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How One iPhone App Could Save Public Radio
A key grantee in the Ford Foundation's efforts to develop vibrant public interest media, Public Radio Exchange (PRX) has launched a new iPhone application to aggregrate public radio broadcasts around the country. Ford-funded organizations like PRX are committed to creating innovative tools and improving the means by which people gain access and control of public information central to their lives.
Published on ReadWriteWeb.com: July 20, 2009
By Marshall Kirkpatrick
Some newspapers scrambling to survive the internet condemn websites like Google News and the Huffington Post. Aggregators, they say, need to pay for the right to point to a newspaper's site. Public radio stations, on the other hand, face competition from the internet as well and are just as competitive between themselves as they are collaborative. Somehow, they've responded differently to new media. There may be no better example of that than an iPhone application built by several large public radio organizations and called Public Radio Player. The team behind the app launched a major new release this morning.
Images courtesy of Public Radio Exchange (PRX).
The application aggregates live streaming and recorded radio broadcasts from across the US, displays their current and planned content schedules and now offers a search function that stretches across all those different types of content: live streams, podcasts and text show descriptions. It's a free app and the organization that makes it hosts almost nothing on its own servers. The end result is a remarkable user experience that ought to be an inspiration for old media of every kind. It isn't perfect, but it's getting better fast.
The app was made by a non-profit organization called Public Radio Exchange (PRX). PRX was founded and is run by Jake Shapiro, a man who used to be an associate director at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Shapiro used to produce an NPR radio show with Christopher Lyndon and before that he was one of the first tinkerers with web distribution of music for his band Two Ton Shoe.
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Visit the Public Radio Exchange at www.prx.org.
Learn more about the Public Radio Player.