Soup sandwich is coming off the menu

To call something a “soup sandwich” is to say that it is disorderly, all messed up, neither one thing nor another. The longer I work in new media, the more it all seems like a soup sandwich to me. It’s hard to tell what’s important, and what’s not, what’s well-produced and thoughtful, and what is pulled out of–well never mind what it’s pulled out of.

It’s not even that the ratio between good stuff and pretty good stuff and not-so-good stuff has changed online. It’s just that algorithms are no substitute for thoughtful curation. All new media platforms, including ours, rely heavily on robots to bring the stuff we see to our attention. This is a totally different experience from the “old media” side of the shop at NCPR.

There, you only experience one thing at a time, a linear stream of audio that has been professionally edited and curated, and assembled to produce an optimum experience for the listener. Sometimes the job is done better, and sometimes worse, but the average listening experience is at a high level of quality, and has some flow.

It’s a kind of experience that can’t be replicated online (except in listening to the broadcast stream). If you go to our home page now, you’ll see more than fifty pieces of content, radio stories, blog posts, photo features, promotions, sharing and listening links, navigation menus and on and on. It’s a soup sandwich, mostly robo-selected for newness, from a pre-set selection of sources. The only human intervention in the experience is selection of the five items in the main feature carousel.

While we can’t mimic the radio side of the shop and present only one thing at a time on the home page, at NCPR we are working hard to make a transformation in our thinking and our work flow to develop a new media experience for the visitor that is less cluttered, and is more thoughtfully selected and presented.

For example, rather than just pull a feed of stories that are currently on the NPR home page, we might curate the selection for stories that are most relevant to a North Country audience, or that have the best and richest digital presentation. Or rather than give home page space to every news story and blog post we create, we might select for the stories that provide the richest or most important experience–and put the rest on the news page, rather than the home page. We might not put audio on every story, if the story is told better with text and picture, and so on.

In short, we plan to give the robot a rest and to serve the soup to those who want soup, and the sandwich to those who want the sandwich. And also, to broaden our palate beyond soup and sandwich into more parts of the public media world. There’s a lot of great stuff out there, if you can find it on the menu.

Tags: listeningpost