An Interview with NPR Digital's GM Maria Thomas

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on October 6, 2006 - 8:26am.

NPR Digital GM Maria Taylor - Digital Music Forum West 2006

NPR Digital GM Reins in Expectations on Forthcoming Music Service
"It won't be a digital download store"
From Digital Music Forum West 2006: That's not entirely true. NPR's new digital music service, announced on Aug. 31 and slated for launch in the first half of next year, will likely point users to digital retailers where they can buy song downloads and a portion of proceeds will go to NPR — a presently offered on NPR.org.

But it also appears that an ambitious and seemingly quite intuitive idea that Thomas had – which was endorsed by others in the field including Integrated Media Association (IMA) Executive Director Mark Fuerst — has been effectively abandoned. That plan would have seen NPR's online identity mimic that of Major League Baseball, with NPR.org mirroring MLB.com, and NPR member public radio station sites maintaining a consistent look and sharing back-end servers and infrastructure (MLB hired Sun Microsystems), like each individual MLB team.

"It is probably not going to happen, a single public radio portal… The idea is very intuitive — it is not efficient to have 300 websites operating on 300 infrastructures running 300 streams. However, the other reality is that every station is licensed in its own market, and every station is slightly differently situated. The idea of a centralized portal is appealing intellectually, but practically speaking, I don't see it happening."

Shy of that goal, Thomas said possibilities for synergy include a federated search functionality, and some sort of federated identity among member station sites.

"My sense of it is that you're not going see a big bang effect in the marketplace. It's not going to be some huge unveiling, and all of a sudden you're going to go to NPR.org/music and there's going to be fireworks going on. Frankly, it will be built the way the website has been built, which is incrementally."

You can download and listen to Mark Hefflinger's entire interview with NPR's Maria Thomas by clicking here (WMA 30 min, 7.8MB).