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Scoping out Public Radio's Future

Here's my take on one such future for Public Radio, as published in "Grow the Audience for Public Radio" by the Station Resource Group.

Some of the themes here will be familiar to folks who caught my presentation for the Public Radio Program Directors' Conference in LA a few months ago - or to folks who have read my new book.

For those of you who would rather read than click, here's the piece in its entirety:

A Future for Public Radio

by Mark Ramsey 

One of the most popular Public Radio personalities has never had a show on Public Radio. 

And it's simply because we have never asked him. 

What is the future of Public Radio? That future is what you will make it. And this much is for certain, it is not more of the past. 

I don't need to lecture you about audience and technology trends with which you're already well acquainted. I don't need to tell you about the tidal wave of entertainment and information options listeners have today. I don't need to rant about the unprecedented control any individual listener has over her own audio experience. I don't need to explain the new primacy of the listener as the source of content, no longer simply its recipient. You've heard all about this before. But what are you doing about it? The old models have a scant few years of life left in them. 

Will there always be Public Radio no matter what? Sure, maybe. But it doesn't have to be vital. It doesn't have to matter. It doesn't have to be "public." And it doesn't have to include you or me in its ranks. 

EBay was born in 1995 when a computer programmer named Pierre Omidyar couldn’t register the name of his consulting company, Echo Bay Technology Group, so he shortened the domain to “eBay.” The very first item to appear on eBay was Omidyar’s laser pointer – his broken laser pointer. 

After selling the item for $14.83, Omidyar contacted the winning bidder to make sure he understood that this laser pointer was, in fact, busted. He did. You see, he was a collector of broken laser pointers.

There’s something for everyone and, thanks to the democratizing force of digital media, there’s now everyone for something. Either you're the best in the world at "something for everyone" or you're the best in the world at "one thing for someone." The former is the "big head" and the latter is the "long tail." Radio is all about the "big head." We are blessed with a gift no new media outfit can match: The power of the tower - a megaphone reaching into every home, workplace, and car. A megaphone mediating the close relationship between you and your audiences in your local communities. Want them to do something they want to do? Want them to go someplace they want to go? Just ask, and ye shall receive. 

Can even the mighty Google match your ability to move your audience to any destination that interests them, online, on-air, or off? Not on your life. So how do you use this gift, this power, this megaphone? 

It was Public Broadcasting's own elder mythologist Joseph Campbell who once uttered the famous words "follow your bliss." What Campbell meant was to live out of your own center, and that, I think, is great advice for Public Radio as it gauges its future. 

Who are you, Public Radio? What is your center? And - more to the point - what are you capable of if you really stretch your wings? What do you do better than anybody else, no matter what techno-whiz-bang comes along? 

You create content. 

You are the program producers, the dream-makers. What Spielberg is to movies you are to audio. Or at least, you can be. Have you ever asked yourself why so little of Public Radio's programming is entertainment-oriented? Sure there's lots of entertainment content out there. But on radio there's almost none aimed at the very audience best served by and most fanatical about Public Radio: Smart people. 

I would argue that Public Radio's future was first glimpsed on a cold night in March of 1948, but it would take 60 years before anyone would see it. That was the night of the 20th Academy Awards, and the world of American movie- making was on the verge of radical change – thanks in part to the advent of an alternative entertainment medium called television. The Hollywood studios would try to battle this new medium, they would try to kill it. They were dependent on audiences and any substantial decrease in those audiences would mean economic disaster. Fear was in the air that night for all the studio-heads. All but one. The one with the crazy ideas. 

Walt Disney would win no awards that night, but he would be the spark that ignited his industry’s future and, at the same time, point the way for our own. Previously, all studios but Disney made their money strictly from theatrical exhibition of their motion pictures. They profited by squeezing down the costs of producing films and distributing them to their own theaters. The talent was under contract and they owned the channel of distribution from head to tail. Disney had already baffled the other studio heads after successfully creating the first full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which had once been known as “Disney’s folly.” 

Not just any movie, this was the first film to gross $100 million, the first to have a soundtrack, the first to have a merchandising tie-in, the first with multiple licensable characters. In one fell swoop, Walt Disney had done more than create a new hit, he had created a new business model. 

Today, the movie business per se is a relatively unimportant part of the business of the conglomerates which own the studios. All the majors routinely lose money on theatrical release, where the massive audiences of days gone by no longer exist. According to Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood , the studios make the bulk of their profits from licensing their filmed entertainment for home viewing and by leveraging that content across all entertainment channels: Video, music, television, gaming, etc. 

