$600,000

Alex Villari

WNYC Radio

To improve a city’s awareness of its arts and culture by bringing more diverse voices to WNYC public radio using a new type of interactive web site. WNYC will use social networking and social engagement tools to “take radio out of the box” and change it from a one-way to a multi-directional conversation. WNYC will create a new portal for cultural news, trends and events, using the tools of e-mail, audio, video, live events, user-initiated meet-ups and social networking. It will create an interactive, noncommercial, social networking platform built around users’ interest in cultural events. It will give listeners an ownership stake in the development of content, while also sharing its expertise with the audience. WNYC will partner with several dozen cultural organizations in NYC, including The New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, The Met Opera Guild, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, Carnegie Hall, Studio Museum of Harlem, Queens Museum, Museo del Barrio, Asia Society, and Harlem Chamber of Commerce. WNYC will work with many smaller community-based arts and cultural groups such as Asian American Arts Alliance, Flamenco Latino, Thalia Spanish Theater and Women's Studio Center to aggregate and organize the city’s cultural events and conversations. WNYC will become the credible center of cultural conversations in NYC. It will help listeners find people with common interests and connect them to local geographic communities by “geo-tagging” its content so that people in specific areas can quickly find what is happening near them and what conversations are occurring about those nearby events.