Fake News Travels Fast

It Really Works

Fake News (false news) moves faster and deeper than the real stuff. The reason is economic. According to a study done last spring, social media rewards views. More eyeballs see the false stuff. The motivation is profit. The effect can be devastating.

Marketplace reporter Molly Wood interviews Sinan Aral of the Harvard Business Review. 

Sinan Aral: There's a story from Barack Obama's presidency where a false tweet that indicated that he was injured in an explosion wiped out a $130 billion of equity value in a single day. These types of stories can have consequential impacts on our democracy, on businesses, on our national security. And so it's a problem we really need to concentrate on.

According to the study that came out of MIT, Twitter leads among all platforms for spreading false news. Is it a coincidence that the president prefers that platform above all others?

Even more disturbing, "A false story is much more likely to go viral than a real story, the authors find, "A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does. And while false stories outperform the truth on every subject—including business, terrorism and war, science and technology, and entertainment—fake news about politics regularly does best."

Journalists, people who check sources, must be free to counter the tsunami of misinformation posing as news in our news feeds. They cannot face it alone. We need to be more informed as consumers about false narratives. Those narratives need to called out.  Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Google will need to do more to stem the tide of misinformation. If they are unwilling to do that, consumers can boycott and regulators must regulate.

Public Radio Dreams

Unsettling Dreams

I've had a series of unsettling and recurring dreams about my radio experience. 

The first one was based on true events. They were in commercial radio. The dream would revolve around not being prepared for the next event. In most cases the first stop set and beyond. What would happen in my dream was at the end of a music set or news segment. Nothing was prepared to go beyond that point. No music was pulled. No stories were set up to run. None of the spots for the stop set were pulled. This actually happened at two of the stations I work for. On my first shift, I was shown the board, the log and left to my own devices. The first break was a nightmare. The result was a really unsettled air shift for at least the first hour as I struggled to get ahead of the breaks.

The solution, I learned, was having the previous shift pull at least an hour's worth of material for the next shift. In some cases more than that. A great idea! I implemented the policy as soon as I moved up the management ladder.  I also required talent to show up an hour before their shift. That policy generated a lot of resistance. There are many who don't want to put in the effort. I still dream about getting in front of the control board and nothing is ready to go.

Nobody's Calling

Dream number two deals with on-air fundraising. In that dream I've spent weeks preparing for the fundraiser, setting strategy, tactics, goals, produced content (on-air and off-air) and lined up talent. The drive begins and nobody calls. Again, the dream is based on experience. In those early days of fundraising the audience was fractured and disloyal. Because of that, there weren't many listeners who qualified as core listeners. as a result, the on-air requests for funding would become more desperate as it became clear the goals were not going to be met. Reasoning and rationality outside the dream state revealed two problems. The programming created barriers to listening and so did the fundraising. I knew this, but that didn't stop the dream from recurring. I stopped dreaming about this after I stopped participating in pledge drives.

It's Baaaack?  

Recently I've had this dream where audiences are falling away. Public radio is losing its audience. Stations are going dark. Millennials and Boomers are listening less and as a result are less willing to support the programming. The core is getting their information fix from other sources, and they expect it to be free. Social Media is fracturing the audience. Creative people become discouraged and move on. The content, for the most part, is still great, but nobody is listening. 

Good thing this is only a dream. Like in the first two dreams, this is still a fixable situation. Like before, collaborations, partnerships, and creative solutions will allow public radio and media to continue to serve its audience and the community.

Growth Starts With Taking Risks

It all starts with knowing your audience.

Enlightening Information  

Understanding the audience is a quest for me. It began when I began in public media. 

The quest began with failed fundraisers. I was thrown into the fire of fundraising early. It seems like days after I began as a volunteer. Actually, it was probably a few months. The question was, why aren't the phones ringing? 

The quest was to better understand our audience, and through that understanding, gaining information on how to grow that audience. A larger audience might mean a growing relevance in our community and the ability to get listeners to invest in the programming. Some research was available within the public radio community. It was the early days of researching the audience. We found the audience to be incredibly small and fragmented. I questioned, "How can we consider ourselves to be a community service if nobody is listening? Are we a service if nobody is being served? 

A Heretic?

I was deemed a heretic, impure, a philistine, an outlier. At one station there was even a palace revolt. Still, many of us were thirsting for more knowledge. We wanted to understand more. It was going to take a change in mindset to putting the audience first. 

There were many more inside and outside the system who resisted any sort of understanding of the audience. The reasons varied. Most of them boiled down to a resistance to change.

