PRI links with NewMarket to offer web content for stations
Originally printed in Current, Jan. 25, 1999
PRI and NewMarket Network, the Internet design company that developed the Car Talk, Whad'Ya Know?, Earth and Sky and Savvy Traveler web sites, announced Jan. 12 a strategic alliance to provide content accessible through stations' and producers' web sites. NewMarket, based in the Boston area, was founded in 1995 by Internet content developer and marketer Tom Lix.
PRI President Stephen Salyer said PRI is also talking with the BBC about providing BBC-related on-line content.
Also planning web content that can be offered through stations' sites: a station group working with consultant Mark Fuerst; Minnesota Public Radio (story at left); and NPR Online.
Minnesota Public Radio begins talks about syndicated web-content service
Originally published in Current, Nov. 23, 1998
The guys in Minnesota are gambling again that they can create a service for all of public radio, as they did in forming Public Radio International, a catalog sales empire, Public Radio Music Source and the Classical 24 music service.
This time the target of opportunity is the Internet. Bill Kling, president of the nonprofit Minnesota Public Radio, sketched a free Public Radio Online (PRO) service and solicited suggestions in recent confidential letters to prominent station managers. Kling also described the project to stations at the recent Station Resource Group (SRG) annual conference.
In a plan that parallels the fully underwritten side of public radio's audio networking, stations would get, without charge, a voluminous supply of material to beef up their local service--on their web sites.
Jon McTaggart, newly appointed MPR v.p. for new media, told Current that PRO will not seek to establish its own brand, but will offer a self-supporting service that strengthens local sites, in the manner of Classical 24's unbranded stream of classical music.
"If portal is an appropriate concept, what we're doing is building portals," says McTaggart. "Each public radio station's web site is a portal. That's where we want the audience loyalty to be."
National Public Radio similarly is finding ways to put valuable material on local stations' sites, says M.J. Bear, director of new media services. Some stations offered streaming audio of NPR's impeachment hearings coverage last week, even if they weren't carrying it on the air. Station sites also are now offering RealAudio files of NPR's hourly newscasts. And NPR, like PBS, is looking at ways to customize their national web pages to lead visitors to their nearest local station.
Public Radio International is also lining up resources for stations' web sites, says Bruce Theriault, chief operating officer. "We'll probably grow something with the stations," he adds. "The localization of the web is going to be a very big key to this."
Managers at the SRG conference were interested in the PRO proposal, but are cautious, says Tom Thomas, SRG co-director. They're getting offers from many web ventures, and they want to protect their stations' web identities while serving their listeners.
Mark Fuerst, coordinator of a small caucus of stations that met in Seattle last month to consider starting a similar service [story], said reps from Minnesota will present plans at the group's next meeting in December. Fuerst already had seen "very positive response" to PRO, based in part on MPR's "unchallenged reputation for financial development."
MPR's spinoff of most of its catalog operation in March added $90 million to the network's endowment and made millionaires of Kling and several other network execs through rare nonprofit-executive perks similar to stock options, though at the cost of controversy in the press and the state legislature.
Apparently impressed, several managers of other public radio stations have asked MPR whether it will be taking investor/partners in the Internet venture, according to McTaggart. MPR had not anticipated that idea, but will consider it, he said.
PRO will support itself through sales of underwriting, products and limited advertising on the stations' web sites, McTaggart said, and it will share revenues from some of the sources with stations.
"We won't throw a lot of money at [PRO], at first," McTaggart said. Its offerings will grow gradually as pieces are developed. He expects that MPR will invest $5 million to $10 million before the project breaks even, three to eight years from now. McKinsey & Co. consultants told MPR the costs will be larger and profitability later, he added.
PRO aims to test prototypes of the first elements of its service early next year at three or four stations, McTaggart said, and go operational next spring, summer or fall.
McTaggart, the project director, has been director of business development for MPR's parent, Minnesota Communications Group for the past two years. This month, he became a vice president two times over: v.p. for new media of MPR and v.p. for business development of MCG.
He began working with the company 15 years ago, managing MPR's Bemidji station and then a three-station group based in Collegeville. Between NPR jobs he spent five years in major positions at a Pennsylvania hospital and a California college.
So, what's the product?
PRO prototypes haven't been shown to anyone outside of MPR and its content providers, McTaggart said, and hasn't finally decided what the offerings will be, but it does know its target audience.
"I think public radio listeners have more money than time," McTaggart said. "They trust public radio to winnow, synthesize and organize cultural information and the public affairs of the day, and deliver real value for the time they spend listening." Public radio's web sites would do the same thing online.
Though PRO doubtless would have a public-radio feel, the elements mentioned by McTaggart resemble common offerings of many portals and web sites:
News and weather: PRO is negotiating deals with content providers to supply information that would be computer-sorted for geographic area and automatically fed into stations' web sites.
