: Double Jeopardy and Bad Feminists Back in 1972, Black Women's Liberation activist Wilhelmina Wanda Hogan lectured at an Illinois YMCA about the "double jeopardy" of discrimination faced by black women: "There is a common denominator, a common strand of history that characterizes all black women, and that’s oppression...[The black woman] faces double jeopardy: she faces racial as well as sexual discrimination." Roxane Gay's 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist casts light on many issues of intersectional discrimination, while simultaneously addressing the complicated matter of combating sexism as an individual raised in — and in many ways, complicit in — a sexist system. Hear Gay (pictured right) on Nerdette and Another Round.

Education: From segregation to integration to re-segregation?

Desegregation of schools was one of the most significant fronts of the Civil Rights Movement. When the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education held that racial segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, the country had to grapple with the complicated process of actually racially integrating schools. Throughout the mid and late 20th century, racial integration was the focus of activism that included sit-in protests, as introduced to students by an Illinois reverend in this Illinois Public Media recording from 1960, as well as the continued advocacy of figures like Thurgood Marshall (pictured above), who would become the Supreme Court's first African American Justice. Hear Marshall speak about civil rights in 1956, just two years after Brown v. Board of Education. Segregation is no thing of the past. KQED Forum recently reported that many public schools are more segregated now than in the 1970s. And last year, This American Life released a two-part story exploring the aftermath of forced integration programs and how often they resulted in re-segregation. Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones: "People say, 'Well, we tried to force it, and it just didn't work out.' And typically, what people are thinking of are places like Boston, where busing was used, and where it was violent and ugly, and white people just left and didn't want to deal with it. White people fled the school systems. And basically they re-segregated the school systems by fleeing." In its second part, This American Life recounts integration success stories, offering some hope for the future of integrated education.

Looking for more? These stories just scratch the surface of the voices from black history, past and present. We'll be sharing #BlackHistoryMonth audio featuring African American writers, musicians, activists, and others all month long from our Twitter accounts @PopUpArchive and @audiosearchfm.

[saltzshaker]

Capturing election talk from podcasts and radio

Pop Up Archive newsletter, Feb 16, 2016

As election season ramps up to a fever pitch, political commentators are tracking candidates' every move, with no shortage of opinions to voice. Words are at the core of this race — whether stump speeches, talk radio tirades, or pundit panels.

We transcribe hours of political chatter as it happens through our podcast search engine, Audiosear.ch. Below are some examples of what people across the U.S. have been saying about Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. You can search and share soundbites yourself over at Audiosear.ch.

On the Majority Report podcast, host Sam Seder praises Clinton's experience, but feels her presidential pitch lacks a strong mission.

"I still think that Hillary Clinton has yet to articulate an overarching message that is that is about her agenda beyond her qualifications. I mean, I think her qualifications are incredibly solid, and I think that if she wants to beat Bernie Sanders, she's made that case. People already know her, and she needs to sort of say, not list off four or five policies of what she's going to do, she needs to have just a cohesive narrative about what she's going to do."

Hear the moment from Cliff Schecter: Democrats Have Two Great Choices & the Resentments of Marc Maron, The Majority Report (2/12/16).

Meanwhile, conservative talk show host Glenn Beck comments on what he sees as Clinton's corrupt superdelegate advantage.

"The superdelegates: they're people that have already made their choice, they can switch if they want to, but they're not tied to the voters. They can come in and they can all say, you know what, Hillary Clinton is the one that's going to win. And Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton have been courting these people for a very long time. And I mean it's just so corrupt. This is the party that's continually talking about democracy, democracy, democracy, democracy. That's not democracy."

Hear the moment from Thank You, Rush Limbaugh, The Glenn Beck Program (2/12/16). 

NPR's Marketplace explores the feasibility of Sanders' ambitious plans for the presidency.

"Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, coming off his big win in New Hampshire, has a lot of big plans for new social programs. Big expensive social programs that, according to Sanders anyway, Wall Street is going to help pay for."

Hear the moment from Bernie, Hillary and Wall Street, Marketplace (2/11/16).

On Real Time with Bill Maher, political analyst Ana Navarro addresses Sanders' potential to gain voter support from minorities.

"I think people underestimate Bernie Sanders. You know, they think that because there's all these African-Americans in South Carolina and African-Americans and Hispanics in Nevada he can't win. You know African-Americans, Hispanics, minority groups, we don't all think alike. This is not groupthink. We're not one big homogeneous monolithic voting machine. There are African-American progressives, there are Spanish progressives, and I think he's going to appeal to some of them."

Hear the moment from Overtime, Real Time with Bill Maher (2/12/16).

On WBUR's On Point, a listener calls in to voice support for the "very business" [sic] Donald Trump.

