RadioSutton

NPR, Its Member Stations, and Trust

2013-05-23T12:49:00.002-04:00

Trust is a funny thing in public radio. The industry’s business model is built on listeners trusting what they hear on public radio and public radio trusting that listeners will voluntarily pay for content they get for free. It’s been a pretty good business model for the last several decades.

Yet within the industry there always seems to be a large measure of distrust between NPR and its member stations, the very entities that deliver the highly-trusted, highly-valued content to listeners.

We’ve been reminded of that distrust quite a bit since Current published our proposal for NPR to raise money directly fromlisteners. Everyone agrees NPR-direct fundraising would be effective. Some think the idea is great, in principle, but need more details on how it would work. Equal numbers disagree with the economic model we proposed and believe that effective fundraising for NPR would be disastrous for stations. Almost all questioned whether NPR could be trusted to act in the best interest of stations if given this fundraising power.

This level of distrust isn’t new. It existed in the early days of NPR, through decades of impressive audience and revenue growth, and into this age of digital disruption. That distrust existed, to different degrees, no matter who was sitting in the President’s office or who was second-in-command at NPR. That distrust has spanned a couple of generations of station managers.

Multiple trust-building efforts and exercises haven’t been able to exorcise the distrust. It is institutionalized.

Institutionalized distrust goes all the way back to the early 1980s and NPR’s financial crisis. It’s worth reading up on that crisis if you don’t know the story.* In short, the entire public radio business model was overhauled to save NPR from going under due to financial mismanagement and many stations backed a loan to as part of the NPR bailout.

Back then member stations had to vote on NPR’s budget every year, with board members and some station managers questioning line item expenses of just a few hundred dollars. NPR’s annual membership meetings were rancorous affairs that always ended with NPR getting budget increases and all parties leaving with bitter feelings.

There were also difficult battles over macro and micro programming issues, from a 4pm Eastern Time start for All Things Considered to giving stations more local cutaway opportunities in the newsmagazine program clocks. Every year stations were paying NPR more money but not getting the attention, respect, or services they felt were needed to grow. Seeds of distrust were sown.

Fast forward to today.

Most stations are paying NPR somewhere around 15% of their gross revenues for the rights to broadcast NPR programs. That’s the highest percentage in the history of the industry.
NPR now requires stations to pay for digital services whether they want those services or not.
NPR is now competing directly with its member stations for listeners.
NPR is now competing with stations for major donors.
NPR is experimenting with raising money directly from listeners for the first time.

To summarize, stations pay NPR a lot of money and NPR remains an obstacle and threat to station audience and revenue growth. Some things never change.

There have been times when the bonds of trust have been stronger than others. Sometimes those bonds were strengthened by people at NPR and at stations. Those bonds lasted only as long as the people lasted in their jobs, sometimes less than that. On a few occasions, those bonds were strengthened by new policies at NPR. Those bonds had more staying power.

One policy in particular was NPR’s decision to “lockdown” pricing for its news programs at a fixed percentage of total station revenues. That change in policy -- how money changed hands in public radio – went a long way towards improving the NPR/station relationship. It put an end to the battles over NPR’s budget and created a stable and predictable economic model that allowed NPR and stations to invest their money and energy into program and revenue growth.

The lesson – the bonds of trust between NPR and its member stations are just as much about policy as people, maybe even more so. A certain measure of trust can be institutionalized. Or perhaps more accurately, a certain measure of distrust can be prevented through good policy.

That’s going to be important in the next few years. Public radio continues to get severe warnings from experts inside and outside of public radio about the dangers of digital disruption. That disruption is already a source of increased distrust between NPR and stations. The disruption will only become more severe with time. Greater distrust will follow unless NPR and its board choose policies to minimize it.

One way to build trust is flip the public radio economic model on its head. NPR will never build sufficient trust with stations as long as it is charging stations more money than ever while actively taking listeners and donations away from those stations. Conversely, NPR could lay a strong foundation for trust by putting in place policies that put money in stations’ pockets and helps them grow audience.

We think our NPR fundraising proposal is a valid approach. We’ve also fielded several other ideas since our proposal was published. We will explore some of those in the coming weeks.

* Amazon link to "Listener Supported" by Jack Mitchell

Early Lessons from Planet Money’s Kickstarter Campaign

2013-05-07T17:48:00.000-04:00

NPR’s Planet Money launched a Kickstarter campaign last week to help fund a story it wanted to produce on the life of a t-shirt. This is NPR’s first foray into direct listener fundraising.

As we wrote in previous postings and in a commentary for Current.org, we think NPR should be raising money directly from listeners but doing it in a manner that results in significant financial benefits for its member stations. The early lessons from Planet Money’s Kickstarter campaign demonstrate this is possible.

First, The Planet Money Kickstarter campaign has all of the traits of good fundraising. The core appeal ties back to the content and the value it creates for the potential giver, the “ask” is straightforward and empowers the giver make a difference, the gift amount is perceived to be affordable and still have impact, and it is easy to give.

Second, the campaign is going well. The outreach was modest by network standards and the goal was an even more modest $50,000. That goal was exceeded within the first 24 hours. In just under 8 days of a 14 day campaign, nearly 11,000 backers had contributed more than $311,000. These are pretty good results for relatively little effort.

Third, there’s how NPR handles its relationship with its member stations as it dips its toes in the forbidden fundraising waters.

When it comes to that station relationship, there are three ways NPR can approach raising money directly from listeners. The first would be for NPR to forge ahead without involving stations. To NPR’s credit, it did not choose this option.

The second approach would be for NPR to treat stations as minority partners in the process. This is the option NPR chose for the Planet Money Kickstarter campaign. NPR plans to use excess revenues from the campaign for local station training initiatives. Stations will benefit a little bit from this fundraising effort but only in ways that NPR deems appropriate.

There are several downsides to using this approach long-term, the most important of which is station financial health. The financial impact of direct listener fundraising on station revenues will be significant. Stations will raise less money from listeners when NPR is asking those same listeners for support. Offering free “extras” to stations will do nothing to improve long-term station finances or the working relationship between NPR and its member stations.

The third approach would be for NPR to treat stations as full financial partners in the process. Stations will have to end up with more working revenue if NPR is to raise money directly form listeners. This is covered in our Current.org commentary on revolutionizing public radio’s economy. It can be done and it will help the public radio system grow stronger.

There will likely be more than $300,000 in excess revenues, maybe $400,000+, by the time the Kickstarter campaign ends. NPR could pass that revenue along to stations in the form of dues relief during its next quarterly billing cycle. It’s not a lot of money for each station, but it would be welcomed by almost all.