Writes Epstein, “Theatrical releases now serve essentially as launching platforms for licensing rights.” Put another way, the movie studios aren’t in the movie business, they’re in the content licensing business. To license content you have to create it first. 

Is it strictly a coincidence that "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me!" has a deal with CBS Entertainment to produce a TV pilot? Is it an accident that Ira Glass begat This American Life the Radio show which begat CD's and books, which begat a first-look deal with Warner Bros. which begat an Emmy-nominated series on Showtime? 

Is it only good fortune that turned A Prairie Home Companion the Radio show into A Prairie Home Companion, the movie? 

These are the exceptions. And that's because Public Radio is aiming too low and aspiring to too little. 

Why is it that Deepak Chopra, an incredible pledge-driver for Public Broadcasting, has a radio show... 

...on Sirius/XM?! 

Could it be that we simply didn't ask first? Don't you think Deepak knows he'd sell a lot more books on Public Radio than on Sirius/XM? 

How will we ever create another show as distinctive and entertaining as Car Talk unless we seek to create another show as distinctive and entertaining as Car Talk? 

And, by the way, who is that top-ranked Public Radio personality who has never had a Public Radio show? The one who ranks in the top five of all Public Radio personalities as judged by Public Radio listeners, themselves? 

He is Jon Stewart. 

Where is the radio show for his audience? 

I'm waiting. 

Bueller? Bueller??

The Bold New Programming Opportunities for Public Radio

A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of doing a Saturday keynote session at the Public Radio Program Director's Conference in Los Angeles.

The topic was on some serious opportunities for the program-makers in Public Radio (it's a topic that has a fair degree of relevance for commercial broadcasters, too). What are the great programming opportunities for Public Radio in the years ahead? Listen in and find out.

You can stream the audio of the presentation here.

And you can read some of the favorable reviews here and here. Thanks for the kind reviews, Todd and Jesse!

Thanks to all the Public Radio PD's who put up with my ranting and raving.

And here is a follow-along version of the visuals:

PRPD 2008 Mark Ramsey Presentation

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: public radio)

The sound of no phone ringing

You're all acquainted with public radio pledge drives.

Often the pledging is done with the sound of ringing phones in the background, where each ring represents another contribution to the station.

The intention is to demonstrate that other listeners are calling to pledge and thus encourage you to do likewise.

Of course, when the phones are not ringing, the signal is that listeners are not pledging.

In one interesting experiment quoted in the new book Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, a home shopping channel changed six words in one of its pitch segments and that simple change caused sales to skyrocket.

They changed the words "Operators are waiting, please call now" to "If operators are busy, please call again."

That is, they signaled that operators were busy, not waiting. And that means people like you are calling, and operators do not have time to check their Blackberries or file their nails.

This is co-author Robert Cialdini's "Principle of Social Proof" in action. The more I think folks like me are doing something, the more likely I am to do it myself.

It's what makes a trend a trend, it's what makes a hit a hit.

And it's what does not happen when you see or hear a bank of pledge drive phones silent.

Public Radio's revenue model will be challenged by Podcasting

Interesting piece by "The Long Tail's" Chris Anderson on how his listening behavior to public radio has been transformed by podcasting.

Says Chris:

I'm listening to more and more of my favorite NPR shows (This American Life, Terry Gross's Fresh Air, Science Friday, etc) as podcasts, something that finally suits me thanks to having [an iPhone] that automatically loads the latest shows. I don't have to avoid the NPR pledge drive anymore.

Chris goes on to say that while he didn't donate to the local affiliate during its pledge drive, he did so when Terry Gross (in the podcast) made the same request. That is, although the money flows to the local affiliate station, he's rewarding the program, not the station.

I realized that I don't really support my local affiliate. I love some of the shows it broadcasts and hate others. My attachments are to individual shows, not to a broadcast station. My engagement with public radio is at a more granular level than the affiliate. I just don't care that much about KQED, and now that I've got another way to get the shows I like, I don't really feel much of a connection to it.

Now that I get my radio via podcast, I don't have to take the bad shows with the good. I've got an a la carte menu, and I assemble my own schedule with what I want and when I want it. My feelings about radio stations are mixed, but my feelings about individual shows are crystal clear.

And he concludes:

My shifting of funding from the general (radio station) to the specific (show) tells me that radio is going to get microchunked, just like the rest of media. The more granular, the better. We're about to find out where people's loyalties really lie.

