Strategy

Take our playbook: NPR’s guide to building immersive storytelling projects

Hypothesis-Driven Design (and our step-by-step guide) can help you navigate uncharted territory in a complicated storytelling project.

Want to start a podcast? Read this first

Use these prompts and quick tips to get your creative process started.

A blueprint for planning storytelling projects

Fill this out when you’re getting started, for focus throughout the creative process.

How to develop a strong, sustainable local newsletter

Creating — and sustaining — an editorial email newsletter can be tough. We’ve identified three models that are delivering results in public media.

The steps to finding, developing and vetting news sources

Sourcing the news is getting harder all the time. For three seasoned NPR reporters, it involves careful vetting, delicate negotiations and, every now and then, cigars.

How to make local listeners care about your story

Using data from the NPR One app, we identified specific approaches to telling audio stories that can inspire your audience to sit up and listen.

5 things to do when programming Facebook

If you’re lucky, your story might sometimes be the topic of that conversation; if you’re smart, you’ll be engaged in the discussion, too.

What improv lessons taught us about live video

“Yes and …” yourself to success!

Plan your editorial project in 13 steps (and with lots of sticky notes)

You can use this process to shape a vertical, to plan a project, to plan newsroom-wide coverage or to plan a social strategy.

9 types of local stories that people like to share

Learn about place explainers, crowd pleasers, curiosity stimulators and six other engagement-encouraging story types — all supported by data!

Acting on analytics: Using data to make editorial decisions

This document will help you use metrics data to make informed editorial decisions.