And that brings us to another benefit of the full financial partner approach. It is the fastest and most permanent way to restore high levels of trust between NPR and its member stations. We’ll have more on that in our next posting.

A Not-So-Modest NPR Fundraising Proposal

2013-05-01T09:01:00.001-04:00

Little did we know when writing our last posting - "The Inevitability of NPR Raising Money Directly from Listeners" - that NPR was planning its first test of direct fundraising from listeners.

NPR's Planet Money launched a Kickstarter campaign last night, a clear experiment on NPR's part to get direct access to listeners' wallets. The goal is a very modest $50,000 in 14 days. That goal should be exceeded in less than 24 hours.

NPR's not the only public radio network going after listener money now. American Public Media programs have been raising money directly from listeners for several years. Last month, PRI's The World launched a campaign on Indiegogo. This American Life has run several direct-to-listener campaigns as well.

NPR raising money directly from listeners could be very good for public radio. That's the essence of a commentary I wrote for this week's Current, public media's industry newspaper.

NPR could raise money in a way that everyone wins big. NPR wouldn't have to charge stations for its programming, would have tens of millions dollars more to spend on news coverage, and NPR would be able to award significant grants to stations for local news and digital initiatives.

That's right, instead of taking money from stations NPR would be giving stations its programs and money.

That would revolutionize the public radio economy at a time when that economy is threatened by digital disruption. All it takes is a commitment for all boats to rise together.

Click here to read the Current article - A Digital Revolution for Public Radio Fundraising.

See the links below for additional RadioSutton postings on NPR raising money directly from listeners.

Everybody But NPR
The NPR Pledge Drive Fuss

Public Radio 2018: The Inevitability of NPR Raising Money Directly from Listeners

2013-04-08T11:08:00.000-04:00

This is the fourth installment in our series on what public radio looks like in 2018. In this posting, why NPR will be raising money directly from listeners and doing it with the belief that it benefits NPR’s member stations.

First, some background. NPR policy prohibits direct listener fundraising. This is to protect the business model of its member stations. For most of these stations, listener contributions are the single largest source of income. The prevailing belief in the industry is that, given the option, listeners would prefer giving their money directly to NPR and not their local stations. The assumption is that the entire public radio business model would be wrecked should that happen.

It will happen. Within five years NPR will raise money directly from listeners. It just takes a little basic audience segmentation to understand why.

Today there are three types of NPR News listeners:

Station Only Listeners
Station and NPR.org Listeners
NPR.org Only listeners

The first two types of listeners hear pledge drives and get off-air solicitations from their local stations. The NPR.org Only listeners do not.

The NPR.org Only audience will eventually be large enough, if it isn’t already, to be a significant source of funding for public radio. If NPR remains banned from asking them to give, then there will be one or two or five million listeners who are never asked to support public radio.

No pledge drives. No emails. No letters. No telemarketing. No annoyance. Such a deal.

And NPR claims that its online audience is much younger than current station audiences. That means a new generation of listeners who will grow to treasure public radio programs with the belief that those programs are free, paid for by someone else.

Further complicating matters, the Station and NPR.org Listeners will eventually start giving less to their local stations. It’s only a matter of time. Every single study on listeners and giving shows that people donate to public radio because they value the entire service they receive from the station. They give because the programming on their station is personally important and they would miss it if it were to go away.

Research also shows that listeners who use their stations less -- are less likely to give. That will be true for people who use their station less because they are getting the programming they value from a different source. Their station could go away. The programming would not. That will reduce the likelihood of giving to the station.

The entire public radio business model would collapse under this scenario. There will be millions of new listeners who will never be asked to give. There will be hundreds of thousands of current donors who will feel less compelled to give because they now have multiple sources for the content they value.

That will be bad for NPR given how much it relies on stations for income. It will be even worse for stations that need excess revenue generated from NPR programs to help pay for local and digital initiatives.

And listener support is likely to become even more important if station audiences shrink in the digital age. The fracturing of the radio audience will likely cause a reduction in business underwriting support for NPR and stations alike. On-air announcements will reach fewer listeners, lowering the number of sales and reducing the value of each announcement aired. Plus, Federal funding will be sharply reduced or gone in five years. The need for listener contributions will be greater than ever.

There’s only one solution and that is for NPR to raise money directly from listeners. It’s the only way to capture giving from listeners who will have no exposure to station fundraising and from listeners who value their entire public radio listening experience across station and NPR outlets, but not enough to give directly to a station. It is the only way to more than replace federal funding and shrinking business support.

In time, NPR will make this case to stations. They will argue it is in the stations’ best interests for NPR to raise money directly from listeners.

Getting there won’t prove easy even when it is obviously necessary. And NPR might not be willing to make the changes it must make to truly benefit stations.

The fundraising piece is simple enough. NPR could be up and running with a highly effective fundraising operation in no time. There’s sufficient evidence from markets with two NPR stations that shows many listeners will give to two public radio services if they value both. So stations will still be able to raise significant, albeit less, money from listeners. But collectively, NPR and stations should be able to raise more money from listeners, for less cost, than stations currently raise.

The problem is that public radio’s spending model, how money changes hands in the business, will also have to change dramatically to protect stations’ ability to serve their communities with national and local programming.

NPR will have to give up charging stations for its programs, or significantly cut back on what it charges, to take into account reduced station revenues. That change will make or break the new public radio economy.

If the new business model is implemented properly, with the stations’ best interests in mind, then stations will have a cash windfall to invest in local and digital initiatives. NPR will end up with more money than it gets from stations today. If implemented without the stations’ best interests in mind, then the new public radio economy will severely damage stations while providing NPR with more cash.

It is inevitable that NPR will be raising money directly from listeners in 2018. Whether it will be done for the betterment of all of public radio is the open question.

Public Radio 2018: Sibling Rivalry

2013-04-04T21:45:00.000-04:00

This is part three of a series on what public radio looks like in 2018. In the first posting, we wrote:

The largest cause of any station audience erosion will come from within the public radio industry, not from outside competitors.
The reason is simple. Public radio news and entertainment programs have developed to the point that no single source can match the sheer volume of quality content delivered on a daily basis, seven days a week.

Public Radio spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually to create its content. NPR alone invests $72 million annually in news. Its total annual programming expense is around $88 million.   The cost of matching the volume and quality of public radio’s content is very high, especially in the digital space, where most media organizations still struggle to break even.

There are only three serious competitors for today’s public radio station audiences – the stations themselves, the networks that distribute the high quality national programs to stations, and listener indifference.

