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.

Americans for the Arts is a national advocacy organization seeking to develop more public (and political) support for arts and cultural activity in the U.S. They’ve released a nine-point plan calling on the incoming Obama administration to take steps to reinforce the arts economy as part of an overall economic recovery strategy.

There are some sound concepts behind these proposals, I think… and the problem definitely hits home for me as the head of an arts/cultural organization that has a paid workforce 28% smaller today (in full-time-equivalent-position terms) than it was on July 1. I see many other arts organizations in the Monterey Bay area making deep cuts in their operations as well, and it hurts.

Americans for the Arts created this link to encourage their members to contact Congressional representatives and express their views on federal support for the arts as part of economic stimulus. More info on their thinking can be found here.

(dear readers for whom this post’s title makes no sense: go here)

In the past week I’ve experienced great pride and satisfaction as KUSP’s General Manager… and also great sadness, disappointment, and anxiety. It’s rare to have one’s work life whipsaw so much from one day to the next.

Some of the best news came at the start of the week, thanks to KUSP’s generous listeners. Our three-day special on-air pledge drive generated over $15,000 in additional financial support for KUSP. No less importantly, the vast majority of listeners who called in or made a gift on line let us give the money we would have used for their thank-you gift to one of our area’s food banks. As I’ve said before, the food banks are incredibly skilled at leveraging cash donations into meals for families in need. KUSP listener generosity last week translated into more than 8,000 additional meals that will be provided this winter. So, from all of us involved in this campaign, please accept my heartfelt thanks.

KUSP Reports will continue our coverage on the topic of food, hunger and generosity through the rest of December, and stories will be available to listen-on-demand at the KUSP Reports page on our web site.

Then, on Wednesday, I had the sad duty to inform three dedicated KUSP employees that they are being laid off, due to the station’s very difficult financial situation. Two of the people affected are upper-level managers (one in programming, the other in fund-raising), and the third is a key behind-the-scenes employee supporting our outreach, training, and production work — some of the most important things a volunteer-based station can do. We did everything as a station we could think of to forestall these cuts, but the trends in financial support we’ve seen so far in our current fiscal year (which started on July 1) give us no other viable options.

The departure of these great people, and the reduction of capacity to do good work in these key areas is all the more painful/frustrating/crazy-making because we’re beginning to see so many things at KUSP just about to come to fruition. Our audience appears to be increasing; I’ve mentioned the ramp-up of our station-produced news coverage; we are very close to finishing what I think is going to be a major enhancement of KUSP’s service to music listeners; there are no end of good ideas in discussion about ways we can be more effective partners for the many non-profits in the Monterey Bay area and beyond who do such great things in the arts, in public service, in education… it’s hard to know when to stop.

And yet, we can’t spend money we don’t have. Thus our cuts in staffing and other areas must go ahead.

A day or so after the layoffs were announced, I did experience a small piece of positive news. Thursday night 12/11 we put into service our new emergency generator for the Santa Cruz studio. In late 2007 and the first part of 2008 our listeners rallied during a special fund-raising campaign that matched a federal grant, enabling us to replace a backup power system that had not been reliable for years. I feel much more confident that in the months ahead we’ll be able to be there for you when you need us.

But at about the same time, the roller coaster dived again; first, word came from NPR that they too were being forced to cut vital staff positions — about 7% of their total workforce. NPR’s mid-day news magazine, “Day to Day,” was canceled, meaning a change in the KUSP schedule will be required by mid-March, when the show ends its run. Several of my friends, some of whom I’ve known since my very earliest days in public radio, will lose their jobs in these cutbacks, and I feel for them, much as I do for my friends and co-workers at KUSP who face the same thing.

In parallel with all that, the city of Santa Cruz moved to make deep cuts in several key public service programs, including their Natural History Museum and Surfing Museum. Talk of the Bay focused on this subject tonight. KUSP has strong links to these museums and their people, and their loss will be felt deeply and personally.

And the final blow came at the end of the week, when Shakespeare Santa Cruz confirmed its deep financial jeopardy. SSC’s 2009 season hinges on raising $300,000 by December 22. Details are linked here and here.

The loss of Shakespeare Santa Cruz would be devastating to the cultural life of our region. You can see the ways in which they are inviting the community to help by following this link.

We’ll try to stay on top of this story in the week ahead. And hope for better times for us all.

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!

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.

A while back I lauded the insight of Rob Paterson, an organizational consultant who hails from Prince Edward Island and has rendered conspicuous service to NPR and all of public radio over the past couple of years by helping us think more constructively about our future.

In his blog today he interviews Michael Skoler of American Public Media Group (whose arms include Minnesota Public Radio and Southern California Public Radio) about “Public Insight Journalism” – a concept that has a lot of resonance for us at KUSP, though as an organization we are a lot smaller than any of the stations and groups that have picked up on the idea.

As we work on KUSP’s future plans, I wonder what you think about the relevance of this idea to us. Go see Rob’s interview, follow some of the links therein, and share your thoughts here, if you would…

Broadcaster and blogger Bruce Bratton hosts “University Grapevine” on KZSC 88.1 FM Thursdays at 4:00 PM. Bruce has invited me to be his guest today to discuss the state of public radio in the Monterey Bay area and beyond.

Posting this prompts me to belatedly thank everyone who attended Media Day at the Museum of Art and History last Saturday (3/29). Bruce put together this event, which was sponsored by the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County. He invited me to appear on his electronic media panel with people from Community TV of Santa Cruz County, Cruzio, and Santa Cruz Indymedia. The attendees I spoke with that day seemed to think it was time well spent, and I know Bruce is hoping to offer additional events along these lines in the future.

On 2/28/2008 the Foundation of CSUMB decided to continue operating their public radio station, KAZU, independently. This wound up a planning process that in some sense had been going on for over a year and a half, and intensively so since February 2007.

I’m really disappointed in this outcome, because I genuinely believe that we can serve the people of the Central Coast better if the two stations can fully collaborate on programming. And the economics of local public radio are such that full collaboration would have to translate to a shared management team, and a financial structure that would let us pool our resources and share the risks of trying new things.

There’s been a lot of media coverage about the end of this process. I think the most careful reporting was by Jennifer Squires at the Santa Cruz Sentinel; you can see her stories here (before the decision by CSUMB) and here (after the decision).

KUSP did a “Talk of the Bay” on February 26 about how the proposal to put KAZU and KUSP together fits into the larger context of changes in the media landscape. I was a guest, but I think the most interesting and important insights came from Tom Honig, former editor of the Santa Cruz Sentinel. The mp3 of the show is here.

A quick word about “editorial firewalls” – host Deanna Zachary and KUSP Talk/Information Producer J.D. Hillard put that show together without oversight from the rest of station management. They asked me to be a guest and I agreed. Though I think the show reflects positively on the idea of bringing the stations together, it wasn’t designed with that in mind. Part of the difficulty Deanna and J.D. faced, as Deanna says in the show, is that CSUMB and KAZU declined to make anyone available to appear.

One of the hardest things for any reporter is presenting a balanced story when some people involved in the story are willing to cooperate with you, and the “other side” isn’t (and that’s as if all stories had two sides, when they usually have many more). We run into this problem at KUSP constantly.

Now we at KUSP will begin developing plans to improve our service, independently of KAZU. Much, much more about this in the weeks ahead…