The Miami Herald and WLRN Radio Join Public Insight Network to Expand News Coverage Diversity Through BilingualActive Audience Engagement
Contact: Jacqueline Cartier
(651) 290-1113
jcartier@americanpublicmedia.org
www.americanpublicmedia.org
The Miami Herald and WLRN Radio Join Public Insight Network to Expand News Coverage Diversity Through BilingualActive Audience Engagement
Deal Marks First Major Market Newspaper for American Public Media Initiative
ST. PAUL, MN (July 29, 2010) American Public Media (APM) today announced the addition of The Miami Herald and south Florida public radio station WLRN as the latest newsroom partners in APM's Public Insight Network. The Herald is the first major market newspaper in the country to join in the initiative.
The Public Insight Network, funded in part by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is the industry leading platform for journalistic audience engagement, giving individuals a direct channel for sharing their knowledge, experience and insights with reporters around the country. This collaborative model in turn helps newsrooms improve journalistic context, depth and quality while forging deeper connections with the communities they cover.
The Herald and WLRN join a growing number of leading news organizations building and engaging the Public Insight Network, from WNYC in New York and Southern California Public Radio in Los Angeles , to Oregon Public Broadcasting and the St. Louis Beacon.
In a first for the Public Insight Network, the South Flordia news outlets are tailoring the Network for its Spanish-speaking audience members. "Our participation in the Public Insight Network will be personalized to the communities we serve, and will include a bilingual user interface to ensure we're interacting with all of our readers and listeners," says Rick Hirsch, the Herald 's senior editor of multimedia. Adds Anders Gyllenhaal, executive editor of the Miami Herald , "This is an important and innovative experiment that should enable us to better reflect what people in South Florida think, what they know, and what they want to know about."
The Public Insight Network was founded in 2003, and to date n early 90,000 people around the country have signed up through websites, social networking, blogs, serious games, email surveys, virtual forums and face-to-face interactions. Demographic information and insights are stored in a secure, searchable database. Participating journalists search the database for knowledgeable sources, or use it to test hunches, identify trends and support production of major projects. In the last year alone, Network sources informed or unearthed more than 700 stories for Minnesota Public Radio News and American Public Media shows like Marketplace. Branching into newspaper newsrooms has long been a goal of APM's Public Insight Network initiative.
"The Miami Herald is the largest newsroom to date to adopt the Public Insight Network as a crowd sourcing platform ñ a partnership made even more valuable by the paper's unique collaboration with WLRN," said Linda Fantin, director of network journalism and innovation at American Public Media. "The addition of Miami 's leading news organizations, in one of the most culturally diverse media markets in the country, opens new possibilities in collaborative journalism via the Public Insight Network, and we're proud to be partnering with them."
To learn more about American Public Media's Public Insight Network, visit PublicInsightNetwork.org .