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.

Failure to Diversify is a Leadership Issue

There's nothing like a Federal Funding crisis to send public radio into fits of guilt over the size and diversity of its audience. The latest wave seems to be started by Sue Schardt, Executive Director of the Association of Independents in Public Radio (AIR). She spoke to the NPR Board about rethinking public radio's programming strategies and who public radio serves. Her comments appeared in the industry newspaper Current.

For Schardt, it's not enough to have 11% of the U-S population listen to public radio weekly and more than 20% listen monthly. That's right. 20% of Americans listen to public radio each month according to the audience estimates created by Station Resource Group (SRG) for 170 Million Americans campaign. Twenty percent!

And Schardt is let down by that.

Her disappointment is due largely to the demographics of public radio's audience, which despite more than two decades of major efforts to diversify, remains predominately well-educated, upper middle class white people.

Schardt attributes this to public radio's focus on growing the Core audience over the past two decades. There's a lot of truth to that. We’ll cover that topic in the next posting and why it’s not a bad thing, even though it is now being positioned as such.

There's also one other essential fact that Schardt leaves out of her public radio audience overview.

Public radio's demographics look almost exactly like the demographics of public radio's executive leadership, including her.

It turns out that the predominately well-educated, upper middle class white people in charge of public radio policy, funding, and programming are very, very good at making radio for their demographic peers and no one else.

The leadership talks a good game when funding is on the line, but the track record shows a different story. After two decades of trying, public radio’s white leadership is incapable of diversifying the audience in any meaningful, measurable way. Just try and find an audience report from CPB or NPR that shows a diversity initiative that yielded audience growth among minority listeners.

Or, look at Grow the Audience, public radio’s current “effort” to diversify listenership. Here’s a CPB-funded project that listed Inclusiveness (the new “diversity”) as its primary goal, yet the project was managed exclusively by white people and its Task Force was initially formed without a single Black or Hispanic station manager, program director or program producer. After public criticism, the project added one Hispanic station manager/programmer.

Here was an opportunity to diversify from within the industry, to bring new people to the seats of public radio power, and CPB fumbled it. Remarkably, this happened around the same time CPB Radio VP Bruce Theriault challenged public radio to “throw open its doors to new people.”

It also turns out that the Grow the Audience Task Force was formed almost exclusively from members or partners of the SRG. That’s not exactly throwing the doors open to new people, especially at the executive level. And finally, there is CPB radio management. There’s no new blood there either -- the executive team is made up of white, public radio veterans -- even after Theriault’s challenge to the rest of the industry.

CPB isn’t alone in talking diversity while failing to implement it at the highest levels of public radio power. Programming executives and major program hosts at all three major networks are predominately white. Even the Association of Independents in Radio chose a white, 20+ year veteran of public radio to be its leader – Sue Schardt.

You know the saying, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” It applies here. For two decades, public radio policy-makers and executives have viewed diversity as a problem to be solved outside its predominately white, veteran power structure through the distribution of money and top-down management. But that’s failed too many times to believe it could ever succeed.

As an industry, we are extremely good at serving listeners like us and no one else. The only way for public media to realize Sue Schardt’s vision of reaching more and different Americans is to hand power and money over to more and different Americans and let them take a shot at it. The question is, do we believe in the mission of public media strongly enough to do that or are we keeping the money and power for ourselves?

Grow the Audience: A Disappointing First Year

The SRG has issued a one-year update on the CPB/SRG Grow the Audience project. The report, to say the least, is rather disappointing.

It's largely a technical explanation about why national audiences are difficult to measure given Arbitron's conversion from diary measurement to PPM measurement. It offers no reports or updates on specific efforts nationally, regionally, or locally to actually affect audience growth.

In fact, since the initial Grow the Audience report was published a year ago, the project has released nothing about CPB's investments in meeting the project goals. There's nothing on the CPB site about the Grow the Audience project and its efforts to affect audience growth. This report appears to be an update on nothing but the hope that the audience might be growing.

On a larger scale, there's no system buzz around the Grow the Audience project. The project was absent at the Public Radio Programming Conference. It has little or no buy-in at the station level.

What started out as an attempt to pull the system together with a common goal has failed to do that in its first year. Grow the Audience has no champions. It has no cheerleaders, not even among the people who conceived of and funded the project. And that's the biggest disappointment of all.

