Current Q&A George Bailey and David Giovannoni
If you’re wondering why public radio listening nationally has slipped slightly in the past two years, look at your own station’s programming as well as your competition in town.
That’s the advice from audience researchers George Bailey and David Giovannoni, who are wrapping up their Audience 2010 inquiry commissioned by pubradio’s Radio Research Consortium.
Bailey and Giovannoni, frequent collaborators for decades, mobilized last fall to probe for causes of a slight two-year decline in pubradio’s national audience—the first in pubradio’s otherwise enviable audience stats. RRC had found that pubradio’s overall average quarter-hour audience fell 0.9 percent from spring 2003 to 2004, plus 2.3 percent from spring 2004 to 2005.
Bailey, based in Wisconsin, does focus groups and a wide range of research through his firm Walrus Research. Giovannoni, a leading conceptualizer in pubradio research, quietly retired in December 2004 after developing a successful line of AudiGraphics analytical services through his Maryland-based Audience Research Analysis. He sold ARA to Steve Olson, another longtime colleague. For Giovannoni, who led CPB’s Audience 98 study and others, the recent checkup for pubradio was a comeback of sorts.
Current editors Mike Janssen and Steve Behrens interviewed Bailey and Giovannoni by phone earlier this month. This is an edited transcript.
Mike Janssen: Why is public radio’s audience slipping?
George Bailey: First of all, we should say that we documented that it is slipping. It is losing momentum. I think there was some denial about that in the first place. Out there in the system, in the press and among managers and other places, there were all kinds of hypotheses or myths or delusions about what was going on. For example, people were saying that satellite radio was taking audience away from public radio. And Vinnie Curren [senior v.p. of radio at CPB] was quoted in the New York Times as saying people might have gotten tired of election coverage—that would be why we’re losing audience.
We wanted to systematically test as many of those ideas as possible. And we pretty much destroyed the myths that blamed the decline on external problems.
We ended up finding that public radio is losing loyalty.
David Giovannoni: That’s the central finding—that we’re losing loyalty. Loyalty is a symptom, it’s not a cause. But it’s a hurtful finding, isn’t it? It’s like learning your girlfriend still enjoys her nights out—just not so much with you.
Janssen: What is loyalty?
Giovannoni: Loyalty reports how well a station is serving its own listeners—their use of your station as a percentage of all their radio listening.
Janssen: How big a deal is this decline?
Giovannoni: Each public broadcaster has to answer that question for him or her self. How much money do you need to run your station next year? That’s how big a deal it is. How long can you afford to subsidize your new national program? That’s how big a deal it is. How long can you stand to become increasingly less important to the American public? That’s how big a deal it is.
Bailey: If you just look at audience numbers and say, “Well, that’s the report,” then it’s just a line on a graph. But in all my time working with public radio, I’ve always found people start to pay attention when there are financial consequences. And we set that up in the very first report—there’s going to be a gap between the station’s potential revenue from listeners and increasing expenses.
Widespread loss of listener loyalty: Not every station is losing audience and loyalty, but the trend is clear. Nearly half of listening to pubradio stations last year was to stations that lost loyalty over the previous year. = percent of listening to stations that gained at least a full loyalty point in a year. Red = ditto to stations that lost a full point. (Source: Audience 2010 study, Radio Research Consortium.)
Steve Behrens: It’s been a long time since spring 2005. Are there newer numbers?
Bailey: When there’s a graph that shows years 2001-2005, each year’s figures include both spring and fall of each year. Our analysis goes through the fall of 2005, which was the most recent big survey.
The winter 2006 survey has come out, but the winter and summer surveys don’t include all markets, and we don’t have the nationwide data that you need to do these reports. So the only thing that’s come out since Audience 2010 is the winter 2006 reports in some markets, based on stations’ metro areas but not their total service areas, and in any quarter you get bounce.
So the next opportunity to update the graphs in Audience 2010 will be after we have data from both spring and fall 2006.
Giovannoni: We can’t make sweeping generalizations from one [ratings] book.
Janssen: Why is loyalty declining?
Bailey: Loyalty is not just one number across the whole broadcast week—each station can look at its loyalty half-hour by half-hour. At some times during the day, listeners are more loyal. At other times they’re less loyal. Stations can look at AudiGraphics and RRC reports to see when their listeners’ loyalty is dipping, when the listeners must be listening to other stations. The report shows what competing stations they’re listening to.
