Thursday

07Jan2010

ABC News Radio and Streaming News with Ford Sync

Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 3:39PM

Earlier today we announced our partnership with Slacker Radio. We will be providing instant news updates via Slacker and their multi-device applications.

We've also formed a news media partnership with TellMe, Microsoft's mobile audio platform. TellMe is deeply integrated in to the Ford Sync media platform and we're excited about the potential of this service.

Here are the partnership details:

Ford’s Sync features voice-activated access to on-demand news, business, entertainment and sports updates provided by ABC News Radio through our relationship with Microsoft’s TellMe service.
ABC News Radio provides news headlines, Sports updates, entertainment and technology news to the TellMe service, which is incorporated into the Voice Activated UI of Ford’s Sync Service.
An example of our business news update is demonstrated in this video distributed by Ford.
Separately, Slacker announced today our new partnership to provide a range of news categories on demand for their users.
Up to this point, Slacker has purely been a music service. Users will soon be able to access news headlines updated every hour, as well as separate news channels containing World, Politics, National, Entertainment, Sports, and Technology news updated throughout the day.

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Thursday

07Jan2010

ABC News Radio Partners With Slacker Radio

Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 10:36AM

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This morning ABC News Radio is proud to announce an official partnership with Slacker Radio. Slacker Radio provides streaming audio to mobile devices. ABC News Radio is one of the largest news providers in the country.

Press Release (from PR News Wire on PressLift):

Slacker Radio to Include ABC News in Personal Radio Service


    Media Contact:               Media Contact:

    Anders Steele                Natalia Labenskyj
    FortyThree, Inc.             ABC News Media Relations
    831.239.0960                 212.456.4396
    slacker@fortythreepr.com     natalia.a.labenskyj@abc.com

ABC News to Be Integrated on Slacker Radio For Listening on Smartphones, PCs, Macs and In-Home Devices

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Slacker, Inc. today announced the coming addition of ABC News to the Slacker Personal Radio experience providing listeners with updated news from one of the nation's most trusted sources. Slacker listeners will have access to a dedicated news station covering national, world, sports, politics, entertainment, business and tech as well as the option to include headline news for top of the hour updates on any Slacker music station.

Diane Sawyer, George Stephanopoulos and other top names in journalism will give an ongoing, in-depth look into current issues from around the world. Slacker will also feature segments from highly rated and critically acclaimed programs, including "Good Morning America" anchored by Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos, Juju Chang and Sam Champion, "Nightline" anchored by Terry Moran, Cynthia McFadden and Martin Bashir and more.

"ABC News is proud to partner with Slacker in extending our high-quality content to the growing Slacker audience," said Steve Jones, vice president and general manager, ABC News Radio. "Under this new agreement, the Slacker audience can hear audio reports on demand from the most recognized and respected names in news."

In addition to featuring top quality news stories, the ABC News station will enable Slacker listeners to easily skip over segments, similar to the song skipping on music stations, for a more personalized experience. Listeners to the free Slacker Basic Radio service will be able to try the news service for a limited time at no cost, while Slacker Radio Plus subscribers will have unlimited access to the new content.

"ABC News on Slacker Radio provides our listeners with easy and customizable access to ABC's award-winning content wherever they are," said Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president of marketing at Slacker. "Many listeners have been passionate about getting current news from Slacker Radio, so we are delighted to partner with one of the most respected names in news to provide this ground-breaking service integration."

Slacker Personal Radio, available online at www.Slacker.com, enables listeners to create their own Personal Radio stations based on any artist or mix of artists, or listen to and personalize over 120 expert-programmed genre stations ranging from Alternative Rock to Comedy and everything in between. Personalization options include rating songs or artists, playing more popular vs. more eclectic music and listening to newer vs. classic songs.

Whether listening on the web, BlackBerry smartphone, iPhone, Android-powered smartphone, iPod touch or a Slacker-enabled TV or Blu-ray player, Slacker listeners now have instant access to ABC News along with their favorite music, artist profiles, album reviews and album cover art.