Turns Out People DO Know About Public Radio

One of the great myths around public radio is that audiences would be bigger if only more people knew about it. If only public radio could advertise with the big boys...

Researcher David Giovannoni challenged this thinking beginning in the 1980s. His point, which is proven once again by the 170 Million Americans project, is that public radio's total audience is much bigger than the Weekly Cume audience.

Giovannoni pointed out that Weekly Cume audience estimates are a necessary, but artificial snapshot of the audience. The Weekly Cume is necessary for advertising and public relations. People need a number they can wrap their heads around and compare to other stations and media outlets. The Weekly Cume is artificial because it stops counting new listeners to the station after seven days -- as if everyone who might listen to a station absolutely will listen within a seven day period.

Giovannoni called this the Cume Trap. The concept is simple. Public radio leadership could get trapped in its thinking about its public service potential if it gave too much weight to the Weekly Cume versus other, more useful public service metrics.

In one of his Radio Intelligence* reports for the industry newspaper Current, Giovannoni showed how public radio's audience was likely to grow if measure by the month or even the year. The Monthly Cume, based on Arbitron's diary measurement system, would be somewhere around 42% larger than the Weekly Cume.

Fast forward to today. The Station Resource Group (SRG) just put together a monthly audience estimate for all of Public Media as part of the effort to defend Federal Funding. Using Arbitron PPM and diary measurements, the SRG puts the monthly audience for public radio at 64.7 million listeners. That's more than double the current weekly audience of 30 millions listeners.

Imagine! There are twice as many people who know about public radio than reported in the Weekly Cume. Some of those are passive listeners. They are exposed to public radio through someone else's listening in a car or at work. But most of those listeners know about public radio and where to find it on the dial. They simply choose to listen less than once per week.

This group of people, they represent growth potential. Public radio just has to give them reasons to listen more frequently. This is not a new concept.

These very fringe listeners have always been the source of public radio's audience growth. They knew about public radio before the first Gulf War and when it broke, they turned to public radio for the news. They knew about public radio before 9/11 and when their understanding of the world was shaken apart, they knew where to turn to piece it together again.

They come when they need public radio and, unlike audiences for many of the cable news networks, many stay in the Weekly Cume. They value the news. They get hooked on the entertainment programs. They become Core listeners. They give.

Some don't stay. But they will listen on occasion. Right now, the SRG is saying that there more than than 30 million of these very fringe listeners who are only partially served by public radio. Who are these listeners? Are they older? Younger? From different ethnic groups? What brings them to public radio? What keeps them from listening more?

As the industry ponders how to Grow the Audience, they seem like a very good place to focus the effort.

* Read Radio Intelligence at ARA's website. Click this link then scroll down to and click on the the PDF for Radio Intelligence. Page 27

A Leadership Crisis in Public Radio?

NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller thinks that broadcast towers will be gone in 10 years.

The CPB/SRG Grow the Audience project calls for increasing by 50% in public radio's average audience in the next 10 years, doubling the weekly Cume, and tripling the number of weekly listeners of color. Central to that plan is acquiring more broadcast signals.

Which way are we going folks?



Note to those following this thread: The posting on financial implications of radio being dead in 10 years will go up on Wednesday.

The NPR-Station Business Model Must Live Up to Its Original Intent or Change

In the discussion about new media, too little attention is paid to new revenue models. Even less attention (almost none, in fact) is paid to the expense side of the equation. That has to change if stations are going to come close to reaching just one or two of the goals laid out by the Grow the Audience project. It has to change for many stations to survive the turbulence of shifting media consumption patterns.

Outside of personnel costs, the fees for NPR newsmagazines are often the biggest chunk of a station's budget. As noted in our last posting, those costs are a bigger burden than ever.

NPR charges stations for Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition based on how much listening those programs generate for each station. There are three key concepts behind that pricing model.

1. Every hour of listening to NPR News has a financial value to the station. More listening creates more revenue potential for the station from listeners and business underwriters.

2. NPR has an incentive to help stations increase listening and local revenue potential. More listening to NPR Newsmagazines means more money for NPR.

3. NPR has a disincentive to cause listening to go away from stations. Causing stations to lose audience means less money for NPR.