The best way for stations to keep, and indeed grow*, the audiences they have is to continue to provide a compelling mix of high quality network news and entertainment programs during peak radio usage hours, supplemented by local content and programs produced to network standards. Stations should extend their entire terrestrial radio brand – national and local -- into the digital space.   Stations brand should be the same across platforms and they should supplement that brand with additional content and the effective use of social media.

But this is not the strategy public radio’s networks are pursuing. Their digital strategies prioritize network access over local access. So today, public radio’s best radio content is now available in near-real time on the web. For example, all of the stories in Morning Edition now post as a playlist by 7:30am Eastern Time. A listener can now go to NPR.org and hear all of the network stories consecutively and without interruption.

Compare this to the policy around satellite radio. The NPR Board was very concerned that running NPR News in real time on satellite radio would kill local station audiences. And kill is not too strong of a word here. So the board prohibits, to this day, the real time airing of Morning Edition and All Things Considered on satellite radio.

The NPR Board recognized that the biggest competition stations could ever face was NPR itself. As mobile devices and digital dashboards become more common, the circumstance that is most likely to pull listeners away from a local FM station or its digital stream is an alternative way to get the same content. And this is now the strategy set by the NPR Board.

Times have changed. Significant competition will not come from a commercial news entity or a non-profit start-up. It will be other public radio outlets. We know this because we see it already in markets where two stations carrying Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

But there might be an even bigger competitor for local station audiences -- listener indifference. This is already happening two ways at some stations.

First, station program offerings are suffering from too much local content for the sake of local content.   Listeners don’t tune in for local. They tune in for interesting. They tune in for quality. And when they don’t find it, they are pushed away.

Second, some stations aren’t executing the programming basics as well as they used to because the energy and resources required are being diverted to digital. Weak programs remain on the schedule. Interstitial content fails to add value to the listening experience. It’s an issue of quality control. And when listeners don’t find quality, they are pushed away.

Pushing listeners away is typically how public radio stations have lost audience over the decades. Listeners are lost when they become indifferent to the station.

That will be true in the digital age. Increasingly stations have the means to be on all digital platforms. They have the means to market and promote where and how to find the station in the digital space. But if the current station offerings are diluted in the digital space, then the listeners will become indifferent. If the station brand they know from the radio – national and local – is different in the digital space, then the listeners will drift away.

They won’t have to go far to find what they want because the most significant competitor will be in the family.

* Yes, there is still room to grow the broadcast audiences for public radio. Most stations capture between 35% and 40% of their own listeners’ listening. That is, the typical public radio listener spends less than half of his radio listening time with the station. The balance of their listening goes to the competition. Better programming and promotion wins more listening from the competition. And remember that the average weekly audience is just that – average and weekly. Some weeks the audience is bigger than average. And then there are those people who listen every 8 days, or 14 days, or 30 days. Get them to listen more frequently and the weekly audience goes up. Some studies show the monthly audience to public radio stations is 50% higher than the weekly audience. There is room to grow the audience. But it requires recommitting to radio growth nationally and locally.

Public Radio 2018: Radio Still Rules

2013-03-08T07:50:00.003-05:00

This is part two in our series on what public radio is likely to look like in 2018. You can read part one by clicking here. In this posting, why public radio stations will still be, by far, the most significant source of listening to public radio content in 2018.

Simply put, listening to public radio stations dwarfs listening to public radio content digitally. Let’s do the numbers.

In Spring 2012 more than 37 million people tuned in to public radio.^
The average number of weekly tune-ins per listener is around 7.5. +
That means public radio listeners chose to listen to public radio stations more than 13.5 billion times in 2012.
All of those tune-ins translated into more than 8 billion hours of listening.
Morning Edition was the biggest draw, attracting 12.3 million listeners per week.
More than a dozen public radio programs have weekly audience of 1 million or more.

By comparison:

This American Life claims to have one of the largest weekly podcast audiences with around 700,000 downloads per week.

While there’s no single source of web and mobile statistics, the most optimistic estimate today is that streaming listening equals 3% to 5% of radio listening.*

In rough numbers, digital-based listening would to double every year for the next five years to equal the amount of radio listening that public radio earns today. That is – the web-based audience would have to increase 100% over the previous year, every year, for five years.

There’s no doubt that digital-based listening in all of its forms will play an important role in growing public radio’s audience. But the idea that digital-based listening will become public radio’s leading source of audience by 2018 isn’t realistic.

Business strategies built on the assumption that radio audiences will be less important in 2018 than they are today are likely to be failed strategies.

^Source: NPR Audience Insight & Research

+Tune-in and TSL estimates with assistance from Audience Research Analysis

* NPR reported that in June 2012, the average aggregated web streaming audience to 88 stations it tracks was just under 7,200 people. That means that the average streaming audience to any one station was less than 100 listeners. It does not include mobile listening. We reached our conclusion using reasonable extrapolations to all public radio stations with mobile listening included. Got better numbers? Please share them.

On the Value of Radio

2013-03-05T18:43:00.002-05:00

TV and Print consume people's time. Radio makes the time people spend doing other things more valuable.

Public Radio 2018

2013-02-26T07:10:00.002-05:00

It’s been more than a decade since some media futurists began predicting the demise of public radio in its current form. While there are ongoing shifts in media usage among public radio listeners, those changes have been more gradual than dramatic.

Doomsday hasn’t arrived and, as long public radio can avoid severe self-inflicted wounds, doomsday won’t arrive.

Over the next few postings, RadioSutton will outline what we think the next five years will look like for public radio and why.

Many of the observations might seem self-evident but we believe that they provide a framework for discussing how all of public radio can be strengthened by the very forces that others believe threaten the industry. Additional thoughts on each topic will appear in subsequent postings.

In 2018:

Public radio stations will still be, by far, the most significant source of listening to public radio content.
The largest cause of any station audience erosion will come from within the public radio industry, not from outside competitors.
Public radio audiences will not be any younger or more diverse.
Most public radio stations will be losing money on their digital efforts.
Network programming heard over the radio will still be the most significant source of income for stations and networks alike.
Local programming on most news stations will still be losing money and require subsidization to break even.
NPR will be raising money directly from listeners and doing it with the belief that is beneficial to its member stations.

Putting the "Radio" Back Into NPR?

2012-12-05T10:11:00.001-05:00

NPR's 2013 Wall Calendar

Apparently, it's still okay to call it National Public Radio for the sake of commerce.

Twisted Logic

2012-12-05T08:58:00.000-05:00

A public radio station carries Morning Edition. That broadcast includes local interstitial content – weather, traffic, community calendars, and the like – plus one or two short localized newscasts and several longer reports from the station’s news team. On the typical day, 20 minutes per hour is not from the network. On some days, 25 minutes per hour is local.