The really cool parts of the research were the possibilities the information presented and that those changes might result in actually serving the audience. We were empowering change by increasing our understanding assessing the risk. Nothing was ever a slam dunk, but we were motivated by the information we garnered to move ahead anyway.

Real Growth (It's All About Audience)

Real growth comes from innovation. The research informed our decisions, but did not hold us back from trying new things and forming new partnerships with our community. The stations that provide the space for innovation continue to grow because of their continued creativity. Community service grew because of the focus on audience service. The stations I worked for that allowed creativity continued to grow long after I left. The innovation created by the talented staff shows everyday on the air. Today they are giving themselves a running chance for continued relevance in the changing media environment because they are willing to learn and to take risks.

The Point

The motivation for this blog came from two articles I read yesterday. The first from John Barth in Transom, "Ten Signs of a Daring Public Radio Station."  Take time to read it. It's a checklist of the things a public media outlet should be doing to keep relevance as its audience evolves. The second came from an article published by CNBC, "These are the top 10 most relevant brands to millennials."  I'm still in search of nuggets of information.

Surprised?

Two findings stand out in the Relevant Brands article that changed my thinking about millennials. Social Media is not included in the top of the list. They are in the top 100, but not the top ten. The most surprising was that Kitchen Aid is at number three ahead of Apple, Google and Samsung.  Kitchen Aid has remained relevant by innovating new products while still maintaining dependability and quality. They are connecting with millennials with their innovative use of Social Media. Kitchen Aid continues to connect with posted content on innovations, new products and creative ways to use their products.

Dare to be bold. Hire good people. Inform your staff while offering room to try things. The best thing I did was having really talented people around me while fostering their creativity.

BTW - We have two Kitchen Aid mixer. Does that make us hip?

They're Still Listening...You're appealing to their values!

Knowing Your Audience

PRPD rolled out the Core Values of Public Radio between 2002 and 2005. I thought it was a big deal then, not because I was on the PRPD board for a couple of years, but because the research was able to define why listeners chose to listen and support public radio. 

According to the latest research shared by Jacobs Media in their 2018 Tech Survey at the PRPD conference, Core Values continues to be the top reasons for listening. I'm assuming this is across all platforms.

Core Values are the top six main reasons for listening.

  More credible and objective programming  78%
  To be informed about the news  72%
  Enjoy learning new things  71%
  Deeper news perspective  70%
  Respects my intelligence  68%
  Balanced perspective  65%

Favorite Program made the top ten. So did presentation style.

Some long held beliefs about radio programming, that listeners tune in because its a habit and because it offers companionship and because it's free, are pretty far down this list. 

For wonky research driven, audience first types like me, Core Values crystallized the reasons for the high loyalty of public radio's listeners. It's good news that those values still hold true. 

The results of the Tech Survey confirms that Public Radio continues to serve it's audience.

Always Expect a Cow

Avoiding Surprises Behind the Wheel

I spend a lot of time these days talking about speed and inattention. Last year the United States led the world in distracted driving accidents. 1.6 million were due to use of  mobile devices. With so many other dangers on the rode, taking your eyes off the road for three seconds is foolishness.

When I was a reporter in Wisconsin, I used to travel to all the small towns around WNRR. Working there was my first experience as a journalist. I would gather police reports and write stories for the morning drive program. One story really stood out.

A driver in Little Chute was traveling at a high rate of speed up and over a hill at night. Just the other side of the hill were four cows. There was no way the driver was going to be able to stop in time. The police estimated he was traveling at over 70 miles and hour. The report focused on the death of the four cows. I had to ask about the driver. "Oh yeah, he died too."

In a way, it's like taking your eyes off the road. The driver that hit the cows couldn't possibly see what was on the other side. If he were driving slower (the speed limit was 50) he might have been able to avoid the cows. It might have been a near miss.

The video below demonstrates what happens when there's a combination of inattention and speed.




Slowing down five or ten miles an hour as you approach an intersection or come over the crest of a hill can make all the difference, that is, if you are paying attention.

Legislating Facts

Newspeak is Here

A free and open press helps protect us in a democracy and prevents the takeover of our government by a totalitarian regime. If Donald Trump or Rudy Giuliani have their way, the free press won't be a problem. They're doing their best right now to undermine a free and unfettered press. Giuliani comments, "They will have their facts and we'll have ours" and "Truth isn't Truth," only scratch the surface of what the neo-conservatives have been saying for over a decade. These same arguments have been part of the political scene for a while. Newt Gingrich and Kellyanne Conway talk freely about alternative facts. They want to cast seeds of doubt. No matter the legal outcome, they want to cast its legitimacy in doubt.

Once the press is marginalized, they will be free to legislate the facts.