On the surface, this pricing model is ideal for the new media marketplace. Here's why:

NPR is now aggressively trying to get listeners to use its mobile apps. A mobile app is, in essence, a radio station. So NPR is asking listeners to bypass local stations.

We've covered the bypass issue before. Ultimately, bypass is about listener choice. Listeners will gravitate towards the best listening experience. If NPR is offering a better experience than stations, they will go.

If NPR sticks to the original intent of the current pricing model and audience for the newsmagazines at stations goes down, then NPR would collect less money from stations. That's the way it should work but history suggests it won't happen.

The pricing model was never properly implemented and the adjustments made by NPR over the years -- from capping station prices that were too high to changing the price points on listening -- have not been true to the intent of the model. NPR just toyed with the numbers until everyone was reasonably happy or at least willing to live with their program fees.

It is still not a given that more listening to NPR apps will result in less listening to stations. If it does cause station audiences to drop, then stations are going to have to pay NPR less money. Otherwise NPR will drive many stations out of business. Those that survive will have very few resources to invest in local programming and other goals laid out by the Grow the Audience project.

It will be interesting to see if NPR will actually live up to the intent of its current policy -- that it will trade cash from stations for listening through its apps -- or whether it will change the rules of the game when the current rules are no longer convenient.

Grow the Audience: Entrepreneurship is Key

The Grow the Audience report Proposals for New Media Investment includes the following goal:

"Create a universal Public Radio Player, an embeddable slideshow and playlist-enabled web player for station and other websites, allowing access to all public radio streams, on-demand content, and localized choices from stations."

The report also says public radio should be spending up to two million dollars a year to develop such players. It shouldn't cost that much.

For public radio to succeed in the open marketplace, it has to stop spending like the subsidies will always be here. The industry overspends on projects because of these subsidies. Continuing that practice will only hinder, not help, public radio when the subsidies dry up. Building budgets and spending money based on the old business model doesn't make sense in the new marketplace.

Read what the universal public radio player is supposed to do. 90% of it is already available in the Listener-Interactive web player, which was created by a few entrepreneurs for far, far less than the numbers in the Grow the Audience report.

You can see a demo of the Listener-Interactive web player here. There is a companion iPhone app with the same functionality. This user interface will transfer to dashboards when cars start coming with mobile broadband functionality.

JSA has been working with Listener-Interactive to develop this listener-focused tool so there will be revenue opportunities for stations. There are also collaborative revenue possibilities that could benefit program producers and networks as well.

More on that in a future posting.

Grow the Audience: Accountability Begins at CPB

Accountability is perhaps this biggest challenge for the Grow the Audience project. We wrote about this last year. The project will not meet its goals without strong, mutual accountability among stations, the networks, program providers, and CPB, which will provide significant funding for Grow the Audience initiatives.

The nature of the industry requires that much of that accountability will be voluntary. CPB can, and does, require some accountability from grantees, but those requirements – such as the Audience Service Criteria – are minimal.

It is extremely important that CPB takes a leadership role in accountability. That not only means supporting mechanisms of accountability, it also means that CPB should lead by example. How? By publishing its own goals, regularly reporting on its results, and when necessary, outlining steps it might take to improve its results.

This isn’t as simple as it sounds. CPB is not held accountable by its board or Congress for the audience performance of its programming investments. It never has been and it probably never will be.

Read the annual reports from CPB from the past several years and you will note that CPB reports on how it spent tax payer dollars on radio, but not on the results of that spending. For several years, CPB listed absolutely no audience numbers for radio in its annual reports. That improved a bit in the 2008, but not enough.

For example, there is no report on CPB’s site or in its annual reports showing the number of minority listeners to public radio over the years even though that has been a CPB funding priority. It’s no wonder the minority audience hasn’t grown. No one is actually held responsible for it.

There is one ironic twist to CPB's reporting of audience numbers. The 2008 annual report does tout audience growth for one CPB-funded program -- Weekend America. That program was cancelled by its producer, APM, at the end of 2008 due to budget cuts and "weak prospects for carriage... foundation... and corporate support."

CPB is evaluated based on whether it spends its funding the way it says it will. It is highly unlikely that its board will adopt new evaluation criteria unless dictated by Congress. To create the type of mutual accountability necessary to make Grow the Audience a success, CPB must embrace results-based evaluation criteria and it must make those criteria public. Here’s one possibility.

