Notices by gbhnews (gbhnews@mastodon.social), page 2

@gemlog I'll type a little more tomorrow, k? I have a basic sense of it but I want to summarize it more cleanly than I suspect I am capable of at this hour. 😁

@gemlog Technical costs aren't the thing holding us back.

📡 for those of you who are just tuning in

GBH News is a PBS/NPR newsroom in Boston, Massachusetts.

We start each day with a greeting, the weather, a news brief, and a poll.

It surprises me when we get people who say they think this is the full output of our newsroom, but of course it is not. We simply care enough about the #fediverse to engage here.

If you want livestreams/video, see here: https://www.youtube.com/c/gbhnews

If you want to do a deep dive, visit our website: https://www.wgbh.org/news/

@dl @feditips what's your source for a total user count? @mastodonusercount is one I often see as well as Fediverse Observer.

Do you know about #Newstodon Friday?

On Fridays, news organizations with an active presence here in the #fediverse share their best work with you.

It's a great way to find interesting stories and news organizations you may want to follow!

Today's #Newstodon Friday host is @themarkup.

Check out what they are sharing: https://mastodon.social/@themarkup@mastodon.themarkup.org/110197536045942313

@msbellows @TexasObserver

That's an excellent question. I worked for INN (The Institute for Nonprofit News) for a few years. At the time we had ~140 nonprofit news organizations as members and the core of our work was helping them get to a place of financial sustainability.

Typically, success looked like:

* recurring revenue from memberships
* events

and sometimes

* partnerships or even acquisition by a public media organization

(it's their call of course, I'm just an observer)

@TexasObserver

We think the story of the week HAS to be: @TexasObserver saving itself. #WeGotUs! International coverage: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/29/texas-observer-closing-gofundme

See how the effort to put the TO on a new footing is going: https://www.gofundme.com/f/laid-off-texas-observer-journalists-and-staff

Just goes to show: the future of journalism is about news organizations directly supported by the people they serve. ?

Congrats to the @TexasObserver ! #newstodon

Since a lot of new folks are here, I thought it might be time for a fresh #introduction.

@gbhnews is a PBS/NPR newsroom in #Boston, #Massachusetts.

We start the day with a greeting, the weather, a news roundup, and a poll.

We're interested your cats, your dogs, democracy, journalism, our neighborhood, our world, and what matters to you.

@nikkiana Having each of these CMS instances support ActivityPub would be a major advance in a number of ways, but in my opinion, this is the big one: it would allow very easy sharing of articles BETWEEN NPR affiliates.

Right now, most NPR affiliates' websites get an automated feed of NPR articles via NPR's API.

But it's still hub-and-spoke; here in Boston I have automatic access to NPR articles but not, say, to the work of an affiliate in San Antonio. 3/x

@nikkiana ...but now ~200 stations will be moving to a CMS from a company called Brightspot (a little background on that: https://current.org/2019/11/public-media-looks-to-new-cms-for-systemwide-boost-to-web-offerings/) 2/x

@dl Yes! I work in public media, so we're not as relentlessly numbers-focused as commercial media is. But we do try to be good stewards of the resources that our members give us via supporting us. I mean, even one server is a whole lotta tote bags! (Sorry, had to get an NPR joke in there somewhere).

I feel like I signed up to get on the waiting list for some Mastodon analytics app...shucks, now I forget the name. It will come to me.

@sarae aw thank you it does help!

Also we do share some stories that aren't from Massachusetts. If you see a good one let me know!

@sarae I grew up with it too! Our logo has changed some, but the sound, called a "sting," is one we still use all these years later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1-vp3Ynzlc

@FindingHobbes You're the best. ⭐️

And I do think engagement is deeper/more genuine here. For now, since Mastodon doesn't have the kind of analytics other social platforms do, follower count is the only hard number I can share with peers in other newsrooms or people here at GBH.

Numbers aren't everything, especially in public media, thank goodness. But when we make decisions about limited resources they are *a* factor.

Here's what I gave to the reporters in my newsroom: https://lisawilliams.github.io/lisa/tech/2022/11/28/mastodon-101-for-journalists.html

It's a little tough to make the argument just on numbers, at least for now. Mastodon has about ~9M users; Twitter has ~240M, and FB and YT have billions.

@fishidwardrobe interesting. We have separated more serious updates from the more lighthearted poll already. Let me think it through...

So it's not just the cost of setting up/running a server (which people tell me here could be quite minimal). It's the man-hours of prep, setup, and ongoing maintenance for things like moderation, tech support, etc. that come into the equation.

And the other half of that equation is the assessment the people involved make of the opportunity. Math is a big part of that. How many users are on that network, and how many of those people are likely to see or engage? 2/2

@mem_somerville Yes. It's just that some people seem to think that the only cost is the cost to set up a server. for a station or a network a lot more goes into it.

Not totally sure why my link is not working but here's the commentary I shared before:

NOTE: as I mentioned to @FediFollows and @hermitary earlier today, it's important to understand the barriers that face stations or networks that want to set up a server. I summarize those here: https://mastodon.social/@gbhnews/110186548799130656

No one should expect anything to happen instantly.