Vocalo’s staff gathers for a launch party. Turner, the g.m., is fourth in front row, Malatia, president of Chicago Public Radio, stands at right.
On South Side: Awaiting judgment, Vocalo gets practice
Second of two articles
Chicago Public Radio’s Vocalo.org stands out as one of public radio’s boldest experiments in trying to reach new audiences. But for the past year and a half, the station has struggled to draw much of an audience of any kind.
“Have you tried to put a tower up recently?” asks Torey Malatia, president of Chicago Public Radio, over lunch at a pub near the broadcaster’s Navy Pier headquarters.
Though he describes Vocalo.org as “a social networking website with a station attached,” having a radio tower remains vital to its success. Until just a few weeks ago, its FM station originating in northwest Indiana barely reached Chicago’s city limits.
CPR turned on Vocalo.org’s 7,000-watt transmitter in June 2007 with plans to boost the signal to 50,000 watts by the fall — and reach into Chicago. But the power increase was delayed more than a year as CPR sought and failed to get a zoning variance for the tower in Porter, Ind.
The setback forced CPR to spend $2 million — equal to Vocalo’s annual operating budget — to erect a tower on a new parcel near Lake Michigan. Malatia’s experience mirrored what colleagues in pubcasting told him—building a new tower is no easy job.
The delay pinched Vocalo.org’s budget and hampered its marketing. On the upside, it gave the staff a long incubation period to develop Vocalo.org’s unconventional sound — music and talk mixed with a heavy dose of content produced by listeners and web users. The programming is aimed at a younger, more racially diverse audience than the norm for public radio, which CPR hopes will make it more relevant in a city with a growing minority population.
Will it work? Malatia admits he doesn’t know. The experiment has suffered funding woes and stirred up internal divisions with CPR. Until now, its on-air sound has evolved by instinct, trial and error. Producers got no listener feedback through Arbitron ratings — the audience was too small to be measured.
Vocalo.org’s expanded coverage area will put it to the test. It now reaches a potential audience of 2.5 million, up from about 400,000 before the boost. The new transmitter extends a signal of 54 dBu strength nearly to Evanston, north of Chicago, while the old signal at that strength barely reached Gary, Ind., judging from maps based on engineers’ projections.
While this expanded jury of listeners is yet to weigh in, Malatia is imagining that Vocalo.org could propagate its philosophy and infrastructure to stations in other markets. “We think it has enormous potential,” he says.
Nervous newsroom
First, however, Malatia and Vocalo.org’s managers aim to get the station on solid financial footing. To distance itself from the traditional sound of public radio, Vocalo.org decided not to raise funds on-air. Instead, it aims to raise three-quarters of its income from underwriting within the next few years. So far, however, that income has fallen short because of the signal problem.
In addition, some grants that CPR sought to fund Vocalo.org came in later than expected. CPR was forced to extract $700,000 from the budget of WBEZ, its popular news/talk outlet, to fund the upstart experiment.
This year General Manager Wendy Turner expects Vocalo.org will absorb an additional $400,000 from WBEZ to cover its budget.
[Lagging revenues also prompted layoffs of 11 WBEZ and Vocalo staff members in December, the station reported Dec. 5.]
Grants have been crucial to Vocalo.org’s growth. It launched with support from the Ford Foundation, the Surdna Foundation and CPB, and expects additional CPB aid this fiscal year. It got some welcome news in October when the MacArthur Foundation announced a $1 million grant to Vocalo.org over three years, with half that amount paid in the first year.
Vocalo.org intersects with several MacArthur funding priorities, says Elspeth Revere, v.p. of the foundation’s general program. The funder seeks to support uses of digital technology that foster better communication among people, Revere says, It has also supported revitalization projects in Chicago neighborhoods such as Englewood and Humboldt Park, where Vocalo.org is angling for both listeners and contributors of content.
“It’s an exciting possibility that public radio can have a branch that is much more inclusive of people who don’t relate to the sound or the content that characterizes it now,” Revere says.
Malatia had promised WBEZ staffers that the bigger station’s budget would remain separate from Vocalo.org’s, and he acknowledges he broke that promise by shifting money from one to the other during Vocalo.org’s first year. The move aggravated worries among WBEZ employees who already feared what the riskier venture might do to their jobs.
