The amazing Jay Boeding, SAC Member and Corporate Relations Representative, Iowa Public Television, sends regards from his Midwest travels!
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Friday, September 21, 2012
The Weekly Debrief: 21 September 2012
By Josie Keller, PBS Interactive Welcome to the Weekly PBS Interactive Station Products & Innovation Debrief, designed to give PBS stations a rundown of Interactive updates and opportunities announced this week on our blog.
In advance of the new FCC-mandated Online Closed Captioning requirements taking affect October 1, 2012, PBS Interactive rolled out upgrades to the COVE Admin Tool earlier this week. These changes will help stations comply with the new FCC guidelines by offering more caption file options for upload in the admin.
Rocky Mountain PBS signed on last year to be one of six alpha test stations for Bento. Carolyn Spellman, Content Producer at RMPBS, describes her experience working closely with the PBS Interactive team to push through the concept stage, past the migration phase, to the construction stage.
Natalie Benson, Colorado Public Television's Marketing & Social Media Manager, stopped by the PBS headquarters while visiting DC. Here are some of her favorite memories from that visit!
Follow the Links Below to Continue Reading
- COVE Admin updated for Closed-Captioning Compliance, New Workflows
- Early Bird: RMPBS Builds 2012 Election Bento Site
- Wordless Wednesday: Inside PBS
At-a-Glance: PBS Interactive Product and Services Updates
- LAST CHANCE! Survey: Station Donation Experience Optimized for Mobile: PBS Interactive is taking a landscape survey of all stations, asking if you have a donation experience that is mobile optimized. If you respond to the quick 2-3 question survey, you will be entered to win a sweet gift bag of PBS surprises! Complete the survey today. The Deadline to respond is TONIGHT: September 21, 8:00 PM ET.
PBS Digital Studios: The PBS Digital Studios added to its line-up "A Moment of Science," a new web video series from Indiana Public Media in which host Mandy Strife explains some of the mysteries of the modern world using science.
PBS Interns: One of our @PBSInterns final presentation is being promoted on the Prezi homepage! Here's a direct link to Brionne's work http://ow.ly/dT2Dl
NewsHour Election Photos: PBS NewsHour hired freelance photographers for the 2012 conventions. All images are rights-cleared for PBS member stations and are available for your use on NewsHour's Flickr page.
Now Accepting PBS Interactive Station Advisory Council Nominations: Are you interested in becoming a member of the PBS Interactive Station Advisory Council (SAC)? We will have four open seats starting in January 2013. Visit http://to.pbs.org/Q43Gcc to read the Station Advisory Charter and the responsibilities expected of its members. Information on current SAC members is located on the SPI blog. Please reach out to us or any of the current Council members with your questions. If you would like to apply, please complete the application by 5:00PM ET on Friday, October 5, 2012.
#PBSBIT: Thank you to Rocky Mountain PBS for hosting Bento User Testing in Denver, CO and to KLRN, UNC-TV, KACV, WPBT, Q-TV, WNIN Tri-State Public Media, and WLJT for joining us for Bento Implementation Training in Crystal City this week. We look forward to hosting WUCF TV, Vegas PBS, PBS Hawaii, Arizona Public Media, KET, KMOS, Wyoming PBS, WFWA, and WSIU next week!
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Early Bird: RMPBS Builds 2012 Election Bento Site
By: Carolyn Spellman, Content Producer at Rocky Mountain PBS
We signed on last year to be one of six alpha test stations for Bento, a tool PBS introduced to create individualized station websites that offer easy content-management and leverage COVE and Merlin, and access to video content.
We’ve been working closely with the PBS Interactive team ever since, and have pushed through the concept stage, past the migration phase, to the construction stage. It took a while to ramp up to actually building the new Bento site, and not surprisingly, there was some trepidation along the way.
Our current site is extremely content-rich, with hundreds and hundreds of pages, and a vast amount of original content. It felt like we were moving out of a rambling old Victorian into a streamlined new loft, and not everything was going to fit in the new place (nor should it, by the way, since some of the stuff was pretty old).