Pricing and Availability

ABC News integration in the Slacker Radio service is expected to arrive early in 2010 by visiting www.slacker.com or accessing the Slacker Radio service from a supported device. The full experience will available to all subscribers to Slacker Radio Plus which is available for as low as $3.99 per month and can be purchased by visiting www.Slacker.comor selecting the "upgrade" button from within a mobile application.

About ABC News Radio

ABC News Radio is America's largest commercial radio news organization delivering daily newscasts and breaking news coverage to more than 2,400 affiliates nationwide and reaches approximately 74 million people each week on approximately 2,400 radio stations. ABC News Radio also produces ABC Sports Radio and ABC Entertainment Radio, along with programs for satellite radio and digital distribution. ABC News Radio is distributed to radio stations by Citadel Media, which has 4,400 affiliate radio stations reaching more than 110 million listeners in the 12+ demographic each week.

About Slacker, Inc.

Slacker is the world's first Personal Radio company offering "Your Radio Everywhere." Slacker allows music lovers to play highly personalized music online at the Slacker web site or on the go with Slacker Personal Radio players and mobile phones. Slacker mobile applications are currently available for Android, BlackBerry smartphones and the iPhone. For more information visit http://www.Slacker.com/everywhere.

For regular Slacker updates follow us at www.Twitter.com/SlackerRadio, become a Fan on Facebook atwww.Facebook.com/SlackerRadio or visit www.Slacker.com.

Slacker and Slacker.com are registered trademarks of Slacker, Inc. All other trademarks and product names are the property of their respective companies.

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Thursday

31Dec2009

The ABC News Radio Digital Platform

Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 12:36PM

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In the news and journalism industry, every day is exciting. Journalists and content producers are constantly rushing off to cover a story, editing audio, taking notes, and typing copy. Boredom is not frequently experienced in a newsroom.

But this year is going to be particularly exciting for ABC News Radio. While we have no intention of abandoning our affiliate stations, we will be ramping up our online presence. In fact, our digital efforts will help to improve the content and service we provide to affiliates, while also making it much easier for the average person to discover our content online.

The plan is to begin launching the ABC News Radio Platform through Q1 of 2010. A 'platform' is far more than a few web sites. Platform implies high quality content supported by infrastructure, technology, relationships, and vision. 2009 involved a lot of construction of the infrastructure and back-end. 2010 is exciting because we get to show off what we've been building.

We'll articulate specific Platform details as the year progresses. Here's the plan:

1.) Web sites.

ABC News Radio will have two web sites: one for affiliates and one for the public. The affiliate website will serve a number of functions, all based around providing timely information in multiple formats to our 2000+ radio affiliates. The public site will serve our podcasts, video, and news content in a simple, flat, highly-searchable interface. Via API, both sites will provide access to our content archive.

2.) Content Archival.

Our media archive spans more than a half decade and includes content from some of the most significant events in recent history. This content is culturally and historically important. We want you to be able to access this content quickly, easily, and affordably. The archive is immense and will take a while to fully digitize. But we can soon offer access to some of the media, and more as time goes on. We're using Amazon Web Services, and specifically S3, to store and distribute our media library. Two days ago we started pushing data from our social web accounts (Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, etc) to S3 and normalizing the data. We'll soon begin uploading portions of our archive. Soon after that we'll start letting select developers and members of the public in to poke around. If you'd like access, let us know.

3.) Data and APIs.

It's one thing to archive our media content library, but what good is that content if it's not accessible and usable? To that end we've been working with a number of developers on creation of Application Programming Interface (APIs). This will allow our affiliates, developers, and the public to access and create content (apps, widgets, tools, etc) with our data in a number of ways. We're very excited about this project and believe that data archival and access will play a significant role in the future of the news and journalism industries.

4.) Application Development.

While public betas of ABC News Radio applications are several months away from deployment, we strongly believe in delivering the news and media content to you in formats that you're accustomed to. We've begun the process of creating applications for the iPhone, Android, Facebook, and other devices. This is a long process but it's our hope that by this time next year you'll be reading a similar post from our blog our your mobile device.

5.) Social Web Integration.

We're committed to using the social web to disseminate our media, connect with our audience, and reach new audiences. There are a ton of fantastic companies, services, and people within the social web community and we've appreciated working with many of them. Some (but certainly not all) of our favorites include Squarespace, Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Blip.fm, Blip.tv, Vimeo, and others.