The future imagined for public radio by its industry leaders like this. The more NPR content listeners can get directly from NPR, the more likely they are to abandon their local station.

The premise is that they would do it today if they could. The premise is that listeners only tolerate current station offerings, with up to 25 minutes of local content per hour, because they currently don’t have adequate direct-from-NPR options.

The fundamental assumption in that argument is that listeners prefer NPR programming to local content. And for the most part, that’s true.

So what do the industry leaders propose as the only possible solution to protect stations from audience and revenue loss when listeners can get their NPR directly from NPR? Stations should increase the amount of less-preferable content that they offer.

The future imagined for public radio stations? Spend more money on less attractive programming that generates less audience and less revenue.

This is why none of the public radio's leaders have bothered model public radio's future economy. They have no clue how to make it work.

That's bad news for all of public radio.

Will Listeners Voluntarily Support Public Radio Web Services?

2012-11-30T21:47:00.003-05:00

Corporate support of NPR was off nearly $9 million last year. You can read about at Current.org.

One item of particular interest in the Current article comes from the section on the state of corporate support for NPR's digital offerings.

"The potential for growth in digital ad revenues is limited because of increased competition and downward pressure on the prices of online ads." - Stephen Moss, NPR’s chief sales rep at National Public Media.

It's a good reminder that listener contributions are the financial foundation on which public radio stations and NPR are built. They are the most important and reliable source of income for public radio delivering $327,000,000 in FY 2010, up from $185,000,000 in FY 2000, and never a down year despite the economic roller coaster we've been riding. (Source CPB)

NPR's board and management are insistent that the future of public radio is digital and not in radio. So much so that NPR's recent strategic planning meetings with stations focused on public radio's Digital Transition rather than planning for a future that is based on some combination of radio and digital.

Words matter. And the words Digital Transition... meaning from terrestrial radio to digital... are significant. If the outlook for digital corporate support for NPR isn't bright, then it won't be any better for local stations.

That makes this a good time to revisit the question, "Will Listeners Voluntarily Support Public Radio's Web-based services?" Here's our thinking from 2006. We believe it holds up today. The link to the original post is at the end.

Will Listeners Voluntarily Support Web-based Services?

A recent, excellent article by Jake Shapiro asked whether public radio’s membership model could work with podcasts. To help answer that question, let’s turn to what we already know about turning listeners into donors.

The Stairway to Given is based on a statistical model that outlines the steps listeners go through to become contributors. Originally published as part of the Audience 98 project, it is a refinement of more than two decades of research on how listeners become contributors.

I’m pretty certain it will apply to public radio services delivered via the Internet, whether those services are from a station, a network, independent producers, or some new entity. But let’s travel the Stairway to Given and see.

The First Step: Someone must listen to a public radio station
This seems self-evident but it still needs to be applied to the web. People who don’t use podcasts or streaming media or public radio web sites aren’t going to donate money to keep them on the Internet. Non-users won’t give. Users might give.

The Second Step: The listener must rely on the programming
Reliance has a very specific meaning here, one that is useful when considering web-based content. Reliance is based on the listener’s use of public radio. It is a measurement of behavior and includes factors such as Loyalty, the number of weekly tune-in occasions, the number of different programs and dayparts used by the listeners, and years spent listening.

This is where we see the financial importance of converting Fringe listeners to Core listeners. This is where we see that it takes an average of 3-5 years of listening before someone will voluntarily contribute money to public radio.

Consider the implications for web-based content. Will listeners use public radio podcasts or streams more than any other source of Internet audio? Will they use them 10, 12, 15 times per week? Will they use them consistently over years, not just weeks or months? Can public radio create in listeners the same level of Reliance on its podcasts and streams as it does on its station broadcasts?

If so, it begs the question on whom is the listener relying? A station? A network? A producer? So far, public radio has looked at this mostly as a delivery question. Who delivers the service? In the end, it is really a branding and marketing question. More on this in a future posting.

The Third Step: The listener must find the programming personally important
Where Reliance measures listening behavior, Personal Importance measures how well the content connects with the listener’s personal values and beliefs. The specific research question is this, “The programming on WXXX is an important part of my life. If it went away I would miss it."

The more a listener agrees with that statement, the more likely he is to become a public radio contributor. Let’s try this with the Internet.

“The podcasts from _____ are an important part of my life. If they went away I would miss them."

“The _____ web site is an important part of my life. If it went away I would miss it.”

“The (classical, jazz, AAA, bluegrass, folk) music from (web site) is an important part of my life. If it went away I would miss it.”

Public radio’s on-line services – audio, print, social networking, you name it – will have to pass the Personal Importance test with users in order to earn their voluntary financial support. Users won’t give if what is offered won’t be missed.

Personal Importance and Sense of Community
One key aspect of Personal Importance is the concept of “Sense of Community.” This is the idea that public radio programming is one of the ties that bind together people with certain shared values. Their common listening experiences creates a Sense of Community.

Today, many public radio listeners hear the same news stories, talk shows, and entertainment programs in roughly the same time frame. They talk about what they heard and relive the experience together. That won’t be as common in an on-demand world. There will be more individual and fewer "communal" listening experiences.

The Internet provides opportunities to compensate for this. Listeners e-mailing audio links to one another is one example of this. Social networking is another. Not all listeners will do these things, but Sense of Community might become even more powerful in the decision to contribute among those who engage in on-line community activities.

The Fourth Step: Funding Beliefs
Listeners must believe that listeners, and not the government, are the primarily source of income for public radio.

This is probably not as much of a problem for on-line services as it is for public broadcasting, which has a long history of federal and state support. That said, public radio has the chance to start educating web content users about how it is funded and the importance of listener contributions.

Audience 98 did not test the question of business support, so we cannot predict how that will factor in voluntary giving decisions regarding web content. That said, a parallel could be drawn between government support during the infancy of public radio and business support during the infancy of on-line content.

If users learn at the outset that someone else will pay for their web-based public radio, it will make it more difficult for public radio to get their voluntary support when it is needed. Public radio should start cultivating those future donations now with appropriate marketing and messaging.

The Fifth Step: Income
Audience 98 showed us that household income was a contributing factor in whether someone would give to public radio, but that it was not nearly as significant as the other steps of The Stairway to Given.

Not all donors are wealthy. Not all wealthy listeners are donors. Public radio is not just for those who can afford to pay. That’s a fundamental aspect of the business. No matter who pays for it, it is available to all. That’s what makes it a public service.

Summary
The Stairway to Given provides a wonderful listener focus for the question of whether listeners will voluntarily support public radio’s web-based content. Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of people donating if they do not rely on it, do not find it personally important, or do not believe their contributions are truly needed?