But we had some deadline-oriented projects – like the coverage of a presidential election - that forced our hand to make Bento our new home.
Cynthia Hessin, the host and executive producer of our weekly current affairs show, “Colorado State of Mind,” and I were excited about all the cool election widgets that the PBS NewsHour recently had introduced, and we wanted to incorporate some of the features in a new election section on rmpbs.org that would also offer background on the state candidates, elections and issues, as well as basic voter registration information.
The thing was, we had to get this election page live by the end of August and we weren’t ready for a full Bento launch -- nor did we want to invest too much time creating a section on our current site that would have to eventually be moved over.
The ever-calm and collected team at PBS Interactive suggested that we build the election section in Bento and link to our current site, as a test-run for the larger-scale project ahead.
It was good advice. Working on just one section in Bento allowed us to get a feel for Bento’s functionality. And it actually was pretty fun. We ended up posting the election section on time, with all the features we wanted.
We’re now in full-on production mode, and we’ve built many more pages in Bento since. But I have to appreciate the unrelenting election cycle for offering us our first real foray into our future Web platform.
We signed on last year to be one of six alpha test stations for Bento, a tool PBS introduced to create individualized station websites that offer easy content-management and leverage COVE and Merlin, and access to video content.
We’ve been working closely with the PBS Interactive team ever since, and have pushed through the concept stage, past the migration phase, to the construction stage. It took a while to ramp up to actually building the new Bento site, and not surprisingly, there was some trepidation along the way.Our current site is extremely content-rich, with hundreds and hundreds of pages, and a vast amount of original content. It felt like we were moving out of a rambling old Victorian into a streamlined new loft, and not everything was going to fit in the new place (nor should it, by the way, since some of the stuff was pretty old).
But we had some deadline-oriented projects – like the coverage of a presidential election - that forced our hand to make Bento our new home.
Cynthia Hessin, the host and executive producer of our weekly current affairs show, “Colorado State of Mind,” and I were excited about all the cool election widgets that the PBS NewsHour recently had introduced, and we wanted to incorporate some of the features in a new election section on rmpbs.org that would also offer background on the state candidates, elections and issues, as well as basic voter registration information.
The thing was, we had to get this election page live by the end of August and we weren’t ready for a full Bento launch -- nor did we want to invest too much time creating a section on our current site that would have to eventually be moved over.
The ever-calm and collected team at PBS Interactive suggested that we build the election section in Bento and link to our current site, as a test-run for the larger-scale project ahead.
It was good advice. Working on just one section in Bento allowed us to get a feel for Bento’s functionality. And it actually was pretty fun. We ended up posting the election section on time, with all the features we wanted.
We’re now in full-on production mode, and we’ve built many more pages in Bento since. But I have to appreciate the unrelenting election cycle for offering us our first real foray into our future Web platform.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Wordless Wednesday: Inside PBS
Natalie Benson, Colorado Public Television's Marketing & Social Media Manager, stopped by the PBS headquarters while visiting DC. Here are some of her favorite memories from that visit!
This is quite an impressive lobby at PBS HQ!!! I kid, I
kid. It's a picture of the beach in Ocean City.
These are pictures of the real lobby. So many TVs...
You can watch PBS at PBS. It's like the movie Inception!
I startled the lobby's security guard and he dropped
his tray.
PBS corporate has a mysterious marker-weilding artist
decorating the glass walls at night.
This man and his helium keep the remote-controlled
flying sharks happily swimming around the PBS Kids floor! Does anyone else
have an office this cool?
Sweet little Kai received a lot of my goodies from the
annual meeting in Denver. She's only 2, but already a PBS kid for life!
Cupcake judging is serious business, and it takes a
serious judge, like yours truly, to do it right!
And the winner of this round is…. Georgetown Cupcake!
Baked & Wired will be challenging Georgetown Cupcake on my next visit.
Stay tuned...
Any #localPBS stations have exciting pictures to share? We'd love to see what's happening around your station!
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