As ever web developer knows all products and projects are constantly in 'beta, and the ABC News Radio Digital Platform is no exception. But we've already accomplished many critical components of the above plan. Development on our web sites began almost six months ago. We've inked a deal with Squarespace to provide critical technologies, we're all over the social web, and have started laying the backbone of an accessible digital archive. There's a lot of work yet to be done, but we're confident that you'll be pleased with the results.

Thanks much for swinging by and for helping us create a better product and platform! If you have any questions or comments feel free to contact us.

- Dan Patterson

Digital Audio Manager and web platform developer [more about Dan]

ABC News Radio

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Tuesday

29Dec2009

Squarespace Partnership

Tuesday, December 29, 2009 at 12:03PM

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It's official! The ABC News Radio web platform is now officially powered by Squarespace. After several months of negotiations, last week ABC News Radio and Squarespace inked a deal that will allow us to to officially develop various web properties and push our media through their unique and flexible system.

Squarespace is a New York City-based technology company. They produce a powerful cloud-based content management system (CMS).

For the past several months we've been unofficially developing two sites using the Squarespace CMS using the domains abcnewsradioonline.com. This site - our primary public site - and an Affiliate Resource site at http://affiliates.abcnewsradioonline.com are two critical front-end and management tools that allow ABC News Radio to accomplish two core tasks:

1.) Super-serve by providing tools and information to our terresterial radio affiliate stations across the country.

2.) Provide the public with easy access to our news and media content.

Our digital initiatives have many technical components and partners. We'll document and highlight each step as we move closer to launch. And while both of these sites are still a few weeks away from launch, the Squarespace deal will allow ABC News Radio to make significant progress towards deploying a robust digital platform.

As always, if you have any questions or comments feel free to contact us.

Thanks for reading.

- Dan Patterson

Digital Audio Manager and web platform developer [more about Dan]

ABC News Radio

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Wednesday

21Oct2009

Development Site

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 11:11AM

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This is a Development Site. We could call it a jargony term like 'super-hyper-beta-alpha-release-candidate-0.81' or something equally silly. But really what this means is that this site is a work in progress.

You're likely to see a ton of design overhauls, feature and functionality additions and improvements, and maybe a few bugs. Most bugs are squashed fairly quickly but feel free to ping us if you have suggestions on how to improve things.

The ABC News Radio web platform is more than just a website and will go through several iterations. We'd like to officially launch the site by the end of 2009. At launch we should have a few content blogs, great audio podcasts from around the ABC News world, and tons of original video.

Additionally, over the next year or so we're working to roll out a content-focused API, several data archival tools, and further integration with the social web. The goal is to a.) provide a sophisticated service to our radio and content affiliates, and b.) provide an equally great service to the public at large. We want our content to be easily consumed, discussed, and shared both offline and on.

Thanks much for swinging by our home-in-the-making. We really do appreciate it. To stay current on site updates you can grab our feed, follow us on Twitter, or add our Facebook page (below). If you have any questions, comments or critiques feel free to drop us a line.

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- Dan Patterson

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Wednesday

21Oct2009

Video and ABC News Radio

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 11:07AM

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ABC News Radio Video Page

For the past few weeks we've been playing around with video. We still haven't settled on a CDN ('Content Delivery Network' for those less jargon-prone) and are still testing a few different options.

For the time being, we're using the great Blip.tv dashboard to upload videos, track metrics, and redistribute to YouTube, Vimeo, and the Internet Archive.

Over the next few weeks we're going to toy around with video interviews recorded in our studios at ABC News Radio, live from breaking news events, and mobile reporting.

We're pretty proud of our video quality - both in terms of the journalism and interview subjects and technical recording quality. And of course we want to distribute our videos - both to our affiliates and our listeners - in the most user-friend formats.

Priorities include:

Getting breaking news and important clips to our affiliates.
Providing a great podcast experience through RSS, iTunes, Zune, and other sites.
Creating a great mobile video viewing experience.
Providing videos in multiple topic-specific channels like news, politics, entertainment, and sports.
Integrating with the social web on sites like Facebook, Twitter, UStream and more.

