KQED
Boosting the signal of independent journalism
We created a powerful publishing platform with global reach
A compelling interactive transformation of a public media giant.
During several years of exciting and innovative collaboration, Aleph led a comprehensive effort to modernize the way KQED delivers content to its audience. As both a technology partner and ideological soul mate, our work supported a sea change for both the newsroom and audience of one of the most listened to NPR affiliates in the United States.
KQED.org
KQED’s Digital Product Team had a mandate to both drastically improve the stability of KQED.org and to make its huge library of broadcast content more accessible to site visitors.
Aleph's collaboration with them, dubbed "The Listening Project", gave rise to audacious new ideas around KQED’s digital publishing platform, user experience and cloud-based infrastructure. Throughout a project that spanned over three years, we completely rebuilt KQED.org from the ground up, providing an innovative, audio-forward user experience supported by modern engineering and deployment workflows.
Our re-imagining of KQED.org continues to be a vital media pipeline, effortlessly transporting rich and nuanced media to its audience, and elevating KQED’s interactive presence to a level on par with its importance and collective talent.
Services
- UI/UX Design
- Full-Stack Engineering
- SEO + Analytics
- Cloud DevOps
Elections Dashboard
During a fateful and frothy election night in 2016, our engineering team worked late to support the culmination of a months-long project aimed at providing unprecedented transparency to San Francisco Bay Area and national election races.
What was once built as a transformative, accessible interface for users to clearly understand the scope of local measures and candidates was now a portal dedicated to consolidating real-time results from sources spanning a dizzying array of municipalities, platforms and technologies.
Election returns notwithstanding, the project itself was a transformative moment for KQED and Aleph; The design and technological paradigms we used were a seed of inspiration for a massive upgrade in the making.
Services
- Full-Stack Engineering
- UX Design
- Cloud DevOps
Our Turbulent Decade
It’s possible that you just had to be here, but take KQED’s word for it: the 2010s were a really interesting time to be in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It all happened last decade, as is told beautifully through the reporting and visual narratives provided by KQED. Aleph built out a user interface featuring original line art and highlighting the tumultuous nature of a ten year period that fundamentally transformed the region and altered the landscape in ways that you can still see right now.
Our work on this project was featured by the New York Times and lives on within the fabric of the modernized KQED.org that Aleph built in support of future decades of visually compelling reporting.
Services
- UX Design
- UX Engineering
- SEO + Analytics
NPR Syndication + Newscast Transcoding Automation
KQED’s hourly newscasts are consumed across many platforms, and major stories are syndicated nationally. Until this project, these processes involved a great deal of manual work by humans.
The audio recorded in KQED's studios isn't only for radio broadcasts; it must also be trimmed, transcoded, and packaged up for distribution to web users, phone apps and smart speakers. After that, all news stories must be packaged up and sent to NPR for even wider syndication.
Utilizing KQED’s existing cloud infrastructure, Aleph reduced the manual nature of this work, reducing workloads by countless hours, and implementing a sophisticated system of low cost, lightweight automation.
Now, simply reporting the news triggers a cascade of on-demand, serverless processes, smartly adjusting and compressing audio for transport, looking for highlighted stories, and interfacing with many different vendor platforms to publish and syndicate audio from microphone to device.
Services
- Back-End Engineering
- Cloud DevOps
