I listen to NPR off-and-on throughout the day. But I rarely listen to live radio — it almost entirely comes from podcasts that I download with iTunes. I want to listen to what I want, when I want, and be able to re-arrange the order of upcoming shows in any arbitrary order I please. But the two main daily shows that I’d like to listen to, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, don’t offer podcasts. I could play the shows directly from npr.org, but then I obviously can’t listen on my iPod, and have less control over how I use it.

So I did some searching and a do-it-yourself approach is far easier than I’d imagined thanks mainly to an open source program called streamripper. Binaries are available for Mac, Linux and Windows. It’s a command line program, so you have to give it some parameters and set it to a schedule, so I can record Morning Edition from my local affiliate, KUOW, by running this command at 5 a.m. each weekday:

streamripper http://128.208.34.80:8002/ -a morning_edition.mp3 -s -d /data -l 7200

To write id3 metadata tags to our new file (used by mp3 players like iTunes), I downloaded id3v2 and gave it the following command:

id3v2 -a “NPR” -t “Morning Edition” -y `date +%Y` -g “Podcast” morning_edition.mp3

I wrapped these commands in a shell script to make it more generic. It saves each show as a separate file such as “Morning_Edition_2007-12-14.mp3”. This will work on the Mac/Linux, but a similar .bat file will need to be created for a Windows environment.

#!/bin/sh

# Config variables
MINUTES=120
ARTIST=”NPR”
DESC=”Morning Edition”
DIR=”/data/podcasts”
GENRE=”Podcast”
SRC=”http://128.208.34.80:8002/”

# Script starts here
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
STUB=`echo “$DESC” | awk ‘{gsub(/\ /,”_”);print}’`
FILENAME=$DATE\_$STUB.mp3
/usr/bin/streamripper $SRC -a $FILENAME -s -d $DIR -l `expr $MINUTES \* 60` -r —quiet
/usr/bin/id3v2 -a “$ARTIST” -t “$DESC” -y `date +%Y` -g “$GENRE” $DIR/$FILENAME

I named the script “morningedition.sh” and put it in my crontab to fire up weekdays at 5a.m.:

0 5 * * 1,2,3,4,5 ~/morningedition.sh

And voilà, I have my podcast. Pair this with other media sources and you can record any NPR show you like.

This is one of the few times that I actually choose a Microsoft product over the competition — that is, when the competition is Real.

Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine writes on the mag’s blogsite, Hit & Run:

The big danger in Monday’s FCC ruling is supposed to be that it will reduce the variety of opinions, views and commentary represented in the media, and I’m beginning to think that must be true: Since Monday, all the commentary I’ve heard about the FCC ruling says the same thing: The move will reduce the variety and opinions represented in the media.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The move will reduce the variety and opinions represented in the media.

The NY Times is squeezing money from every nook and cranny of its website. After shutting off permanent links several weeks ago (which has surely hurt their rate of incoming links), I just received an email from them. It reads in part:

Times News Tracker has been such a hit with loyal users like yourself that we’ve been working hard to build new enhancements to make keeping in touch with your world even easier. But providing this valuable service to our readers requires time and resources so we’ve made the hard decision to convert Times News Tracker to a subscription service.

So now if I want to have daily emails sent to me with keywords “Seattle”, “Nebraska” or “Portugal” I have to shell out $19.95/year. This, with absolutely no discounts for regular daily paper subscribers! Pbfft.

As this nation’s newspaper of record, the NYT’s significance on the web is diminishing as they continue to put up more fee boundaries around their content.

In response to my email stating that I would never pay for online services when I’m already shelling out $30+/month for the printed paper, the NYT writes back:

NYTimes.com is part of a different division than The Times newspaper, and each division manages its own products and is responsible for its own revenue. At this time we are not able to offer combined print and online discounts, but will continue to explore these types of offers. News Tracker is a valuable service that requires staffing time and resources. After significant research and user polling, we decided to enhance the service and charge for it.