Radio Scout search engine: If listeners wanted to know who Terry Gross was interviewing yesterday, or where Norman Schwartzkopf had guested, they could find it with a special public-radio search engine, developed with aid from the CPB Future Fund and the J.L. Foundation.
Editor's Choice: PRO would gather the best local material from public radio and make available a selection to stations' sites, both in text and streaming-audio form. Visitors to MPR's web site have just as much interest in reading radio scripts as in hearing them via RealAudio, McTaggart said.
Interactive and chat services: PRO will try to offer moderated chats, which users prefer over unstaffed bulletin boards, but few stations can afford to run them, according to McTaggart. Program hosts will take questions or join in chats.
Events calendar: Users could check events in their own cities or elsewhere in the country, through a database using entries from local stations.
E-commerce: Stations will be able to sell memberships and local merchandise, with PRO handling secure credit-card transactions as well as fulfillment.
Though the core service to stations will be free, smaller groups of stations will be able to share costs of custom web projects that aren't widely used, McTaggart said.
PRO will use commonly available World Wide Web technologies instead of proprietary software, and will strive to make its offerings flexibly usable, he said.
The project has been under development for at least three years. That long ago, MPR rejected the idea of developing a national supersite, McTaggart said. Providers of elements, including national program producers, will have their own national sites, however.
It's not clear how all of these interests will interact economically, however. Broadcast economics are odd enough, so that it's hard to predict whether the station should pay the program producer/syndicator or the other way around, and web economics are even more obscure.
Asked how PRO will support itself, McTaggart gives the example of a public radio cooking show that would pay PRO for collecting listeners' favorite recipes over the Internet and then pay royalties to PRO from the resulting cookbook. But the recipe web page might be as much of a benefit to PRO as to the program producer, which can easily create its own web site and publicize it on the program.
Likewise, the public radio stations hold the key asset of their airwaves, where web sites get essential publicity, as the Seattle caucus realized. Under those conditions, a syndicated web service may have to be free.
With shared efforts, radio stations would upgrade web sites
Originally published in Current, Nov. 9, 1998
Public radio stations don't have the big bucks that entrepreneurs are sinking into Internet projects, but they do have a great advantage over most: a costless way of publicizing their web presence.
With that recognition, six prominent public radio stations are combining efforts to share web content, technology and alliances among their local online sites.
The informal Public Radio Internet Group, which met Oct. 14-17 in Seattle, initially includes WKSU in Kent, Ohio; WILL in Champaign, Ill.; WXPN in Philadelphia; New Hampshire Public Radio; Nebraska Public Radio; and KPLU in Tacoma/Seattle, says consultant Mark Fuerst, who's coordinating the effort.
When they meet again in Chicago, Dec. 10-11, they'll talk more about possible web products and partnerships that could make them successful.
The group is starting small and with low costs; members are pledging $5,000 for the first six months, Fuerst said, and will invite reps from other stations to join them. But the group of self-described "early adopters" want to move quickly, creating a coalition with PRI, NPR and other partners, without having to get every station in the country to agree, he said.
Their effort may help generate a second wave of pubcasting activity on the web. In the first--beginning in 1995--PBS and NPR created strong web sites while stations' largely separate local offerings lagged. Now, in the second wave, local stations' offerings could become gateways to expanded national content--just as on the radio. In a petition to PBS last month, public TV stations sought greater integration of their local identities in PBS Online (story, page 1).
"The eventual direction of station web sites will inevitably be some mix of local content, some level of cooperation with NPR and PRI," says Dick McPherson, a marketing consultant who participated in the Seattle meeting.
One option for public radio stations would be to create sites "where America learns about classical music," says McPherson. In addition to local playlists and schedules, the service could offer material on music appreciation, chatrooms for classical fans, and interviews with rising artists.
Though public radio has valuable strengths in news, the web competition in that area is so fierce that classical music would be "more defensible," Fuerst speculates.
Audio streaming is an obvious option, but the group is "not sure that's the most important application," he adds.
So far, most stations aren't even extending their fundraising efforts to the web. After checking out more than 200 station sites, consultant Tom Livingston reported that only 90 offered online "forms" that make it easy to join the station, and just 17 had the secure servers needed for collecting credit-card numbers.
The stations hope to cover online costs with e-commerce, Fuerst says.
Radio managers have various expectations about how much web content they'd have to create, he says, but all recognize that they're competing for attention against sites with larger resources. Public radio stations appear to assign at most one staffer to web tasks, he said.
"Basically, local stations' web sites are not very good," comments Livingston. "We're leaving a huge opportunity on the table."
Web page created Jan. 23, 1999
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