Organisational taxonomy alignment project use case

New York Public Radio (NYPR) is a nonprofit media organisation that owns numerous public radio stations and a live performance space in the New York area. Since 1924, WNYC has grown and evolved in response to changing radio technology and consumer behaviours, most recently introducing podcasts to its numerous audio experiences. In 2019, NYPR embarked on a metadata and taxonomy alignment project to support the end-to-end alignment of metadata tags across content types, brands and business functions. The project began by surveying relevant business units and performing audits of content and data across those teams to identify the most salient issues to be addressed and to prioritise actions through the rest of the project. This paper describes how user personas and ‘content journey maps’ were drawn up to identify the driving needs of the primary business units and the current state of content as it moved through its life cycle, including the players involved in the content’s life cycle, the systems it touches, the metadata applied and whether the content is archived. As this paper will show, the information from these exercises drove the creation of a multi-tiered taxonomy with top nodes classifying information around people, content, assets, entities and distribution.