Tapping Into Community

In my work at WNYC, there’s a frequent saying, when it comes to special projects: If you build it, and promote it, they will come. There are few things more fulfilling than seeing “audience” members respond enthusiastically to a call-to-action. Audience participation builds community and loyalty, and provides valuable insights into the minds of our most dedicated readers and listeners. Here are some of the engagement projects that I’m proud to have worked on.

WNYC’s Public Song Project (2023)

Every year, a new batch of copyright protected content enters the public domain, allowing creators to remix and re-interpret those works. We thought that, more than allowed, such creativity should be encouraged. So we encouraged the musicians in WNYC’s audience to submit their public domain-derived creations to a contest, assembled a panel of musicians and experts as judges, and published a playlist of all of the wonderful works. We got a wonderful range of submissions, from a low-tech recording of a seniors’ Ukelele club, to high concept re-imaginings of “The Best Things In Life Are Free,” to several amped up renditions of “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

Reading Their Names (2021)

NYC got hit early with COVID, and we got hit hard. This is a city of stranger-neighbors, and we knew when we entered lockdown that when we emerged, some of them — our deli cook, our bus driver, our subway regulars — wouldn’t be there. This is a memorial to honor them, whether we knew their names or not. All told, 445 participants read 4 names each for a total of 1,780 names. Organizing this project was a daunting logistical undertaking, but with some creative problem solving and a few dozen lines of code, I was able to automate much of it, resulting in a powerful 90 minute ritual of community grief.

WNYC’s 2020 Time Capsule (2021)

A year after the pandemic hit NYC, we asked our listeners to reflect on the past year and share the stories and meditations, good and bad, that they don’t want to forget. The capsule was placed at the top of the Empire State Building, next to the station’s transmitters, and will be opened in 2030. This project took many long hours to gather and package, but has been one of the most fulfilling projects I’ve gotten to work on.

Audio/Text Library of Crowdsourced “Emergence” Poems (2021)

This April, as the vaccine rollout continued and the post-pandemic world appeared on the distant horizon, WNYC’s newsroom asked listeners to submit poems around the theme of “emergence.” The project leads curated a selection of over 80 poems, and solicited readings in audio form. Using CSS, HTML and Javascript, I built an interactive library to package and share them with our broader audience.