CPB could help establish an industry website that aggregates information on system-wide diversification efforts. One section could be on audience and another section could house information on diversification of staff.

On the audience side, CPB would publish the goals of its diversity initiatives, the programs or stations it is funding to reach those goals, and regular reports on the audience performance of those programs. All stations and programs receiving CPB funding would be required to participate. Producers and stations not receiving CPB funding could post their activities and results as well.

The key here is CPB’s full participation. Without it, it’s simply business as usual in public radio. This is CPB’s Grow the Audience project. CPB is championing these goals. If CPB doesn’t take the lead on full, mutual accountability, who will?

Grow the Audience: By the Numbers

The Grow the Audience project set three broad audience growth goals for public radio. Over the next decade, the project aspires to:

1. Increase the average audience – the number of people using public radio at any given moment – to half again as large as it is today.

2. Double the number of people who use public radio every week – on-air, online, and on other platforms.

3. Triple the amount of listening by people of color.

The numbers are intentionally vague at this time because of Arbitron's transition from diaries to PPM measurement, and that's appropriate. Still, the concepts adopted by the project leaders point to very specific actions required to meet the goals.

The first goal, increasing the average audience, validates public radio's multi-decade strategy of increasing audience loyalty through strengthening programming. Average audience grows when the current audience chooses to listen to public radio more times per week.

To meet this goal, stations are going to have to jettison underperforming programs. The challenge facing the SRG and CPB is developing a compelling case for change at stations that have chosen to ignore best programming practices for the last decade or more. Additionally, the networks have to improve or discard programs that are average or below average performers. There is no room for "good enough" on the network level.

The second goal, doubling the weekly audience across all platforms, will prove tricky to measure. Currently, there is no measurement of unduplicated broadcast, streaming, and time-shifted audience. The weekly broadcast broadcast audience will increase significantly if the "average audience" goal is achieved, but it will not double.

The on-line audience, streaming or time-shifted (on-demand or podcasting), will most certainly double in the next decade. That won't be difficult to achieve. Determining how many of these on-line listeners are new to public radio will prove difficult. It might require proprietary, and expensive, research to measure this.

The third goal is tripling the amount of listening by people of color. For the first time on a national level, a diversity goal is properly stated. The non-white audience must grow faster than the white audience for public radio to diversify. Anything less is status quo.

As we've written before on this blog, that will be extremely expensive. The cost to create an hour of listening from a new target audience is always more expensive than the cost of creating an hour of listening from the current audience.

Tripling the number of minority listeners to public radio stations will cost hundreds of millions of dollars over the ten years envisioned by SRG and CPB. The costs could be lower if most of that new listening is on-line or through media partners with existing minority audiences. Still, the cost of growing the minority audience faster than the white audience will be great.

CPB's past investments in minority audience growth have been too little to make a measurable difference in minority audience growth. Projects such as Talent Quest are a move in the right direction, but fall far short of the amount of content needed to meet the growth goals.

On the whole, the Grow the Audience goals are spot on. There aren't enough resources to meet them all so priority-setting becomes critical. And the Grow the Audience report was a bit vague on the lines of accountability for meeting these goals. That will be the topic of our next post.

Grow the Audience: Inclusiveness

Inclusiveness is so important to the Grow the Audience project that it is the number one item in the report. The report prominently includes this passage:

“We challenge public radio to commit to a greater inclusiveness of people of color in every dimension – the governance of stations and national organizations, the hiring of management and programming staff, and the voices, views, stories, and music of day-to-day programming.”

It is a worthy goal and with that in mind, I offer the following:

Public radio’s national leadership – at CPB and the major networks -- is less diverse than ever despite nearly two decades of talking about the importance of diversity.

In fact, all of the key decision-making power in the Grow the Audience project, including the ultimate control of the tax dollars that will be spent on this initiative, is in the hands of White Baby Boomers.

It is incumbent upon on CPB and the project leaders at SRG to meet their own challenge if public radio is to break its pattern of talking about diversity but failing to affect real change.

