Today is FluPortal’s last day as an active H1N1 project. As of tomorrow, the National Center for Media Engagement will host the site as an archive. An archive, however, that remains useful into the future! Here’s how FluPortal can continue to inform your journalism — on flu and any other issue.

Many of the flu resources aimed at reporters are relevant to seasonal flu — and of course to a possible third wave of H1N1. FluPortal puts government info, scientific studies, and flu-reporting tips all in one place to save you time when you’re on deadline.

Also: all of FluPortal’s tech tips are applicable to reporting on any kind of crisis. In fact they’re relevant for reporting on any topic at all.

Have you been wanting to learn how to use Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious on your station site or in your newsroom? FluPortal can get you started (here, here, and here). You can also learn how to use social media to report and illustrate stories.

Would you like to host live chats on your site? Check out our guide to CoveritLive. Have you wondered how to display various RSS feeds? Here’s a quick tutorial on using Yahoo Pipes.

Finally, this blog also contains a good number of posts outlining “evergreen” flu and tech resources. You can search for posts that might interest you by scrolling through the blog, entering keywords in the search box, or using the category or archive links in the sidebar.

Thanks to your feedback and collaboration, we learned a lot, throughout the project, about how to improve FluPortal. We hope some of these lessons will be useful for any future “crisis portals” modelled on this site. You can read more about the FluPortal project — and recommendations for pubmedia crisis coverage — in our final report: “Crisis Coverage by Public Media: A Review of FluPortal and Recommendations for the Future.”

You can also find a brief introduction to FluPortal here.

Fluportal.org is one of a growing number of projects promoting collaboration and cooperation within the public media system. As the project wraps up, I wanted to highlight our Public Media H1N1 widget and what it can offer to future collaborations and crisis response efforts.

From the beginning, we wanted to find a way to catalog and display H1N1 coverage from across public media. By showing the breadth and diversity of public media coverage, we hoped to demonstrate the reach and value of the system. We not only wanted to post this content on FluPortal.org, but we felt stations would be interested in supplementing their own local coverage.

We were surprised to find that there was no way for us to get a detailed picture of news coverage and other programming from public media stations across the system. Our first solution was to use Delicious.com to hack together an RSS feed of public media coverage. While this system worked, it was dependent on our team manually searching, saving, and tagging H1N1 coverage. A more robust and automated solution needed to be built.

In partnership with NPR, we set out to create a platform for aggregating and syndicating public media content related to H1N1. The result is our Public Media H1N1 widget — a highly flexible tool that can be redeployed in future public media collaborations focused on a particular issue or crisis.

Working with NPR project manager Javaun Moradi (whose vision and hard work was invaluable to this project), we identified the scope and necessary functionality and decided to use Daylife, a provider of news aggregation services. Daylife’s technology crawls RSS and ATOM news feeds and identifies the major themes in all stories it finds. Daylife enabled us to quickly create an automated content feed for the H1N1 and filter by media source, in this case a list of over 40 public media stations and programs actively publishing coverage of the pandemic. (Note that Daylife can only scrape content from text-based RSS or Atom feeds, excluding audio-only sources and stations that do not offer feeds.)

By using the Daylife platform, we were able to create something quickly without expending a lot of developer resources. The stories collected by Daylife are delivered as a highly configurable Javascript widget and RSS feed available for stations to use on their websites. (Read more about it on Daylife’s blog.)

Public media is in need of more shared technology resources, and what we have built with the Public Media H1N1 widget will scale well and is available for use in future public media projects. With such a reusable infrastructure in place, our industry can respond very quickly to crises and create and syndicate automated feeds of public media coverage. We hope our work here will prove valuable for others and serve as a model for future development of shared tools and resources.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned from my outreach for FluPortal.org is the value of feedback. While this may sound obvious, listening to needs of public media outlets is crucial for the success of projects like FluPortal.org.

Simply put, there is no “one size fits all” when providing tools and resources. Some aspects of FluPortal.org, such as the Quick Start menus have nearly universal appeal. But, aspects such as resources for reporters evolved over time.

