Public Radio Partnerships: Strength in Numbers

If I had just one wish for Public Broadcasting it would be more collaboration and less competition within the system. We would be so much better at serving our audience if we just found ways to work together.

Unified Vision

When I first came to New England, I was working with several stations on a project that looked at better serving our audiences locally and collaborating regionally. The premise of the regional collaboration was to better serve the public radio audience up and down the I-91 corridor with a high quality service meeting the needs of the region. Despite honest efforts, it never came to pass as stations focused on their own issues without drawing on the experience of others.

The collaborative spirit was replaced by competition and distrust. 

There have been some hopeful efforts recently funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Three notable collaborations include stations along Ohio River Valley, A News Initiative in Indiana and Alaskan energy issues. The hope is these collaboratives will motivate others to do the same.

Earlier Efforts

I was involved in previous efforts. Most notably, the Environmental Initiate at WNPR, a collaborative with solid funding that involved several stations in the Northeast. Once the grant ran down, the stations were unable to sustain the regional effort. Shared funding was suggested based on listener hours, but nothing re-lit the collaboration. I also assisted in the Kentucky Public Radio Network collaborative. KPRN is still going strong and involves several of the stations working together in the Ohio River Valley project.

These partnerships are like any intense relationship. They take work and compromise to keep them together. The pay-off is higher caliber content that has a stronger appeal to the public media audience. They also have the advantage of pooled funding and shared costs.

Podcasts - The New VHS?

I struggled with the conclusion of this blog. I am not against podcasts or progress or new platforms. It's more about collecting and saving content that I may get to later. For me...later never seems to happen.

Digital Clutter

I was sorting through some of our stuff. Actually, I was looking for things to toss and I came across some VHS tapes. None of them have been watched. It looks as if I will never watch them for two reasons.

1. I no longer have a player
2. I'm no longer interested.

I'll save one tape. I contains video of my son when he was two. The rest is just trash.

I recently read articles about the generational divide for public radio and NPR. So...are podcasts the saving grace? The line that stood out was that there is no way to measure if all those downloaded podcasts are actually being listened to. Time Spent Listening for radio can be measured, but there's no way to determined of listeners are actually listening the content on podcasts. 

This is an important issue when it comes to building audience and loyalty. Marketing and development becomes more effective when positive outcomes from a listeners perspective can be demonstrated to the potential funder or contributor. Money follows audience.

I'm curious. How many podcasts are just taking up space on your device? How many do you actually listen to? Is there a way this could be measured? Opened emails can be measured with an email service. Analytics can show information about time spent on a blog site and website. Even the number of clicks on a page can be measured. Once a podcast is downloaded, what happens to the podcast is not traceable. Wouldn't it be nice if we could track actual usage for podcasts?

No Critical Mass?

But, are the numbers big enough to really matter? Serial is considered a breakout hit for podcasts. There were over 40 million downloads. It is estimated that each episode was downloaded 3.4 million times. Unfortunately, most podcasts don't come anywhere close to those numbers. Compare that with the weekly cume of the public radio station I listen to most. WNPR has over 200,000 listeners weekly. The weekly cume for public radio is 30 million. That's an unduplicated cume. I'm not sure, but the unduplicated weekly cume for Serial was 3.4 million. Cume is not the critical number when it comes to funding...the core audience is. Perhaps, if we could figure out the podcast's core?

I think the question is moot. Podcast's may be suited for the younger demographics of public radio's potential audience, but they may not be suitable for broadcast. Radio works best when it has a consistent audience appeal. You can tune in anytime and get what you want. It does not work well as a venue for appointment listening. Podcasts are all about appointments (so were VHS tapes).  The best part is the technology allows the user to make the appointment. We can make certain aspects of public radio programming available for on-demand listening and use social media to try to create a viral buzz, but as with most podcasts, don't expect the response and buzz that was created by Serial.