The doubters and skeptics will use that last question as ammunition for arguing that the voluntary support model is dead. I disagree.

I believe The Stairway to Given is a blueprint for designing public radio’s web-based services. Let’s start asking how users will rely on us in meaningful, measurable ways and then construct our service offerings accordingly. Let’s ask if our content resonates with users deeply enough that it becomes personally important. Let’s find ways to use the web to build Sense of Community around the values we share with our listeners. Let’s ensure that we don’t create misperceptions about our funding that we will have to undo down the road.

We know what we need to know to get users to voluntarily support public radio. If we successfully hold our new, web-based offerings to the Stairway to Given standard, they will financially support those too.

The original post is here.

Rinse and Repeat

2012-11-26T10:02:00.000-05:00

Nationally, audiences are off slightly. NPR's underwriting revenues are down. The Digital "scare" level for public radio remains high. That makes it a great time to dust off an old blog posting or two. Here's one from nearly seven years ago.

Minding the Franchise

Public radio stations generated more than a quarter-billion dollars in listener support in FY2004. Underwriting revenue from businesses was around 140 million dollars. This is called "listener-sensitive" revenue in public radio because it is driven by the amount of listening to individual public radio stations.

Businesses pay more to reach more listeners. People who listen more are more likely to give. Givers who listen a lot are more likely to give larger gifts. But we're not talking about weekly listening. No, giving is greatly affected by the amount of listening done over years.

That listening is the public radio franchise and it has never been more at risk. There are very real threats from competition, including an increasing number of commercial broadcasters putting news/talk on FM. We are also a threat to ourselves.

Most stations still have weaknesses in their significant parts of their program schedules. Several national programs, especially weekday programs, under-deliver given the available audience. Failure to fix these problems makes public radio more vulnerable to all competition, whether it is coming from the radio dial or the iPod.

Much of the discussion in public radio is that audience loss is inevitable given the growth of new technologies. That assumes listening to podcasts will come at the expense of listening to public radio stations. It doesn't have to be that way.

Public radio listeners, on average, spend more time listening to commercial radio than to public radio. Our Core listeners spend about one-third of their radio listening time with the competition. That could be the listening that goes to podcasts, even public radio podcasts. Or, it could be the listening that public radio stations capture to reverse the tide of audience loss.

Even if public radio loses current listening to new delivery platforms, there will always be radio listening to capture from the competition, much of it being done by our own audience. We can still grow radio listening.

The point here is that public radio can never stop fighting hard for every available hour of radio listening. The shear volume of that listening will always make it the most financially productive hours of listening public radio will ever capture. More important, every hour of listening we don't get today negatively affects how much money our listeners will give in the coming years.

Radio listening is the financial foundation of anything that public a radio station might want to do with podcasting, Internet streaming, local programming, or the next cool thing to come along. It's the franchise and public radio needs to give it the lion's share of new investments of time, money, and attention.

Outside Expertise vs. Public Radio Wisdom

2012-11-13T20:10:00.001-05:00

Conventional wisdom holds that NPR and its member stations are quite fortunate to have avoided the fates of public television and the newspaper business. Viewer loyalty to public television is low, on-air fundraising is heavily dependent on transactional infomercials, and cable competitors have created good quality alternatives to many of PTV's best content categories, which in turn erodes the distinctive look and sound of PTV. Newspapers suffered significant losses in local revenues and had to shed staff because their new revenue streams aren't bringing in enough money to support the old infrastructure.

For more than a decade, outside experts have telling public radio leaders that they must act swiftly and boldly to avoid having similar market forces affect public radio in similar ways.

So where do we stand today?

Well, the top executive positions at NPR, the recently filled or created positions, are now held by former public television and newspaper people. Stations are being encouraged to spend more money by investing in more newsroom infrastructure even as radio audiences are predicted to decline. NPR stations remain distinctive, standing out on the radio from their commercial counterparts, but NPR and station web sites increasingly look like dozens of other national and local news web sites. And the discussion about public radio's future economy is almost solely focused on new revenue models rather than on whether the old economic infrastructure is even viable in a new media marketplace.

In short, public radio is well-positioned to repeat many of the same mistakes made by PTV and the newspaper industry. It will take much more than smartphone apps, mobile websites, and local news to avoid the fate of these other industries. It will take a renewed and sincere commitment to growing public radio's traditional audiences and overhauling public radio's current economic model, revenues and expenses. Accomplishing that requires industry leaders who understand they have has as much, if not more, to learn from public radio as public radio has to learn from them.

Words Matter

2012-11-12T13:52:00.000-05:00

The well-chosen word. The well-turned phrase. Public radio, and especially NPR, thrives on good writing, careful editing, and thoughtful presentation.

So it must tell us something about NPR's priorities that the strategic planning agenda for this week's annual membership meeting fails to include the word "radio."

A Glimpse of Public Radio Yet to Come?

2012-10-16T18:56:00.000-04:00

The central question facing local public radio stations is whether they can survive when the public radio behemoth starts directly competing for their listeners. We might already have the answer on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

In this version of the story, the public radio behemoth isn’t NPR. It’s WAMU, a public radio station based in Washington DC. And the local stations feeling the impact are part of Delmarva Pubic Radio -- WSDL, an NPR News station and sister station WCSL, offering a mix of classical and news.

According to a recent study by Public Radio Capital, all-news WAMU, operating a repeater station on the Eastern Shore, has skimmed enough audience away from the local NPR News service on WSDL to render that service unsustainable. This isn’t an indictment of WAMU, by the way. All public radio stations should be free to expand their reach and build audiences wherever their service is relevant.

Back to Delmarva Public Radio. After exploring all options, Public Radio Capital has recommended that the licensee, Salisbury University Foundation (SUF), abandon NPR and local news all together. The most viable strategy, according to the report, is for SUF to enter into operating agreements with other stations or format syndicators who would program the stations with syndicated Classical and Triple A music enhanced with local content.

The way we read this is that there are no viable options for SUF to maintain an NPR and local news presence on either of its signals.

The implications are serious. Local NPR News, in a market this size (under 500,000), can’t survive any meaningful competition for their audiences from other public radio entities, even when the programming originates from out of market. This means quite a few stations will be at risk when technology advances enough to where the really big public radio behemoth, NPR, becomes significant, direct competition for their listeners.

Listeners in these communities will ultimately be deprived of a locally relevant NPR News service and public radio will lose a significant argument for federal funding.

The conventional wisdom has been that localism is the future of public radio stations in the digital age. Public Radio Capital's findings seem to lay that argument to waste, at least in markets similar to the one served by Delmarva Public Radio.