There is a wide disparity of how stations perceive the role of their websites. A growing number of public radio stations consider their sites to be high-value news and information sources, often a companion to their on-air coverage. FluPortal.org provides very valuable resources for these stations.

Still, many public radio station sites and most public television sites are little more than placeholders — “cobweb sites” so to speak. Until more stations repurpose their web presence to more actively engage their viewers and listeners, projects such as FluPortal.org will be underutilized. 

My philosophy of outreach is to identify and super-serve stations with the greatest desire and capacity to provide news and information on all platforms. To do this, we expanded on our “curator” role to cross-pollinate coverage ideas among stations whenever possible.

I frequently was asked by FluPortal.org users — particularly reporters — for help in generating story ideas and developing new angles for better local coverage. Though FluPortal.org provided this information on the site blog, users wanted more assistance. It is vital for future projects like FluPortal.org to have a qualified topic expert on the team to help drive new stories and angles.

FluPortal.org is a collaborative project in the best tradition of public media. Thank you to everyone on the team, PRX, NPR, CPB and at stations. I particularly want to thank my associates who helped me learn about public television. I very much have enjoyed my work on behalf of FluPortal.org.

More details on what I learned about outreach for FluPortal.org (and possible lessons for the future) are in this section of our final report.

• NPR Flu Map — After March 31, the embed code will remain active but the NPR flu map will no longer be updated. We recommend stations make arrangements to remove this map from their website in the coming weeks.
• H1N1 Public Media Widget — During the month of April, this widget will continue to scrape public media sources for news stories related to H1N1. On May 1, 2010, NPR will shut off the Daylife feed that powers the widget. Stations should make arrangements to remove this widget from their website in the coming weeks.
• Yahoo Pipes Widgets — FluPortal created a number of widgets by inputting H1N1 related RSS feeds through Yahoo Pipes. After March 31, the widgets will no longer be supported. These widgets will remain active until May 1. Stations should make arrangements to remove them from their website in the coming weeks. Learn how to create similar widgets for your site in our guide to using Yahoo Pipes.

Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

In looking back over the FluPortal project, I felt we probably hadn’t featured our Delicious bookmarks prominently enough. But whether or not we promoted them well, Delicious is a powerful tool. You might be interested to learn what we did with it — so that you can start using it yourself, either publicly on your station’s website or internally as a reporting tool.

Every morning after scanning for H1N1 news and leads, we’d use Delicious to bookmark the best reporting, press releases, studies, etc. These bookmarked pieces showed up on our Delicious page — and also in the box at the top of our “Reporter & Program Resources” page.

The main point, here, was to provide a one-stop shop of the best reliable news about H1N1. We spent time searching for it online to save you time. This required an editorial eye, but it ensured quality — something automated aggregators don’t always supply.

Some of the nitty gritty: We learned, partway through the project, to make prominent the source of each bookmarked piece — so that you could judge quickly that it was reputable. We also used a consistent stable of tags to label each piece — so that you could search for information by topic. Finally, we inserted a sentence or two from each piece that summarized its most important information — so that you could decide whether or not to click through.

To learn more about how we used Delicious for FluPortal, check out our final report. To learn how you can use Delicious on your station’s website — or in your reporting — try this FluPortal guide.

If you blog for a pubmedia station — or would like to start — here are a few tips we can recommend. They’re based on what we practiced and learned blogging here at FluPortal.

