Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

As I reported here a month or so ago KUSP is making a change in programming strategy on weekdays, from early in the morning through the end of the afternoon commute. KUSP’s new schedule in those times focuses on what we believe are public radio’s most significant news and information programs. We think the KUSP audience will come to appreciate our new programs: The Story with Dick Gordon; our new collaborative project with station KALW in San Francisco, Your Call; Day to Day from NPR News, The Diane Rehm Show from WAMU in Washington; and Marketplace.

Several programs in this schedule now air twice - either twice the same day for two weekday programs, or on two different days for some weekend programs. This idea has disconcerted a number of people, but the reasons for doing it are fairly straightforward.

We are repeating several programs we know can serve large and loyal audiences. Not many people can be tuned in to KUSP all day, every day… so by strategically repeating what we think will be among our most-listened-to shows, we increase the chances that a potential listener will have a chance to tune them in. Experience at other stations indicates that more people benefit from having a second chance to catch the show, than are put at a disadvantage by running into a show they’ve already heard once.

Another reason is more long-term. KUSP’s programmers are working on several new projects, which might meet listener needs and desires better than anything we’ve done before. We’ve seen in the past few weeks how hard it can be for a station to end programs that a number of listeners care about (even if, compared to other programs on the station, the shows that are ending reach relatively few listeners). But sometimes a station needs to create time for something new — as we’re doing now for our collaborative project with KALW, “Your Call.”

When our program development projects bear fruit (and I definitely believe they will, though I can’t say for sure when), it will be less disruptive, we hope, to adjust the schedule to make room if some of our daily content before the switch includes repeats. This also includes looking carefully at programs airing on KUSP as well as on another station in the area.

Not every popular program is practical to repeat. We thought long and hard about repeating Democracy Now! which currently attracts the most loyal audience of any of KUSP’s weekday shows. The problem is, by the time we air Democracy Now, the program is already three hours old; since DN! is a topical news program, a repeat broadcast later in the day runs the risk of bringing listeners news that is out of date. Other news programs where our content repeats (Morning Edition, for example, or Marketplace) have personnel in place all morning and afternoon so that, if news events warrant, stories can be updated.

As we go along I’ll write more about the new shows on the schedule, and look forward to seeing your comments.

Today we were able to release the full schedule of KUSP programs beginning Monday, September 1. It’s linked here on the site. We’ll be updating all the relevant site pages as soon as we can.

The new schedule took a while to finalize and release because the negotiation process involved in scheduling our KUSP-produced music programs was complex. From the outset we wanted to offer our very best music programming at the times our listener research indicated we had the most receptive audience for music.

Because our hosts are volunteers, and all have other life commitments besides volunteering at KUSP, in many cases it was hard to match up the best program host with what felt like the best air time. In that “the best air time” for a show is also influenced by the programs that precede and follow it, there was a lot of give and take between our programming managers and our hosts as we sought out the best available combination. We also listened to much feedback from station people and our listeners, and incorporated some of that advice into the final schedule.

As we begin this schedule, 32 different KUSP music programmers will be sharing with you the music they love, and music is on our air every day of the week. Our music programming schedule increases the amount of jazz on the air, and continues our commitment to classical music as well as to music with a global reach. We have a rockin’, soulful Saturday night lineup with Charlie Lange, J.T., Louise, and Seth, and we’re looking forward to building a late night lineup of interesting, eclectic music to keep listeners who tune in after midnight engaged and entertained. Many late night programmers our listeners enjoy continue in those slots now, while we continue working on long-term plans for those hours.

In another post I’ll write more about our new weekday lineup of what we think are outstanding news and information programs, most of them unavailable from any other station on the Central Coast.

Overall, we have high aspirations for KUSP’s new programming. This is what our Board of Directors wrote this week and wanted me to share with you:

KUSP remains committed to original, locally produced content, both in music programming and news and information. In an effort to regain audience loyalty and increase public service to a region that has been dramatically affected by recent media consolidations, KUSP will shift to news and information programming during the weekday hours. This content will feature independently produced local news running in tandem with the best in nationally available content. In the evenings and weekends, KUSP will build upon its 36 years of eclectic programing by highlighting the best in volunteer produced programming in underserved musical genres, with particular emphasis on jazz, classical and world music. Our late night service will continue the ‘pataphysical tradition of offering up our airwaves for creative programming that might not other find a broadcast outlet. We
hope that this schedule will lead to increased listenership and loyalty as well as increased public participation in community radio.

