Programs/Content
Radio stations go to new places to court younger listeners
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With dating mixers, breweries and family days, stations aim to welcome millennials to public media fandom.
Current (https://current.org/tag/audience/)
With dating mixers, breweries and family days, stations aim to welcome millennials to public media fandom.
The changes include shorter segments, a broader range of topics and more “joy.”
Programmers are pessimistic that cume ratings can rebound to their pre-pandemic highs, but that doesn’t stop them from trying.
Public radio has become “too predictable and a bit boring,” writes Jack Mitchell, a founding producer of “All Things Considered.” “Fix that by letting ideas clash. Generate light with some heat.”
“We are going to create a whole new audience and a new way of receiving information in the Black community,” says Tracy Parsons, a community advisory board member involved in developing the new service.
Listeners have been tuning in more frequently and listening longer. In some markets, they’re hearing new voices and more beats in the music mix.
Stop wringing your hands over how to attract Millennial and Gen Z audiences — focus on creating programs that give them more reasons to listen.
Stations outpaced their commercial competitors in audience share growth measured last month.
Whether news, music or multiformat, a station can zero in on underperforming programs.
The trend could affect revenue for NPR and its member stations.
A new audio processing device takes on a shortcoming of the Portable People Meter system.
• A lengthy Columbia Journalism Review feature focuses on a conflict over journalistic ethics at Anchorage-based Alaska Public Media. CFO Bernie Washington has been nominated to serve on the State Assessment Review Board, which helps to determine revenues from oil taxes in the state. APM journalists are concerned about Washington’s appointment compromising the network’s coverage of the review board. “We are aghast, quite frankly, aghast that our management doesn’t understand that this is a solid, more than apparent conflict of interest,” Steve Heimel, host of Talk of Alaska, told CJR.
• President Obama will nominate Elizabeth Sembler for a second term on the CPB board, the White House announced Thursday. Sembler joined the board in 2008 as an appointee of President Bush; her term expires this year. She currently serves as the board’s vice chair.
The much-anticipated fourth season premiere of Downton Abbey on Masterpiece Classic drew a massive 10.2 million viewers on Sunday, good enough to make the two-hour episode the highest rated drama premiere in PBS history, according to PBS.
PBS is pairing two Masterpiece favorites on Sunday nights: the upcoming third season of its hit Sherlock and ratings blockbuster Downton Abbey, the network announced today. “We continue to execute on our programming strategy to focus on our key genres, build on our night-by-night schedule, and develop new brand-defining content that sets PBS apart in the changing media landscape,” PBS program chief Beth Hoppe told member station executives in an email today. PBS also announced that its 2012–13 primetime programming ratings increased 7 percent over last season, elevating the network to No. 8 among all broadcast and cable outlets from its previous rank of No. 11.
Atlanta’s WCLK-FM, a jazz station licensed to Clark University, aims to double its audience share with a new approach to programming music that went into effect Aug. 26.
Of all the complex and potentially fateful decisions faced by public radio program directors as they navigate the emergence of multiplatform distribution, one of the most significant is the drive to “go local” and produce more local programs, especially news and information. This push signals a strategic shift for public radio, with potentially enormous consequences for growth or decline. Audience 2010, one of a series of landmark research reports on programming trends published in the previous decade, reported that much of the credit for the growth of public radio listenership could be traced to a shift “away from local production toward network production, away from music-based content toward news, information and entertainment.” That shift was extraordinarily successful, representing two decades of impressive audience expansion and financial growth at a time when other parts of the radio industry struggled. Now, it appears that program decision-makers are changing course. But why would dozens of stations move off the path that worked so well and choose another approach that, viewed through the lens of audience research, would seem to be both more costly and less powerful in attracting listenership?
Audiences for news and talk stations delivered more than half of public radio’s listening in 2012, according to Arbitron’s annual study on public radio audience trends. The average quarter-hour (AQH) share, an Arbitron term describing the percentage of public radio listeners who tune to a specific format, hit 51.7 percent for pubradio news and talk stations last year, an 2.7 percent increase from 2011 and a precedent for the growth of public radio’s most powerful format, according to Arbitron’s “Public Radio Today 2013.” The study, which looked at audience trends across all stations and formats in 2012, found that public radio’s total audience remained at 32 million, or 12 percent, of all radio listeners. The number of weekly listeners grew by 7.5 percent, or 1.2 million, to a total of 18 million. Triple-A stations contributed to the gains by boosting the format’s weekly cume to 3.4 million listeners, an increase of 8.7 percent.
The Nielsen Co., the stalwart television-ratings tracker, announced Feb. 20 that it plans to track viewing on additional devices beginning in September. The news was reported by the Hollywood Reporter. Among the media Nielsen will include are Xboxes and over-the-top devices that stream programming from services such as Amazon, according to the Reporter. In January, PBS signed a deal to bring some of its local and national programming to Xbox and over-the-top device Roku.
The landscape of the audience-ratings business began shifting with this morning’s announcement that Nielsen Holdings plans to buy Arbitron Inc. in a $1.62 billion all-cash deal. New York-based Nielsen will pay $48 per share under the sales agreement, a 26 percent premium from Maryland-based Arbitron’s closing price on Monday. The deal, announced Tuesday, is supported by the boards of both companies. Bloomberg News reports that the agreement will have to meet antitrust standards of the Federal Trade Commission before the sale can close. “I would expect to see some push back from local customers like local radio and TV operating groups,” Rich Tullo, an analyst at Albert Fried & Co.
The Public Radio Program Directors Association gave its 2012 Don Otto Award to audience researcher Peter Dominowski, who co-founded PRPD in 1987. PRPD bestowed the award Sept. 13 in Las Vegas, where it observed its 25th anniversary as an organization. Dominowski is president of Market Trends Research, a market-research company based in Matheson, Colo. In presenting the award, Jeff Hansen, p.d. at Seattle’s KUOW, cited Dominowski’s many focus groups and research studies, and his work with the Morning Edition Grad School training sessions for stations and as a member of the Strategic Programming Partners consultancy.