Sue Schardt, on NPR:

We unwittingly cultivated a core audience that is predominately white, liberal, highly educated, elite. “Super-serve the core” — that was the mantra, for many, many years. This focus has, in large part, brought us to our success today. It was never anyone’s intention to exclude anyone.

“Don’t alienate the core” is the version I always heard. Truth is, I always felt alienated by “the core.” As a young public radio reporter, in San Diego and then Boston, I was not “the core.” Attempts to challenge “the core” were tiresome, if futile. This is why public media is so maddeningly slow to change: Don’t alienate the core.

Schardt:

One choice, at this transformational moment, is to say, “We are satisfied with what we are doing. We — in radio — are providing 11 percent of America with an extraordinary service.” If this is our choice, we need to carefully consider whether we warrant public funding and, if so, what the rationale would be.

Another choice is to say, “We have cultivated and built an extraordinary infrastructure of interconnected stations that’s now adopting networked digital technologies. More important, we have created a culture of human beings who — in this building, at stations, and in my constituency of hundreds of producers — are fluent in a particular craft rooted in an idealism of service. Individuals whose intention at every step is to contribute to the greater good. Ours is a human endeavor. That is what differentiates us. This is what is at stake. This is what we must preserve.”

Jay Rosen:

Wake up, public media people! You have no magic exemption from the requirements of political maturity. There are people out there who seek your destruction, and they are not evenly distributed. They reside among culture warriors on the political right. That is a fact, and you are in the business of reporting facts.

Ira Glass:

As somebody who works in public radio, it is killing me that people on the right are going around trying to basically rebrand us, saying that it’s biased news, it’s — it’s, you know, it’s left wing news, when I feel like anybody who listens to the shows knows that it’s not. And we are not fighting back. We’re not saying anything back. I find it completely annoying and [LAUGHS], and I don’t understand it.

The Onion:

NEWSWIRE: NPR Refuses To Show Bias By Defending Self

Meanwhile, the latest from NPR? A weekold press release, buried in the bowels of its website.

It’s time to alienate the core. It’s time to fight for 40 years of thorough, respectful, groundbreaking journalism.

• Related: Fact checking the “defund” debate (written when this effort was just getting off the ground)

You work the two-man sports desk at the Chronicle-Telegram in Elyria, Ohio, and the Cleveland Indians lose (again) in an East Coast game. When the wire story finally crosses, it’s all wrong for your audience — wrong lead, wrong quotes, wrong stats. It’s 12:20 and the paper has to be on the lawn at 6. You’ve got 10 minutes to rewrite.

In the old days, of course, you would have just sent your own reporter on the road, back when you had money, back when the Indians were good. Game stories are commodities now, and newsrooms are outsourcing the coverage.

In my latest for the Nieman Lab, I explain the AP’s response to papers who can’t staff away games (all 81 of them) during the regular baseball season. The network will now file “hometown leads,” stories that focus on the losing team, in addition to its standard “game-over” stories. Editors have been asking for it for years.

I interview the AP’s sports editor, Terry Taylor, and the man who works on that sports desk in Elyria.

Why is Porter Square Station, on the Red Line, so deep? The adjacent stations at Davis and Harvard aren’t. Look up, to the top of the escalator, and it feels like you’re at the base of the pyramids.

Twitterer Amber Ying (@diabola) is first out of the gate with this 2006 blurb from the Boston Globe:

The reason Porter is the deepest station in the Boston area is simple. When under construction in the early 1980s (Porter opened in 1984), a construction-related decision was made to burrow deep and build the tunnel and station in rock as opposed to soft clay, said MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo.

“It would have been much more expensive (and taken significantly longer) to construct the tunnel and station in the soft clay due to the earth support system that would have been necessary if a more shallow alignment had been selected,” he wrote in an e-mail.

I had no idea. NPR’s Adam Martin (@adamjmartin) chimes in:

best guess…area had many shallow tunnels used by cattlemen in late1800s/early 1900s T needed to go deeper to avoid cave-ins

Better hope those escalators keep running. The elevators will be closed for a year, starting next week — ironically, to make the station more accessible.

In a piece for Harvard’s Nieman Lab, I explain the second attempt by Foreign Policy magazine to repackage and monetize its reporting — this time, on the Egyptian revolution — as an e-book. The book was published just 10 days after Hosni Mubarak’s fall from power.

The medium form — or midform journalism — is an attempt to give readers deep context for breaking news and world crises. And the convenience of a single download may be worth one, two, or five dollars.

Last week I sold my iPad 1, after 11 happy months, in anticipation of iPad 2.

I had to choose from a lot more options this year — black or white, 3G or no 3G, AT&T or Verizon? After a lot of agonizing, here is what I settled on: black, 32GB, Wi-Fi + AT&T 3G.

The color decision didn’t take long. White is pretty, even prettier in real life than I thought, but that could be just because it’s new. I think white might be too distracting. As John Gruber writes in his excellent iPad 2 review, “There’s a reason why movies are letterboxed with black bars, not white ones, and why most TVs are framed by black.”

The real decision was whether to pay $130 extra for 3G for connectivity. I sorely regretted buying the Wi-Fi model last year; my iPhone has trained me to be “always on,” and it’s frustrating to find myself “off” in a car, a bus, a train, a coffeehouse without Wi-Fi, or an airport with crappy, expensive Wi-Fi — all the places that using iPad is most delightful. I was fixated on buying the 3G model this time.

