Media 4Non Journalists

Ken Freedman, general manager of freeform public radio station WFMU, is creating his own conference.

Together with public radio personality Benjamen Walker, Freedman is launching Radiovision — a festival, not a conference — which aims to emphasize the more practical aspects of the craft. Radiovision will latch on to its larger and more famous big brother, the WFMU Record Fair, on Oct. 28.

“...We want to get past the idea of convincing radio stations that they should be engaging in the Internet. We want to find out how successful people are doing it.”

Successful people are booked, including Ira Glass, Joe Frank (who is said to be Glass’s greatest influence.

“Each one of them was more or less told, when they started off their respective radio shows and podcasts, that it was a terrible idea, that they would never succeed,” Freedman said. “And each one of them persevered, and now each one of them is really super successful…and they’ve done it completely on their own terms.”

One day of the festival is a hack day — the first I know of just for radio — bringing together storytellers and coders to develop innovative, original projects in a short time frame. The participants will get their hands on three new APIs: from Cambridge startup Zeega, whose HTML5 platform is designed for interactive storytelling; from The Echo Nest, whose Pandora-like algorithms power iHeartRadio and KCRW’s Music Mine app; and from WFMU for its Free Music Archive.

In a panel called “Virtual Communities,” Tim Hwang (ROFLCon) and Kenyatta Cheese (Know Your Meme) discuss the ethics and social values of online communities as disparate as Facebook and 4chan. A panel about business models invites people from Kickstarter and The Awesome Foundation to discuss new ways of monetizing content.

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http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/10/wfmu-wants-to-shake-up-radio-storytelling-with-a-conference/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NiemanJournalismLab+%28Nieman+Journalism+Lab%29