Pledge Drive Procrastinator Amnesty

2012-10-08T21:51:00.002-04:00

For those of you with fund drives in progress, or about to begin, a fun little way to start off the last day. Pledge Drive Procrastinator Amnesty.

Public Radio's "craigslist" Moment

2012-09-26T22:35:00.000-04:00

The single most import strategic decision facing NPR is this:

When a fan of public radio gets into his car, pushes the start button, and gets ready to pick something to hear through his web-connected dashboard, does NPR want him to…

A. Choose to listen to content directly from an NPR member station?

B. Choose to listen to content directly from NPR?

Today, the entire public radio economy is based on answer “A.” All of the money donated to public radio stations by individuals is based on listeners choosing to hear their public radio content directly from a member station. Almost all of the underwriting money is based on answer “A” as well. Federal funding is predicated on Community Service. Foundations invest in being heard.

The single greatest potential disruption faced by public radio is not that listeners will start to use digital technology. The single greatest disruption will be that stations will not be able to aggregate listeners in significant enough numbers to grow the industry’s revenue base.

This is public radio’s craigslist moment.

You’ve heard the story about how craigslist destroyed the newspaper business revenue model by changing where and how people placed and viewed classified ads. Just as classifieds were the newspaper industry’s most profitable source of revenue, tune-ins to NPR programs are a public radio station’s most profitable source of listening. Take the NPR program tune-ins away from stations and the industry’s revenue model collapses.

This is especially true of NPR’s business model. NPR collects $70,000,000 per year from stations. An additional $40,000,000 to $50,000,000 in corporate support is directly linked to reaching tens of millions of station listeners each week. That’s up to $120,000,000 of NPR’s annual revenue directly linked to NPR member station audiences.

Station audiences are built one listening choice at a time. When a listener can choose between NPR and a member station on the dashboard, NPR’s single most important strategic decision is if it wants that listener to first choose listening to the member station or to first choose listening directly to NPR. The entire public radio economy rests on that choice.

There will be financial disruption in public radio no matter which strategic choice NPR makes. The issue facing NPR is the magnitude of that disruption and how to manage it. To do that, NPR needs to develop system-wide economic policies that put the industry ahead of the audience/financial disruption curve.

Unfortunately, NPR’s greatest weakness today is that it is ill-equipped to develop policies that can simultaneously serve the best interests of NPR, its member stations, and listeners.

NPR’s Board and Executive Management, while pushing forward hard with NPR direct-to-listener strategies, have rolled out nothing on what the public radio economy looks like when listeners begin choosing NPR before member stations. It’s as if NPR has become policy-adverse, which startling given the invaluable role policy played in fostering the strong public radio system we have today.

While the NPR Audience was built through great network content and great programming at local stations, the public radio system was built through smart policy making. Policy was used to professionalize stations, ensuring adequate staffing and skills training. Policy was used to set growth goals and success metrics that increased public service and financial self-sufficiency for stations, program producers, and NPR. Policy was used to save NPR from its financial crisis. Policy was used to develop program pricing models that fostered a more productive and less antagonistic relationship between NPR and its member stations.

NPR needs a smart economic policy today more than it needs the latest and greatest in digital technology. Technologies change. Adaptation will be slower than anyone expects. In the meantime, NPR can make its single most important strategic decision. NPR can imagine a healthy economic future for NPR and its member stations. And NPR can start developing an economic policy to create that future. It is how the public radio system was built and it is how the public radio system can grow more relevant through technological and economic change.

Local News is Not the Future of Public Radio

2012-09-19T09:05:00.000-04:00

On one hand, public radio stations are being told that if they don't respond to digital threats quickly and effectively that they will suffer the same fate as local newspapers. On the other hand, they are being told that local news is their future. In other words, the future of public radio hinges on content that is no longer commercially viable. It's like the 70s and 80s all over again.

Funny how that worked out. The dead commercial radio formats curated on public radio didn't fuel the industry's growth. Public radio's growth was driven by inventing something new... news for intellectually curious people who view themselves as citizens of the world and entertainment programs with a complementary appeal.

Public came to public radio because it was't local. That's a big part of the appeal.

Local presence is important. Local news that lives up to the NPR standard is too. That will make a station locally relevant.

But the future of public radio stations remains doing what they do best... providing a window to the world to people who think beyond their personal geographies. Anything less will send those listeners somewhere else.

Read more at radiosutton.com as part of our Best the Best Button series.

Be the Best Button

2012-09-13T11:58:00.000-04:00

This is an update to our May 2005 Be the Best Button blog posting about mobile internet in the car.

Nothing has changed in seven years. What we wrote then remains true today.

Eventually, all the technology just becomes buttons on the dashboard and the button with the best programming always wins.

And what was true in May 2005 was true for decades before that. Success in radio has always been about being the best button.

Digital doesn't change that. The source -- FM, AM, HD, on-demand, podcast, personal playlist, satellite, streaming -- doesn't matter.

The consumer now has 5 to 15 physical buttons on the dashboard from which to choose. Those buttons will be on a screen in a digitally equipped car, but the human equation will be the same. The consumer pushes a button. If the content satisfies frequently enough, it becomes the favorite button. And there will be FM and AM buttons on the dashboard.

Digital is not a threat to terrestrial public radio unless we make it one. We are our own biggest threat if we give up on radio or if we let others tell us that radio is less important than digital. Believing that is a recipe for financial disaster because the ROI for radio will be far superior to the ROI on digital for the foreseeable future.

The key to public radio success in the digital age is growing the radio audience and embracing digital as a way to make our primary radio service even more relevant to listeners than it is today.

It’s not an either/or proposition. It’s not broadcast radio versus digital. Listeners pick buttons, not technologies.

Be the Best Button.

Read more at radiosutton.com.

Let's Not Get Small

2012-07-16T16:10:00.002-04:00

Change is inevitable but it's really interesting how so many people in public radio have latched on to the idea that radio is on the decline, even public radio, when that's not really true.

One of the more popular myths is that young people don't listen to the radio anymore. Also not true. The Radio Today report at Arbitron.com shows more than 90% of all 25-34 year olds listen to the radio about 14 hours per week. There's a tiny amount of streaming in that number, but not much.

What's happening is that rumors of radio's death are being greatly exaggerated by those who have an interest in new and disruptive technologies. While it is essential for all of us in public radio to understand how those technologies will change our industry, it is even more important to push back against the industry outsiders who try to minimize the value of radio today and in the future.

Another area in which the value of public radio is being minimized is philanthropic giving. Increasingly foundations are insisting that grantees show they created "impact" with the grant money the receive. There's no single metric for this. There's only the idea that the grantee has to show something was changed with the foundation's money.