Then Apple threw a wrench in my decision-making works. With the iOS 4.3 “Personal Hotspot” feature, you can share the Internet connection of your iPhone 4 with up to five devices (including iPad).

I have an iPhone 3Gs, though. I could upgrade to iPhone 4 for $200 and then tack $20 onto my monthly data plan for AT&T’s $45/month “unlimited” plan. That way I would save the $130 on iPad’s 3G hardware.

Here’s how my math breaks down for the 32 GB model:

Current iPhone + iPad 2 (with 3G)

$0 + $730 = $730 (one-time)
$15-$25 (iPhone data) + $15-$35 (iPad data) = $30-$60/month

____

iPhone 4 + iPad 2 (no 3G)

$200 + $600 = $800 (one-time)
$45 (iPhone data) + $0 (iPad data) = $45/month

For just $70 more upfront, and essentially the same monthly commitment, I could have two shiny, new devices and be always on.

But. The latter plan would make one device dependent on another (where Wi-Fi is unavailable). That creates one more step before “on,” and it depends on iPhone having juice. (My iPhone is pretty much always dead.) Moreover, unlike iPhone, iPad lets you sign up for, change, or cancel service anytime. No commitment. Plus, $130 is a one-time tax that I will have forgotten about when the time comes to upgrade in one, two, three years.

So it came down to a decision between AT&T and Verizon. Because their networks are built differently, you have to choose one upfront. (Eventually, the hardware will be unified.) Since my iPhone service is AT&T (and I intend to keep it), I could get Verizon for iPad to cover me in places the AT&T network is dead. Redundancy is good. Plus, I like Verizon’s data plan pricing better. (MacWorld has a helpful chart.)

But in the end it came down to speed. AT&T’s network is just faster, much faster by some estimates. I need speed. It doesn’t hurt that AT&T is giving away a free month of data on new sign-ups.

On Saturday, my mind made up, I visited the Cambridgeside Galleria, pushing my way through a sea of mall rats, oversexed teenagers, and fat people until I came upon that oasis of minimalism, the Apple Store. In my excitement I missed the gigantic sign declaring that iPad 2 was out of stock. When I informed the sales clerk of my decision to purchase, she seemed almost to take pity. They were out of stock; everyone was out of stock.

When the iPhone came out, Apple cleverly showed the stock levels at retail stores on its website. That’s not the case this time. Apple wants people in their stores, lots and lots of people who wait in long lines and then play with these things. That’s why you couldn’t pre-order iPad, and why Apple’s online store shows a shipping delay of “3-4 weeks.” (Best Buy’s website does tell you if their stores have it in stock, though.)

My next decision was to visit again next week or buy online (and avoid the weird people). I decided to buy online. Here’s why:

• Everyone is sold out — the retail stores, the authorized stores, the AT&T stores — within 50 miles of here. At least I have a place in line.
• I don’t think it will actually take 3 to 4 weeks to get here. I think Apple is saying that to dissuade online shoppers, at least at first.
• Apple offers free engraving for online orders only. I really like this. I chose to have my name chiseled in the aluminum backside.
• The extra shipping time gives me time to change my mind.

What I will buy in person is Apple’s magical new Smart Cover, itself a reason to upgrade to iPad 2. I don’t like the garish polyurethane covers; I want to see the leather ones in person.

It all sounds like too much money and thought for a “gadget,” but it’s not. iPad has become my primary computer. The iPad is equipped for 90 percent of the computing I do on a daily basis: Twitter, chat, e-mail, reading news and blogs, watching video and listening to music, playing casual games. My (aging) laptop is overpowered for these tasks; it’s heavy, and the battery doesn’t last nearly as long.

Apple says my new iPad ships April 4, the week of my birthday. I really hope it gets here sooner.

Update: Apple has pushed back the shipping time to 4-5 weeks. This is how high the demand is.

I wanted to do something new. It’s really that simple.

In September 2008, I left a radio job in San Diego to become WBUR’s first Web journalist. My job description was messy and unfocused. The station had no sense of direction on the Web. My boss just wanted to hire someone who “vibrated Web” all day. He had a vision and trusted me to execute.

A few months later I set out to build a new wbur.org, the one you see today. I was named Project Manager. At the time, a lot of people in the building thought this was a bad idea, a waste of resources: WBUR is radio. They were wrong, and I knew that.

I kept the team on an impossible timeline. I almost literally had to talk people off the ledge sometimes. Our gifted developer, Will Smith, wrote almost all of the code, a Frankenstein’s monster of PHP, ASP.NET, XSLT, and TLA. Will and I wireframed, planned, or decided almost everything you see on the site today. Our team of five launched in five months. It was a wild success, etc.

Since then, I devoted hundreds of hours to training radio journalists in the Art of Good Web. I storyboarded the iPhone app, created Hubbub, and took over our social media. The organization gave me a lot of room to experiment and play. The department has grown considerably and has an executive editor now. It is in good hands.

In other words, my work was done and I got bored. What’s next? I have a couple of irons in the fire that are hot, but my eyes are wide open. I’m taking this opportunity to be 25, have an existential crisis, and take some time to find my next adventure. And I do so with all the gratitude in the world for WBUR.