We launched a new set of social media tools on NPR.org on Sunday night. I know it’s not groundbreaking stuff. But it’s a big moment for us and we hope to use it to connect with our audience in new journalistic ways. Go ahead and create a profile on the site if you’re a fan of NPR!
For a little while now NPR has had a small visual-journalism team in place. Now they have a podcast. You should subscribe. It’s worth watching. They’re leading the effort to translate NPR’s strength as audio storytellers into a world they call Radio Pictures. You can also find their work at NPR.org/multimedia.
John Poole, Coburn Dukehart, David Gilkey and Keith Jenkins are NPR’s multimedia department. They are producing the stories that take NPR into the realm of sight. Check it out. I think you’ll like it.
(In case it’s not obvious, I work for NPR. But, I think, that has very little to do with my admiration for the multimedia team. 
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Why is the Web organized into pages? Why? The Web is just a way of making information more widely available. It’s not intended to create a newspaper with 70,000 pages. That’s of no use to anyone. Lots of work has been done on the computer UIs. Why isn’t that work being applied to news Web sites? The Web is just a widely distributed computer — like John Gage apparently said. Why do we access it through a clunky interface intended to remind us of a paper? The Web is an almost infinite well of information that should be accessed in the most efficient manner possible. I can guarantee you that that manner is not in the style of a scrolling page on a computer monitor.
A matchup for the ages?
Through the miracle of the DVR, I caught this image Wednesday night during ESPN2 recaps of the day’s World Cup qualifying matches. Yes, that’s the flag of Georgia, home of Coca-Cola and CNN, matched against Italy. It’s not the flag of the former Soviet republic, the team that actually played Italy and lost 2-0.
For the casual admirer and regular movie goer, I’m not sure there could be a more fitting tribute to Don LaFontaine than this video someone pointed out to me on YouTube a couple of years ago: