'We're a player' in Minnesota, Kling says. 'That's an opportunity that public radio has'
Gov. Ventura doesn’t seem to be a fan of public radio. I understand there have been meetings between him and MPR since he proposed the funding cuts. Has he softened his position?
Actually, he was more or less discovered by being on our air during the campaign—we gave him the same treatment that we gave the two major candidates. He said on our air that Minnesota Public Radio was responsible for his election.
This jousting between Garrison and Jesse is part of their personalities. Garrison couldn’t possibly resist the material, and the Governor can’t resist responding. But I don’t really think he’s angry at us. He has sat next to me at lunch a couple of times and never even mentioned it. It’s really a media thing — Doonesbury had a nice time with it.
As far as the funding goes, when you have the largest broadcast newsroom in the state, and you cover the Legislature as effectively as we do, taking state funding is going to be a roller coaster ride. We stopped taking it for many years — from the early ‘70s until the late ‘80s — and then made a policy decision to take it only for capital purposes. That way, if they appropriate it one year and cut it the next, it only effects your service expansion.
Considering the $110 million endowment that Minnesota Public Radio now has, and the fact that the subsidy gives certain legislators and other MPR critics leverage, have you thought about removing yourself from the state funding pool?
The Legislature feels quite strongly about expanding MPR, getting it into nooks and crannies in the state. With 30 transmitters we serve virtually everybody in Minnesota, but you’ll find some pockets without service.
As far as the endowment goes, it’s about the same size, actually somewhat smaller, than the major arts organizations. And they all receive state funding.
It’s large for public broadcasting, it’s not large for an organization that does the kinds of things that we do.
Back to Garrison Keillor and Jesse Ventura. . . . Somebody said to me, “Most station managers would be shaking in their boots, having their star take on a governor.” Does it make you nervous?
I don’t give it a thought—
Really?
I’ve known Garrison since 1969. I know what he does. I know what he’s good at. I think the audience is enjoying what he does. I suspect the Governor enjoys it. I think the Governor ought to be tuning in regularly, listening to how he’s being portrayed. There’s a bit of an edge to it, but it always comes out in a fairly friendly way.
How did the state of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale come to elect Jesse Ventura?
We may be seeing the beginning of a trend—not necessarily more people of Jesse’s background, but more people with Jesse’s style. He came into a campaign where you had two very polished politicians. Skip Humphrey grew up in politics. Norm Coleman, the Republican, is a very talented guy and very good at what he does. But the two of them danced around every issue. Listen to the debates — a question would come up and the Republican candidate would dash around it one way and the Democratic candidate would duck around it another way. And Jesse would say, “I don’t agree,” or “I’m in favor of that.” He gave clear, simple straightforward answers. Interesting: then the other two candidates would come back and say, “Well, I agree with Jesse. Jesse’s right about that” — they had seen the audience’s reaction. But what they did was legitimize his answer. The son of Hubert Humphrey said, “Jesse’s right.” The mayor of the City of St. Paul said, “Jesse’s right.” The people who were listening said, “Jesse’s clear,” and Jesse got elected. And I think you might see some more of that.
Minnesota Public Radio has seen phenomenal growth in the past 30 years. You just completed your two-channel network, blanketing the state. You were able to get the endowment in place. What’s ahead for MPR?
Content is one. We never give up on being able to deliver higher-quality news and information. We have 70 people now in our news department, but still we can be more successful.
Content distribution: we once had a couple of stations, then a state network, now we have two statewide networks. The Internet is clearly going to be the next best way to distribute content.
Standards is one area, improving our standards. If you look at public radio over its history, you’ll see we, as an industry, have been awfully good at holding ourselves back. We’ve had every opportunity. We had reserved frequencies that waited for our industry to get its act together. We had the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act that gave us significant money. We had the Temporary Commission on Alternative Financing during the Reagan Administration that recommended relaxing the underwriting rules. We’ve had a lack of competition. And, despite that, we haven’t reached our potential.
When I started in this industry, a lot of the people I came across were heads of audio/visual departments at small colleges. They were in charge of the radio station because it was microphones and wires and amplifiers. The standards have gone way up since then; there are some very talented people in our industry. But we’re not there yet. We’re not yet pulling in enough top-level talent. Part of that is compensation—we don’t pay competitively. Part of it is recruiting—we don’t go off to colleges and business schools in a significant way.
How much are the problems structural? So many stations say they can’t move ahead the way they’d like to because of their institutional licensees.
Part of it is structural. The licensees too often don’t understand their role in community service. They have institutional objectives. They don’t have the resources. Some of them don’t understand that they are the custodian of the frequency as opposed to the owner. There have been so few instances where an institution has been civic-minded and forward-thinking enough to give its station away. And we’re one of them; we started out as a college radio station — at St. John’s University in Collegeville. The college couldn’t afford the level of quality it desired and instead of saying to us, as many institutions have, “Cut it back, stop spending so much,” they said, “How can we broaden the support base?” So they took the license out of the college, put it into a community corporation. And that college and six others like it that work with us have gotten back more value because of the strength and growth and reputation of MPR than they ever would have if they kept it as a student radio station or something connected to the curriculum.
Can you talk more specifically about that value?
Go back to the purpose of operating a station. In the case of St. John’s, they wanted the station to be the center of culture in their community. It was a Benedictine institution. Benedictine monasteries throughout history have been patrons of the arts. And they said, we’d like to do it through radio. But it wasn’t affordable.
They transferred the stations to MPR, but the colleges are still associated with MPR in their region. In St. Cloud, Minn., we say, “Brought to you in association with St. John’s University.” Most people there think this is a St. John’s University radio service. And the same is true in many of the other regions we serve—they provide funding that helps us to cover issues and keep a staff and studios.
So they’ve gotten a much stronger program service—a $27 million service—for a small cost to them over the years. They have the service in the community they wanted. And they’ve gotten the credit all these years.
Station managers have a hard time convincing their licensees. I wonder why you’ve been able to not only do it in several cases, but do it fairly quickly.
As you know, we’ve proposed a partnership in Los Angeles [at KPCC, licensed to Pasadena Community College]. Here you have a college with all the right intentions. It’s a two-year college with a limited budget. Their frequency reaches from San Diego County to Santa Barbara—13 million people. How do you serve a community of that size as part of a college? And then when you quickly conclude you can’t, what’s the appropriate way to take that license and ensure that it will best serve the community and still serve the interests of the college? There’s a lot of complexity to figuring out how to use that license, how to structure the arrangement. But it can be done to everyone’s advantage.
Take a look at the public radio demographic in Minnesota. There are 600,000 people with a college degree or higher over the age of 25—the core public radio demographic. That produces 90,000 supporting members or about $7 million in membership support. In Los Angeles, there are at a minimum 2 million people in the same demographic, 25 and over, college degree or more. That would translate to $23 million in membership support. Right now at KPCC, their entire budget is in the range of $1 million.
[It raises the question]: what is public radios’s potential? We don’t really know, as a system, what our performance standards should be. That issue needs to be higher on the agenda. If you are underperforming, not just in audience, but in every other way, why is that?
What has been the problem at KPCC?
Resources. It’s a good station. Format is smart talk. They do a good job of that —
Their programming is fine?
Well, their programming, you can always do more. They don’t do any significant amount of local news coverage or state news coverage. But their ability to go out and raise major dollars from foundations, as with all institutions, has to wait in line for the other needs of the institution, a new science building, etc. Their ability to hire the kinds of people who can deliver superior performance is limited.
And salaries?
They aren’t able to go beyond the faculty and institutional pay scales. And sometimes that isn’t just dollars, it’s the number of hours that people can work. It just doesn’t fit a 24-hour a day radio station.
What’s the status?
We’ve had some very good conversations. They told us they expect to make a decision by the first of July.
I heard the talks were stalled.
I wouldn’t say that. It seemed to me that we were in agreement, had addressed all the issues. But there are still advisory boards and boards of trustees. Now, it may not happen. They may decide they don’t want to do it. If they decide they don’t want to do it, it’s a lost opportunity for public radio. The primary reason we're doing this--people say, “Sure, MPR is a successful public radio system, but there’s something different about Minnesota that can’t be duplicated or replicated elsewhere.” And I think we need—in one of the largest cities in the country—to replicate it. To be able to show that you can hit the same benchmarks, that you can have the same strength in local programming. That you can have a strong board of directors. And the prestige of the college rises. If you can do that in Los Angeles then the model is there. And some institutions may look at it and say, that really has solved the big problem.
Some California managers argue it’s inappropriate for Minnesota Public Radio to deliver services outside of the state. It’s understandable they would resent fighting for resources with an outsider.
Well, I go back to what is the point of the frequencies. If the FCC wants to allocate one frequency in Los Angeles and put some clout behind it and say this is to be a public radio service, and CPB would say we’re going to fund this in a significant way, we wouldn’t think of going into Los Angeles. But the fact is there are half a dozen frequencies and I don’t see that any of them are doing a significant job of local or statewide coverage, issues coverage.
One of the interesting points people make in this debate is that we are not local. But our whole plan is about how to do local and state programming. With a board of directors drawn from California. It’s going to be as Californian, or more so, than any other entity.
The Minnesota Public Radio faction of the board would actually be one person bigger.
Yes, because we have said we would take the risk, guarantee the budget. If you don’t have one extra vote, somebody could vote through a budget of $10 million, raise only $4 million of it, and we’d be out for the other six.
But the fact is you never get all 13 members at any meeting; we never get all 30 of our board members. And you don’t vote on a 7-6 basis.
Do you have a sense at this point how much of the new station’s programming would be local, national and how much MPR?
There would be no Minnesota content that isn’t available as national programming. They already carry Sound Money, Prairie Home Companion, other programs. But we have no intention of sending them the latest from the Minnesota Legislature.
We have in our mission statement a national service objective. And it’s been there for many many years. It’s why PRI was started under our umbrella. We raised the money, carried it, invested in it and gave it life. And then when it looked as if it could be more effective as an independent entity, we let it go. Why did we do that? Especially after we went through all the difficult part of starting an organization. There was criticism—a New York Times article said we were going to kill NPR, said, “You’re bad people,” basically. But that’s exactly our history—we were set free.
It’s all part of the national service mission. I was one of the 15 station managers that founded the Station Resource Group, one of the original board members of NPR, and of the Association of Public Radio Stations. All of them were controversial. None were particularly fun to get started. And yet in hindsight, people look back and see benefits—greater diversity, system responsiveness, new program ideas. And that’s what was intended. So the same is true in Pasadena. I think we need a model in a tough city, a big city, the second largest city.
Laura Walker is doing the same thing in New York and she’s really taken on a challenge. She’s gotten the license away from the city, and I hope that she’s more successful than we are. People forget the success of any part of public radio ultimately comes back in some way to the whole.
At your 30th anniversary celebration in 1997, Garrison Keillor said during remarks on stage that you envision the public radio audience as the core of the public. It’s not the fringe, it’s the middle—middle class, middle American values. Has that been your guiding notion of the audience and, if so, will it work in California?
My sense has been, “If you build it, they will come.” If you put quality programming on the air, thinking people will listen to it. Our impact in Minnesota has become quite significant. We are a player when it comes to setting the agenda for this state. That’s the opportunity public radio has.
I’ve never believed we couldn’t get every person who is the least bit thoughtful to listen to public radio. I still think we can get every listener to be a member. People say, “You have 16 percent of your [cume] audience in your membership—that’s way above the average. We shouldn’t set our goals any higher." And I say, who said 16 percent is the top? Why isn’t it 25 percent? 50 percent? 70 percent?
Some people are saying the sensibilities won’t translate on the West Coast. How are you going to get the right people to staff the station?
Sure. And that might happen. If Pasadena City College decides they want to do this, we may find we fail at it. We have guaranteed a significant budget that will take the station to three or four times where it is now. And [MPR news chief] Bill Buzenberg, who I think is one of the most talented people in journalism and journalism management, will help identify the kinds of people who can staff a news operation. If that doesn’t work, if there’s something different needed, then we’ll learn something. But it’s the same reason I challenge the 16 percent membership figure. Who says it won’t work? Nobody’s tried it.