"I am a super Trump supporter, and the reason why is I really believe that Donald Trump has fooled them all and is very, very wise, very savvy, very business. And he has led the media around like a puppy dog. And they just follow him and follow him and follow him."

Hear the moment from Week In The News, On Point with Tom Ashbrook (2/5/16).

On The Media asks whether talk radio rhetoric may have bolstered Trump's unexpectedly successful candidacy.

"This truly is conservative talk radio's election. Michael Harrison of Talkers magazine says talk show hosts praise God for giving them Trump. Trump is, quote, 'a shock jock now running for President.' Meanwhile Ted Cruz, running in second, has made talk radio the centerpiece of his strategy. So now that medium has two native sons battling it out and pumping up the ratings."

Hear the moment from The Elephant in the Room, On The Media (1/29/16).

Ted Cruz's conservative, evangelical supporters have long been avid listeners of talk radio. Despite this, Trump's bombast over the airwaves has managed to cut in on some of Cruz's base.

"[Talk radio support] started with Cruz — he's like the natural outgrowth of conservative talk. But Trump is starting to supplant Cruz and not because of ideological reasons. He has more pizzazz than Cruz. Trump has this cross cultural appeal. It's not all angry old white men who like him, and that's what I'm told is consistent with the listenership of talk radio. It's a little bit more diverse than you might expect."

Hear the moment from The Elephant in the Room, On The Media (1/29/16).

Slate's Political Gabfest further attributes Cruz's success in the Republican race (at least relative to non-Trump candidates) to the organization of his campaign.

David Plotz, referring to the New Hampshire primary: "Ted Cruz I think arguably had another good night because he finished third, and clearly is the strongest non-Trump candidate in the race I think. I mean John, let's start with that: Is Cruz the strongest non-Trump candidate around?" John Dickerson: "Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Yes, that's true both ideologically — he is most in sync with people most likely to participate in caucuses and primaries — [and] he's also got a heck of a lot of money. Many have shown that he's got organizational success."

Hear the moment from The "Happy Valentine's Day Rubio Robot" Edition, Slate Political Gabfest (2/12/16).

We've still got a long, discussion-filled election season ahead of us. You can use Audiosear.ch to keep tabs on trending political issues — or sign up for audio alerts to track candidate mentions.

[saltzshaker]

Resurfacing historic radio broadcasts from the LGBTQ movement: D.C.’s trailblazing "Friends" radio program and the Rainbow History Project

Pop Up Archive newsletter, Apr 20, 2016

History happens fast, and there's not always time for archiving. A group of LGBTQ activists in Washington D.C. realized this firsthand: after decades fighting on the front lines for LGBTQ equality, they'd amassed thousands of historical artifacts in urgent need of preservation. In 2000, The Rainbow History Project was founded out to steward the many first-hand documents and recordings from D.C.'s vibrant LGBTQ community.

Among the founders of the Rainbow History Project was Bruce Pennington, who intimately knew the need to preserve this history: he had almost a decade's worth of historic recordings on reel-to-reel and cassette tapes rapidly disintegrating in his own basement. That's because Pennington was a founder of Stonewall Nation Media Collective, which created programs like D.C.'s groundbreaking "Friends" radio show.

Friends was one of the first and longest-running radio programs to specifically address LGBTQ issues, creating stories "for, by, and about the gay community." Amidst much contention (one critic called Friends "the voice of the Viet Cong"), the show ran on Georgetown University radio station (WGTB-FM) and later Pacifica Radio (WPFW-FM) from 1973 to 1982.

When Pennington passed away in 2003, he left the recordings, along with funds for their digital preservation, to the Rainbow History Project.

Since then, an active community of volunteers has been hard at work to digitize the Friends archive and make it discoverable to the broader public. Yet even after many of the recordings were transferred to CDs, the archive was still far from searchable. The audio was digital, but it was still opaque, stored in files with labels like "Untitled I." Other recordings either lacked labels entirely or were stored in containers with labels that were smeared or destroyed. And with hundreds of hours of audio, the volunteer-run organization simply didn't have the resources to listen through it all.

"Pop Up Archive gives us a tool for preserving and sharing our history." 

