Ann Marie Cunningham & Sharon Benjamin

It truly is a small world. My good friend Ann Marie Cunningham is the executive director, TalkingScience and a best-selling science print journalist (Ryan White: My Own Story) and award-winning television producer who helped develop the PBS series Ghostwriter, CRO, Cyberchase, and Innovation. Ann Marie recently met up with another good friend, Sharon Benjamin. Sharon has a BA in Biology from Bowdoin College, and an eclectic resume. She has held bearcubs in Maine; studied sustainable development and eco-tourism while traveling in Costa Rica; and volunteered on research surveys off the northeast coast for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She just finished her most recent venture – managing a successful political campaign in New York City – and is applying to graduate schools for environmental and marine resource management. She currently lives in Manhattan.

TalkingScience, founded by my friend Ira Flatow,  is a part of the Science Friday Initiative. The mission of the Science Friday Initiative is to provide a public platform for discussion and understanding of the latest discoveries, innovations and controversies in science. In collaboration with the Science Friday radio program, the Science Friday Initiative aims to make science more accessible, fun, and interactive for young people using new media technologies and live events.

Ironically…they met not knowing they were both longtime FOBS (Friends of Bill Sobel) and the photograph above is the proof. FYI…Ann Marie & Shareon are standing at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.  They’re on the floor of Brookhaven’s particle collider, known as RHIC, Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.  It’s like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland:  physicists use it to smash particles together and study what conditions might have been at the dawn of the universe, right after the Big Bang. They’re standing outside one of the points on the collider’s 2.5 mile track where particles actually collide.

In March of this year, National Public Radio (NPR) revealed that by the end of 2008, 23.6 million people were tuning into its broadcasts each week. In fact, NPR’s ratings have increased steadily since 2000, and they’ve managed to hold on to much of their 2008 election coverage listenership bump (with over 26 million people tuning in each week so far in 2009), unlike many of their mainstream media counterparts.

Compared to cable news, where most networks are shedding viewers, and newspapers, where circulation continues to plummet, NPR is starting to look like they have the future of news all figured out. Or at least, they appear to doing a lot better at it than the rest of the traditional media.

But what is NPR doing differently that’s causing their listener numbers to swell? They basically have a three-pronged strategy that is helping them not only grow now, but also prepare for the future media landscape where traditional methods of consumption (TV, radio, print) could be greatly marginalized in favor of digital distribution.

FOR THE COMPLETE STORY CLICK HERE