In other words, the program director of the station already has the information to see when my girlfriend is not dating me, who is she dating and how often.
As I said before, that really does vary by station. The formats are different, the competition is different. So at the individual station level, they can see what they’re doing right in terms of loyalty and what needs to be improved in terms of loyalty.
Behrens: Were you able to test the hypothesis that changes in the competition in general are responsible for the drop in loyalty?
Giovannoni: We could have spent six more months studying that question at the national level, or we could strongly encourage station managers and program directors to spend five minutes answering the question for themselves in their own circumstances. We chose the latter.
Bailey: It’s irrelevant whether competition is changing. If you’re competing in any endeavor, you’ve got to be as good as or better than the competition at every point. It’s public radio’s problem and public radio’s opportunity. And we wanted to focus everybody’s attention on programming in public radio instead of worrying about all these external forces, such as satellite radio.
Behrens: But knowing what the competitors are doing right would help you figure out what you ought to be doing.
Bailey: And that would vary by station and by market. For example, you might think Air America is eating into your audience. Well, Air America’s on in very few markets, and in those markets it might represent one kind of a challenge for the NPR news station, but it might be irrelevant to the classical music station.
It’s wrong to try to look nationally across the whole country and say, “Here’s the one factor in the competition that’s doing better, and so we can learn from that and emulate it.”
Giovannoni: If Audience 2010 has any single message, it’s that public broadcasters can get the answers for their own circumstances with just a few minutes’ work. And no matter what problems or opportunities they find, it’s up to them—and them alone—to go after them.
Losses for major program types: Listening to locally produced music slid first, but other categories also lost momentum—even network news, which has fueled pubradio’s audience growth. Listening is measured in billions of listener-hours per year. (Source: Audience 2010.)
Behrens: Were you disappointed that the patterns weren’t clearer in explaining why some stations were gaining listeners and others were losing?
Giovannoni: We weren’t disappointed. The fact that Climbers and Divers are doing all kinds of programming tells us the problem is not one of format; it’s a problem of implementation.
Bailey: You put this in negative terms that there’s no “pattern.” I think there’s a positive way to look at it.
If NPR news stations were the only ones with increasing audience, and if all of the classical stations were losing, then you’d have an essentially futile and deterministic situation: That’s the end of classical; we all should switch our stations to NPR news.
The fact that some of the NPR news stations are doing well and some are not, and the same with the other formats, indicates that public radio really can support a variety of formats and maybe even serve a variety of audiences with those different formats, but that within any one of those formats there’s a variety of right and wrong ways to do it. So I think it’s positive that there’s a lot of opportunity for a range of formats in public radio.
Janssen: The Audience 2010 reports cast a shadow on locally produced programming, and in particular on local news and information programming. By what measures are local news and information programming falling short?
Giovannoni: Let me be clear. Audience 2010 isn’t about local versus network shows. In the last few years we’ve also seen a few national as well as local initiatives fall apart. This is not a local-national thing.
Go back to Audience 2010’s central question: How can we provide public service that is both significant and sustainable? The economics of local programming are brutal, man. We don’t need Audience 2010 to remind us of that. But in looking at the current state of affairs, we thought it opportune to remind people of the inherent brutality of local public-service economics. Local programming is often where most of the programming budget goes and certainly where most of the managerial mind-share is. Being so highly invested, many broadcasters resist the fact that listeners tend to value local programming less than they value network programming.
When I talk about value here, I mean value in a public-service sense. Local programming is generally less important in listeners’ lives. They wouldn’t miss it much if it went away. So Audience 2010 just reminds us that local programming suffers a double whammy—relatively high cost with relatively small public-service and financial returns.
Now, we can argue whether every program should be financially self-sustaining. We can argue whether subsidizing a show is helping or hurting our public service. But we cannot argue that programming that decreases loyalty to our service—that is, programming that causes our listeners to turn away from us to commercial radio—is good for our listeners or good for us.
Behrens: Well, your “good” is in terms of financial and ratings consequences, right?
Giovannoni: I don’t use the term “ratings.” I use the term “public service.” Public broadcasters don’t chase ratings—they aspire to public service. And they seek listener-sensitive money to sustain that service. Both public support and public service require significant audience and significant listening. It’s the significance of the programming that sets us apart from commercial broadcasters.