Nations Built on Lies

Earlier this year Poland made it illegal to speak about their collaboration with Nazi Germany in World War Two. The new law imposes a prison term of up to three years for anyone who asserts that the anyone from the Polish Republic is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes.”  According to Robert Kinzer who wrote this piece published in the Boston Globe, "The purpose of this new law is entirely political. It wins cheers from chauvinistic nationalists, of whom there are evidently many in Poland. That provides votes to politicians who rail against the world and picture their nation as an innocent victim of history." Since Kinzer wrote the article, it looks as if the law will be watered down or reversed after international condemnation.

Not the First Time

Kinzer points out in his article that this is not the first time a country has tried this and it is easy to imagine what it would be like if other countries tried to change history by simply lying. His list includes:  

Austria: It is illegal to say that Hitler was born here, that most Austrians were thrilled when he absorbed Austria into the Third Reich, and that he was welcomed with delirious enthusiasm when he visited in 1938.

France: It is illegal to say that our troops supported Rwandans who carried out the 1994 genocide, and then, after their defeat, moved them into the Congo, where they have been rampaging ever since.

Great Britain: It is illegal to say that British imperialism was one of history’s most monstrous projects, brutally looting nations and sparking much of the chaos and hatred that now shakes the world.

Israel: It is illegal to say that our country sits on land that once belonged to Arabs, or that we chased them away in a campaign of ethnic cleansing in order to make room for victims of a crime that Arabs did not commit.

Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia, and Ukraine: It is illegal to say that our citizens joined Nazi death squads and concentration camp detachments in extraordinary numbers.

.United States: It is illegal to say that our country was built on the bones of slaughtered Indians and enslaved Africans.

Rewriting History - Altering the Facts 

Altering the facts can happen subtly. Civil War history was rewritten with the help of a wave of nostalgia created by Hollywood through "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind."

It can also be very unsubtle. The BBC recently published a report on the most dangerous places to be a journalist. These are places that do not allow a free press. The government wants to have total control over the flow of information. At his rallies Trump places the journalists in a pen in the middle of the crowd. He then singles out journalist in the pen encouraging violence against them. It is clearly an attempt to intimidate the press while inciting his base.

Most Dangerous Places for Journalists

North Korea is not on the list because they have complete control over the flow of information. It is interesting that Russia and the Philippines are in the top five. Two countries led by people Trump admires.  Murder isn't the only way silence journalists. Putting them in jail is another. According to the BBC 272 were put in jail in 2017. The BBC says, Countries with the highest numbers of journalists imprisoned for doing their jobs are: Turkey with 73 journalists, China with 41 and Egypt with 20.

Given the president,s propensity to lie, it does not seem far fetched that he is altering  the facts to suit his purposes. In fact, that is what he is doing now, and the pace of lies is increasing. The New Yorker reports, "In his first year as President, Trump made 2,140 false claims. According to the Washington Post, in just the last six months, he has nearly doubled that total to 4,229. In June and July, he averaged sixteen false claims a day. On July 5th, the Post found what appears to be Trump’s most untruthful day yet: seventy-six per cent of the ninety-eight factual assertions he made in a campaign-style rally in Great Falls, Montana, were “false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.” 

The founders of this country thought a free and unfettered press so important that they put it in the Constitution ahead of the right to bear arms.  They understood that information could provide a check and balance against the excesses of the powerful.  Think of it this way, There are facts and there are opinions. They are not the same thing. When people say they have differing facts, they actually mean they have a different opinion based on their perspective. It is not the same thing.

Public Media v Social Media: Advantage Social Media

It's Addictive

Social media apps are 'deliberately' addictive to users

How do you compete against something that is deliberately addictive? Does Public Media stand a chance when the deck is stacked?

In programming sessions we used to talk about how we had just seconds to draw in the listener before they would tune away. Once the audience is drawn into Social Media, they may never come back. A recent Pew study found that 45% of teens admit to face time with their screens all the time.

Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018

As an instructor I talk with teens about their media use. Most of them never listen to the radio. As Social Media addicts looking for the instant gratification of the like button, they haven't got time, and Public Radio isn't nearly as exciting.

Among adults, 59% say it would not be hard to give up Social Media, but that comment seems to be contradicted by the study published by the BBC. Indeed, among adults who grew up with Social Media, Millennials 18 to 24, 51% admit that it would be hard to give up social media.

Social Media companies are using color, sounds and unexpected rewards to drive compulsive behavior. A Social Media developer quoted in the article said quitting is a lot like trying to quit cigarettes, he went through withdrawal. I don't think anybody has said that about Public Media. Of course, we often talk about the news junkie during fundraisers. What happens if Social Media has a stronger allure?