NPR CEO Gary Knell was beating this drum a bit during his speech at last week's Public Radio Development and Marketing Conference. He said, "ratings and eyeballs aren't good enough anymore."

The fact is, they never were. At least in public radio. Even though public radio looks at Arbitron data and other market research, we've understood for a long time that those numbers represent how many people consume our mission each week, and even more importantly, how much of our mission is consumed.

Those numbers tell us that nearly 65 million people each month* are served by terrestrial public radio each month and they listen to public radio stations more than 10 billion hours each year. That's 10 billion hours that Americans spend consuming the mission of public radio. Each year. On the radio.

Listeners come to public radio because we make their time more valuable. Think about that for a moment. Each year, we make 10 billion hours more valuable to the people who listen to us.

The trap for public radio is accepting another institutions success metrics as our own. Our greatest leverage is that we reach significant audiences with significant content. Every day we help millions of people learn something new about the world. We have a bond of trust with listeners that this exchange of ideas and information helps create better people and a better society.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to help our funding partners meet their goals. If "impact" is one of them, then we should try to find ways to help them deliver impact, provided that impact doesn't conflict with our mission. That's an important part of building community.

But if public radio buys into the argument that "impact" is the only metric that matters, or even the most important metric, then we make our current service to the public less significant. It's kind of like saying the only people who matter to a talk show are the callers and not the listeners who never call. We make ourselves smaller and we devalue the significance of what we do every day.

No amount of philanthropic money is worth that outcome.

* Source: 170 Millions Americans
The 10 billion listener-hour number comes from NPR's Fall 2011 Arbitron audience estimate of 37.6 million weekly listeners to public radio. That number is multiplied by the average of 5.5 hours of listening per week per listener found in Public Radio Today 2011.

Future Revenues

2012-07-11T02:44:00.002-04:00

Public Media Futures Forum: We participated in a robust discussion about revenue growth opportunities for public radio. Once again, we raised the idea that public radio is leaving money on the table by not allowing NPR to raise money directly from listeners.

We see up to $50,000,000 in upside revenue for the industry and we think we've found a way to protect station's membership fundraising at the same time.

Current.org has a summary of the discussion here.

Previous posts on the topic are at the end of this post.

We believe significantly different revenue results require a significantly different effort. That's why we keep coming back to this issue. Also on our list of opportunities:

1. Public Radio's national leadership has to fall in love with radio again. There is still plenty of room and opportunity to grow the radio audience and reap the revenue benefits that come with more listening.

2. Public Radio's national leadership has to rekindle its passion for station success. Large national goals mean nothing. Helping the greatest number of stations succeed is more important than reaching a big number nationally.

We also love the work Barbara Appleby and Valerie Arganbright are doing with sustainer giving. So much so that we suggested to NPR that it find the means to make their services available to stations at no cost. (But not through a tax on stations. Been there, done that).

More to come as the conference progresses.

Links to past posts:

NPR Pledge Drive Fuss
Everybody’s Doing It
New Business Model

Car Talk Controversy: The Dearth of New,Good Public Radio Programs

2012-07-09T12:49:00.001-04:00

Ira Glass puts the blame for lack of program innovation in public radio on station program directors. The argument, and it is not just Ira’s argument, is that program directors are risk averse. From my experience, the opposite is true. Stations are craving new, good programs to try. In this case “good” means programs that meet the station’s mission, show potential to build audience loyalty in an underperforming time slot, and also pack some on-air fundraising punch.

The simple fact is that producers aren’t delivering programs that come close to meeting all of these needs. They often have the mission piece down, but most new programs are sorely lacking when it comes to audience performance and fundraising support. The reason is public radio’s top-down mentality to program creation.

Here’s a brief history lesson. Public radio’s signature news programs were created at the network level, top down, and took decades to develop into audience powerhouses. With the exception of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, public radio’s top-performing entertainment programs were developed at stations, over years, and then took a good 3 to 5 more years as network programs to become audience powerhouses.

Garrison Keilior, The Magliozzi Brothers, and Ira Glass cut their teeth at local stations where they could make mistakes while figuring out how to make great radio programs. They tried new things. They learned from audience and fundraising feedback.

This American Life (TAL) presents an interesting case study. For its first five years in national distribution, TAL was a lousy audience performer. Quite a bit of the content wasn’t suitable for air before 7p. Stations first struggled with whether to clear the program at all and then where to schedule it. But Ira was also providing his stations with many of the best fundraising spots ever made. And they worked in Morning Edition! That was an incredible incentive for existing outlets to keep the program and even convince others to add it.

Over time, This American Life found its voice and became a strong audience performer for stations. While TAL doesn’t have the sheer numbers drawing power of A Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, none of those programs have the mix of storytelling, journalism, and entertainment that makes This American Life the embodiment of public radio ideals.

Ira worked hard to make TAL a successful radio show. He had a passion for station success, first for WBEZ and then for the stations carrying his program. Solid audience performance in lesser dayparts and a stellar public radio image earned TAL the prime time slots on Saturdays it now enjoys.

Wait Wait also struggled in its first few years and the program was on the verge of losing valuable affiliates. Wait Wait was saved by a frank letter from Producer Doug Berman to stations acknowledging the program’s problems and a heartfelt promise to fix them. It required a host change and eventually recording the show in front of live audiences but that passion for station success helped Wait Wait blossom into an elite audience performer.

The passion for station success is almost always absent in the top-down model of making radio programs. NPR’s Tell Me More is a great example of this and it is one of the newer network offerings. It has the least station-friendly program clock of any major weekday network program. There are too few opportunities for station IDs, local underwriting, and local promotion. There are no pledge drive friendly cutaway opportunities during the program. Its audience loyalty is weak and there seems to be no plan to address that.

The better model is for producers to partner with a station for a few years to develop a radio program that delivers solid audience performance and good fundraising results. This is especially necessary for first-time producers. There’s a big difference between putting together an hour of good audio content and making a great radio program. It is something that is learned, not taught.

Ira learned those lessons and he continually applied them to TAL without compromising his vision for the program. Helping stations succeed made TAL a success and that helped Ira become the star he is today. Producers who want station airtime would do well to emulate Ira’s path to success rather than blaming station program directors and Car Talk for their inability to get on the air.

Car Talk Controversy: The Intersection of Idealism and Income

2012-07-03T09:14:00.000-04:00

There’s an interesting debate at Current.org over Ira Glass’ assertion that stations should drop Car Talk when it goes to full-time repeats. Ira’s stance is that air time is too valuable to waste on repeats and should instead be used for experimentation and innovation.