“I worry that the management didn’t realize how much tension there was, and sometimes I worry that they still don’t,” says Jason DeRose, a former reporter and editor at WBEZ who now works as an editor for NPR’s Day to Day. DeRose recalls that when all of Vocalo.org’s host-producers received BlackBerrys, WBEZ reporters still lacked them.
“We’d been screaming for them,” he says. “People felt hurt about that.” DeRose and his colleagues quickly got their own after speaking up, he says.
Turner went ahead with buying the devices for Vocalo.org because she found a good deal, she says, adding that WBEZ had the money in its budget but hadn’t spent it.
Strand in “emerging DNA”?
Malatia anticipated these tensions. The launch of Vocalo.org reminded WBEZ staffers that their station, like many in public radio, was missing a swath of listeners beyond the white, affluent and well-educated core audience, he says.
“We’re doing this to protect those people and what we’re doing currently,” he says of Vocalo.org. He sees the station as a “hothouse” for ideas that WBEZ can borrow: “It’s like having your own experimental theater upstairs.”
Malatia faces a challenge known as “the innovator’s dilemma” — the difficulty of diverting resources from a successful enterprise to develop an alternative that may outstrip it in the future. Students of organizational strategy recommend making room for experiments within the established business, as Malatia did. Internal friction is inevitable, says Robert Paterson, a consultant to pubcasters and new-media advocate who has written about Vocalo.org.
“All traditional systems can sense when their replacement is on the scene,” Paterson says. “And they can’t help but do their best to destroy it.”
Paterson compares Vocalo.org to efforts underway elsewhere in public broadcasting, where stations work to involve audiences in creating and informing news and public affairs content. These initiatives include Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism and projects Paterson has advised at KETC in St. Louis, which has recruited community members to share their personal experiences with headline-grabbing events such as home foreclosures and the election.
Paterson also assisted WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, with creating its Social Media Café, a budding collaboration with local bloggers. Tapping outsiders to get involved “revitalizes public broadcasting,” says Susan Meyer, WOSU’s director of marketing and communications.
“For better or worse, public broadcasting has always been labeled ‘elitist,’” Meyer says. “Being able to open up the airwaves, television and online is stripping away that charge of elitism because people are seeing themselves there. They’re seeing their ideas and comments reflected in a way they haven’t seen before, and that makes them more invested in public broadcasting.”
“There’s a DNA emerging here,” Paterson says of these efforts to turn the audience into participants. But Vocalo.org suffers from a flaw, he says. Unlike KETC, the station has yet to rally listeners around challenges facing their communities. In tough economic times, he says, stations that shirk this role will struggle to raise funds to survive.
“The model of activating the community to solve problems is maybe the missing piece of Vocalo,” he says. “Simply having people contributing—on its own, I don’t think it’s enough.”
Vocalo.org’s Turner acknowledges this shortcoming. She says the station will address it with a website upgrade in January that lets the staff and users organize content by theme. This will help “build momentum and perhaps movement on issues people care about,” she says. “We can cultivate and promote participation in groups and topics that seem to catch fire or are timely.”
The completion of Vocalo.org’s long-delayed tower upgrade now gives Turner and her staff a chance to see just how a much larger audience will answer the call to get involved. CPR plans to increase promotion of Vocalo.org through other websites, social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, and print publications in target neighborhoods.
To succeed, Vocalo.org will need a growing core of frequent online users. Turner hopes listeners who contribute content online will spend more time in coming months listening to and discussing each other’s material. Most now spend more time posting than consuming.
What results is definitely interactive and not entirely top-down media transaction, but it falls short of the UGC ideal.
“We’re trying to get people to interact with each other,” she says, “not just with us.”
See also the first of Current's two articles — Vocalo's test ahead: will it be in with the out crowd?
Chicago Public Radio lays off 11 staffers as revenues decline
Chicago Public Radio has laid off 11 full-time WBEZ and Vocalo employees, or 9 percent of its staff, and cut some vacant positions, the station reported Dec. 5.
Management cited a projected $1.5 million shortfall in revenues, including listener donations and corporate underwriting.
Some senior staffers took pay cuts. Employees laid off include four producers and host/producers and three managers.
Michael Miner of the Chicago Reader reported on the layoffs in the weekly's blog Dec. 5.
Web page posted Dec. 8, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