Grow the Audience: Priorities

There’s pretty much something for everybody in the Grow the Audience report from the Station Resource Group (SRG) and CPB. According to the report, public radio must:

• Strengthen its current national news programs
• Increase the amount of local news programming and reporting
• Build new and improved classical, jazz and AAA music services locally and nationally
• Build new services to attract Black and Hispanic listeners to public radio
• Do all of the above on the radio and on-line

“Do everything” is not a strategy. And this is partially acknowledged deep inside the Grow the Audience report. Section Six, Develop Market by Market Strategies for Audience Growth, rules out investing resources in growing the audience at stations in markets 51 or smaller.

Even if smaller markets are not included in project, the reality is that there aren’t enough resources to serve the objectives listed above. It would be a waste to spread limited funds across such a large swath of activities. Further prioritization is necessary to make smart, effective investments in audience growth.

The Grow the Audience report is silent on that prioritization process. We believe the difficult decisions about who gets help and who gets left behind should be fully transparent. Hopefully, CPB and the SRG will address this in future reports.

2010: A Defining Year for Public Radio

What happens in 2010 will have a significant impact on what public radio looks like in 2019.

This year, more than any other, will define the future relationships among stations, program producers, networks, and the audience. This is the year where the actions of the networks, particularly NPR, will determine whether the majority of stations will thrive or languish in the new media marketplace. This is the year when CPB, through the Grow the Audience project, will set funding priorities that determine which markets and public radio entities will be targeted for growth and which ones will not.

If the events of 2009 were any indication of what’s to come in 2010, then public radio can expect a further fracturing of the industry between the current “haves” and “have-nots.” Here are two examples:

• NPR’s current revenue strategy for the mobile web excludes stations. In fact, NPR is considering charging stations for the right to offer newsmagazine content on-demand. Put another way, NPR is eyeing station fees as a possible source of revenue for its own mobile strategy. You can read more about it in Current.

• CPB’s Grow the Audience project, which on the surface looks like the “No Public Radio Child Left Behind” program, will out of necessity have to fund relatively few, high impact projects. There’s not enough money to create incentives to get everything done.
  

We’ll explore these and other industry-defining challenges in upcoming posts. In the meantime, stations not wishing to be left behind need to start thinking aggressively if they want to stay competitive on-line and in the public radio industry.

Grow the Audience:Defining Inclusiveness

In 1997, NPR published a major report, funded by CPB, on reaching more Black listeners with public radio. Twelve years later the industry is still trying to figure out how to do that.

One of the top goals of the CPB-funded Grow the Audience project is Inclusiveness. In public radio, that means achieving greater ethnic diversity.

It's been pointed out that targeting an audience by physical characteristics is an odd thing to do given that public radio is an industry focused on the mind. Yet that's pretty much a requirement that goes with receiving federal dollars. The problem, of course, is that physical characteristics say nothing about what people will find interesting to listen to on the radio.

The Grow the Audience project tries to address this by adding the demographic filter of college education to the ethnic demographics since education is a strong predictor of whether someone listens to public radio. That filter, however strong it is, is not a useful as it might appear.

Three decades ago, when researchers first learned that level of education was a power indicator of public radio listening, far fewer Blacks and Hispanics had college degrees. The educated "market" was predominately White and full of baby boomers coming of age.

The college educated population is very different today. It is not only more ethnically diverse, it is also more culturally diverse. This is quite evident when analyzing the educated population, particularly in large markets, using research tools like Scarborough or MRI.

College educated Black, Hispanic, and White consumers make very different media choices. They hold a different mix of jobs. Their political-affiliation profiles are different.

It is a mistake to assume that ethnicity, even filtered with level of education, is a sufficient starting point for reaching the goal of Inclusiveness. Those two demographic characteristics are not precise enough research tools in an increasingly complex media marketplace.

The listener's mind matters more.

If public radio is to become more inclusive it is going to have to address the issue of cultural diversity in its programming and management, locally and nationally. Inclusiveness must be defined by personal, social, and political interests and values.

Do that right and the ethnic audience numbers will fall into place. Stay the current course and twelve years from now Grow the Audience will look like just another failed academic exercise.

Grow the Audience Update

The Grow the Audience Project just released a new audience report and the first in a series of "Thinking Audience" pieces.

As noted in a previous posting on this blog, the project has been short on the vision/mission component of growing the audience. The Thinking Audience pieces appear to be trying to address that. You can find the first of those pieces here.

