For this week’s blog post, I decided to focus on Here & Now, WBUR’s flagship midday news show. Here & now is hosted by Tonya Mosley and Robin Young, and describes itself on the WBUR website as a show that “reflects the fluid world of news as it’s happening in the middle of the day, with timely, smart and in-depth news, interviews and conversation.” It tends to deal with national and international news and explores topics and trends that are affecting the whole country, and can often get some fairly big-name guests and interviews. A staff of 25 people in total work on the show, and it’s syndicated all across the country–when I interned at 90.5 WESA in Pittsburgh, we had Here & Now syndicated every day at 1 pm.
What I was particularly interested in for this blog, though, were the different ways that stories from Here & Now are presented on the WBUR site. They’re usually short interview segments, five to ten minutes long, that are cut, from what I can tell, from the main interview that aired during the day. A list of clips that made up that day’s full show is also available on the page for Here & Now, at a smaller link, and you’re able to search through the archive by date.
As for the articles themselves, they’re usually paired audio segments with a transcript or written summary of the interview. Some, however, include interesting multimedia components. This story about comics artists working to increase Black representation in comics and graphic novels includes an embedded portion where you can read an actual excerpt from a collection of short stories about the superhero Black Panther, which the artists discuss in the interview. This story includes the full text of a brief from the Birmingham Public Safety Task Force about police reform. Both are displayed using Scribd, an e-book and document subscription service, and are accessible right within the page. This setup seems pretty useful for providing access to detailed documents like this–it allows a potential reader to go deeper into the story if they want to, while also being placed in a spot that isn’t too obtrusive if they don’t have the time or attention to read the full document. It also feels remarkably transparent as a news decision, as well, to make text source material publicly front and center.
Not every story comes with a summary or quotes. This interview with the Governor of Puerto Rico about the effort for Puerto Rico’s statehood has a much smaller description, presumably to encourage viewers to listen to the actual interview. It’s a shorter interview clip, which may also contribute to the decision not to summarize it right away. I also noticed that for some articles / interviews that were posted earlier in the day, the inverse was true–an article went up summarizing the briefer points of the news segment, with a disclaimer that the audio would be added later in the day, which it was a few hours later. This practice makes sense in terms of workflow as well as what’s practically possible when dealing with breaking news in an audio broadcast format–written copy is easier to get up on the website quickly than edited audio, and if readers are looking for a quick explanation of a situation, they can read the summary first and get the audio afterward.
In terms of social media, the Here & Now twitter is pretty active, posting about twice an hour to promote stories from that day’s show as well as retweet links from reporters that produced or reported for them. The Twitter also tends to double-post or repeat postings of big stories, within the same day at different times, presumably to get more eyes on the story at different times of day. This tweet including a link to the interview with comics creators Jesse Holland and John Jennings was posted three times, each time with a different excerpt or fact in the body of the tweet.
In terms of readability and clarity, it’s pretty clear, though the frequent repeating of stories can make it a little confusing if scrolling directly through the feed of Here & Now itself. It makes sense more that these multiple postings of stories aren’t really meant to be seen in succession, but are more for people to potentially run into during their day when they’re free.
Julia Maruca 
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