• Think hard about your blog’s purpose — develop a clear niche and voice.
• Don’t limit your posts to tight finished reporting. You can use your blog to report — by asking questions to solicit story ideas, leads, etc.
• Keep posts concise and scannable. If you don’t hook readers rapidly, they’ll move on.
• Establish a regular blogging schedule. This will let people know what to expect — and increases the chance that they’ll return to your blog.
• Look for leads everywhere online — not just in mainstream media. See our social-media guide for ideas.
• Make post titles literal and Googleable. In other words: use keywords that people are likely to enter in Google searches. This will increase the chance of someone landing on your blog.
• Break up long quotations into small chunks and write into and out of them.
• Use links as footnotes. They’re a really handy way to back up statements you make.
• OK, just use links a lot. Linking out is the generous thing to do. It will also encourage other bloggers to link back to you (which can increase your traffic).
• Attribute photographs, videos, etc. — with links. Use a consistent style for the attributions.
• Use a search box, tags, and categories to help readers find older posts.
• Decide on a commenting policy (and make that clear on the blog).
• Interact with commenters in the comments section — this can help develop a regular community on your blog.

To find details about some of these tips — and some of the difficulties we had with FluPortal’s blog — check out this section of FluPortal’s final report.

This is the official announcement to public radio and public television organizations explaining the end of the FluPortal project.

March 25, 2010 — The FluPortal project comes to an end on March 31. Thousands of public radio and television stations, public media outlets, community information groups, and bloggers have made use of the editorial and technological resources on FluPortal.org since the site’s launch in early September 2009.

Please read our final report, “Crisis Coverage by Public Media: A Review of FluPortal and Recommendations for the Future.” We’re posting report highlights on our blog over the next several days.

The National Center for Media Engagement (NCME) has agreed to continue hosting FluPortal.org as an archive site. They will not be adding new material, but will keep the site live to allow public media and public health professionals to reflect on our response to this major public health crisis.

We encourage you to make further use of timeless materials such as the technical guides, editorial resources, and select blog posts, including:

• Was H1N1 Info Communicated Well to the Public?
• Building an H1N1 Web Page with Limited Resources
• Make Your Station a Facebook Power User
• How WBUR’s Sacha Pfeiffer Reports on H1N1
• Crisis Response in Haiti
• Can Health Reporting Weather the Economic Storm

We thank many of you for your ideas and contributions to the project, which we hope has laid the groundwork for collaborative public media responses to future crises. A special thanks to project partner NPR for their efforts, including an embeddable, interactive map of the pandemic, a widget displaying swine flu coverage by stations across the country, and editorial insights.

Best,

The FluPortal team

Rekha Murthy, Josh Andrews, Katherine Bidwell, Ken Mills

About the Project

FluPortal is an online resource for public media organizations covering the H1N1 pandemic. The FluPortal team aggregates and curates exemplary coverage, news alerts, and other information from public media and public health organizations. The project has also assembled a suite of web tools to help station websites become major sources of H1N1 information in their communities. The goal is to support a coordinated public media approach to crisis response now and in the future.

This project is led by Public Radio Exchange in collaboration with NPR and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

I like to think that I’m in the same boat as a lot of public media web managers — I’m not a programmer by training. Sure, I’ve learned a good bit about coding over the years, but by no means am I the guy in the movie who hacks into the Pentagon’s mainframe. There are many stations in the public media system with someone just like me at the helm of the website — someone who wears more than one hat at the station (how about Web Manager/Morning Edition host). So nine months ago, when we were tasked with developing a web presence for this project, I often reminded myself to keep that type of station in mind.

In my section of the FluPortal final report, I detail how we approached the task of building and maintaining this website and shaped the project’s digital strategy.  As we prepare to wrap up the project next week, I wanted to take a moment to discuss one aspect of my work that may, hopefully, spark some further discussion about the evolution of the public media system’s online presence.

One of my responsibilities on the project was to curate the selection of web tools available on our For Station Sites page. As I approached the task, I wanted to offer an abundance of easy-to-use embeddable media —  items like widgets and maps, badges and news feeds that took little time and effort. But I also wanted to encourage web managers to try some new approaches and a few new tools. With this in mind, I included three introductory guides to the NPR API (a powerful tool underutilized by too many stations), the Twitter API, and Yahoo Pipes. Most everyone coming to this website has heard of these tools, but I know what it’s like to oversee a station website and how day-to-day demands and deadlines too often interfere with opportunities for experimentation. We knew many stations were planning to update their websites with H1N1 pandemic information and I thought this could provide a good excuse for web managers to try out a few new tricks.