The audience report confirms again that education and personal values and beliefs play a significant role in determining who does and does not listen to public radio today.

Based on the audience report, it appears the project is leaning towards Cume Rating and Share as public service metrics of the future. More on why this probably isn't a good idea later this week.

Now That You Give a...

Early indications are that interest in the election and the economy could translate into strong audience gains for public radio news stations. We shouldn't be surprised if gains among younger listeners are substantial.

The same thing happened after 9/11. We called it the "Now that you give a... darn" effect.

Many people knew about NPR and their local stations, but the news leading up to 9/11 didn't affect them enough to result in regular listening. Events changed that and they came to public radio in record numbers.

Unlike the cable news networks, public radio listeners stayed as war news became daily news. Some of that had to do with the nature of radio and cable usage. Most of it had to do with good programming and promotion around the news programs. The talk and entertainment programs provided additional value to listeners seeking news. Loyalty went up. News listeners became station listeners.

The same opportunity is before public radio today. Listeners who are in the audience for election and economic coverage can become loyal station listeners with strong programming choices, superior on-air execution, and smart cross promotion. We can't know for sure, but a surge in audience now could lead to a multi-year run of audience growth.

The window of opportunity to keep these listeners is probably small. That makes the next week a good week to take stock of your station's programming and promotion fundamentals. If it's broke, don't wait to fix it. The benefits of acting now could pay off for several years.

Growth Requires Calculation + Inspiration

Most of the news out of the Grow the Audience project is focused on the math part of the initiative. How many listeners does public radio have? Which audience segments does public radio want to grow and by how much?

That's all necessary but it is no different than the work of our commercial counterparts. It's just an exercise in math.

The Grow the Audience project won't take off until there are content visionaries sharing how exciting it could be to serve new audiences. It won't take off until there are inspiring conversations about how lives can be changed and communities can be improved by public radio's service.

Consider these excerpts from NPR's first "mission statement."

National Public Radio will serve the individual: it will promote personal growth; it will regard the individual differences among men with respect and joy rather than derision and hate; it will celebrate the human experience as infinitely varied rather than vacuous and banal; it will encourage a sense of active constructive participation, rather than apathetic helplessness.

Programs in the "by and for" specific cultural, ethnic minorities category could be developed. For example, there could be a linkup of stations in urban areas with sizeable non-white audiences, or student groups studying ecology, or groups with distinct lifestyles and interests not now served by electronic media. As man pulls himself out of the mass society to develop his unique humanness, his minority identification (ethnic, cultural, value) becomes increasingly important...

In order to provide minorities access to the medium, it is not only important to establish the identity of that group, but essential if the total population is to understand and appreciate the interdependence of pluralism.

The people who wrote these words also had a vision for how to turn these ideals into content. They were involved in the creation of the service from the start. Through experience and subsequent calculation their inspiration evolved into public radio today.

Now public radio is trying to do this process in reverse; to calculate first and then find a vision to fit the math. It's a much tougher task.

You can't just go out and sub-contract for inspiration. The content visionaries have to be deeply involved in the process from the start. If they are involved in Grow the Audience at this point, it's not apparent. If they aren't, it's time to get them involved.

Grow the Audience: Black and Hispanic Listening and Accountability

The Grow the Audience project has released a new report on listening by Black and Hispanic College Graduates. You can find the PDF here.

It's an informative report and, surprisingly, one of the few published reports with any Black and Hispanic audience numbers for public radio.

One would think that with all of the time and money invested in growing Black and Hispanic audiences over the past decade that it would be easy to find reports with actual audience numbers in them.

There are lots of reports on what was done and how money was spent doing it, but virtually nothing on the audience outcomes of those investments. In other words, public radio was measuring its success based on what was created, not on how much it was heard.

It's no wonder the audiences didn't grow. The measurement of success (programming investment) wasn't in alignment with the stated goal (audience growth). One is an input, the other is an output. Under this configuration, there has been no accountability for results.

JSA submitted a commentary to the Grow the Audience project web site to address this issue. It is republished below.

Grow the Audience: Clear Goals, Sufficient Funding, and Accountability Are a Must

At the Public Radio Program Director's conference, Tom Thomas stated that the Grow the Audience project's goal is to increase the broadcast audience for public radio.