As always, your comments and suggestions are encouraged! We know that you watch a ton of video, so drop us a line with your ideas on how best to implement various types of live, real-time, and podcast video. Stay current by grabbing the RSS Feed and by following us on Facebook and Twitter (below).

Thanks.

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Monday

12Oct2009

Sign In With Google Friend Connect

Monday, October 12, 2009 at 10:26AM

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Hi there! It's been a while since we've checked in. This is not to imply that nothing has been popping at ABC News Radio. The opposite, in fact! We've been pretty busy here at ABC News Radio.

I'll post a list of our current projects a bit later this week, but right now I'm stoked to have implemented Google Friend Connect (Wikipedia link) on our sites. See that little 'Sign In' button in the right side bar? Click it and you can securely log in with your Google credentials.

What does this mean for you? A few things: First, it means that you can easily interact with this site. It also gives you a bit more security as Google handles the authentication process, not us - Google acts as a thrid-party buffer between websites and end-users.

Much like the Disqus/Facebook/OAuth/OpenID implimentation of a few weeks ago, Google Friend Connect allows you to log in to our and follow our site and content in Google. This will allow you to use your Gmail credentials to log in, follow us in your Google Reader, and share our content with your Google Contacts.

More site updates coming soon.

As always, the RSS feed for this blog is here, you can follow us @ABCNewsRadio on Twitter, and catch our and status updates on Facebook.

If you have any questions, comments or critiques, please visit our Contact Page.

Thanks!

- Dan Patterson

Digial Audio Manager

ABC News Radio

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Wednesday

12Aug2009

Improvements in Design and Functionality

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 at 1:36PM

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This week ABC News Radio took a giant step closer to launching our new site. As you know, this site is a development site - we're working hard to integrate our broadcast properties with the social web.

Krystyn Heide, a Squarespace developer, has done fantastic work both cleaning up our code (especially the CSS - those pretty round corners) and significantly improving the design of our site.

A priority of ours is to make the site as simple and 'flat' as possible, and to emphasize beautiful design. We're very proud of our news content, and want the site to fade in to the background as much as possible, allowing you easy and quick accesss to what matters most: great news content.

Additionally, you'll soon be able to play audio content (podcasts) directly within posts. We're also working on ways to push / pull content and comments from the social web. Our goal is to wrap conversation around content in near real-time.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or critiques please feel free to drop us a line, or ping us on the social web. Thanks.

- Dan Patterson

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Wednesday

12Aug2009

Minor RSS Changes to Site Blog

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 at 1:16PM

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The ABC News Radio development site blog URL and feed have changed. This is a minor change and won't affect most of you (the Feedburner feed remains the same). However, be aware the the blog URL and feed has been shortened from /site-updates to simply /blog. The true URL is now simple http://abcnewsradioonline.com/blog and the true RSS feed is http://abcnewsradioonline.com/blog/rss.xml. Again, most readers are subscribed to the constant (and unchanging) Feedburner feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/AbcNewsRadioOnlineUpdates. If you're subscribed to this feed, you will experience no changes.

Here are the important links:

Site Update Blog URL

Site Update Blog Feed

Also of note: we have enabled the instant update protocol PubSubHubBub to facilitate instant pings of feed readers and other notification services.

ABC News Radio on Twitter

ABC News Radio on Facebook

Thanks.

- Dan Patterson

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Saturday

01Aug2009

Identity Online

Saturday, August 1, 2009 at 5:18PM

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Identity, online and off, is very important. Identity is tied to trust, ideas, and individuality. We take great pride in providing world-class reporting. And our great reporting is tied to the great individuals who comprise ABC News Radio.

The massive, buzzy social web is also highly integrated with individual identity and we're making great strides to define our identity online. As we continue to integrate our terrestrial radio product with the social web, we're contestant looking for ways to increase engagement around our content. Comments and discussion on Facebook and Twitter are, obviously, very important to true engagement.

The team at Disqus has helped ABC News Radio use their commenting platform In addition to logging in using your OpenID, Disqus, Facebook, and Twitter profiles, you now have the ability to retweet / repost our content to your media feed.

