Fast Company on WNYC's Storytelling Experiments

Fast Company writer John Paul Titlow did a great job capturing the spirit of experimentation at WNYC -- and me doing an ill-advised live demo on stage:

"Anyone who thinks old-school media can't be stealthy and innovative has never seen John Keefe text a room full of people from a command line on his laptop. But tonight, the senior editor for data news at WNYC—a public radio station founded in 1924—is showing off some things he built to help his colleagues tell stories."

Read the whole story here.

Make Every Week: Texted Picture Catcher

“Let’s have people send pictures!”

This idea comes up a lot where I work. And we’ve done some great photo-crowdsourcing projects.

But how best to get pictures from an audience? Telling people tag us on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook can work, as in WNYC’s Bodega Cats project. But people have to be using those services.

Most folks can email a picture, especially when the email address is easy to remember. That’s what we did for WNYC’s Abandoned Bikes project.

What about texting pictures?

The phone/texting service I like to play with, Twilio, recently added MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service. MMS is what you’re using when you text a picture or video.

So for this week’s #MakeEveryWeek, I wanted to figure out how to text a picture to my server, via Twilio, and then upload it to Flickr:

Phone -> Phone number -> Twilio -> My Server -> Flickr

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