And I’ve had people say to me, “You know, people in Los Angeles aren’t interested in local news.” And I’ve repeated that to other people in Los Angeles and I get very angry responses. Is it right or wrong? We’ll find out.
You had an Local Management Agreement [LMA] proposal in San Francisco which you withdrew.
We were asked to respond to the opportunity by the Station Resource Group— I’ve never had a conversation with a single person in San Francisco about a radio service for San Francisco. But I’ve been very active and aggressive in Los Angeles.
The SRG took on the KALW project and asked its members who would stand behind it, who could make this happen. We were told at the time the interest was classical music, and we operate C24 [24-hour music service “Classical 24”]. But some time back in November we told the SRG and some of the others in California who were interested in the station that we would not pursue it because we wanted to concentrate on Los Angeles.
Will there be other LMA proposals?
I don’t think so. Others have been offered. Every now and then because of publicity about the proposal in Pasadena, somebody will contact us and say, “Please come out.” We’re not looking to start a company that would operate public radio stations across the country. I’m not sure that somebody shouldn’t, but I don’t think it should be MPR.
You seem the most likely.
Well, there was no National Public Radio until public radio created it. There was no PRI until we created it. The system should look [at these issues] at a forum like a Public Radio Conference, where we could talk about lifting the standards of all of public radio, and help it reach its full potential. I’d like to be helpful in whatever capacity that I can to see that we do reach that potential.
Can you tell the story about the beginnings of American Public Radio [APR, now Public Radio International], which is so often told in slightly different variations and came up again recently in a New York Times article, with negative comments from former NPR President Frank Mankiewicz?
In Phoenix in about 1983, three or four of us [station managers] went to see Frank. The NPR Board was meeting and several of us were on it. At that time CPB funded all national programming directly through NPR. And we went to Frank and said, there are some other ideas out around the system and now that we have the satellite in place, we’d like to see some process for looking at program ideas outside Washington. And Frank looked at the group of us and said, “No . . . any money we allocate outside of NPR itself is money outside our shop, and I’m trying to build the core of National Public Radio.”
So we left his hotel room, went down to the swimming pool, sat down, and basically formed the concept for Public Radio International. When we created NPR we had done exactly the right thing, which was to consolidate all strength in one place, because there was no national programming. Ten years later NPR had grown quite strong and we realized there’d been one flaw in the design of it, which was that there was no incentive to look at any other ideas, to bring in programs from stations or independents. So we formed PRI and told it: you may not produce anything yourself. You can only use your funding and your resources to go out and look at other people’s ideas, partner with them. NPR quickly became more competitive.
How do you feel about the fact that PRI has evolved into a producing organization?
I worry a bit it will go through the same cycle. The World is a very important program. It’s a difficult program because the American audience isn’t ready for it. We carry it; I support it fully, because I think the American audiences will come around to it and when they do, we’ll have the best global news program there is. At the same time, it does take most of the time, attention, and money that Public Radio International can muster. So it reduces a bit the idea their efforts should be focused externally.
You were instrumental in founding APR; you were its first chairman. And then you had an advising role. But it seems lately that PRI and MPR are drifting apart.
I think it’s the normal maturation process of the institution. Most people, when they ask that question, are referring to our Internet partnership with NPR. We started talking to National Public Radio two-and-a-half years ago about the Internet because the Internet concept was driven by content, and the largest owners of content are National Public Radio and Minnesota Public Radio. So NPR was the logical choice.
All of our major programs are still distributed by PRI. We’re doing [documentary project] American Radio Works with NPR because it fits into their newsmagazines. But it does cause people to wonder. And what they’re missing is that our purpose in creating PRI was to create it, and now it’s up and functioning. It doesn’t mean we’ll never do anything with NPR again. But people seem to expect we have to be monogamous.
Why have you ended your role advising PRI?
When PRI decided they too would undertake an Internet initiative, it didn’t seem to me I could stay on the advisory board. I wouldn’t want a competitor sitting on my board saying, “Tell me what your plan is.”