In short, we hope this plan brings more Central Coast listeners the kind of public radio they’re seeking. While we know that change is hard, and that many program hosts that are loved by our listeners leave the KUSP schedule for now, we’re committed to keeping doors open for volunteers new and old, and to working to the best of our ability to expand our capacity to broadcast. That way, you’ll have even more and better listening options from KUSP in the months and years to come.

The KUSP Board of Directors approved several significant changes to our station’s schedule and programming strategy at their board meeting last night. These are the first large-scale changes to KUSP’s schedule in about five and a half years. Most changes will go into effect on September 1.

The most significant change adds more news and information programming in the middle of the day Monday through Friday, where right now we run a mix of different kinds of music programs. This will put news, talk and information on the air weekdays from early in the morning through the end of the afternoon commute.

Classical music will continue on the schedule weekday evenings and jazz will follow later at night, as happens now, but these programs will extend across the whole week, from Monday through Friday (rather than Friday being different from the other weekdays). We will also begin featuring our On-Site live and recorded concert performances (music festivals, local symphonies and chamber music groups, and so on) on Friday nights, instead of late Sunday morning.

The news, talk and entertainment shows that air on weekend mornings will extend a little longer into the day, and be followed on both Saturday and Sunday afternoon by music with kind of a global flavor (we’re still working with our program hosts to plan out exactly what that will sound like; we have three different kinds of “world music” programs on Sunday afternoon now, and a Celtic music show on Saturday afternoon, so this may not be that big of a change).

Saturday nights will have more of an upbeat kind of rhythm musically, and Sunday night will continue much as it is now, with interview and cultural programs in the early evening, followed by jazz.

KUSP will broadcast all of NPR’s news magazines (like Morning Edition and All Things Considered) seven days a week, so you’ll never be too far from an update on world events from what I think is clearly the best broadcast news organization in the U.S.

The part of the decision that provoked the most discussion and controversy involved very late night programming (after midnight), which is now a decidedly eclectic mix of music and talk (and some dead air when we have no volunteer program hosts). In the end the board determined that we need to re-evaluate how we use this air time, hoping that we can evolve it into a more effective laboratory for creative radio programming (something that we were also exploring for web-only content at kusp.org).

The changes emerge from many months of discussions with listeners and seven full-scale surveys about public radio listening in the Monterey Bay area. We learned a lot about how people use public radio, and what they wish could be different. Listeners reinforced the message that they value both news and music on their public radio stations, but attach more importance to the news and information that we provide. There’s more of a preference by listeners for news in the daytime, for music in the evenings, and a mix of news, talk and entertainment to start the day off on the weekend - and we think this updated schedule will fit those preferences.

The schedule retooling on our main over-the-air stream won’t mean the end for all time of the kinds of programs that are coming off the schedule right now. We plan to offer more content than before on kusp.org, produced by more people in our community. This is a critical part of our RadioEngage on-line project, which I’ve written about before - opening up the pipeline for creative kinds of radio so that we’re no longer constrained by the kinds of conventions that have grown up over the nearly sixty years since KPFA pioneered this kind of broadcasting (as in, you have to be willing to come in at 3 AM to get air time for something radically different).

We’re also continuing to pursue multiple over-the-air streams of programming, and will in particular explore whether we can develop a full-time stream of music that would generally parallel what we’ve been playing on “The Open Road,” the weekday music show that debuted in 2003 and wraps around our “Live at Lunch” in-studio music segment. There’s several different ways that second stream could get out to our listeners (including Internet streams and HD Radio digital broadcasts), and we’ll be evaluating all of them.

More generally, we’ve vowed to do careful and extensive listening to listeners about their specific kinds of music preferences. We discovered in the last year and a half of work that it’s easier to reach general conclusions about public radio listener preferences in news and information than it is about music. But music is very important to us - it’s always been a vital part of KUSP - and we want to make our music programming as relevant and important to you as it can be.

For a while today the Santa Cruz Sentinel was reporting on their web site that KUSP was dropping all local music programming; this was not true, and was apparently pulled off their site later in the day. Sentinel reporter Shanna McCord interviewed me this afternoon, along with two other members of our board of directors, and we’re told a story will run in the Wednesday 7/30 edition.

In a few days we’ll have worked out more details of our new over-the-air schedule and we’ll share them with you and the local news media as soon as we have them.

Please take the opportunity to share your thoughts about our changes with me as they get underway!

Jesse Thorn, the host of The Sound of Young America, comments lengthily on the cancellation of Bryant Park Project and Fair Game with Faith Salie… and other principles and problems of traditional public radio programming strategies.

I spot only one provably untrue statement in his post; it is not true that “no one has HD Radio.” I have two. Since last summer we at KUSP have given away about 30 to deserving donors as thank-you gifts.

