NPR’s exper­i­ments with social media from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Andy Carvin, social media strate­gist for NPR.org, has spent the past sev­eral years exper­i­ment­ing with inno­v­a­tive approaches to the news. As the head of National Pub­lic Radio’s social media desk, he’s been given a sand­box to fos­ter high-quality jour­nal­ism using social tools in an age when the pub­lic demands engage­ment and par­tic­i­pa­tion — and when many other tra­di­tional news orga­ni­za­tions have been slow to adopt social media.

For exam­ple, as Hur­ri­cane Gus­tav churned through the Caribbean last August, even­tu­ally caus­ing $8.5 mil­lion in dam­age in the South, Andy (@acarvin on Twit­ter) formed a Ning group — Gus­tav Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter — and got scores of vol­un­teers to par­tic­i­pate in shar­ing infor­ma­tion dur­ing the course of a sin­gle week­end, largely through the power of Twit­ter and Facebook.

“Part of what I do at NPR is to really help our jour­nal­ists think about how can online com­mu­ni­ties be used to improve the qual­ity and diver­sity of our jour­nal­ism,” he says in this 9-minute video inter­view, con­ducted at South by South­west Inter­ac­tive in Austin, Texas, in March 2009.

He also cites David Troy’s cool visu­al­iza­tions with Twit­ter­vi­sion (you’ve surely seen this, yes?) and Twit­ter­votere­port dur­ing the 2008 elec­tions, a project by NPR and tech­Pres­i­dent that allowed any­one at a polling sta­tion to report prob­lems using Twit­ter, text mes­sages, voice mail, iPhones and other mobile devices. “It didn’t mat­ter if you had no Inter­net access at all or if you had an iPhone and every­thing in between — you could sub­mit reports and geo­tag it.” The site got about 10,000 sub­mis­sions dur­ing the election.

For its Inau­gu­ra­tion cov­er­age, NPR col­lab­o­rated with CBS News, Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity and vol­un­teer pro­gram­mers, adding Flickr pho­tos and YouTube videos to the mix. They got more than 40,000 con­tri­bu­tions, which is “some­what astound­ing,” Carvin says.

NPR staffers who’ve recently begun using Twit­ter include David Greene and Scott Simon (a scant 195,035 fol­low­ers as of this writing).

Keep evan­ge­liz­ing, Andy! Here’s the inter­view (9 minutes):

Watch or embed the video on Vimeo
Watch or down­load the video on Ourmedia

Related:
• Using Twit­ter at the Chicago Tri­bune
• How to use social media in the news­room
• Using social media to build an audience

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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