WHAT'S NEW?

SITE OF THE WEEK

Radio isn’t radio anymore. It is morphing into a super hybrid medium that includes readable text, pictures, video, databased content and computer interactivity. Radio is no longer constrained by time or limited by distance. With improved streaming and archiving techniques, you can listen to it anywhere, anytime.

VISIT the WBUR FM 90.9 web site

Thanks to the Internet, radio has even broken free of its own dictionary definition. According to Webster, radio is strictly a wireless medium. It is a transmission through the air that falls within a clearly defined frequency range. When you listen to music on your satellite TV – that’s radio. Even your new cell phone is technically in the radio family. But when you listen to a radio station that travels to your computer through a phone line or a cable modem, it is no longer wireless, therefore, not radio.

But radio is still fundamentally about sound. Unless you are one of those lunkheads who watches Howard Stern’s radio show on television, we can agree that the experience is still primarily aural. Radio treads more gently on the brain. Radio lives where the largely visual medium of television fears to tread – at the dentist, on airplanes, in stores, in the front seat of cars and on long jogs through the park.

So when I am listening to WBUR on my computer, I’m usually doing something else with my eyes – like writing this column. But should I elect to "watch" this radio station too, to give it my full attention, a whole new world opens up.

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

The problem for most radio stations, to date, has been exactly what to do with all this newfound power and flexibility. Commercial music stations, finding few ways to generate money online, have largely dropped the ball.

Their web sites are often little more than commercials, contests and low-end humor by station dee-jays. Who cares about Internet radio if it merely rehashes corporate pop culture and plays the same music? What matters online is something fresh that you can’t find elsewhere. WBUR.org fits that definition.

WBUR emanates from Boston University and began as a 400-watt campus station in 1950. It has evolved into one of the finest public radio stations in the country. While most radio stations have all but abandoned news reporting, WBUR is the first non-commercial station to be named "News Station of the Year" by the Associated Press. The station’s reporting and news commentary is first rate and each day WBUR produces five hours of additional original programming. "The Connection", for example, is an edgy two-hour show about ideas that may cover poetry one day, Hollywood the next, and air live from Baghdad the following day. "On Point" in the evening and "Here and Now" at noon start with the news and track deeply into areas that commercial news often misses entirely.

Robin Lubbock, the station’s director of "new media" says the site is attracting a million page views a month. Making a quick check, Lubbock discovers 750 listeners currently tuned into the station via the Internet.

"The question that we’re all asking ourselves is -- what do the users want? Why do they come to us?" Lubbock says. It is a question that is forever on the table and leads to a constantly tweaked and improved web site.

Users are asking, he says, for more national and international news, for more streamed news and for more archived shows. We are starved, it seems, for voices we can trust who will tell us the truth.

"In many ways this thing, the Internet, allows us a much greater reach," Lubbock says. Streaming allows readers in Europe, for example, to participate in a live talk show going on in a Boston studio.

THE UP SHOT

I’ve never listened to WBUR on an actual radio. My dial there is loyally fixed on either the New Hampshire or Maine public radio stations. They too offer great streaming web sites with intriguing local programming that is nicely archived. But something about the WBUR online format appeals to me while I am working. It’s a subtle, but powerful pull that I’m only now coming to understand.

It begins with the homepage that constantly refreshes visually to keep up with the changing radio programs. Drawing from an endless rush of Reuters news photos and the work of their own reporting team, WBUR.org is every bit as intriguing as a major online newspaper. But the feature section goes even further. A complete video tour of Boston’s Big Dig, including a clickable map, and a narrated slide show tour of the historic Forest Lawn Cemetery are typical of the enormously detailed "bonus" tracks. The station offers in-depth arts coverage and a rich calendar database of Boston area events. WBUR emanates from Boston, but it is about the world.

These features alone earn the web site a "favorites" bookmark. But amazingly, these are only the backdrop to a top-notch radio station. The pumpkin colored "Listen Live" button in the upper left tells you instantly what is playing. Click and the show loads quickly through a variety of streaming media. The schedule page provides a very clear map of the days programming. Missed a show? WBUR programs are available in the archive section just three minutes after the show ends. Amazing.

Lubbock says that, from the arrival of the Internet, WBUR embraced the technology. The station’s deep commitment to its online persona is evident at every level. Like few stations, WBUR has turned its linear broadcast, a broadcast that never stops, into a fully understandable nonlinear media. The web site keeps pace with the station while simultaneously commenting on it, enhancing it and archiving it. That is a Herculean set of tasks and yet, on the surface, WBUR.org is breathing calmly.

But there’s more. Lubbock points to a new search function that the station is developing with the Hewlett-Packard Corporation. Readers can now type words into a search box online and the experimental software searches spoken words in the WBUR archive looking for matching content. It is not searching a text transcript, but the audio files themselves. It isn’t perfected, but it is an indication of where the "new" radio is headed.

"The Web is endless," Lubbock says. "We’ve managed to kill the tyranny of time. Our business model is to make great content and hope people will pledge to support it."

WBUR then "bundles" its programming in with other great content coming from National Public Radio and the BBC and Reuters. The result, online at least, is a seamless, ceaseless, serious flow of intelligent programming.

Intelligent, in-depth, noncommercial content available for free 24 hours a day all across the Earth – it’s a cutting edge idea. But can it compete with Madonna making out with Britney Spears? Inquiring minds want to know.