Report from Public Radio Nation
Public radio programmers descended upon Philadelphia this week for their annual gathering, the PRPD. We went to peddle our show, give away t-shirts and pick up the latest vibe in public radio world.
The news from Philly is that the public radio audience is starting to decline after long, steady growth. The people who crunch the Arbitron numbers say listeners are migrating to commercial radio which targets the same educated, 25-55 demographic. Programmers in urban markets say they’re very worried about younger listeners who have tuned out and are getting their audio and music elsewhere. There was a little buzz about the results of a local news survey in several big markets that revealed that most people think the ambient sound public radio producers love to put into their stories to make them “sound rich” just sounds like background noise.
Public broadcasters have been slow to wake up to the opportunities afforded by the Web. Some of the old timers just want to be retired before they have to really deal with it. Some are just confused or clueless or broke. Others, like the stations that carry Open Source embrace the future of their medium with all of its uncertainties.
NPR has been convening exhaustive meetings and gropathons for several months as part of its New Realities process to consider the future of media and how NPR and its listeners fit into it. They’re aggressively trying to figure out how content should be distributed digitally and who should manage it. This makes some stations nervous. They’re worried that if NPR controls a giant digital network they’ll get screwed. It’s happened before.
Our no longer very new reality is that we’re making interactive radio every day, somedays with more success than others, and we want to share what we’re learning with stations and other producers. We think they can learn by our example and by our mistakes. We’d also like to be on more stations to enlarge our community. So send your local station a copy of this very favorable article in Current, the public broadcasting newspaper of record, and tell them to give us a listen. I do not look as old and haggard as depicted.
September 17th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
“Public broadcasters have been slow to wake up to the opportunities afforded by the Web.”
Here’s an example of that: I’m a contributor to both of Boston’s NPR stations, at amounts above the basic level. Why do people who’ve already made their contribution have to sit through long, annoying pledge drives? Especially if they’re near a computer?
Technically it would be relatively easy to set up their streaming audio feeds to carry their regular programming, minus the begathon, by entering a password that we are given when we become a station member. Membership SHOULD have priveleges that go beyond tote bags and coffee mugs, and one of those priveleges should be freedom from pledge drives.
I’ve made this suggestion to both WBUR and WGBH and neither one has even given me the courtesy of a response!
When pledge drives come on I go out on the web and listen to my favorite programs over my PC. Sometimes I listen to NPR programs on other stations’ streams around the US. Often I listen to Australia’s ABC/Radio National, which has BETTER, more intelligent, programming than NPR: Check out By Design, Night Air, Poetica, and a dozen others that have no peers on NPR. See:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/subject.htm
Using podcasts I can listen to these while driving or on the go. There are also great classical music streams all over the world, at far higher bitrates (ie., better audio quality) than most NPR stations.
Keep in mind that with WiMax and EV-DO and other technologies starting to deploy widely, soon we will no longer be tethered to a PC to listen to streaming audio on the Internet. That will end the rationale for conventional broadcast radio stations. Local NPR stations that don’t start adapting NOW will no longer have a raison d’etre.
September 18th, 2006 at 12:32 am
Interesting issue.
I quit the radio way back in the day. Podcast IS the new Broadcast.
THE ONLY Advertisement I HEAR is whatever advertisement IS ON THE PODCAST!
If I were an advertiser I would put my money on that PODCAST ad spot.
September 18th, 2006 at 8:07 am
“If I were an advertiser I would put my money on that PODCAST ad spot.”
No WAY! I don’t want to listen to ads on my iPod!
I’m a member of both of my local public radio stations (are you?) so I’ve already paid my dues.
Anyway, the hail-Mary ad model where a company buys some ad-time or space and just prays it reaches the right person or that someone responds to it is ***SO*** last century! The problem with putting an ad on an iPod is that they have no way of knowing if it’s reaching the right ears or if someone deleted it or fast-forwarded over it or didn’t listen to it till six months later. Or it could be an ad for a Lexus and the listener is a kid working at a Starbucks, or an ad for leather furniture and the listener is a PETA activist. Also they can’t measure whether that particular ad resulted in a sale or contact.
So, NO, the broadcast advertising model went out with corded telephones, Ed Sullivan, and Pet Rocks.
September 18th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
Great article! Great news about making the 1st page of Google. I’m relieved because I didn’t know how the show was doing in the big picture. In my world you are at the top of my bookmarks/favorites page. I loved the old “Connection†even though I never called in and if ROS had no website I would still be a loyal listener. To think that I have been able to contribute to the ROS cause in some small way by blogging has been an honor. It has also enriched my life by making me feel more engaged in the world, and hopefully that enables me to enrich the lives of people around me. The ROS vibe spreads far from your tree in Cambridge.
I’m not a big tech person, so I especially appreciate the basic nature of the web site. You didn’t build it to bring a new site to a web audience; you built it to bring a new audience to the web. When I have a conversation on the site, I don’t feel like I’m talking to web people, just people - and that includes the staff. As Chris says in the article:
“It’s not about the technology,†he says. “It’s about the implications for democracy and information and communication and human contact and formation of opinion, and I just love it to death. It is a new world.â€
So thank you Mary for your hard work and your imagination. It might be that you and Chris are the Lewis and Clark of this medium and the rest of us are jockeying to be on the exploration team.
And did you say something about t-shirts? ☺
September 18th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
“and if ROS had no website I would still be a loyal listener.”
That is an interesting observation. I think of WGBH and WBUR as primarily radio stations that happen to have websites. And I think that has to change if they are to survive. ROS is exploring some possible directions for that change.
I think there’s a whole generation of people out here, including myself, where the radio part, like newspapers, is basically “old media”. I hardly EVER listen to WGBH or WBUR on the air - I rely on archived or podcast shows, which I arrange in sequenc to match my interests. On my iPod I have playlists of talk or discussion programs organized by subject. In the same playlist I might have a ROS, an OnPoint, a Here On Earth (Wisconsin Public radio) and a Deep End (Australia’s ABC radio national), for instance.
September 18th, 2006 at 10:06 pm
Hey nother, you make my day. Yes, there are t-shirts.
Hugh Macleod created it for us:
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/003214.html
email me your size and address and I’ll be happy to send one off to you.
September 19th, 2006 at 12:11 am
[...] ohn Sutton has a series of PRPD posts here. Mary McGrath weighs in on the Open Source blog here. Rolas de Aztlan, program director for KPFT has a wrap-up here. - Disturbing [...]