Programs/Content

Report: SiriusXM to end The Bob Edwards Show

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SiriusXM Radio will wind down The Bob Edwards Show next month, according to a Politico article published Friday. Citing unnamed sources, Politico reported that the show will end Sept. 26. Public Radio International distributes a weekly version of the show to public radio, and PRI spokeswoman Julia Yager said that program will continue. Edwards declined to comment to Current, and SiriusXM did not respond to a request for comment.

Programs/Content

Arbitron reports new benchmark for pubradio news/talk audience

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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.

Programs/Content

Preparing public media newsrooms to cover local crises

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Crisis coverage will stress several layers of a public station’s operating systems — from newsroom layout to editorial decision-making; from the flexibility of web-hosting services to interpersonal relationships among key staff members, each of whom will be asked to step up and work under conditions they have never faced.

Development

A digital revolution for public radio fundraising

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Marketing consultant John Sutton has been forecasting what public radio will look like in 2018, and his predictions, published on his blog RadioSutton since February, have been provocative. Sutton is among the pubradio analysts who believe that federal funding “will be sharply reduced or gone in five years.” He also believes that digital listening will fragment the audience enough that eventually NPR will have to raise money directly from listeners or the current public radio economic model will collapse. Below, he lays out a proposal for overhauling public radio fundraising and how it makes both dollars and sense. Imagine a future in which listeners donate 26 percent more money to public radio at half the cost. Imagine that NPR has nearly $60 million more to invest annually in world-class journalism and development of new programs.

Is this imaginative exercise making you uncomfortable?

System/Policy

Tiny audience, debt service put Tacoma signal in jeopardy

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Public Radio Capital is working to keep an FM station it owns in Tacoma, Wash., on the air after June 30, when Seattle’s KUOW will stop programming it. In six years of operating as an internationally focused alternative to KUOW, KXOT failed to attract enough new listeners to support its operations. PRC is negotiating with National Cooperative Bank, which backed the brokerage’s $5 million purchase of KXOT-FM in 2003. Payments on the loan have stopped while PRC tries to come up with a plan for KXOT. When KUOW began managing the Tacoma station in 2006, its leaders hoped to buy it.

System/Policy

Albany gets a lot of Chartock, but how much is too much?

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When Alan Chartock, president of Northeast Public Radio in Albany, N.Y., was on a wife-imposed Mexican vacation, despite her objections he still found a way to call in for his five-day-a-week 7:34 a.m. spot. Chartock, 70, lives and breathes the media institution he created nearly single-handedly in 1981. He’s on air most days and often hosts two weekly shows, one about medicine and the other about media. If you are one of the 450,000 monthly listeners to mother station WAMC or its 22 repeaters in the hilly towns and valleys where New York meets Vermont and Massachusetts, you know a lot about Chartock. You know he’s always trying a new diet (currently, no white food).

Public Media Policybase

Public radio (unofficially) asks CPB to serve as political firewall, May 2005

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Public radio station representatives endorsed this resolution by voice vote during NPR’s annual Members Meeting of stations, May 3, 2005. The meeting lacked the quorum necessary to adopt a proposed official resolution. The proposal, offered by Tim Emmons, g.m. of Northern Public Radio in DeKalb, Ill., responded to recent news coverage about CPB activities promoting conservative programming on public TV. Whereas it is the statutory and historical role of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to serve as a firewall between partisan politics and public broadcasting; and

Whereas the Public Broadcasting Act specifically directs CPB to act “in ways that will most effectively assure the maximum freedom of the public telecommunications entities and systems from interference with, or control of, program content or other activities”; and

Whereas CPB has in the past respected the First Amendment rights of broadcasters and deferred to the professional judgments of journalists; and

Whereas the Public Broadcasting Act requires CPB to distribute program funds by grant rather than by contract specifically to limit CPB interference in the editorial decision-making process of public broadcasting program producers and stations; and

Whereas the Public Broadcasting Act requires CPB to create and annually update a plan for the development of public telecommunications services and consult with interested parties when so doing; and

Whereas CPB has recently dismissed its President and CEO under uncertain conditions; and

Whereas the CPB board recently appointed two ombudsmen without consulting with the public broadcasting system, raising legitimate concerns of an institutionalized process for potential interference in content, and

Whereas, such a process within a funding agency is fundamentally inconsistent with the principles of ombudsmen in reference to news organizations;

It is therefore resolved that:

CPB should follow statutory requirements and do nothing to diminish the firewall between the Federal funds appropriated by the Congress and the public broadcast programming it funds; and
CPB should follow statutory requirements and refrain from interfering in constitutionally protected content decisions; and
CPB should follow statutory requirements and, before making changes in funding priorities, should engage in a system-wide consultation about the priorities of public radio and defer to the reasonable and legitimate choices of broadcast professionals to build services of value within the local communities they serve.

CPB

The Public Radio Study, 1969

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This study — partially funded by CPB and the Ford Foundation during CPB’s first year and released in April 1969 — recommended creation of a public radio network and a national production center (a year before the founding of NPR), restructuring of the noncommercial FM band, and formation of a radio division at CPB to look out for public radio’s interests. The study was headed by Samuel C.O. Holt, who later served as programming chief at NPR. Holt’s recommendations are here. Summary
The Public Radio Study was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and The Ford Foundation at an important time for the medium. We have tried to gain a feeling for noncommercial educational radio and its problems, to get from the station managers and others who work in the medium something of their attitudes toward their field and its future, and to make recommendations to meet some of the problems we encountered in our field work.