It’s time to become more than a radio station

— by offering new options that
listeners are now choosing

Originally published in Current, Sept. 19, 2005
Commentary by Tom Thomas and Terry Clifford

What a different time it was — the late 1960s, when public broadcasting first put its footprint on the American media landscape. Television was three networks and maybe an independent channel, radio was Top 40, most Americans read a daily newspaper, and we had yet to go to the moon. It was a very different America in which the heritage of public broadcasting was formed — a great legacy that has sustained, informed and guided what we’ve done in the intervening years.

We are in a time of redefinition for public media that is as important and profound as those earliest years of our field. Electronic media are helping to drive continuing changes in the social and economic architecture of information, culture, entertainment and education — and are themselves transformed by those changes.

Public radio must reshape itself as digital technology and economics give listeners growing control over their media consumption. Listeners can now time-shift, pause and resume, play back, edit, archive, search and forward content and combine material from different sources.

At the same time, media presenters command equally powerful new platforms for delivering content — wireless phones among the most recent. Online, satellite and digital pathways to our audience have been part of our strategic vision—as both opportunity and threat—for some years now, but at the periphery rather than in its central focus.
What’s new is that these delivery systems are beginning to reach audiences of significant size, albeit still modest compared to those of our broadcasts.

We have reached a time for transformation. Against this backdrop stations must address two fundamental questions about their priorities and roles:

How much effort and investment will stations put into their broadcast services and how much in newer channels and platforms?
How much effort and resources will stations invest as creators of original content and how much as selectors and context-setters for content produced by others?

Priorities: toward a multiplatform strategy

With highly valued public radio content already increasingly available through emerging channels, conveyed directly to listeners by content creators or national distributors, stations are finding themselves locked out of opportunities to develop their own multichannel services.

Public radio also faces competition from new content creators on the Internet and satellite radio, including commercial entrepreneurs who aim squarely for the sound and audience of public radio. Some of these content creators may prove to be partners, but not without some serious work.

We believe overall use of public radio’s services, in all its forms and from all its sources, will grow significantly over the next five years. But it is not difficult to imagine that by the end of the same period a third of public radio’s weekly audience will listen an average of two hours a week to public radio delivered through a platform other than our primary broadcast channels. A very aggressive prediction envisions half of public radio’s weekly audience using new platforms an average of four hours a week.

These levels translate to a range of 8 percent to 25 percent of public radio’s total service—clearly a change worth taking seriously for its threats, opportunities and effects on our present service model. The fundamental question is: Who will be managing and providing these new platforms and services?

Stations must address some key questions:

Given expectations that broadcast radio will remain most listeners’ preferred audio delivery platform for some years to come, how quickly should stations shift their investments toward other delivery systems?
What content is best for the new channels, compared with the primary broadcast signal? Closely aligned or significantly different? What are the smart programming strategies in this new space?
How should stations experiment with new business models in this space, most notably subscription services for premium content? How should they share what they learn to speed widespread adoption of best practices?
Are there promising avenues for shared research, development, and investment? Who are the appropriate partners, and how might stations develop those relationships?
Can stations take steps to protect their “franchise” by assuring that they have rights to signature programs on nonbroadcast platforms, or even securing exclusive rights to the programs? What are the costs and risks of doing so?
As stations take more active roles on the Internet, how will they deal with the likelihood that they will become competitors with their public radio colleagues from other regions? What are the opportunities for cooperation and collaboration, and how do we differentiate services and maximize public service in this new context?

Roles: balancing presentation and creation

In allocating resources, stations routinely weigh their investments in two basic elements of their service. One is selecting content and setting its context and the other is creating original content.

Most public radio stations devote the bulk of their resources to the first role, assembling a service from the output of national networks and producers, the music industry, wire services and other sources. The value proposition lies in the careful, artful assembling of major elements and the insertion of small amounts of purely local content, such as weather, traffic, local news, announcements and flashes of local personalities that together provide practical information and convey a unique sense of place and connectedness.

A far smaller number of stations invest significant portions of their budgets in the second role, often capturing a significant portion of their listening with content they largely created themselves—newscasts and newsmagazines, talk shows, artist interviews, live and recorded performances from the studio or the community, variety shows, comedy, quiz shows, and live broadcasts from events.

Many in public radio believe the value of the first role will decline over time. With most content suppliers pursuing listeners directly, stations will no longer be the exclusive source of some unique content. Moreover, services on other platforms will attempt to present, recommend and set context for programming—using ultra-niche strategies in satellite radio and Internet radio and database-driven, user-focused customization in online and on-demand services. Listeners themselves, meanwhile, will be able to assemble their own packages of material using a combination of subscription, search, storage, editing and retrieval tools.

