It's no secret that the variety of entertainment, news and information content offerings has expanded over the past decade, and that the pandemic caused a virtual explosion in consumption. Digital content reliance has increased dramatically in the past 18 months as people moved indoors to work from home, heed COVID mandated lockdowns and escape an unrelenting news cycle.
At KPBS we experienced a three-fold increase in people coming to our website, live radio stream and video streaming portal, Passport. While the pandemic accelerated the trend, our digital audience was already growing at a faster rate than our broadcast channels. Our breadth of digital distribution includes newsletters, podcasts, various news aggregation applications like Apple News, Google News and Newsbreak, as well as YouTube, mobile apps and smart speakers. We’ve known for a few years that we needed to upgrade our website’s technology and design; the pandemic simply made it a more urgent necessity to do so in order to meet our community’s demand.
With this in mind, KPBS is pleased to announce the launch of its new website on September 27, 2021.
A number of things have changed:
- You will first notice the new modern design that is very mobile-friendly. All of the content you are used to accessing is still there.
- A powerful search function that works (many of you have expressed frustration over the years at our old search tool).
- Pages have moved to different URLs. In general, old URLs should still take you where you want to go but you may need to use the search function.
- The navigation at the top of the site has been streamlined based on feedback from our audience and our staff.
- The radio live streams (news and classical music) are now in the “persistent player” at the top in desktop or bottom on mobile devices. You will no longer have a pop-up window you need to keep open.
- The TV live stream is easily accessible from the “Watch Live” link at the top.
- The events search has fewer options for now but we’ll be adding more search parameters shortly to help you narrow down what and where you want to attend.
These are changes you will see. What is exciting for Team KPBS is what only we see. It's been clear for several years that creating content on our website was taking more and more resources which could best be used elsewhere. We needed a digital publishing platform that increased efficiency and allowed for faster and wider sharing of the local news, information and entertainment you count on. We wanted the flexibility to mix content up on the site so we could promote an event in a story or a podcast from a video without requiring a web developer to make those enhancements.
Around the same time KPBS started searching for a solution, NPR announced it would offer a product tailored toward public media stations. After much review and due diligence, KPBS decided to migrate to this system so we could make the most of our internal resources and maximize our ability to share with our public radio and TV colleagues. We are excited about this new milestone.
As with any major project, we anticipate there being unforeseen problems we need to fix and a growing punch list once we are live. Our team is ready. If you would like to give feedback, please reach out to us at communications-dept@kpbs.org.
So please pardon our dust while we work to finish our "digital remodel" and set the foundation to deliver the best local news and information to our audience.