There are now at least three Internet projects developing in public radio, if you count the group of stations called the Public Radio Internet Service Alliance. Some say the system should move into the Internet as a united front. Don’t the advantages of exploiting all of public radio resources outweigh whatever creative and motivational benefits you get from intersystem competition?
I think we and NPR believe we have the majority of the system’s resources.
We’re starting out from a service perspective. The Internet is a huge opportunity to provide back-up service to our programming. Look at what we’ve done so far. The Radio Scout search engine—stations can use that to answer questions from their audiences or they can refer their audience directly to it. Audio on demand, backup content supporting our programs, online versions of our programs. That’s the first step to this.
The second step is to build communities. And the third step will be to create e-commerce and provide products and services based on what the audience has told us.
Weren’t you talking with NewMarket Networks, the same firm that’s now working with PRI?
We were thinking about partnering with NewMarket. But we had a two-pronged approach. Ours had something called Public Radio Online, which is the nonprofit service-oriented aspect of it. [The second piece] had a working title of Audiences—odd title, but it was the only way we could describe how it worked—bringing the audience together. So NewMarket would have been used as a “platform” for the Audiences part of it. And the reason for that was, they were up and running—they were a short-cut—and we thought that we were two years if not three years late in getting started.
What kinds of e-commerce activities do you envision?
I think the audience is going to come in and tell us what they’re interested in and help us create services. They’ll come into Morning Edition's site to find out what Al Gore said about Bill Bradley this morning, and eventually migrate over to Food or Adventure Travel or Money and Finance. When they do that I think they will tell us enough for us to create products and content. They might for instance tell us what the best fly-fishing streams are in the Western United States. They might become competitive and insist they know which is the best half mile. Out of that content comes a book on fly-fishing. Or an outfitted tour to go fly-fishing.
It’s basically saying to an audience that knows us and trusts us, you tell us what your interests are, and we’ll try to find ways to put you together with other people like you and fulfill your interests in ways that will help us support the Internet service, or possibly even make enough money to support the program service.
Another question we often hear is, what will stations get out of it? And the answer is, there should be opportunities for everybody. In public radio we often think the pie can’t grow. There’s a defined amount of money, there’s a defined audience size that can’t get any bigger and you have to divide it up and fight for your slice or lose out. The Internet is one of those technologies that’s going to make that pie much, much, much bigger.
We’ve got this incredible audience, we have transmitters that can call that audience to action—in other words we have the ability to bring them into the Internet site, which is a terrific advantage. And they trust us. And so in the process they will come to us first. If we don’t blow the opportunity we can be the best choice for the public radio audience when it wants to get into thoughtful discussion with other people. It’s regularly said about our audience that they feel they have more in common with other people in the public radio audience than they have with their geographic neighbors.
What is public radio’s edge going into the Internet over other services that reach the same audience, like Salon, like Amazon.com. Same audience.
Nope. That’s why we code-named it “Audiences.” The audience that public radio attracts is the whole key to it, and that audience’s thinking, knowledge—and then the question is, can we draw that knowledge out of them. In the process of giving them what they want from public radio, they’re going to give us ideas, content for programs, themes for Talk of the Nation, Splendid Table or Sound Money. They’re going to give us experts that we don’t have in our Rolodexes. More diversity, more breadth. That makes broadcast programming stronger, it improves the value of the Internet service and it then leads to new products and services.
What Amazon doesn’t have is the ability every day right at the point of some crucial piece of information to say, “And go to our web site.” Amazon has to spend millions of dollars to buy market share. We’ve already got the audience listening. That I think carries the greatest value.
That combination of trust, the nature of the audience and the transmitters; we have something that no other online service has.
How careful does public radio have to be in terms of commercial activity on the ‘Net?
I think you have to be careful not to alienate your audience. We don’t have FCC regulations, as you know. I was on the TCAF panel when they wanted to experiment with commercials in public radio. I voted against it because I didn’t think it got us anywhere. I thought we would lose more than we gained. Enhanced underwriting was very important, and we got that. Same way on the Internet—if you do it wrong, go too far, exploit it, over-commercialize it, the audience will go away. They have a lot of other choices.