Since there are supposedly about one billion radios in the United States, the 32 HD Radios I’ve sent into the world may statistically equal “none” — but still.

Anyway, I concur with much of what Jesse is saying and hope you have a look yourself.

On Friday night 7/25 the FCC approved the merger of XM and Sirius by a 3-2 party line vote, the Republican majority prevailing. The merged entity will control all of the direct-to-listener satellite radio frequencies in the U.S.

The national program distributors in public radio all have relationships with XM, Sirius, or both, and that’s expected to continue… but there has been no place at the table for smaller public radio organizations. Efforts to provide more non-commercial access to satellite radio listeners as a condition of the merger were turned aside, as were efforts to require future satellite radio receivers to include the capability to tune in terrestrial HD radio signals (such as KUSP broadcasts, and plans to expand).

NPR was active in lobbying the FCC for these public-radio-friendly conditions to the merger, so having it go through with only minimal concessions was disappointing. The gist of NPR’s statement on the subject:

“The FCC’s approval of the merger of Sirius and XM undermines public radio and, in turn, the public’s access to our services. While NPR, other public radio producers and public radio stations have had long and mutually-beneficial relationships with both companies, this new monopoly - wielding unprecedented control over spectrum and without the mitigating conditions we sought - will limit the public service mission of public radio and dilute the significant investment our community, our audience and Congress have made in HD radio technology. The public interest is not being served in this decision.”

With a few exceptions, such as the Howard Stern premium channel on Sirius, satellite programming has not developed significant audiences. Independent audience estimates of satellite radio listening have only recently begun to emerge. In estimates released last fall, Howard’s channel had a total weekly audience of over 1.2 million. The public radio channels on satellite are vastly smaller; XM Public Radio, where Bob Edwards moved after NPR, reached an estimated national audience of 48,300 persons per week - only a few thousand more people than are estimated to listen to KUSP! And XM Public Radio has a larger weekly audience than most of the other non-commercial channels on XM or Sirius.

The task of turning the satellite radio industry into a profitable venture is immense.

Should you by some chance diligently follow all the suggested sources in my blogroll, this may be an especially unenlightening post. On the other hand…

Yesterday Doc Searls very nicely encapsulated what seems to me like a very plausible scenario for what’s apt to happen to “radio” once iPhones and their ilk really take hold. Doc’s post, jumping off an analysis by Andrew Leyden, is on his Linux Journal blog.

At nearly the same time and at the opposite end of the Northeast Corridor from Doc’s command post at Harvard, Amy Schriefer from the music operation at NPR digital media puts out a call on “inside NPR.org” for NPR music iPhone apps you’d like to see. npr.org/music has a budget that’s pretty much a rounding error in terms of the overall public radio economy, but no need to dwell on that here - in boxing terms, they punch above their weight class…

And a couple of floors above Amy at NPR headquarters, CEO Dennis Haarsager posts about his recent appearance on “The Gillmor Gang” podcast to explain NPR’s new application programming interface, a tool to help people connect themselves more completely and easily to NPR’s online content. This is pretty geeky stuff, but not insignificant.

And Rob Paterson thoughtfully reminds us that the ground beneath our feet, in the manner of Wile E. Coyote, will crumble at any minute (if indeed it hasn’t already). Rob was perhaps a bit irked by the reaction Jeff Jarvis got during a panel on social media at the Public Radio News Directors conference last week, which Jeff previews here and tells about how it went here.

This weekend the KUSP staff will be finishing our recommendations to our board of directors on how our public radio station gets from where we are (informed by 36 years of over-the-air broadcasting on a single channel, and about a third as much time serving you online here at kusp.org) to where we think we need to be (multiple channels with multiple services, on FM and on the Internet). We see this as a pretty complex task that will take some time to execute, but all the above signs (and many many more) tell us we need to get started. Now.

At its monthly meeting on Monday, the board will have the opportunity to approve our operating plan and budget for the next year, which would bring along significant changes we believe will improve our service to you. It’s a public meeting, so come join us if you’d like: 6:00 PM on Monday July 28, at the KUSP studios at 203 8th Avenue in Santa Cruz.

In the past two weeks I traveled to two public radio meetings… one quite small, a meeting of the NPR Board of Directors; and one quite large, the PRDMC (short for Pubilc Radio Development and Marketing Conference). I could easily perceive the pressure on public radio rising at these meetings.

