TV as the New Radio

     NPR’s News Applications Editor Brian Boyer is pioneering the way for a new era with TV acting as the new radio.
     Since 2007, NPR has been gathering popular musicians from around the world to perform in an intimate setting known as the “Tiny Desk Concerts.” The artists sing into a single microphone in front of an audience of NPR employees, and then the videos are posted online to YouTube. However, this year, you won’t have to go to the web to enjoy your favorite artists. You can simply turn on your TV and enjoy the music after downloading an application on your phone for Roku. With millions of views online, Boyer is hoping that the videos will be met with the same enthusiasm when put on TV.      
     Radio was the first device that allowed for mass communication. Today, however, radios in the home have become rare, and you are most likely to see them sitting on a shelf covered in dust with their days of playing music and news long gone. While radios may be outdated, the idea of sole sound is still very much in use. That’s because it allows for much more multi-tasking, which is great in a world that is continuously growing busier.
    “Audio is a medium that fits into peoples’ daily lives,” said Boyer.
     For NPR, who lives and breathes audio, what better way to market their “Tiny Desk Concerts” then to put them on a device that you’d be hard pressed not to find in an everyday household.  
    “There’s this box in everyone’s house, this TV, that’s totally good at playing audio and I don’t really have to put anything interesting on the screen,” said Boyer. “I feel like that’s the machine we need to infect with our work.”
     Boyer, who began his career at a software company in Chicago after studying computer science, had no plans of becoming a journalist (although he did work at his high school’s newspaper.) But his work in software was not fulfilling, which is how he stumbled across the idea of journalism.
     “At the end of the day, it was just soul sucking crap to work on. Making rich people more money,” said Boyer. “Thankfully, through good luck I came across a blog post on boingboing about Northwestern University giving scholarships to software developers to study journalism for a year.” 
     After graduation, Boyer went on to intern at ProPublica in New York and then spent three years at the Chicago Tribune working on their news applications team before finally landing where he is today at NPR, where he’s worked for almost two years.
     As for Boyer’s future, he is most excited about doing more with television, depending on whether or not the “Tiny Desk Concerts,” or what he calls “experiments,” are successful. And while his vision of what he’d like in his future doesn’t seem too clear, he’s confident that his talented teams are going to end up someplace “really cool” in the years to come. But for someone with a job like his, the future doesn’t need to be, and isn’t, written in stone.
     “There’s no obvious path for someone like me,” said Boyer. “I’m just enjoying the ride and we’ll see where it takes me."

Brian Boyer talks about the history of being a "data journalist." VIDEO: Meghan Whiting, runtime ;15