Stations will have the option of responding by moving aggressively to new channels and technologies, assembling multiple packages and offering dramatically more content than can be provided through a single broadcast channel. They, too, can use technologies that give listeners more control over content. In effect, stations can extend their selector and context-setter role, positioning themselves as organizers and guides for educated, curious listeners in a fragmented, specialized and complex media landscape.

Stations can tilt their resources toward creating unique, distinctive, high-quality content. They have more control over the content they create, both on their broadcast channels and on other platforms. To the extent that such content reflects unique and desirable qualities—such as a specific sense of place, access to special resources, or a talented personality—it gives stations a competitive advantage. If the programming makes a strong connection with the community, it serves as a powerful pathway for listeners to identify the station as a community institution.

Stations that make a strong commitment to creating local content may need to rethink their programming economics. Original production is very expensive. While networks can spread such costs over many station users, a station often must shoulder them alone or in combination with only a few partners, as in a regional collaboration. As a result, many programming dollars will yield limited listener hours of use.
In many cases, stations are unlikely to recover costs through the conventional listener-sensitive combination of memberships and business underwriting. If, however, the local creation and presentation of distinctive programming materially advances stations’ significance as local institutions, such work can reap dividends in the kinds of major gifts and philanthropy that flow to other major cultural and civic institutions. It is important to remember that virtually none of public radio’s national producers and the programs they make fully covers its costs through marketplace transactions; they all sustain themselves through a combination of transactions, gifts and grants. There is no reason to expect it would be different for stations.

It is difficult for a station to ease gradually into significant local production. To provide enough local content to warrant philanthropic support, a station would have to make major commitments of resources and airtime—and sustain those commitments over time. It is a public service gamble that most stations have hesitated to take.

Indeed, to sustain local production, stations typically must do a good job as presenters of others’ programs, generating positive returns on investments in national programming, carefully choosing acquisitions, bargaining over prices and, for NPR members, working for favorable dues levels. If a large number of stations were to commit to a local content creation strategy, it might require some rebalancing of the role of station investments in national programming.
Station leaders need to think through the evolution of their service strategies and strategic position to answer these questions:

How should stations balance their roles of content selector and content creator?
Are different strategies appropriate for stations working in certain formats, in various kinds of communities, or at different scales?
The content selector/presenter role will clearly change as a station moves from curating a single channel to managing a multichannel, multiplatform, more interactive service. How do stations speed the acquisition of knowledge and skills needed in this new framework?
What steps beyond a station’s own efforts will lead to better quality and greater impact for station-created content? Possibilities include producing partnerships among stations, partnerships with content creators outside public radio, training programs for producers, and shared editing.
How can stations best position and promote their production efforts to attract philanthropic support as community institutions?
Is the need for greater investment in station content creation significant enough to warrant major efforts at shifting the current station investments in national programming? How would that be pursued?
As service models and strategies evolve, are stations likely to need new approaches to evaluate the impact and success of their efforts?

Leveraging our assets

To flesh out plans and set about this work, stations can bring significant assets to the task: strong programming that sets us apart on the media landscape, a significant and growing share of listening (one in 20 Americans who have their radios turned on), a diverse economic foundation, great brand recognition and a talented, highly motivated workforce.

We also have a principled strategic position. Producers and audiences share a clear sense of core values. We are trusted and sophisticated producers, selectors, and context-setters for content of high quality and depth. And we present that content with genuine respect for the intelligence, curiosity, values and sensibilities of our listeners.

We help our listeners connect the dots in a very complex world so that they can work toward solutions in their lives and their communities.

We celebrate America’s diverse culture with integrity, authenticity, and joy.

We provide a shelter from the storm of a difficult and fast-moving time, important moments of reflection and refuge.

Our task is to leverage these genuine assets to positions of strength in a changing context and to preserve this important and distinctive strategic position in new settings and on new platforms. If we do that, the reward is enormous opportunities for growth in the service we deliver and its support from our listening communities.

Tom Thomas and Terry Clifford are co-chief executives of the Station Resource Group, a Maryland-based strategy-focused alliance of 40 public radio broadcasters. SRG members operate some 170 stations and produce much of public radio’s national programming. SRG’s mission is to help America’s strongest public radio stations better serve the public and thrive in a period of radical change.

Web page posted Oct. 31, 2005
Copyright 2005 by Current Publishing Committee