Where people are few, pubcasting provides 'country store' variety
Some programs bring in the outside world, and others report on the home communities, like Vermont PTV's Rural Free Delivery. Above: host Andrea Melville
Originally published in Current, Jan. 25, 1999
By Geneva Collins
Those who live on the nation's vast farming lands, in mining valleys or along fishing coasts have one thing in common: the nearest neighbor might be far away, but a lifeline is as close as the dial tuned to a public radio or television station.
"Public radio is the great leveling ground for all sorts of people. Lawyers, farmers, bartenders would listen to it," said Roger Verdon, remembering his days as managing editor of the Hutchinson News, a small newspaper smack in the heart of Kansas farm country. (He's now managing editor of the not-so-rural Lawrence Journal-World, but still a big fan of pubcasting.) "My brother-in-law is a hog farmer. His pigs listen to public radio. As for public television, you'd go to a town meeting and somebody was always bringing up something they saw on Nova the night before."
Interviews with many pubcasting g.m.'s in rural areas, as well as conversations with devoted listeners like Verdon, support the finding that in this age of widespread cable, satellite and Internet options, all these media have limitations that make public television and radio a valued service out in the boondocks.
Cable, for one, tends to be limited to areas with at least moderate population density, since it's not cost-effective to run the lines to individual homes miles apart from one another. "About 60 percent of our state has cable, and I assume that figure's not going to go much higher," said Dan Miller, director of programming and production for Iowa PTV.
Satellite dishes are growing in popularity as costs have come down--Rita Ray, executive director of the West Virginia Educational Broadcasting Authority, joked that "the satellite dish is considered our state flower"--but as Ellen Rocco, station manager of North Country Public Radio in upstate New York pointed out, "Even if you have one of those dishes, you're not getting local TV and weather forecasts, which means radio becomes that much more important for people."
NPR groupie Scott F. Davis, editor of the Prairie Grove Express and Lincoln Leader weekly newspapers in northwestern Arkansas, said he frequently gets ideas for his regular column from listening to NPR. "The best thing about it not having advertising sponsors, it allows the news broadcasters to be as independent as a hog on ice," he wrote in a column titled "Reasons for Listening to NPR."
Davis said many of his readers share his limited access to good journalism: a satellite dish brings him movies, sports, and lots of other entertainment, but the satellite service blacks out the network news and entirely lacks local news. The networks--and public TV from Tulsa--can theoretically be picked up with a regular antenna, but Davis doesn't have dependable TV reception with rabbit ears.
He can, however, pick up public radio either from Fayetteville or over the Internet. "NPR is my only electronic media that gives me national news. I have NPR as the default home page on my computer. It was a real priority for me to get RealPlayer working" to listen to NPR programming via the Internet.
Internet service is usually available anywhere there are phone lines, but like the aforementioned cable and satellite services, it costs money (often including long-distance phone charges). The fact is, says Hope Green, former president of Vermont Public TV and now a pubcasting consultant, many who live in rural areas are poor. Public broadcasting is free and usually even more accessible than a newspaper.
"If you've never lived in a small town you might not understand that you can't just go into a store and buy a good paper" like the New York Times or Washington Post, said West Virginia's Ray. "When I lived in Beckley, I couldn't get the Charleston Gazette [from the state capital] delivered to my home because not enough of my neighbors subscribed."
What does pubcasting offer rural America that it can't get elsewhere?
Truly alternative programming and viewpoints. Although some radio g.m.'s said a small part of their audience can tune in little else except their station, a more common experience is recounted by Kathleen Pavelko, president of Prairie Public Broadcasting in North Dakota. "People may be able to get lots of commercial stations, but it's all the same top-40 rock and country."
"It's not something I can prove from research, but I've had plenty of people tell me that NPR is an oasis because what's here is country music, more country music, and Rush Limbaugh," said Craig Oliver, president of the Radio Research Consortium.
"One way we differ from metro stations is that we can still make a case for an eclectic format," said Rocco, whose North Country Public Radio broadcasts to northern New York, western Vermont, southern Ontario and Quebec. "We're a bit like an electronic country store," she said: the station not only offers a vareity of opera, blues, news and so forth, but also lets listeners "drop in" to get its updates on community events, road and school closings, and to chat with one another on local talk shows.
Offering programs no one else does is just as important on the TV side. "Public television has always offered a very diverse array of programs that are aimed at the interest and needs of many different audiences, not just the assembled 18-to-34-year-olds who all live in New York, that all the commercial stations go after," said Iowa PTV's Miller. "When Market to Market [an IPTV show covering agribusiness and rural issues] first started in the '70s, farm programs existed on commercial TV. To my knowledge they don't exist anymore."
Coverage of local and state events. Many of the g.m.'s interviewed said that their radio and/or television stations were the sole electronic media outlet in the state to offer regular, weekly coverage of the state legislature. Iowa PTV has covered college wrestling and the State Fair since the early '70s. (The 1998 state fair broadcast had a 26 share, higher than Walker, Texas Ranger, Miller said.) In Petersburg, Alaska, KFSK-FM airs high school basketball and volleyball games. Magazine shows like Living in Iowa, West Virginia Journal, and Kentucky Life help residents in disparate parts of a state feel part of a unified whole.
In Spring Grove, Minn., sixth-grade teacher Terry Nelson has made lobbying for a transmitter to pick up the signal from KSMQ in Austin a class project for the past eight years. In that corner of southeast Minnesota, "we can pick up Iowa Public Television and Wisconsin Public Television, but I wanted my kids to be able to watch the governor's inauguration, follow things happening in the state legislature," said Nelson, who took some sixth- through 12th-graders to the capital two years ago to testify in a state senate hearing and received a $900,000 grant. An application to erect a transmitter is currently pending before the FCC.