Interestingly, my behavior has tracked along the exact same lines as Chris's. Much of my public radio listenership has moved to podcasting. But does it matter, once the pledge time comes?

Yes, it does. If anything, listening to a podcast is cloaked in even more anonymity than listening to the radio itself. No live DJ's, no phones ringing in the background. So listeners will feel even less guilty when they hear a podcast they don't pay for than when they hear your live plea for money and ignore it. And less guilt means less responsibility means less willingness to put some dollars in the tip jar.

That suggests, in other words, that the path of podcasting - essentially circumventing the local affiliate - might depress the likelihood of patronage even as it increases exposure and listenership to these programs.

On Chris's "microchunk" issue: Obviously, radio can only get microchunked to the degree that it is program-based. You can't chunk what isn't chunkable. Most of public radio is, of course, highly chunkable.

Clearly, public radio needs to navigate the needs of its broadcast affiliates (who pay for these programs) with the challenges and opportunities presented by "chunkability," because in the long run, certain things are clear to me:

1. Listeners will increasingly prefer to pay for programs, not stations. Just as music buyers want individual songs, not entire albums. It doesn't make sense for me to subsidize a station for a podcast I can hear without that station. Nor does it make sense to pay for a station that mixes in lots of stuff you don't like with exactly what you love.

2. The definition of a "public radio listener" will have to be reconsidered when such a listener may - in some cases - listen to public radio podcasts but never to a radio station that airs them. If I never listen to a station but do hear numerous public radio podcasts, how can I support my favorite shows without supporting a station I ignore?

3. Public radio will have to significantly enhance their ability to solicit and encourage donations from podcast listeners for podcasts. A passive "please pledge" will not do the trick. At the very least there should be a "walled garden" that listeners elect to pay for, behind which are all kinds of goodies for premium podcast subscribers only. This is no different from the premium items stations use in their solicitation efforts now - except it's program based and online. It's not about blocking free distribution, rather it's about offering premium access to a deeper experience of the program. But we're a long way from that now: If you go to the page for NPR's Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me, it's not even possible to support the program directly from this web page!

4. Stations will have to recognize that their value is related to the manner in which they mix public radio programs and add original local content that is a magnet in and of itself. To expect support for the station simply because it airs Car Talk will no longer be reason enough to expect support.

5. Revenue models will have to change. Revenue can and should shift to web-based models for program sponsorship, with the station affiliates sharing in those proceeds. In the long run, the stations will be supported by the programs, not vice versa.

6. More funding for public radio programs will have to come from corporate or other non-listener sponsorship.

And by the way, Chris's point about the duller than dirt California Report - I could not possibly agree more.

Sharing stories on your website

One of the toughest parts of integrating social media tools into a radio station website is plugging in those tools which listeners actually want to use on a radio station site as opposed to wherever they're accustomed to using them now.

Just because YouTube is hot, for example, doesn't mean YOURtube will be hot. Just because I can share photos on Flickr doesn't mean I'll want to share them on my favorite radio station's website. Economy of effort is part of the media economy, so your site will win my web traffic only because you invite it in a way that is unique to you and compelling to me.

And that's why the new announcement from Philadelphia's non-commercial (!!) 88.5 WXPN is so interesting. Says VP Bruce Warren:

Today [we] launched the 885 Most Memorable Musical Moments. Basically we're asking our listeners to contribute to a massive archive of personally important musical moments and historically significant moments. We will make sense of the many thousands of submissions we get for the countdown and playback of the top 885 in October. The next two months, we are in the "share" phase.

Visit the site and the blog you'll find a growing repository of online shared music experience. This is not for every station, of course, but if your audience is driven by a passion for music doesn't it make sense to invite their stories and that passion to be expressed on your station's site?

So many people ask me what they can do to attract more listeners to their websites. And the answer is to give listeners what they want that relates to your station that they can't get or do as a unified community in any other place.

This American Podcast

Rejoice!

The best show on radio is now available via podcast.

If you're an iTuner, go here.

The State of Public Radio

For you public radio folks out there (or those commercial stations readying to see your ratings shoulder-to-shoulder with public radio, thanks to Arbitron's recent announcements), check out the audio archive from the recent Public Radio Programmer's Conference in Philadelphia.

If you want to "cut to the chase" you can stream the audio from the opening session panel, The State of Public Radio, which included me, Paul Jacobs from Jacobs Media, and other distinguished members.

Or at least more distinguished than I am.