NPR Programming VP Eric Nuzum takes issue with Ira, responding that Car Talk actually fuels innovation because it generates large audiences and significant revenues for stations and will likely do so in repeats. Nuzum argues that those listeners and that money are irreplaceable at this time.

The topic has generated hundreds of comments and interesting threads from industry professionals and listeners.

It is a classic “mission versus money” debate. And as with most debates within public radio today, it’s starting from the wrong place. This is not an either/or proposition. It’s a both/and issue.

At the heart of the matter is the difference between understanding listeners and understanding audiences.

The listener is an individual who hears the content. Ira understands listeners quite well. He creates compelling stories and, by far, the most compelling on-air fundraising bits in all of public radio. He’s helped stations make millions of dollars, if not tens of millions, through his ability to connect with listeners.

Audiences, on the other hand, are groups of listeners whose behavior helps us understand what listeners like about our programs and stations. Understanding audience behavior is central to programming a station effectively and raising the necessary money to keep the programming on the air.

It is impossible for a public radio station to succeed without understanding both listeners and audiences. Ira knows listeners but his understanding of Saturday audiences is all wrong.

First, Ira suggests that Car Talk needs to move to make room for new innovative shows in prime Saturday time. That’s not at all necessary. There are plenty of prime hours on Saturday afternoons for new programs to make a mark. Most stations lose audience from 1p to 5p on Saturdays even though lots of public radio listeners are using the radio then. For many stations the potential audience on Saturday afternoons is as great as it is during weekdays from 10a-4p.

The problem is that most of the weekend programs available to stations are mediocre audience performers as best. They drive listeners away more than they bring them in. Stations are not lacking for available times to try new, good programs. They are lacking new, good programs.

Second, Ira says “…we don’t need Car Talk to shore up audience numbers on Saturday mornings. Thanks to Doug Berman, there’s another public radio blockbuster that’s building audience and loyalty on Saturday mornings right now — Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!”

Ira’s logic is that it is better to have one successful program on Saturday mornings instead of two.

Had he done a little fact checking he would have seen data that shows considerably stronger overall performance on Saturdays, not just Saturday mornings, when Weekend Edition, Car Talk, and Wait Wait air consecutively.

And make no mistake about it, Car Talk will remain successful in repeats, at least in the short run. Even if Car Talk’s ability to pull in listeners drops by 15% or 20%, it will still be a stronger audience draw than This American Life. It is also likely to generate more income for stations in repeats than This American Life will generate with new programs in the next few years. That’s how powerful the program is.

Eric Nuzum was exactly right in his response. Stations absolutely need Car Talk on Saturday mornings. In fact, stations need to be running Car Talk and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me twice each weekend. Those programs draw listeners to the station and make weekend listening stronger for all programs.

In the real world of public radio economics stations need programs that generate surplus revenues to help pay for innovation, overhead, and the “mission” related activities that require subsidy. These days that also includes local programming and digital offerings. Car Talk is among only a handful of programs that generate such revenue. Public radio needs more Car Talk’s, not fewer.

The argument that stations should walk away from Car Talk and all of its value in the name of “mission” is ridiculous. It’s as ridiculous as suggesting that This American Life should give its program to stations for free so they would have more money to invest in innovation.

The intersection of Idealism and Income is not a four-way crossroads where stations must choose one direction. It’s a three-way intersection where two important paths to public radio success merge into one.

Red State/Blue State

2012-06-04T11:19:00.000-04:00

Remember how during the Cold War Conservatives would rather be “Dead than Red?” When did that change?

When it comes to symbolism, the whole Red State/Blue State concept is ridiculous.

Red ink and Red tape. They are hardly conservative values. Wikipedia says the color “Red is used as a symbol of guilt, sin, passion, and anger, often as connected with blood or sex.” It makes one wonder what happens at the Republican National Convention when the TV camera lights are off.

There are Red Blooded Americans but if the Conservatives get that one, then Liberals are our country’s new Blue Bloods.

Red is the first color in the old Red, White, and Blue. Then again, 9 of the original 13 colonies are currently Blue States.

While it is true that many people in conservative-leaning states are Seeing Red these days, one has to stretch all the way to Feng Shui to find a positive connection between Conservative values and the color of Red. Yes, we are now importing our political symbolism from China as well.

In Feng Shui, Red still represents passion but it also represents luck, richness, and luxury. These good Conservative vibes come with a warning, however. Too much Red can bring on restlessness, bursts of anger, and over stimulation.

Painting Liberals Blue also has its ridiculous side. It is true that Blue is the color of depression and sadness, a theme conservatives are hitting hard in the economy. But in the fine Red State of North Carolina they proclaim that God made the sky Carolina Blue. Intelligent Design, anyone?

Using our new Made in China political symbolism, Blue is a refreshing color of calm, ease, purity, and abundance. Those aren't the first words most people associate with Liberal values.

The real absurdity here isn’t that the Red/Blue symbolism fails to line-up with the political ideology of Conservatives and Liberals. What’s really absurd is that the media, including public radio, has turned Red and Blue into the new Black and White.

Our democracy isn't that simple.

The Ship Still Sails, NPR's Revenue Woes

2012-05-31T22:36:00.000-04:00

I received a comment the other day pointing out that it's been two months since the last posting on the blog. The question was whether this blog has been abandoned.

The answer, of course, is no.

But a considerable uptick in business simply puts blogging at the bottom of each day's to-do list. Client results come first. But that doesn't mean we haven't been thinking about public radio as a whole.

There are a considerable number of important issues to address in the industry. Among them is NPR's revenue shortfall due to less business underwriting, as reported by Paul Farhi in the Washington Post.

Revenue shortfalls, by themselves, are not news. What makes NPR's shortfall noteworthy is that it comes on the heels of mandatory station payments for digital services. While those payments are being phased in -- they don't represent significant income for NPR this year -- it reinforces that stations, not advertising support, are NPR's most important source of revenue. NPR's Core radio service and it's digital services are dependent on the success of member stations.

Farhi reports that NPR is considering budget cuts, including possibly killing the program Tell Me More. This raises the issue as to where the pain of budget cuts might be felt.

NPR now has two main routes to listeners' ears. This first, largest, and most profitable route is through stations. The second route is through NPR.org and related web services. In a budget shortfall, where will NPR cut? Will it reduce services to stations? Will it reduce the budgets of its direct-to-listener services? Will it do both?

If NPR CEO and President Gary Knell cuts station services and spares NPR's direct-to-listener services, then he will signal that little has changed at NPR since the departure of former chief Vivian Schiller.

The message will be that NPR sees more of a future on its own, reaching listeners directly, instead of as a membership organization that serve stations and the tens of millions of people who listen to them. That would be bad financial news for NPR and the stations that keep it afloat.