Cultural events from the big city. "Not everyone who lives in rural areas is a bumpkin or hillbilly," said newspaperman Davis, and Prairie Public Broadcasting's Pavelko said earlier stints in rural Pennsylvania and West Virginia markets had taught her "you underestimate the cultural interest of your audience at your peril. ... I would go to community events and expect to hear feedback on news and weather coverage, and these very rural residents would discuss with authority and passion the symphonic concerts we aired. ... The rural audience has a lot of windshield time--not just driving in your car but listening to the radio in the cab of your combine or tractor."
"I was manning our booth at the state fair six or seven years ago," Miller recounted, "when a guy came up to me, probably in his 40s and dressed just like the cattle feeder he was--boots, jeans, big silver buckle on his belt, big dusty hat, and he says, 'I just want to tell you how much we value Iowa Public Television.' I expect he's going to praise Market to Market, but instead he says, 'If it weren't for you, my son would never see opera. But, thanks to you, he does.'"
Programming that explains and preserves the region's history. "We take very seriously our role as the region's historian and storyteller," said Pavelko, citing recent Prairie Public Broadcasting documentaries on the Mennonite community and ethnic Germans from Russia, two groups important to the area. Shows like Vermont Public TV's Rural Free Delivery showcase modern-day practitioners of dwindling rural traditions like goat-cheese-making, dowsing for water, and farming with draft horses. In the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, WMMT-FM preserves and promotes both traditional and evolving mountain music.
Outreach and education efforts that go farther. In West Virginia, projects like Ready to Learn can take on enormous importance in educating child care providers, many of whom are unlicensed and may not be well educated, said Ray. West Virginia PTV also airs Homework Hotline, a thrice-weekly call-in show in which students receive on- and off-air tutoring from math and science teachers. "It doesn't happen often, but we've had people call into the show from pay phones because they don't have a phone in their house," said the show's producer, Theresa Webster.
Ray says such programs send a subtle but important message that education is valued--a message students may not be receiving elsewhere.
In Vermont, "we were always getting feedback from home-schoolers that they depend heavily on public television broadcasts and on the ITV materials," said Green.
North Country Public Radio's participation in "Under Our Influence," an outreach project devoted to fighting youth substance abuse in rural communities, "is an example where the issue of scale works in our favor. Here, an outreach effort can have a measurable effect; in New York City, this would be a drop in the bucket," said Rocco.
In extreme cases, personal messages. Residents of an archipelago off the shore of British Columbia tune in seven times a day to KFSK-FM in Petersburg, Alaska, to hear "muskeg messages." ("Muskeg" is the geologic term for the boggy terrain of the islands.) The station relays personal messages--birthday greetings, medical test results, news of deaths and lesser dispatches--to listeners who don't have telephones, said Tom Abbott, g.m. and program director. Even those who do have home phones often spend weeks at a time fishing offshore, where radio is the only way to reach them.
"They're fun to broadcast and fun to listen to," said Abbott. "People can use code words and code names for personal messages. Sometimes you hear somebody's dirty laundry. A few weeks ago we had two people going back and forth at each other because one of their dogs got the other's dog pregnant. But sometimes they're very serious, like one woman who was on chemotherapy and was getting daily dosage information from the Seattle hospital treating her," said Abbott. Alaska stations have a dispensation from the FCC to air personal messages, he said.
According to Abbott, KFSK boasts an astounding 87 share of the listening audience, largely because the only other station that can be picked up at all is a commercial station affiliated with the Christian Broadcasting Network. (It, too, airs personal messages). Although some people in Petersburg get cable, those who live more than three miles outside of town, like Abbott, can't get it, or broadcast TV either. Newspapers from Seattle or Anchorage arrive three days late.
"In terms of having an educated electorate, we're everyone's source of news. If you took away this service, voter turnout would drop dramatically," Abbott predicted.
In last year's ice storm that paralyzed the Northeast for two weeks, North Country Public Radio performed a similar role, exchanging personal messages, Rocco said. "We were essentially the communications lifeline for the region."
A higher degree of interactivity. "What's neat about a small community station like ours is that when you call up, the station manager answers the phone," said Maggie Montgomery, g.m. of KAXE in Grand Rapids, Minn., where the listening area's population density is 13 people per square kilometer. Newspaperman Verdon said "even the guy who reads the weather is treated like a celebrity when people run into him at the grocery store."
KFSK, like many other community stations, rely on volunteer producer/hosts. "It's not just this silver voice on the radio. It's your neighbor, a co-worker, someone you know," said Abbott, who then recounted a tale that epitomizes how personal radio can be in the smallest of markets:
Two women, both in their 80s, have been volunteer hosts of a weekly show of big-band music since the station went on the air some 20 years ago. "One time, one of them went on vacation and the other did the show alone," said Abbott. By herself at the end of an evening shift, she didn't know how to run the audio board because the other woman had always done that. "The first record ended, but she didn't know how to put more music on. But she did know how to turn on the microphone, so she got on the air and in this absolutely pitiful voice--I was listening at home, I wish I had this on tape--asked for somebody to please come help. I live 10 miles away and immediately grabbed my coat. By time I got to the station, it was filled with people who had come to help."
Related article: Additional aid to rural stations was a long time coming.
Related article: Translator stations that serve remote areas are threatened with loss of channels.
Web page created Feb. 11, 1999
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