Story Exchange (formerly Story Market) is a way for local public radio stations, producers, and listeners to pitch, find and fund documentaries and stories on important local issues. We’re also one of this year’s winners of a Knight News Challenge grant.
Here’s how we envision it working: Let’s say that in Kentucky the issue of mountaintop mining needs a deeper investigative look. On Story Exchange, the Louisville public radio WFPL station can invite producers to bid on reporting the story, ask listeners to contribute funds as well as ideas, and see the story through to completion for broadcast and digital distribution.
You can also watch this video to learn more:
Story Exchange has deep roots as an idea at Public Radio Exchange. Since we first launched in 2003 the core service of PRX has been an open online marketplace for public radio stories — audio documentaries, interviews, features, and other pieces that might have already aired somewhere locally or nationally but have continued value in distribution. Over time we have built a robust market where today over 2,500 local stations, independent producers and others regularly buy, sell and distribute tens of thousands of stories (over 8,300 purchased so far just this year), reaching millions of listeners through broadcast and digital channels.
PRX Today
PRX’s approach has been to create efficient tools for distribution and discovery that reduce barriers and friction, establish incentives for participation, and increase the overall pool of talent, content, access, and reach. (PRX has expanded its services and recently announced a significant round of funding.)
But even as this has succeeded on PRX.org, we see ongoing gaps in supply and demand, and new ways to use PRX’s growing community and platform to connect stations and producers — and the public — around issues that need coverage.
Today a typical transaction on PRX might consist of a local public radio station looking for an hour-long documentary on, say, urban agriculture. They search the site, find a handful of results, audition them and then license one for broadcast. PRX charges a license fee and pays producers royalties when their work is used.
If the results turn up empty, or stations wants something customized for local use, the most PRX can typically do is help connect them with producers as a kind of talent broker. (Producers maintain LinkedIn-style resumes and portfolios on PRX.)
But what if stations, producers, and listeners themselves could use PRX as a way to seed, surface, and fund original content matched to a direct distribution opportunity? What if donations from “listeners like you” weren’t just for the news you already use, but for what’s missing?
This is the idea behind Story Exchange.
Story Exchange
When we were gearing up to pitch Story Exchange as a News Challenge project, we came to an interesting conclusion. While we had been kicking around the idea for several years, by now there were similar projects taking shape. Some were in adjacent fields like indie music (i.e. Sellaband), and one in particular in journalism (Spot.us, a previous and prominent News Challenge winner).
The News Challenge states up front that criteria for selection include innovation and originality. Rather than try to claim Story Exchange as a unique insight, we stated what our idea had in common with Spot.us and proposed a code-level collaboration as a signature approach of the project.
By joining the open source development of the Spot.us codebase we’re going to help develop and extend the platform, integrate it with PRX’s own services, and add functionality specific to the public radio system. We see this as a unique opportunity to build on a promising new model with an open source approach.
Knight’s commitment to open source software sets an important threshold, but while there’s important value in ensuring that investments in software stay accessible, most open source projects fail to attract a community of developers beyond the project’s original team. A benefit of PRX joining forces with Spot.us is the greater likelihood that the codebase will evolve and stay relevant as ours and other projects incorporate it.
Story Exchange is just getting under way, we’re planning our first pilot later this year with our partners at Louisville Public Media. Right now we’re working out the details of various APIs and user authentication integration with our friends at Spot.us (If you’re a coder you’ll be interested to know that Spot.us and PRX are both using Ruby on Rails — one more incentive for our collaboration — and you’ll be able to track our progress on GitHub).
We anticipate (and will blog about) some of the challenges to come, including the ways that Story Exchange runs counter to some of the ingrained public radio culture, the obstacles we encounter integrating a new model into the existing PRX system, the tech partnership, and the overall merits and successes of the emerging crowdfunding model for journalism. Stay tuned!