–Vincent Slatt, The Rainbow History Project That's where Pop Up Archive comes in. This year, Vincent Slatt, who works as an archivist by day, has been spearheading the effort to make the Friends archive accessible online. To date, the Rainbow History Project has uploaded more than 114 hours of audio to a public collection at Pop Up Archive. Immediately after uploading, the team began to surface gems, including a 1973 interview with independent film director John Waters and his muse, Divine, and a 1976 speech by then-Governor, future President Jimmy Carter, that details his views about employment of homosexuals (spoiler: he's all for it, unless your homosexuality can be used as blackmail in a national security position). Beyond the big names, Friends also broadcast recordings from some pivotal events in America's LGBTQ history, such as early Gay Pride celebrations and a "Lesbian takeover" of anAmerican Psychological Association seminar in Detroit. According to Slatt, the collection on Pop Up Archive still only represents about one third of the complete Friends archive. The Rainbow History Project hopes to raise the funds to digitize and upload the rest of the archive to Pop Up Archive by the end of the year. In addition to transcripts, Pop Up Archive provides a user-friendly digital archive interface that can be edited and maintained by their volunteer base over time. The Rainbow History Project also benefits from Pop Up Archive's integration with Internet Archive, as ultimately their audio will be preserved both at Pop Up Archive and through archive.org. Already, the Rainbow History Project's public audio archive serves an invaluable resource for researchers and history buffs alike.

[saltzshaker]

Harvey Milk, the Fruit Punch Collective, and Gay Rights: Archival audio for LGBT Pride Month

Pop Up Archive newsletter, Jun 20, 2015

June is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month. Pop Up Archive's public collections surface many key moments of LGBT activism and discussion, from the the assassination of Harvey Milk to the Stonewall Riots. Hear the evolution of the conversation around LGBT rights from the 1950s to the present.

Homosexual In Our Society: A Panel Discussion (1958) The Pacifica Radio Archives

Dr. Blanche Baker (center). Source: One Archives at USC From The Pacifica Radio Archives: 

“This recording from 1958 — the earliest known radio recording to overtly discuss homosexuality — features KPFA Public Affairs Director Elsa Knight Thompson interviewing Hal Call, editor of the Mattachine Society's Mattachine Review, Dr. Blanche Baker, a psychologist noted for her then-uncommonly-held belief that homosexuality was not an abnormality nor an illness, and Leah Gailey, the mother of a gay man. Gailey recounts her shock at first learning her son was gay and her eventual embrace of her son's sexuality. Call asserts that "every tenth person... is predominantly homosexual." The recording received the California State Fair Press, Radio, and TV award in 1959.” One highlight: Dr. Blanche Baker expresses her "minority view" on homosexuality: 

"I do not look upon homosexuality as a neurotic problem, but more a basic personality pattern reaction, just as some people prefer blonds, and others prefer brunettes. I think the fact that a given person may prefer a love of the same sex is their personal business."

Studs Terkel talks with members of the Mattachine Society (1970)

The WFMT Studs Terkel Radio Archive

Founded in 1950, The Mattachine Society was one of the earliest gay rights organizations in the United States. In this interview, Studs Terkel talks with three members of Mattachine Midwest: Jim Bradford, Valerie Taylor (pen name of Velma N. Tate, 1913-1997), and Henry Weimhoff. Together, they discuss the realities and myths of homosexuality in the United States.

Taylor closes the interview: 

"If I could just say three words to the entire heterosexual world, or uninformed world, they would be: homosexuals are people. We're just like everybody else, except in the matter of who we go to bed with — and what we do in bed really isn't all that different." 

(Studs responds to this last comment with his signature cackle.)

Dan White: Reaction to the verdict (1979)

The Pacifica Radio Archives, produced by the Fruit Punch Collective

From left to right: Harvey Milk, George Moscone, Dan White

In a controversial 1979 verdict, San Francisco City Supervisor Dan White was sentenced with just seven years after fatally gunning down two San Francisco politicians: mayor George Moscone and his fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk. Milk was the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States, and Moscone was an open supporter of gay rights. You may have learned about the trial from the Gus Van Sant biopic Milk, or from the now infamous "Twinkie Defense" cited by White, in which White said it was a "sugar-induced psychosis" that drove him to commit the murders.

This report from KPFA's Fruit Punch Collective in Berkeley came in the direct aftermath of the Dan White verdict. Members of the collective recorded reactions from people on the street, and emotions run high. One woman, Sally Gerhardt, describes herself as "increasingly angry, increasingly scared, very deeply hurt, very much ashamed of a system that I put — not much faith in, but at least a little bit of faith in, sometimes." The program also excerpts from a Harvey Milk speech: 

"Every gay person must come out... and once you do, once they realize that you we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere... every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed everywhere."

More where that came from Explore Pop Up Archive's tags for topics like Homosexuality, Gay and Lesbian Issues, and GLBT Issues to find audio from across the archive including more from the Fruit Punch Collective, Jonathan Katz, Graham Robb, and the GLBT Museum in San Francisco.

