St. Louis's KDHX isn't joining the flight from music, but its consultant says Hacker and Leone (pictured) have built support for upgrading its music format.
Eclectic formats overhauled in hunt for listeners, viability
It happened yesterday in Santa Cruz, Calif., and last month in St. Louis and Oxford, Ohio. Next week, it will happen again in Fort Myers, Fla., and, later this fall, in Portland, Ore.
In these and other cities, listeners of public radio and community radio stations will be surprised to find favorite programs missing and something else in their place — even though they’ve been told in advance that change is a-comin’.
Stations in these cities are revamping dual-format schedules in attempts to serve more listeners, and most are reducing music while adding hours of news, in line with a longstanding trend in public radio. Two mainstream NPR stations, WMUB in Oxford and WGCU in Fort Myers, are going all-news and moving music to less-used HD Radio channels and online streams.
For community stations such as KUSP in Santa Cruz, KDHX in St. Louis and KBOO in Portland, with long traditions of eclectic, volunteer-driven programming, format changes are potential powder kegs, but they’re feeling economic counter-forces to revise their formats.
KUSP: Driven to compete in news
At KUSP, a community radio outlet spurned by a potential merger partner early this year, the schedule that took effect Sept. 1 replaces a midday music block with talk programs from NPR and American Public Media. Also airing middays is Your Call, a one-hour regional call-in show originating at San Francisco’s KALW, which KUSP will help produce. Music programs are restricted to evenings and weekends.
General Manager Terry Green said planning for the format change began shortly after KUSP’s proposed merger with all-news KAZU in Monterey was rejected by KAZU’s university licensee (Current, March 3). The newsier schedule wasn’t designed to put KUSP in direct competition with KAZU, according to Green, although the other station has absorbed many of his news listeners in recent years. KUSP’s news lineup, which included NPR’s newsmagazines before and after the schedule change, has been a key source of underwriting revenue, Green said.
In designing KUSP’s new format, Green and his staff looked for ways to add shows that listeners couldn’t find anywhere else — such as the regional news coverage in Your Call. KUSP’s and KALW’s signals do not overlap because they’re on opposite sides of the Santa Cruz Mountains, Green said.
With commercial Triple A station KPIG dominating the alternative music niche in Santa Cruz, the public radio station saw little chance to compete for music listeners. It opted to drop its midday music shows such as The Open Road and Beans and Cornbread. Evening and weekend music programs feature classical, jazz and global music. Volunteers still program many music shows and contribute to news and talk programs.
KUSP faced the “classic problem” of all mixed-format stations, said Marc Hand, managing director of Public Radio Capital, who got to know the area when he helped negotiate the failed KUSP-KAZU merger agreement. Hybrid-format stations have a “mixed appeal from scheduling news and information and music programming, and most of their revenue is driven by news and information listeners,” Hand said. By expanding its news lineup, KUSP has a shot at regaining some listeners it lost to KAZU.
One scenario KUSP investigated before designing the new schedule involved dropping NPR news programs entirely, Green said. He examined nonprofit tax returns of comparable community stations that don’t carry NPR newsmags and was dismayed by “how weak the sector was in terms of finances,” he said.
“Very few were generating an operating surplus or had reserves that were solid by normal nonprofit ratios for organizations of their size,” Green said. KUSP would have been on the same trajectory had it not revamped its format, he said.
“There is a very serious and widespread economic pressure on these volunteer-based models for operating a public radio station,” Green said. “As the range of media options increase the pressure on diverse-format, eclectic stations, that pressure is even greater for community stations than it is on other parts of public radio.”
KDHX: Reaching consensus
Two community stations feeling this squeeze are KDHX in St. Louis and KBOO in Portland. Both have struggled for more than a decade to pass CPB’s audience and fundraising hurdles to secure their eligibility for federal Community Service Grants, but they’re pursuing different strategies to do it.
KDHX, one of five stations participating in CPB’s Station Renewal Project, introduced a new schedule Aug. 11 that emphasizes music over news (Current, April 7). It scaled back the timeslot for Democracy Now! to just 10 minutes of headlines, which leads in to KDHX’s hourlong block of evening talk programs. The music lineup uses dayparting and tries to stimulate audience flow with a more consistent music mix. Shows dedicated to specific genres, such as electronica, hip-hop and punk, are scheduled at night.