Oh, a part of a different division, so obviously the services and fees simply cannot be integrated for the same content. Pbfft. They obviously haven’t studied the user experience here.. why would someone pay for the same content twice? The web site, as a mostly free service, should compliment the printed paper, promote the brand (unbiased, authoratative, accurate (minus Jayson Blair), comprehensive, trusted), and not try to be a money-making entity itself. I came to the printed paper through the online edition as it was just getting off the ground. Others, too, buy the printed paper after clicking on links sent through email and referenced on web sites. The incentives to link to NYT content are dwindling since the links will be broken (or rather, require a fee three times the cost of a daily paper) just days after being published. As Dave Winer observes, they’re losing web market share while they figure all of this out.

The Seattle Times claims that their circulation lead over the Seattle Post-Intelligencer grew in the last year.

Does this include the free six-days-a-week newspapers they’ve been sending to our house for the past few months? Or is this to further their money-losing scheme so they can get out of the joint operating agreement with rival Seattle Post-Intelligencer?

The same week the LA Times was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes, they talk about their photographer assigned to Iraq who altered a photograph to improve the photograph’s composition. The photoshop-happy photographer was dismissed.

This raises an interesting question for the Times Rights and Permissions FAQ that I stumbled across regarding the licensing of Times’ articles, photos and graphics:

Q: May I alter the photograph or graphic illustration?
A: No, photographs and graphics must be used as published.

Must the licensee use the altered photograph “as published” even though it was altered? You see where I’m going…

Free access to articles on the New York Times web site used to expire after 30 days. After that time you were required to pay $2.95 to read an article if you used NYT’s search to find it. But if you had the original URL to the month-old content, the one that appeared in their index pages when the article was current, you could still access it freely for an unlimited period of time. This allowed sites to link to NYT articles without forcing those users to pay for the specific article referred, while people who used the NYT’s own search for research would have to pay the fee.

I often wanted to take another look at articles I’d read in the printed edition after their free period expired and would be irritated by the $2.95 fee after already paying them $46/month for the daily subscription. But I didn’t want to keep stacks of old newspapers lying around in the chance that I might want to read something again, so I duped the NYT by creating a daily cron job that would capture each day’s HTML of each major section of the newspaper. I also stripped out the advertisements and other repetitive junk to get each day’s HTML grab down to ~1MB. The cron’d Perl script would then save the HTML according to date/month/year/section so I could do a search for an article on the NYT web site and then access the original link from my archives with a few clicks.

But today I noticed the NYT shut down free access for ALL URLs! By denying those with original links access to the articles it means that linking to NY Times will be worthless after seven days (unless the casual reader wants to pony up $2.95), so they can expect an enormous drop in incoming traffic. They’ve even reeled back the free period from 30 days to 7 days, without providing any special leeway for daily subscribers.

I’m bummed that my favorite major newspaper is shutting out folks like me who subscribe to the daily newspaper but prefer to preserve articles in a digital format. I assume they’re getting pressure to make the web site financially sustainable and, since the amount of growth the free online edition has provided for the paid printed version is not quantifyable and disregarded, this was the knee-jerk reaction to increase revenue before management had a reasonable, thought-out plan for subscribers.

I’m not planning on further subverting the NYT by grabbing every single page of each day’s news—that seems a bit extreme and would gobble up more HD space than would be worth. Instead I’ve written to feedback@nytimes.com and am hoping they’ll come up with a better solution, especially for paid subscribers.

I am subscribed to the CNN Breaking News list, and I periodically get messages like this:

U.S. troops launch assault on Baghdad international airport, wire services report. CNN is working to confirm.

So, they’re saying We don’t know if it’s true or not, but being first to deliver the news is more important than being right, so here’s our hunch.

These emails are also flawed because they link to the CNN home page.. so if you don’t read them until the next day, any relevance to that particular news flash is long gone from the home page.

From Decoding Visual Language in News Content

News delivery in this country is increasingly comprised of carefully crafted displays of visual information. As consumers of information, however, most of us have never been taught to critically read or decode images and other graphic displays of information in the same ways that we have been taught to analyze verbal communication. We are taught reading comprehension and writing skills throughout most of our educational experience, but not visual language comprehension. Yet, if we wish to remain critical viewers of the news media in the midst of this imagedriven, converging media landscape, we must develop equally sophisticated visual literacy skills.