Mark Stencel, Managing Editor for Digital News at National Public Radio, spoke to our class today about the challenges radio faces in the media today. Stencel first started working in online journalism back in 1991, when it was called “new media.”

Check out his personal Twitter and his NPR bio.

Stencel says that NPR has done very well in the past few years because of all of the road traffic in the Washington metropolitan area. More people are able to listen to the radio in their cars while they NPR’s audience has grown tremendously, becoming one of the largest consumed news  organizations in North America. However, even though they have a huge national audience on the radio, they do not have the same audience online. Because they are mainly a radio outlet, they face competition from many other online news sources.

To set themselves apart from the rest, NPR has engaged in:

  • experimenting telling stories with animation
  • creating a “print journalism” platform and a layout for their online webpage
  • beginning to employ NPR staff photographers and videographers
  • involving their audience on the NPR Facebook page, which has over 1.5 million fans!
  • learning how to convey stories in different ways, and determining how their stories can be more compelling than their competitors

An example of NPR angling their stories in different ways would be their coverage of the Royal Wedding. Most media outlets are focuesd on the entertainment aspect of the wedding, however NPR will differentiate itself by providing more contextual and historical information for the story while still making it relevant. To do this, NPR is including  an interactive royal family tree, questions about royal scandals, a royal/political analysis, and a more of a focus on the “how” and the “why” of the story.

Regarding smart phones, Stencel says, “They are basically Tivo for radio.” They provide a way to do audio journalism for the web that works for an online audience.

Stencel says one of the best pieces of journalistic advice came from his co-worker, Matt Thompson — “Don’t cover events, cover the implications.”