That's a strong and welcome statement about the intent of the project. Radio isn't dead. There's room to grow our public service through radio listening and there should be specific growth goals, especially among Black and Hispanic listeners.

Those growth goals should be sufficiently funded based on existing programming economic models. We know the range of financial investment required to generate an hour of broadcast listening today. Getting new listening, especially from previously unserved audiences, will cost as much or more. Anything less sets the project up to fail.

Finally, someone must be held accountable for these audience growth goals. Goals tend to be missed if they have no champion. A lack of accountability for results is among the reasons past efforts to diversify the audience have failed.

Someone needs to be in charge and needs to have incentives to succeed. That's a standard business practice on the fundraising side. Missing substantial goals gets you fired. Making them has rewards. Applying similar standards to meeting audience goals increases the likelihood they will be met.

Diversity and the Audience Growth Project

The Station Resource Group, which is managing the Grow the Audience project, objected to my posting on public radio's poor track record regarding diversity. At issue are two adjacent paragraphs in the original posting. Here they are again:

It will be quite some time before the success of this new initiative can be measured but it should be noted now that there isn't a single African American or Hispanic person from inside public radio on the Grow the Audience Task Force. All of the diverse voices are from outside the industry.

The composition of the Task Force, unfortunately, shines a light on the inability of public radio's national organizations to recruit, nurture, and promote African Americans and Hispanics to positions of power and influence.

The SRG objected to the first paragraph, pointing out that the three diverse voices on the task force have worked extensively on the board level in public radio. It is a fair complaint. Board members, though not involved with day-to-day operations, should be considered from within the industry. The SRG provided short bios on each person and those are shown below.

The central point of my post can be found in the the second paragraph, that the composition of the Task Force is an unfortunate reminder that public radio has poor track record at recruiting, nurturing, and promoting African Americans and Hispanics to position of power and influence.

I could have written my way into that more carefully and for that I apologize. But I stand by my central point.

According to CPB's 2007 report on diversity, only 1% of officials at "non-minority controlled" public radio stations are Hispanic. 2.5% are African American. 1.3% are multi-cultural and 2.5% are Native American.

The same report shows there are no Hispanics in charge of major programming decisions at "non-minority controlled" stations. African Americans make up just 1.4% of those in charge of major programming decisions at "non-minority controlled" stations. 1.5% are multi-cultural and 2.5% are Native American.

The industry simply has to do better at providing high-level opportunities to persons of color. There is no better time to enact change than at the beginning of a major initiative such as the Grow the Audience project.

Apparently, and despite their objection to my posting, the SRG agrees. Not long after receiving their first email, the SRG sent another email saying that Sylvia Rivera, General Manager of WRTE in Chicago was added to the Task Force.

It's a start.

You can see who's on the Grow the Audience Task Force by clicking here. The SRG provided bios for 3 of the 17 task force members. They are posted with the SRG's permission.


Frank Cruz is a Trustee of the University of Southern California, the licensee of KUSC, and for the past 8 years has worked directly with the station as a member of KUSC's Board of Councilors. Classical KUSC has the largest Hispanic audience in public radio. Frank served for 12 years on the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, including as Chairman from 1999 to 2001 and two terms as Vice Chair. He is currently working an effort to bring a new, Latino-focused, English-language public radio service to Los Angeles.

Andrea Taylor has served on the WNYC board of directors since 1997 and has helped guide WNYC's dramatic evolution – in audience, funding, and facilities – over the past decade. WNYC-FM has the second largest Hispanic audience in public radio and WNYC-AM and WNYC-FM have the 10th and 12th largest African-American audiences. In addition, as a grant maker, Andrea has overseen tens of millions of dollars in production funding for public media, including major grants to our national networks.

Orlando Bagwell worked at WGBH for five years, from 1995 to 2000. He also has had a distinguished career as an independent film maker, including a key role in the historic Eyes on the Prize series. He has received two Columbia School of Journalism Duponts and two Peabodys among the many awards honoring his productions. Though he is admittedly more from the "tv side of the house," he knows – hands-on – what it means to make programming, find funds, connect with the network, do outreach, and develop an aftermarket. Orlando is directing the Ford Foundation's five-year $50 million investment in public media that includes major funding for NPR, PRI, PRX, Public Radio Capital, and several major public radio stations, all of whom he meets with both individually and collectively on a regular basis.