“We describe it differently internally here and to our audience than we would to someone who works in radio,” said Nico Leone, co-executive director. “We talk about daytime rolling through a roots rock-and-blues sound.” Volunteers continue to program KDHX’s music lineup, and Leone says they were “extraordinarily accommodating” in adapting to the format changes during the station’s intensive consultations with listeners, volunteers and other supporters.
The CPB renewal project, which pays for consulting and research assistance to stations willing to adopt comprehensive changes that will bring their listenership or fundraising up to CPB’s “audience service” standards, is roughly halfway through its two-year lifespan, according to Dennis Hamilton of Public Radio Capital, which is managing the project for CPB.
KVCR in San Bernardino, Calif., is the next and last of four participating stations to revamp its lineup, Hamilton said. The other three — WIPR in San Juan, Puerto Rico; KRCL in Salt Lake City; and WUMB in Boston — so far don’t have solid audience data that could show the effects of schedule changes.
But Hamilton, PRC’s lead consultant on the project, already sees breakthroughs in the way KDHX managed its schedule change. Co-Executive Directors Beverly Hacker and Leone have done a “superior job of talking through the need for change, getting input about it and working on a plan that they could execute with generally strong buy-in from all sectors,” Hamilton said, continuing, “I’m proud of them. They’ve taken a unique station and done a really good job in building a template for other stations.”
KDHX began its renewal project by looking for the media values that characterized its community service and gauged the levels of agreement and trust among its listeners, volunteers, staffers and other stakeholders.
“There were questions like, ‘Do you think other people at the station have similar values to yours?’” said Leone. The research found “strong belief that people shared those values and acted in accordance with those values,” said Leone. “That’s part of why the change has been so smooth.”
“In some ways, we’ve taken a more cautious approach to change,” said Leone. “We recognize we’re not where we want to be in our metrics, but we’re not starting from zero. We’re mapping a path of change from where we are, rather than starting from zero by coming in and installing a new format.”
KBOO: Time’s running out?
Portland’s KBOO has been “chasing the CPB benchmarks” for a decade, and its declining finances have persuaded stakeholders to support needed changes, said Arthur Davis, g.m. Membership rolls are dwindling, and KBOO will end the fiscal year with its first budget deficit in 10 years.
“We’re not going out of business in the next couple of years, but it’s all trending down, and we’ve got to start making tough choices,” Davis said. “Frankly, we haven’t done any work on program quality and scheduling for the last decade. There’s a lot of consensus here that it’s time for change.”
After the National Federation of Community Broadcasters performed a station assessment at KBOO this summer, the station rescheduled its morning news block, moving Democracy Now! to morning drivetime and cutting locally produced news and talk programming to an 11 a.m. headline break. Davis anticipates more changes in the months ahead and is developing a proposal for a top-to-bottom evaluation of KBOO. Potential funders include a local foundation and CPB, he said.
The “easy way” to build the audience and support would be to go Triple A, Davis said. “We’re already a portal for bluegrass, folk, country, singer/songwriter, blues and the Grateful Dead,” said Davis. “We could have a lot of listeners and make a lot of money, but our mission is to serve diverse communities” with a broad mix of music and original local programs for minorities and other underserved groups.
“In some regards, it takes more overhead and capacity to work with volunteers than if you’re just pressing a button and playing the BBC World Service,” Davis said. “We want to bring in diverse community members in the area, and in reality it’s an expensive proposition to do it well and for the long term.” KBOO’s proposed project would aim to figure out just how to do that.
Ginny Berson, NFCB v.p., described an increasing willingness among community stations to adopt professional programming techniques. “More stations are starting to accept the fact that there are ways to stay true to our values and mission and be smarter about what we put on the air,” she said. Some stations are responding to audience losses; others have come to accept that there are “ways to use audience research that are more in keeping with the values of community radio.”
Web page posted Sept. 8, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
