NPR’s Facebook Puppet Newscast: What’s Up With That?
Michael May of NPR's Story Lab shares the story behind Korvacita, our latest experiment in Facebook video.
Today we put a video on Facebook that features Moscow Correspondent Corey Flintoff being interviewed by a puppet likeness of Korva Coleman (who is indeed dreadlocked but not actually purple).
This leads to a couple obvious questions: Is NPR so bent on shedding its straight, no-nonsense image that we’re willing to let our most respected journalists experiment with puppets and this newfangled medium called video? Or is there some method to this madness?
The answer: It’s a bit of both.
See the video on Facebook.com.
The puppet newscast came out of NPR’s Story Lab, which gives newsroom staff the time and support to create experimental content. The Lab has a few purposes: It’s the grassroots component of NPR’s new content pipeline; it allows newsroom staff who have great ideas—but who are often stuck working tight daily turnarounds—to produce something that could be NPR’s next big thing. But it’s also about making NPR a fun place to work, an opportunity for staff to stretch and be creative, to step off the treadmill and hopefully come back to their job with fresh ideas and new skills.
Korva, from the Newscast team, and Eyder Peralta, a reporter for The Two-Way blog, pitched their idea to the Lab earlier this year. Their goal was to provide newscasts to a new audience, one that was more likely to go to Facebook than turn on the radio. They’d already experimented on their own, putting a version of NPR’s Newscast on Facebook accompanied by nothing more than an image of the NPR logo. It reached a large audience. But the average view duration was only 13 seconds.
They wanted to use their time in the Story Lab to create original newscasts that were designed specifically for Facebook. The Story Lab panel gave them the green light, and Claire O’Neill, a producer on the Visuals Team, signed on to produce, direct and edit the videos.
During our first meeting, we considered what approaches would be engaging and feasible. We immediately rejected making videos with Korva reading a newscast—we didn’t want to recreate TV news. We considered hiring an illustrator, but that would be time-consuming. We wanted something that could potentially be turned around on a tight deadline.
We quickly settled on working with a puppet: Puppets felt fun and a good fit for Facebook. It provided a way to showcase Korva’s distinctive voice without completely pulling back the curtain. Plus, why not?
On the Sunday before the Lab session, Claire made the puppet from a dishtowel and yarn purchased at Walmart while binge listening to WTF with Marc Maron. We were ready.
Or so we thought. It turns out that puppeteering is no joke. Morning Edition producer Barry Gordemer, an accomplished puppeteer, gave us invaluable tips on how to sync the puppet to Korva’s voice and give it personality. We got better over time. We started with a full newscast and interview and eventually gravitated towards just an interview – it was more dynamic having the puppet interact with a human and was much easier to produce. (Full disclosure: we record the interviews straight from Skype.)
By the end of the two-week sprint, we produced four episodes. We shared the videos with friends and colleagues and began to work with NPR’s top managers to convince them to let puppet Korva (aka Korvacita) out into the wilds of Facebook. Once we had their support, the challenge was producing a new video around our daily jobs. This is a reality at NPR – there’s a huge willingness and desire to experiment. The trick is finding the time.
Now that Korvacita is free to roam Facebook, we’d love to hear what you think. Let us know in the comments section for our post on Facebook or hit us up on Twitter with the hashtag #korvacita. We’ll follow up with a retrospective post here once we have taken stock of how this experiment was received by our community.
-- Michael
