Lessons from #PubRadioVoice
Let’s start the week off right with a note from Code Switch's lead blogger Gene Demby about the team’s successful #PubRadioVoice chat. - Kate
We’ve hosted some pretty lively Twitter chats since Code Switch launched two years ago, but our chat around the hashtag #PubRadioVoice blew up in a way we could not have anticipated. Not long after we kicked it off, it became a trending topic on Twitter. And as I write this late Friday afternoon, the hashtag is still humming along.
So let’s back up a little. Last week, Chenjerai Kumanyika wrote an essay for Transom about uneasily trying to shoehorn his decidedly un-public radio sound into his first public radio report. An excerpt from his essay:
The voices on podcasts and public radio are informed, interesting, gentle friends. They keep me company as they share important, entertaining, and sometimes tragic stories. But the timbre, accent, inflections, rhythm, metaphors, and references of these voices reflect class, region, ethnicity, gender, and other components of identity. Meanwhile — though I don’t have the statistics handy to prove this — my impression is that very few among the hosts of popular narrative non-fiction podcasts and public radio programs are non-white. In short, very few of these hosts speak the way that I speak.
His piece picked up a lot of steam — it was reposted on BuzzFeed — and the folks at All Things Considered asked him to do a commentary. And my editors on Code Switch (Alicia Montgomery and Tasneem Raja) planned a Twitter chat around Kumanyika’s ATC segment.
(Editor’s note: What is so great about both articles is that the first has a note that lets readers know about the Twitter chat at the very top of the piece, and the latter provides plenty of context about why they’re hosting the Twitter chat. Smart).
We brainstormed some hashtags over the course of the day before settling on #pubradiovoice, while Kenya Downs rounded up all the participants of the chat (Kumanyika, as well as our own Audie Cornish and Sam Sanders and a slew of others) to discuss the themes Kumanyika teased out in his essay.
We went live at 6:30 pm on Thursday. In an e-mail, Tasneem explained what happened next:
Hashtag tracking is a mushy science, but from I gather across a few of the (free) analytics sites, there have been over 5000 original tweets (and counting), with combined impressions (the number of people who potentially saw both the original tweets + retweets) of over 3 million Twitter users. These are conservative figures.
(Editor's note: Twitter Reverb is a great tool for highlighting top tweets during a hashtag campaign. Check out this visualization of the most retweeted #pubradiovoice tweets from the public and this one of the most RT’d tweets from NPR staffers).
Interestingly, the volume of #pubradiotweets appears to have started spiking around 5pm Eastern, well before the panel started at 6:30pm. The volume predictably crashed at 8pm, when Gene et al. largely signed off (and Scandal came on :) ), but it appears to have shot up again around 9pm Eastern (aka 6pm PST), higher than during the official chat, and surged on till 1am EST/10pm PST.
To me that’s the ultimate indication that we created a valuable space for conversation; it lives on without us, and it drew in a whole new audience that we weren’t fully able to pull in during the official chat (West Coast, during work hours).
We thought it was an important conversation to have, but it was clearly a conversation an awful lot of people wanted to have as well. It’s also important to note the drastic difference in tones between the Twitter conversation compared and the conversation in the comments on NPR.org; Twitter was passionate and respectful, while the site’s commenters… did what our site commenters do.
It underscores how different NPR’s audiences are in different spaces, and why it’s so important to avail ourselves of all the different platforms we have available to us.
A few other updates since Gene sent this note: Code Switch’s Kenya Downs wrote a follow-up post recapping the chat. Gene also spoke to Scott Simon on Weekend Edition about the conversations that took place during the Twitter chat. This conversation was truly cross-platform: from web article to broadcast to Twitter to broadcast and more web articles. And #PubRadioVoice is still going strong on Twitter.
