Welcome to NPR Digital Media’s tech blog!
A thriving, mission-driven multimedia organization, NPR produces award-winning news, information, and music programming in partnership with hundreds of independent public radio stations across the nation. NPR listeners value information, creativity, curiosity, and social responsibility — our employees do too. We are innovators and leaders in diverse fields, from journalism and digital media to product design and software engineering. Every day our employees and member stations touch the lives of millions worldwide.
The Digital Media department at NPR’s Washington, DC headquarters got its start over 20 years ago from a persistent producer on Weekend All Things Considered who had a sneaking suspicion that this new thing called “the internet” might be a way to engage with our devoted and curious NPR listeners. From our earliest days online (anyone else remember Mosaic?) to our most recent efforts to bring public radio to new audiences through the NPR One app, our team works daily to advance NPR’s mission: to create a more informed public — one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas and cultures.
These days, our team is a hybrid group consisting of visual designers, interaction designers, web and mobile developers, QA specialists, sysadmins, support engineers, data scientists, product managers, scrum masters, and audio production engineers, each of whom holds a smattering of other superpowers in addition to their technical skills. Some of our digital products include NPR.org (and the home-grown content management system that powers it), the NPR News app for iOS and Android, and NPR One, which offers a personalized mobile and platform listening experience for 21st century radio.
At the same time, our partners-in-crime up in Boston, at NPR Digital Services, work closely with individual stations to help them maximize their digital impact and share resources and content across our robust membership system. Their projects include Core Publisher, Composer 2, the Station Analytics System, and additional training and support as stations bring their local content into NPR One.
As developers, we work in cross-functional scrum teams to build engaging experiences that serve our listeners and member stations, whether that is on our website or mobile apps, through a TV or in a car, and anywhere else our listeners may want to tune in in the future! We solve tough problems daily, and we’re passionate about the work that we do. We're polyglot programmers who use PHP, Java, Objective-C, node.js, MySQL, Redis, Javascript, HTML, CSS, or whichever tool or language is best for the job. Currently, we are obsessed with Lean product development, responsive design, document databases, RESTful and Hypermedia APIs, performance and scalability, and machine learning, but who knows what tomorrow will bring? We are diverse, lifelong learners and read omnivorously from NPR’s giveaway bookshelf, regularly walk down the hall to Tiny Desk Concerts, tell coding jokes, and edit bad grammar on milk cartons.
We've got a lot to share and a lot to learn, and we're excited about this new venture as digital citizens. Welcome to our blog!
