Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

At noon today the 91.7 MHz public radio facility that serves the Highway 101 corridor from King City south to Paso Robles (and communities west of there) passed from KUSP’s ownership to our colleagues to the south, at KCBX. KCBX now has three major transmitters: KSBX 89.5 in the Santa Barbara area; KCBX 90.1 for northern Santa Barbara County and most of San Luis Obispo County; and what will be (after the FCC approves a change in call letters) KNBX 91.7 north of that.

This change in ownership furthers the strategic plans of KUSP and KCBX, and has been under study by our stations for almost a year. For KCBX, the acquisition of the 91.7 frequency fills in areas of poor coverage in the northern part of their home county, San Luis Obispo, and adds coverage in more rural parts of southern Monterey County — a place that, culturally, has more in common with San Luis Obispo County than it does with the communities ringing Monterey Bay and the urbanized areas along 101 (from Salinas north to Silicon Valley), where almost all of KUSP’s audience lives and works.

For KUSP, this transition is a strategic move that accomplishes three important and interrelated goals.

First, it strengthens us in financial terms. That in turn makes it possible to keep moving forward in two critical programming areas — building a team to bring you the news and issues in our area that you care about, and building the capacity at kusp.org to get all our programming to our audience how they want, when they want, wherever they are.

In the past year KUSP has invigorated our news and information service, and you have responded. Our audience research indicates the station’s core audience — the number of people who depend on us more than any other station — is about 30% bigger than it was in early 2008, and as big or bigger than at any time in KUSP history. More people are tuning in more often, and stay with us longer. Audience size is not the only measure of how a public radio station serves its audience, but it’s significant.

And in the past year we have worked very hard to build kusp.org into a public media center that can carry our station and our values far into the future. The RadioEngage project, developed with our partners at Quiddities and supported by a generous grant from the Knight Foundation, is just about ready to go. We know that the choice and interactivity the Internet brings our community of listeners has changed, and will continue to change, our public radio world — profoundly and irreversibly.

Thirty-eight years ago, the people who started our station didn’t sit around and just pine for their own AM radio station — they went out and got an FM license, even though FM listening was only a tiny fraction of AM listening in 1971. They saw what the medium was capable of and moved to secure that capability for their community. We reap the rewards of their foresight around the clock, every day.

Now, we must do something nearly as bold. We need to strengthen the over-the-air service built on our founders’ foresight, and move — quickly — to build a great on-line service. If the world of public media moved more slowly, we might have chosen to wait until the economy had recovered, before charging ahead into the world of on-line listening and connectivity though mobile devices like the iPhone. But I think all of the professional and volunteer leaders at KUSP agree that it’s necessary for us to move assertively. This arrangement with KCBX is one step towards securing the substantial financial resources we need to go forward.

When KUSP put KBDH San Ardo on the air in 2001, we filled in one of the largest geographic gaps in public radio coverage in California. The transaction completed today maintains public radio service for everyone in or passing through the 91.7 signal area, something we felt was vital. And, having finished this particular transaction, we hope to explore future collaborations with KCBX in other ways that strengthen public radio in central California overall.

I wouldn’t leave this subject without thanking the hundreds of KUSP supporters in southern Monterey and northern SLO County who have listened and contributed to our station these past eight years. As Internet and mobile device technology improves (and this is happening at lightning speed) we’ll still be a listening option for many of you.

We hope that these changes benefit everyone in the long run. Indeed, we’re confident they will.

Rob Paterson has stimulated a lot of my thinking in the past three years or so concerning organizations and social networks. Today he posted to his blog a careful and extensive breakdown of public radio’s efforts to engage with its audience in the Internet age. NPR brought Rob in as a catalyst to a major planning effort with stations that started in late 2005. He has remained a friend and a thoughtful critic.

As readers of this blog know, we have worked diligently at KUSP to move our station in this direction. And I concur with Rob – the potential for positive and transformative change is now being realized, as 2009 turns to 2010.

Fans of public radio should take heart in the growing impact of what we are all building together — as listeners, local stations, collaborations of local stations, and national/global networks (like NPR and BBC).

So, thank you for being part of our construction team!

NPR has launched a top-to-bottom revision of the network’s web site. The new approach has a lot in common with what we’ve developed as part of our RadioEngage project, which is in the final tuning stages.

I’d be interested in learning feedback about what you like and don’t like about the new npr.org; I’ll share it with the team that’s putting the finishing touches on the new kusp.org.