[saltzshaker]

10 years of podcasting, past and future

Pop Up Archive newsletter, Jul 21, 2015

Ten years ago, Apple dropped the first batch of 3,000 podcasts into the iTunes store. In honor of this anniversary, they're celebrating #10YearsOfPodcasts. In the past decade, podcasting has transformed from an obscure medium for hyper-tech insiders into a media format that even your grandma can tune in to. They've come a long way, but podcasts have even further to go. What's in store for the next decade of podcasting and radio?

1. Á la carte listening

Many podcast apps (including Apple's Podcast app) make users subscribe to whole shows rather than letting them pick episodes à la carte. In the next 10 years (or sooner, we hope), it will become easier to listen to audio stories like we read articles: here and there, without an ongoing commitment.

2. Listening is connected across devices 

From phones to cars to watches, people will have ample technology for listening to podcasts. In particular, the rise of cars with "smart dashboards" means that people will increasingly tune into podcasts as easily as they once turned on the radio. 

3. Online discussions about podcasts go viral, regularly

When the first season of Serial aired, conspiracy theories abounded around the real life murder of Hae Min Lee. (Fans active on the Serial podcast subreddit are still compiling evidence.) As more online centers for podcast-specific discussion crop up (check out The Timbre or Spoken.am), podcast fandom can only grow.

4. Metadata about podcasts is consistent and structured

Ten years into podcasting, apps still rely primarily on RSS feeds to describe them. But RSS feeds are often unwieldy, disconnected from podcasts' web presences and the people involved in them. Soon this data will be aggregated (for example, see people data and web profiles from Audiosear.ch), so it will be easier to find information about the people and things mentioned in podcasts, around the Internet.

5. Listeners support shows through new membership models

Though the large majority of podcasts are still generously free to download, podcast networks like Slate and Gimlet are experimenting with payment models where listeners pay up to tune in. If podcasting is going to be a financially sustainable industry, people will pay for (at least some) audio stories.

6. Audio recommendation is smart and personalized, even at the episode level

Just like we see recommended links at the bottom of articles we read, and recommended videos on YouTube, reliable podcast episode recommendations will mean you'll never be at a loss for what to listen to. 

7. Celebrities turn to podcasting to make their voices heard

The trend of the celebrity podcaster is already underway, with Hollywood stars like Alec Baldwin and Kevin Smith picking up the mic. In the same way that celebrities have turned to Twitter to communicate personally with their audiences, it's only a matter of time before stars like Taylor Swift and Kanye West recognize the potential of podcasting to voice their unfiltered points of view.

8. Podcasts seduce big-name advertisers

In the past year, more and more advertisers have taken notice of podcasts. The intimacy of the medium, and the tradition of host-read ads makes podcasting especially value to advertisers looking to connect with audiences. Big brands like Ford are partnering with podcasts like Gimlet's StartUp.

9. Audio stories are searchable

If the ubiquity of closed captioning for online video is any indication, we can expect that automatic speech recognition will extend further and further into the podcast world. The Pop Up Archive team has made strides toward this vision with Audiosear.ch, our podcast API and search engine.

10. Developers hack podcast projects !

The technology around podcasting is ripe for innovation. Hackathon events for audio storytelling, like This American Life's upcoming Audio Hackathon, reflect a consensus that quality audio deserves quality technology. Apply for the hackathon and join us for a weekend of audio technology scheming! What do you think about our predictions for the next 10 years of podcasting? If you've got something to add, tweet at us! See you in the archive, The Pop Up Archive team

[saltzshaker]

In this early mockup for Pop Up Archive’s embeddable transcript player, I combined social media icons with Pop Up Archive’s simple player and full-page transcripts.

The result is a searchable, shareable, and portable player for spoken word media like this Maya Angelou interview from The WFMT Studs Terkel Radio Archive.

[saltzshaker]

These are mockups exploring redesigns of the Pop Up Archive home page.

[saltzshaker]

Using Adobe Illustrator, I digitally recreated animal characters from vintage book covers and posters (vintage originals on top, and my recreations are on the bottom).

[saltzshaker]

Together with Anne Wootton at Pop Up Archive, I designed a card-sorting experiment to determine which 10 top-level categories to offer on the Audiosear.ch podcast search engine.

Podcast-savvy participants sorted cut out images of top podcasts into categories we had identified, allowing them to mark extra categories in orange. We then logged their choices into a spreadsheet and analyzed them to determine the top categories.

[saltzshaker]

This is a mockup for a feature on Audiosear.ch that allows users to search “tastemaker” recommendations from podcast review outlets. Also displayed are snippets of editorial commentary for each podcast episode recommendation.

[saltzshaker]

This is a mockup for a feature on Audiosear.ch that allows users to search “tastemaker” recommendations from podcast review outlets. Also displayed are snippets of editorial commentary for each podcast episode recommendation.

[saltzshaker]

Popcast logos, icon from the Noun Project CC by 3.0