If at Third You Don't Succeed…

Diversity was a big topic at the recently concluded Public Radio Program Director's Conference. The issue was most prominently on display in the activities of CPB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Though CPB started investing in diversifying public radio's audience more than a decade ago, the composition of the audience hasn't really changed. None of the past efforts have been significant enough in scope to add a meaningful number of new listeners.

The new effort is multi-faceted. CPB's Talent Quest has identified and is now investing in several new programs hosted by African Americans. A service targeted at multi-lingual Latinos in Los Angeles is in the works. Audience diversification will be a key component of the new Grow the Audience project.

It will be quite some time before the success of this new initiative can be measured but it should be noted now that there isn't a single African American or Hispanic person from inside public radio on the Grow the Audience Task Force. All of the diverse voices are from outside the industry.

The composition of the Task Force, unfortunately, shines a light on the inability of public radio's national organizations to recruit, nurture, and promote African Americans and Hispanics to positions of power and influence.

When was the last time a high-level executive position that influences programming at CPB or one of the major networks was filled by a person of color who came from within the ranks? When was the last time the host chair of a major public radio program was filled by a person of color who came from within the ranks? How is it that a task force charged with growing and diversifying the public radio audience fails to include a single African American or Hispanic from the industry? It's not a very good track record.

The Grow the Audience Task Force presents an opportunity to change that record, even if it means slowing the project down a bit. There are many managers, programmers, producers, reporters, and music hosts of color already in public radio who could significantly contribute to the project on a strategic level.

The argument against this will be that these individuals can participate in "working groups" that will contribute to the Task Force's recommendations. That's not good enough because working groups ultimately have no strategic decision-making authority.

Now is the opportunity to bring diverse voices from within public radio to the highest levels of strategic thinking, planning, decision-making, and budgeting. It is a golden opportunity to diversify the industry's leadership. Hopefully, the opportunity won't be missed.

If Public Radio Really Wants to Grow the Audience

As noted before, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is investing in a new project to grow public radio's audience.

Signifcantly increasing the audience is no easy challenge. Only one of the three past major audience growth initiatives has succeeded. That was the audience doubling project of the 1980s. While that project failed to meet its goal on time, it helped create the foundation for nearly 20 years of growth.

The other two initiatives (if they could be called that)-- getting younger listeners and getting more Black and Hispanic listeners -- haven't come close to succeeding.

The reason is simple.

The goals were wrong.

Public radio never set out to reach a specific demographic with its original programming. The current demographics are a reflection, a side-effect even, of the values embedded in the programming. Even the most predictive public radio demographic characteristic, level of formal education, is only a proxy for what really explains public radio's success.

People listen to public radio programming because it speaks to them. Public radio resonates with their interests and values. Most people who don't listen choose to not listen because public radio does not resonate with their interests and values. They choose to not listen because public radio doesn't speak to them.

We've known this for a while. In fact, the Grow the Audience project principals -- Tom Thomas, Terry Clifford, and George Bailey -- have done some of the most extensive work in public radio on the psychographics of public radio listeners. That would be the VALS (Values and Lifestyles)research that came out of Audience 88 and Audience 98.

Yet the initial work from the Grow the Audience project appears to be starting in the same place of past audience growth failures -- age and ethnicity -- and not with values and content.

Here's a link to a piece I wrote for Current nearly four years ago on this topic. The essential point of the piece is that reaching listeners with different values requires programming created by people with different values.

Public radio was fortunate that it's early leaders could articulate and turn into content public service ideas that ended up resonating with those people VALS describes as Innovators and Thinkers. Understanding those market segments helped public radio grow its audience.

It's entirely possible that the VALS research that served public radio so well during its 20-year growth phase has little or no application public radio's next growth phase. There might be better ways of looking at how non-listeners view themselves and see the world. Gaining that understanding is the first step in identifying new public service opportunities.

That's the discussion public radio should be having. From those discussions, thought leaders will emerge. Those leaders, who might not even be in public radio today, will lay the foundation of new, meaningful content and future audience growth. Getting there requires letting go of the idea that public radio can grow by chasing age/ethnic/education demographics.