After the launch of the site, we heard some positive feedback on the guides and decided to expand the roster to include Facebook Connect, CoveritLive, Delicious, and a guide to using social media in editorial coverage. (All the FluPortal guides are collected here.) These guides are in no way meant to be a full user manual on any topic. Instead, I hoped to familiarize stations with the potential that these tools offer, provide some tips on getting started, and include a preliminary set of best practices. While this project has focused on covering H1N1, the hope was that stations would try these tools and then integrate them as a  regular part of their online presence.

I believe the public media system could benefit by building and maintaining a central warehouse of similar guides, best practices, and other resources related to emerging web technologies. While some large-market stations are moving fast to adapt to the digital future, we risk leaving behind large numbers of local stations which lack the resources to stay on the cutting edge. In this tough economic climate, we risk growing into a system of digital haves and have-nots. Providing an online space for public media web managers to learn, share, and experiment would help combat this trend. What are your thoughts? What kind of collaboration and knowledge sharing do you think would prove most helpful for local stations, large and small?

On March 31, the FluPortal project comes to an end. We’re happy to say this is well after the H1N1 flu pandemic has itself waned in the United States. Given this fortunate turn of events, we took the site into new directions beyond pandemic flu, exploring how public radio and public television stations can cover a range of emergency situations where public information is critical.

Our report, “Crisis Coverage by Public Media: A Review of FluPortal and Recommendations for the Future,” gives in-depth perspective on the technological, editorial, and communications aspects of the project.

FluPortal.org, the website, will remain accessible indefinitely. Public Radio Exchange (PRX), which has led the project with support from partner NPR and funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, will migrate the site to the servers of the National Center for Media Engagement. We’ll stop blogging and adding new material, but we hope public media and public health professionals, as well as the general public, continue to refer to FluPortal for information and ideas on covering flu pandemics and crises in general. Given the nature of technology, our website tool guides won’t be timeless, but they’re cutting edge so they should last for a while.

I’d like to thank our team — Josh Andrews, Katherine Bidwell, and Ken Mills — for their efforts in breaking new ground for public media. I’d also like to thank NPR — particularly Joe Neel, Keith Jenkins, Javaun Moradi, and Robert Benincasa — for their work as well. And a huge thank you to the hundreds of people at stations, media organizations, universities, and health/science organizations who presented at our webinars and contributed content, crosslinks, and insights.

We hope FluPortal represents a step forward in public media’s ongoing efforts to collaborate and share knowledge. We also hope that this will be sustained and built upon by future efforts. It’s in that spirit that we wrote the report, and we welcome your thoughts.

Rekha Murthy
FluPortal project manager
Public Radio Exchange (PRX)

We’ll be putting FluPortal to bed on March 31st. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting funded the project to help pubmedia stations report on H1N1, so with this wave of swine flu winding up, it’s time for FluPortal to wrap up, too. You’ll still be able to visit the site, but we won’t be updating it any longer; it will stand as an archive. (Rekha will provide more details shortly.)

In tying up the project, we’ve tried to extract lessons that could be useful for future crisis websites modelled on FluPortal. Find out what we learned in our final report: “Crisis Coverage by Public Media: A Review of FluPortal and Recommendations for the Future.”

Each of us on the FluPortal team wrote up what we worked on day-to-day — and what we could recommend for future “crisis portals”: Rekha gives a detailed overview of the project. Josh explains how he built the site and shares tech tips any station webmaster could use. Ken lays out how he spread the word about FluPortal and solicited feedback. And I describe how we collected H1N1 information and blogged about it.

Many of the “lessons learned” will be useful primarily to teams building other “crisis portals.” But some of what we figured out at FluPortal could be directly useful to you: pubmedia reporters, news directors, and webmasters. In the next few days, we’ll be posting some condensed tips from the report that might help you cover future crises.