NPR is experiencing pressure on its major sources of revenue while the need for the programming it generates (and the expectations of the listeners) grow steadily. NPR gets significant income through program underwriting announcements from foundations and businesses, and the sagging health of the general economy puts the squeeze on those budgets. Income from the NPR endowment is affected by the return on their investments, which isn’t so great right now. The biggest share of NPR’s revenue comes from member stations like KUSP, and we’re not seeing our budgets grow - so we’re ill equipped to send more to NPR.

At the same time, people want and expect more from NPR, over-the-air and on-line. They’ve resisted making cuts in the news-gathering part of the company (probably the only national news operation in America that can say that), meaning that the pressure comes even more acutely on other activities. I’m sure that played a large role in the decision to end the Bryant Park Project.

At PRDMC, the financial pressure on local stations was evident, for the same basic reasons. “Development,” in non-profit jargon, means getting the resources you need to fulfill your mission. That obviously includes fund-raising. One overriding theme of the conference was that station people need to pay close attention to the feelings and attitudes of their listeners - something we certainly try to do at KUSP. Those needs can be hard to reconcile with what stations can do… many listeners now regard pledge drives with absolute scorn, but there’s no revenue model for public broadcasting that doesn’t depend mostly on voluntary support. Pledge drives, it must be said, give people the chance to become new member-supporters of public radio.

Once a member is “in the door” and we know who they are, we can ask for their continuing support in various ways - through the mail, via e-mail, and so on. Getting that first gift in a way that’s affordable, though, is very hard to do without pledge drives.

As I’ve said before, I’m happy that KUSP’s pledge drives are shorter than most. Also, not many stations have fewer drives than we do (at two per year). But our number of new members is tailing off dramatically in recent years, and overall we have fewer current donors. This is something that’s been true in other communities as well, and I hope it is a trend we - and you - can turn around.

This morning NPR announced the cancellation of “The Bryant Park Project,” a daily morning news program that debuted late last year. BPP was developed to reach a morning news audience different from the people faithfully tuning in to “Morning Edition.” Most of its audience was online, through its podcast; few public radio stations carried it. The final program will air on July 25.

At KUSP we were reluctant to, as a stand-alone station, gamble on losing our loyal Morning Edition audience (and our business supporters who underwrite that program) by replacing it with a new show, given that Morning Edition would be available to most of our potential listeners via KAZU and/or KQED-FM and/or KCBX. Had we been able to combine our operations with KAZU as we had hoped, that might have created an opportunity for The Bryant Park Project to get on the air in this area. We had talked with NPR about that possibility, but the failure of the KAZU deal to materialize ended the discussion.

To the extent that new public radio projects need both over-the-air and on-line space to develop and find their audience, the chances of success for new shows are slim — especially as long as we are stuck in this semi-collaborative, semi-competitive environment that is present in most of public radio.

The timing of BPP’s cancellation carries even more resonance for me in that (1) we are close to finishing our plans for KUSP programming adjustments in light of the end of the KAZU opportunity, a planning process that has consumed much of the station’s energy for the past four months, and (2) I spent last Thursday and Friday at a meeting of the NPR Board of Directors in Washington, representing the California Public Radio stations (I’m the vice-president of our statewide organization). More on those topics shortly. And no, NPR board and staff members didn’t give us in attendance any indication that BPP was on the chopping block.

Final twist… the story of the cancellation leaked to the New York Times the day before the announcement. The BPP blog promptly reported this report of their own program’s demise, before the NPR management officially gave the show’s staff the news.

I’m sad to see BPP go and I wish everyone who worked on or listened to the show the best.

After many months of reduced power operation due to a failure in the cooling system, our southern Monterey County/northern SLO county transmitter, KBDH 91.7 San Ardo, went back to full power operation over the weekend.

This should noticeably help reception for listeners in that area. For many people in the region, our 91.7 signal is the only reliable public radio reception. Most other listeners can choose between us and KCBX, which broadcasts from Cuesta Peak near San Luis Obispo. For all the folks in the KBDH listening area, we’re glad to be back with you at full power.

We are continuing to work on a long-delayed (over three years) project to upgrade the signal delivery system to the KBDH transmitter. This is intended to improve reliability and audio quality. We may see this project successfully completed by the end of the summer.

Todd Mundt tipped his blog readers (myself included) to a post by Diane Mermigas that discusses different ways public media might be able to gain the financial support it needs to function in the future. There are some interesting intersections between the ideas she writes about and things we are working on right now at KUSP… particularly in the context of our RadioEngage project. She also mentions Nonprofit Finance Fund, a very forward-thinking organization that has been a primary capital resource for KUSP for many years.

I’d love to know what you think about Diane’s ideas…