Are On-Line Listeners Even More "Elite?"

Among the comments AIR Executive Director Sue Schardt made to the NPR board is that NPR has attracted an audience that was "predominately white, liberal, highly educated, elite."

Elite is such an interesting word to use to describe public radio listeners, especially in the context of diversifying the audience.

What make them elite?

Certainly not being white. What about being liberal?

NPR refutes the claim that the audience skews liberal, showing a relatively even distribution of political orientation among its listeners. What about age?

It turns out that the median age of the NPR listener is 50, just 5 years older than the national average. Does being slightly older make one elite? Probably not.

What about education level? Does being well-educated make one elite?

NPR Podcast users are much younger than public radio users (33 vs 50), yet are more likely to have a college degree (83% vs. 68%).

If elitism and education go together, then public radio's on-line audience is shaping up to be more elite than its radio audience.

Maybe it's money that makes public radio listeners elite. The median household income in the U.S. is $53,600. For public radio users its $90,000 per year. For NPR Podcast users its $76,000. 33 years old and making $76,000 per year. Imagine how much money they will be making when they are 50.

If elitism and income go together, then public radio's on-line audience is shaping up to be more elite than its radio audience.

All of this runs counter to the rhetoric in public radio that on-line services are the answer to diversifying the audience. If anything, the current trend is for on-line to attract a younger, more educated, and wealthier version of the current audience.

NPR hasn't released data on the ethnicity of on-line listeners, it might not have that data, but that doesn't really matter. Even if the skin color of on-line listeners is more diverse, it doesn't mean those listeners will be less elite.

If the goal to diversify public radio by making it less elite, then the public radio's on-line efforts might be hurting rather than helping the cause.

Wittingly Growing the Audience We Have

What happened … is that we unwittingly cultivated a core audience that is predominately white, liberal, highly educated, elite. "Super-serve the core" — that was the mantra, for many, many years. This focus has, in large part, brought us to our success today. It was never anyone's intention to exclude anyone. -- Excerpt from comments by AIR Executive Director Sue Schardt to the NPR Board of Directors.

Actually, it was intentional.

It is an indisputable truth that every programming decision is a decision to serve a specific segment of the population. Every choice rules out far more people as potential listeners than it includes. That is how radio works. That is how all media work. To believe it could be otherwise is naïve. To spend as if it could be otherwise is folly.

By focusing on the building the core audience public radio programmers, managers and funders perfectly understood they were choosing to serve some listeners and exclude most others. After all, the majority of people in this country are not interested in hearing 8 minutes on credit default swaps or spending a few hours on a Saturday afternoon listening for the F-bomb to drop during the Met Opera’s broadcast premiere of Nixon in China.

Some history. In the late 1970s and early 1980s public radio attracted a very small and unique audience. Those listeners turned out to be knowledge-seeking global citizens who were curious about science, had a strong interest in art and culture, possessed diverse tastes in music, were concerned about community and committed to social causes.

Those listeners came from population segments now known as Innovators and Thinkers, as described by VALS research from SRI. Innovators and Thinkers are mostly white, highly-educated, and have above average household incomes. Today, they represent about 25% of the U.S. adult population and the overwhelming majority of public radio’s weekly audience.*

Beginning in the mid-1980s, public radio wittingly chose to use research and good radio practices to serve Innovators and Thinkers better. In doing so, public radio chose to exclude from its audience most of the other 75% of the U.S. adult population, people who didn’t necessarily have Innovator/Thinker traits or at least a high enough concentration of them to find public radio’s content of personal value.

There are several reasons this was a good choice. First, there were not enough resources to serve 100% of the population, or even 50% of it, well. There still aren’t enough today. It’s taken hundreds of radio stations, billions of dollars, and decades of work for public radio to build the audience it has. Second, public radio’s federal funding came under attack in the early 1980s. Industry leaders correctly recognized that the audience it had could help support public radio financially, especially if that audience grew. Third, the people in public radio, with a few exceptions, weren't capable of making programming for people who weren’t like them. That’s still true today.

By concentrating resources on the listeners it naturally attracted, and choosing to not serve most of the population, public radio efficiently and effectively grew a sustainable audience. It’s an audience that has grown in the face of strong competition from new media and a serious decline in overall radio usage.

The path public radio followed to achieve its current audience success is still the right path to follow if public radio wants to serve a different segment of the population. That segment has to be identified by its interests and values (not the color of its skin) and it has to be super-served by people who share those same interests and values.

Anything less would be a waste of time and money.

* Source: Audience 98. SRI changed VALS segmentation slightly over the years. Innovators and Thinkers used to be Actualizers and Fulfilleds.

Budgets Reflect Priorities

According to Current, NPR's on-line budget is going up 43% this year to more than $13,000,000.

That's probably a wise investment. It takes significant money to cultivate new audiences. It's entirely possible that $13 million a year isn't enough to do the job.

Which brings us to the main point of this post. Budgets reflect priorities.

NPR is leading the way by showing how to make growth a priority. From here on out, any national entity -- NPR, CPB, PRI, or APM -- that doesn't back its talk of diversifying the audience with an ongoing, annual budget in the tens of millions of dollars is just blowing smoke.

National Campfires and Audience Diversity

The reign of personal media technology is putting out the national media campfires. Instead of getting our news from a few sources such as the big three networks, we are all now getting the same news but from many, many different sources.

No news in that, really. But it is an essential point as public radio struggles with audience diversity issues.

If it was folly 15 or 20 years ago to talk about an individual station or network program diversifying its broadcast audience, it is an even greater mistake today. There are too many media choices. Pulling current listeners, let alone new ones, to the same source at the same time is becoming increasingly difficult.

This was especially apparent with the Don Imus and Virginia Tech shooting stories. If you survey the people you know, chances are very good that they tracked these stories differently than you did. There might be a little crossover in news sources and channels, but they probably got their information from a largely different set of web sites and cable networks in addition to NPR.

This speaks to public radio’s need to think about serving diverse audiences, not diversifying its audience. It’s an important distinction. The idea of a truly “national audience,” people hearing the same thing at the same time, is fading away.

The goal now is to reach different people across different channels at different times with ideas and content that still has the power to bind those individuals into a community. It’s a tremendous new opportunity to achieve public radio’s audience diversity goals. Those goals can only be met if we remember that the challenge is not about technology and backroom operations but what we choose to communicate for the public good.