Do you have sponsors lined up yet?
No. The other thing you hear a lot about is station investment in this. Before we agreed on our partnership with NPR, we let the Station Resource Group know we were going ahead with this. And what we heard from stations was, “Could we invest in this?” And I was cautious about that, because when you start talking about investment, you don’t necessarily automatically double, triple quadruple your money. Invest in start-up, high-risk businesses or something like this, inevitably the money’s going to get burned up in the development of the service and more money will have to come in. Where’s it going to come from? The same people who gave you the original money? A lot of times no. So they get diluted. Instead of owning 1 percent, they may own half or quarter percent. You could lose all of the investment.
So, it’s not a slam dunk. It isn’t, “Let me invest a $100,000, and when do my dividends start coming? And by the way, when can I cash out?” It’s a true risk and a high risk. We’re in a position to take it. NPR, through its foundation, is in a position to take some risk.
I hear people say that Minnesota Public Radio is a success not only because of your gifts as an entrepreneur, but that there’s a lot of good timing involved. Do you hear that?
Good timing in the sense of?
Well, good timing in the sense that you were there at St. John’s when Father Coleman Barry had his passion to start a radio station, and Congress was doing—
Oh, sure. I went to work at St. John’s in 1966 and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was born in 1969. And public radio funding started coming about 1970. But, you make your success. I was lucky to find some very talented people who were willing to come to work for a fledgling company at very low wages. I could show you a picture of the first board of directors of National Public Radio. A group of us under the leadership of CPB said we needed a national program service, so we created it.
That’s happened consistently. In the late ’70s, public broadcasting decided to put money up for a satellite, largely because of public TV—radio was an afterthought. It was going to be a four-channel Washington-based single system and some of us figured out that would be nice, but not as helpful as if we had more channels and more feed points. That wasn’t easy; it was very controversial. At one point we were told there would be no satellite system. I was chair of the technology committee for NPR and for APRS [the Association of Public Radio Stations], which at the time was representing the stations in Washington. We stood firm and said, “Either do it right, or don’t do it.”
And they gave us 24 hours to decide where to locate the uplinks—something that ordinarily would take months, not 24 hours. But few understood the opportunity. And so they were “logically located” and that gave us the satellite and that gave us the ability to produce and distribute programming like Sound Money and Prairie Home Companion and St. Paul Sunday. So, yes, that was an advantage. The satellite wasn’t there for years before, when my predecessors were running radio stations. But some of that success you have to create—nobody hands it to you.
Coleman Barry did hire me, in 1966 when I was 23 years old. Silly decision! What on earth ever made him think that anyone that age would know how to do it?
He hired me to start a station. To build studios and to read books on acoustics and how to form the walls and lay out transmitters and figure out opportunities. To find out where the highest hill for an antenna was. You learn a lot when you start from scratch.
At what point did you envision a statewide network?
At the point we were drowning in debt, trying to operate from one station in central Minnesota. Basically we had two choices. One was to give up. Or to expand. And we tried to see if by losing more money, we could get more market share. So we built a higher powered station in the Twin Cities and we pulled together a variety of partnerships. And then it started to turn around. Community leaders liked the idea of a statewide service, which could link the state together so people in both urban and rural areas could hear about issues.
To this day we have a news production team called Main Street Radio, a talented group of three or four people, that’s never allowed to come to the Twin Cities. They roam around the state.
Not even for the office Christmas party?
[Laughs.] They’re out picking up big stories.
But nothing has come without controversy. When we had our second station in the Twin Cities, it became clear that we were going to challenge the then preeminent public radio station, which was the University of Minnesota’s AM station. And there were consultants were hired by foundations to see who should build the statewide system. And the governor created a task force, two years of study involved. And we just went along and kept on creating stations. And in the end, the task force report suggested that there should be a two channel service, Minnesota Public Radio was the right model for it in terms of governance and that there should be state funding to help with the capital expenses. I suppose at that point — they didn’t mention us by name — they just sort of described us. At that point we were anointed as the statewide entity. But we would have just done it anyway. We were building a statewide system because it made sense.
Photo courtesy of MPR.
Copyright 1999 Current