Thanks again for your comments and critiques of ABC News Radio. As we progress towards official launch, your help and feedback becomes more and more important. You can always contact us on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed. And our email is located here.

So give it a shot - log in using your preferred ID and let us know what you think!

Thanks.

- Dan Patterson

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Tuesday

21Jul2009

Comments and Connect

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 1:00PM

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There have a been a few updates to the ABC News Radio Online platform.

The ABC News Radio Facebook Page is growing quickly - thanks to everyone who joined! We've added the Facebook 'Fanbox' to ABC News Radio. The Fanbox will live on our Online page and is live right now. You can also see the Fanbox on the front page of this site. The Fanbox aggregates our news content, allows you to signup, and provides a few nifty interactive features.

Comments are live and social! We're testing the Disqus commenting system to our posts cross-site. There may be some integration bugs, but right now Disqus seems to be working just fine. Disqus is a comment aggregator that provides an identity system for all commentors, and allows easy site registration.

So, leave a comment below with your thoughts on our comment and Facebook integration - we'd love to know what you think!

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Friday

17Jul2009

Audio Player + ABC News Headlines + Search

Friday, July 17, 2009 at 3:28PM

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Three pre-weekend updates from ABC News Radio Online:

We've added an audio player and 'Listen' page that contains our latest news and audio. This particular player pulls from our podcast full content RSS feed. We'll be upgrading the player and adding several useful features soon

We've added a 'Headlines' section. This section pulls the latest headlines and breaking news from ABC News, then points back to the original story. Over the next few months we'll add ABC News Radio headlines to the mix.

Finally, we've integrated an 'Advanced Search' feature in order to help you find specific pieces of audio and news content. As we continue to integrate our content library, Search will play an increasingly important role on our site.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us.

Thanks.

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Update on Friday, July 17, 2009 at 7:21PM by

ABC News Radio

There are a few issues with audio enclosures in the full podcast feed (and subsiquent player) and on page-specific posts. Just wanted to let you know that I'm aware of these issues and will work to resolve them over the weekend. If you stumble upon any other bugs, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks.

- Dan Patterson

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Friday

10Jul2009

Podcast Feeds Updated

Friday, July 10, 2009 at 2:41PM

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I've made a few improvements to the ABC News Radio podcasts page. I've also created a full content feed that includes each episode of each show. Here's the RSS feed and iTunes link.

ABC News Radio podcasts - including This Week, President Obama's Weekly Address, Cybershake, and more - are available on this page.

Additionally, each individual podcast has a unique page with RSS and iTunes feeds and a chronological listing of each episode. Check out the This Week with George Stephanopoulos podcast page for an example of aggregation in action.

Clearly there are still a few bugs and rough edges, but the site is evolving quickly.

As always, if you have any questions or would like to report a bug, feel free to contact me at any time via our email page or on Twitter.

Thanks.

- Dan Patterson

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Monday

06Jul2009

Site Development Blog

Monday, July 6, 2009 at 4:39PM

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ABC News Radio Site Updates Feed

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Hi there - My name is Dan Patterson. I'm the Digital Audio Manager for ABC News Radio. This is the development blog for ABC News Radio. We're in the process of transitioning our web properties and integrationg various social media applications.

While terresterial radio is our bread and butter, our hearts are in news and the dissemination of news. We're not leaving radio (in fact, we're big fans of radio!) but we are looking for ways to better integrate our content and reportage in to the social web.

This process will take a while and may be a bit buggy. But we'll get there, and this blog will document various steps towards launch.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions we'd love to hear from you. Feel free to leave a comment below, visit the comments section, or follow us on Twitter @abcnewsradio. And if you have any specific/geeky questions, please feel free to ping me @danpatterson.

Thanks.

- Dan Patterson

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Wednesday

20May2009

ABC News Radio Online Reboot

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 at 9:30AM

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This is the future new home of ABC News Radio. We there's not much to see here right now, but we iterate frequently. We do offer an assortment of RSS feeds for site updates, news and headlines, and audio podcasts. If you'd like help or information about us, please visit the contact page or leave a comment below.

Thanks!

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