The first Public Radio Camp is now history, committed to scores of tweets on Twitter, a hoped-for wiki entry or two, and a lot of work yet to be done.

Behold, a Wordle from Quiddities’ Margaret Rosas reflecting the Twitter traffic:

The second day of this event was much smaller than the first; about eight participants versus the 60-70 present on day 1. One of the things we did was spend some time discussing the overlapping spheres of public media; one model put public media organizations into three groups, shaped by significantly different histories and schemes for regulation… public broadcasters (over-the-air radio and TV) in one sphere, the community media centers with roots in cable TV public, educational, and governmental access (PEG for short) in a second sphere, and the print-based and/or Net-based media groups (Wikimedia, projects like Public-Press.org in the Bay Area, and so on) in a third sphere. Some public media efforts (Democracy Now! came immediately to mind) touch all three spheres, others only one or two. Thinking about these different approaches to public media might help us be more effective in the roll-out of RadioEngage.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who took part in the BarCamp, and we’ll push forward from here…

I thought today’s Public Media Camp was a success, on the whole. At least 60 participants came to NextSpace in downtown Santa Cruz on the first of two days of visioning and planning about web content for public media organizations. Most participants were from the Santa Cruz area; many were from the San Francisco Bay Area, including folks from KQED and KALW; and I was especially happy to see people from NPR’s Public Interactive division, and from American Public Media.

Great thanks to all the event sponsors: the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, NextSpace, Sunkist Naturals, Lifestyle Culinary, Armanasco Public Relations (special tip of the cap to Tom Honig), Drew Miller Insurance Services, B. Ruby Rich, and above all to our colleagues at Quiddities that put it all together.

Significant take-aways for me included these:

KUSP’s on-line ambitions are greater, and closer to realization, than most public radio organizations of similar size;
Many KUSP people, and many other Santa Cruzans, want to use on-line public media to strengthen our community;
KUSP’s fire coverage this past spring and summer had a sizable influence on people’s perception of the station and its potential as a media organization operating on-line;
I saw a number of content producers working on news and information that have fairly concrete ambitions for how they want to serve audiences on-line, but not as many content producers focused on music are as far along;
Ideas abound about ways to generate financial support for public media from on-line users, but (at least with this group) I saw very little agreement about which ideas were most likely to succeed, and few of these ideas have actually been tested;
In a related story, few people if any thought the main ways public radio has raised money from people over the years — pledge drives and direct mail — will work effectively for on-line audiences;
And the last two points combined could mean real trouble for public broadcasters in the near future.

The Santa Cruz Public Radio Camp may spawn similar BarCamps elsewhere in the U.S. in the coming months, which will be a welcome development, as this seems like a productive way to advance planning for public media’s on-line services to viewers and listeners.

The event will continue tomorrow.

Tonight is the first night of a BarCamp event called “public media camp,” sponsored by Quiddities Dev. Inc. — our collaborators in the RadioEngage project. Follow the above links to find out more about what we’ll all be doing. If you’re in the Santa Cruz area, you can register on site Saturday morning between 9 and 10 AM.

And, it’s free!

Look for reports on the goings-on this weekend.

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!

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…

Today the Knight News Challenge, a program of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, announced a $327,000 grant to Quiddities Dev Inc. a web solutions organization based here in Santa Cruz. With KUSP’s collaboration, Quiddities will develop RadioEngage, an open source publishing platform optimized for the needs of public radio stations.

KUSP will pilot the project here at kusp.org and our content team, led by New Media Director Steve Laufer, will work closely with Quiddities’ designers as they explore this new territory for public media.

As an open source project based on the Drupal software platform, RadioEngage will be available for all public media organizations to freely implement and improve upon as soon as it is released. Our objective is deeper community participation and engagement by allowing the creators, contributors, and listeners of news, information and music to communicate and collaborate directly and easily.

A year ago, at the time the first Knight News Challenge grants were awarded, Knight recognized Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism project with its Knight News Innovation EPpy Award. We are incredibly honored that Knight chose our collaboration with Quiddities to further advance their commitment to community-service-focused, participatory public radio.

The full press release for the grant (as a pdf file) is linked here. We’re very excited about this opportunity and I am grateful to Margaret Rosas and her team at Quiddities, KUSP Development Director Virginia Wright, the aforementioned Steve Laufer, and all of the staff and volunteers in KUSP New Media who worked hard to create the proposal… and to the fine people of the Knight Foundation who saw it as worthy of such generous support!

Watch this space!