Behrens: Public broadcasters have always gone after smaller audiences than commercial broadcasters. Within public broadcasting, station managers can also decide for some other reason that if they’ve got important work to do, even though it will lose some audience—
Bailey: [Laughs.] You want to rephrase that?
Giovannoni: Don’t put in that question. It doesn’t make you look good, Steve.
Bailey: Did you say public radio managers can make a decision that it would be important to put on programming that loses audience?
Behrens: Well, they’re doing that now by not carrying American Idol.
Bailey: [Laughs.]
Giovannoni: Your question assumes that a program’s “importance” is inversely related to the number of people who want to listen. Audience 98 put the last nail in that coffin. It’s a false dichotomy.
Years ago, our shows attracted too few listeners to be commercially viable. But viable commercial audiences have gotten smaller — while public radio’s audience has grown. Our audience isn’t small by radio standards anymore. Commercial broadcasters want it. And as they openly court our listeners, the days of programming that loses audience — programming that’s just “too good to listen to” — are over.
Researchers see revenue fallout: Public radio’s core listeners, who are more likely than others to donate to stations, have been doing less listening, measured in billions of listener-hours per year. Figures include persons 12 and older. (Source: Audience 2010. )
Behrens: David, you’ve often said that you don’t want to be taken as prescribing program changes, but don’t you sometimes worry that what you’re saying is taken as a prescription, just as ratings are taken in commercial broadcasting? A station manager can always point to them, but when they’re making decisions based on unquantifiable reasons, like “Classical music is good for the community,” there aren’t any figures to point to. Do you have any way to help them take these nonquantifiable questions into account?
Giovannoni: Yes, I’ve written about how such “intangibles” can be assessed, but not as part of Audience 2010.
Behrens: But programmers will think, “Gee, the numbers are saying I’ve got to dump my classical music or my local programming.” You aren’t prescribing that, I know — you are informing them of the costs and consequences.
Giovannoni: The job of research is to describe, not prescribe — to make connections, not decisions. Research doesn’t judge a broadcaster’s public-service mission or select the programming.
Behrens: We asked Leslie Peters of Audience Research Analysis whether there were any patterns characteristic of local news and information shows that have done well in loyalty, and she found only a couple of programs have loyalty on par with the stations’ average loyalty. And those are the talk shows of Faith Middleton on Connecticut Public Radio and Brian Lehrer on WNYC.
Giovannoni: And there’s Terry Gross on WHYY, Diane Rehm on WAMU, Tom and Ray on WBUR [Car Talk], Michael Feldman in Wisconsin. Like we said earlier, it’s about talent and implementation, not about source of production.
Behrens: Is there any indication there or elsewhere what would make locally produced programs with particular characteristics more competitive?
Giovannoni: We found no patterns by format or program, either. So again, it means that success and failure are in the implementation, not in the genre.
Behrens: Yes, implementation is what I was wondering about.
Bailey: Let me say this, which you might find comforting: I just finished 36 focus groups with public radio listeners for the latest Public Radio Program Directors’ Core Values project. You may recall that previously we did core values of classical music, and we did core values of jazz. In this case, the focus was on local news and information programming.
In these focus groups, we are able to look at local news production in very fine detail. We play air checks of particular stories, and the listeners describe what they liked about the topic or the editing or the way the talent was talking.
That’s what we called microformatics, and it can shed light on matters of implementation. It’s the hardest work of producing programming. Some results from the focus groups are going to be extremely helpful to program directors, and organizations like PRPD can be helpful in the implementation stage.
I’m going to have to ask you to come to the PRPD conference to hear our findings from these focus groups.
Janssen: In doing Audience 2010, what did you learn that most surprised you?
Bailey: Regardless of whether it surprised us, one point has to be a big surprise to almost everyone in the radio business. You’ve seen news reports over the last 20 years saying that listening to radio has been declining, which is true.
It turns out that when you examine AM radio versus FM radio, almost all the loss in listening to radio has been due to the fading popularity of AM radio. That’s something Arbitron has never reported, and Audience 2010 is the first study to report that. It wasn’t that long ago that public radio managers were thinking about buying AM stations.
Blame AM for all of radio’s lost listening: Nobody has failed to notice that FM radio outdraws AM. It gets 84 percent of listening, including commercial and public radio. That’s an AQH of 30 million, compared to 5 million for AM. Bailey and Giovannoni figure that AM’s continuing slide explains all of the slippage in radio listening for the past 20 years. AQH figures are listeners 12 and older averaged across a week, 6 a.m. to midnight. (Source: Audience 2010, based on data from Duncan’s American Radio and Arbitron Nationwide. )
Giovannoni: Here’s another surprising and alarming thing we learned: Before starting work on Audience 2010, we reviewed both the public and proprietary work done for our industry over the last few years. And what alarmed us is how much of what passes for science in our industry isn’t. The results could just as easily be wrong as right.
I don’t mean to sound like an old coot, but much higher standards were required back in the day. I’ve been away from public radio only a couple years, but man, I’m taken aback by how quickly this has infiltrated and how seriously lacking some of it is.
Behrens: What’s missing?
Giovannoni: Basic stuff, beginning with methodological rigor.
Bailey: Here’s a simple example. It is now possible to put a pop-up quiz on a website for a station or for a program. For some of the people who visit this website, this thing pops up and says, “Hi, be in our survey.” Some major operators in public radio are doing this. It fails right away in the most fundamental requirements of a scientifically sound survey: defining the target population, getting a sampling frame, pulling the random sample, knowing what the cooperation rate was, et cetera.
We’re talking about research reports put out there as being actionable—some by stations, some by national producers, some by networks. And it’s funny—I’m so old that I remember when there was no research done at all for public radio. In 1978, the word “research” was an obscenity in public radio, because station executives didn’t want to know about their audience. Now it seems that we’re in a phase where anybody figures they can do research.
Also, there are commercial consultants who have seen the rise of public radio and realize there’s money to be made. For whatever reason, we’re in a situation now where, as we said in our report, public radio needs to try to sort out the rigorous, legitimate research from a lot of other stuff out there that really is not rigorous.
Giovannoni: The problem runs even deeper than that. Some of these folks have a lot to offer our industry, but some just don’t get the appropriate metrics of public service. Like the one who wrote that loyalty is a meaningless metric. Excuse me?
We invented loyalty because standard Arbitron metrics are insufficient. We spent 25 years examining how and why loyalty is both a powerful and extremely appropriate measure of public service. We’ve directly linked it to our ability to serve our own listeners and the financial sustainability of our enterprise. We’ve done all this with statistical rigor that I’ve not seen even the best commercial analysts approach. What do you mean loyalty is not an appropriate metric? Take us back into the Stone Age, why don’t you.
Janssen: How is public radio absorbing and reacting to Audience 2010?
Bailey: I’ve had plenty of people talk to me about the reports. But based on my experience, just because somebody says they read a report doesn’t necessarily mean that they understood it. And even if they understood it, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to take it to heart and eventually take strategic action. So I don’t know what it means to get attention from the system.
Janssen: What are the most important points that you’d like people in the system to take away from Audience 2010?
Giovannoni: “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Fortunately, that means the solutions lie within us, too. Every day, millions of decisions are made by thousands of professionals at hundreds of stations and a few networks. If they don’t monitor the outcomes of those decisions, they don’t self-correct and the audience gets less loyal.
Bailey: We got into this in the first place, because we wanted, with the RRC, to provide an independent, critically objective set of information not coming from any source that has a dog in the fight. Here are the facts, and, as David said, here are the tools to move forward.
Janssen: Does Audience 2010 suggest to you any further research that needs to be done, more questions that need to be asked?
Giovannoni: Yes, and not just research but action. Station programmers should review their Loyalty and Opportunity graphs; network programmers and distributors should identify where their programs are placed on the wrong stations or at the wrong times. I hate to sound like a broken record, but research needs to be done station by station, half-hour by half-hour.
Janssen: What’s next for Audience 2010?
Giovannoni: This summer, we’ll integrate the interim reports into a single volume with an overview and synthesis. That will give it a larger readership and a longer shelf life. And I’ll speak at the Public Radio Development and Marketing Conference in July. Audience 2010 builds on a solid foundation of audience and programming knowledge created over the last quarter-century. My hope is not to rehash its findings but to stand on that solid foundation and look forward a ways.
Web page posted June 29, 2006
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