Endless Scroll

Why is this so different? Listeners used to tune out all the time. If they were loyal to Public Media, they would always come back. One of the advantages of the of the newer technologies is the endless scroll. Users can thumb through an endless scroll of content. Public Media is just one of an almost endless stream of content. That's a shift from when we were a high quality choice among a few options. The competition is fierce, and the likelihood that we may never be seen or heard is increasing.

Millennials and Giving - It's Complicated

More Give Less

Millennials give less because they have less. 

Unemployment among millennials is high. Their unemployment rate is 7.2%. Among the youngest in this group, the rate is 14%!

Student loan debt is oppressive. The average is $37,000. 9.6% of those debts are past due.

Overall giving is down 12%.

On-line giving is up with Millennials leading the way.

Millennials are giving more than money. 

"They were far more likely to donate clothes, food and other supplies (41%) and volunteer their time (27%). While 22% of American adults gave more in 2017 than they did last year -- almost twice as many as the 12% who are giving less -- Millennials are showing how to make the most impact with the least cash."

Millennials are more likely to work for companies that give. Resurrecting the ideas of matching gifts might be a good idea.

Give.org finds that Millennials are the most generous generation in history. 



To find out more, go to thestreet.com.

You'll Lose Thousands of Listeners

WAMU recently replaced longstanding big band jazz program, "Hot Jazz." There's the usual reaction with angry calls...even a petition.

‘You will lose a lot of listeners’: Petition fights cancellation of WAMU’s ‘Hot Jazz Saturday Night’

Replacing programs on public radio has never been easy. I've done it. I feel your pain. I feel the listener's pain too. I've logged countless hours listening to complaints about program decisions. I didn't argue. I empathized. I thanked them for their support. I didn't change my mind. I didn't relent.

There's loyalty that builds among the core, but there's core as defined by the listener and core as defined by the program source. It's he larger core, the audience loyal to the radio station that I hoped to serve.

The Small But Loyal Audience

The small cadre of listeners loyal to a single program are always sure the programmers decision are wrong, misguided and foolish. They may say something like, "I've talked with all my friends, and they're really upset." I pointed out to one caller, "That's why they're your friends. You have common interests." That didn't mollify the caller. Despite the negative reaction from disgruntled listeners and flaming letters to the editor, my experience in all of these changes has been audience growth, not loss.

The point is, a station's audience divided up by small but loyal audiences has a much more difficult time generating listener support in numbers significant enough to be self sustaining.

A Bigger Picture

Core for the radio station is among the loyal listeners who tune in several times a week for a variety of programs. These are the people who support public radio over the long haul. They are the listeners who are most likely to be members. In the case of WAMU, that's 80,000 contributors out of a weekly cume of 730,000 listeners.

All Is Not Lost

Use the momentum of the petition to look for another platform. There are public and commercial radio stations other than WAMU that might be interested. Commercial radio stations (AM Stations) are clamoring for content on the weekend. There's also Internet Radio. Could this be the beginning of a big band music station. Then there are the possibilities presented by social media. Find you niche audience and super serve them with Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Podcasts and YouTube. There are many ways to get your content to your audience. Think beyond the box of your Philco radio.

Podcasts: How Long is Long Enough

What's the Sweet Spot?

Attention spans are falling. It's not that this problem is new. As a journalist I was taught to put the compelling information on top. Most readers would drop off before the tenth paragraph. (subheadings helped). In radio, stopset content over a minute causes tune out. Writers of long blogs are doomed. Maybe 5 percent might stick around for the conclusion. The sweet spot for YouTube is about four minutes. Since the inception of the smartphone, attention spans have dropped dramatically. Millennials have an attention span of eight seconds, but they aren't the only ones. 

Length A Barrier?

When it comes to podcast, length is for me. I'll often read the description, look at the length of the podcast, and find myself wishing I could read the text. I would rather skim the article to look for the pertinent information, then, if intrigued, I'll fill in the details by reading other parts of the article. If there is no text, I look at the length and usually decide not to bother. 45, 35 even 25  minutes seems daunting. I'm looking for the CliffsNotes version.

Podcast Sweet Spot

AudacitytoPodcast.com suggests the sweet spot is 30 to 45 minutes, about the length of a commute. That's really generous.

Cision.com claims the average length of a podcast is about 30 minutes with users actually listening 22 minutes. They cite the average commute at 20 minutes. Users prefer podcasts that are 16 minutes.

7 Podcasting Best Practice

Cision's Recommendations

1. Respect People's Time 
2. Plan Your Content 
3. Augment the Audio with Text (the complete text) 
4. Don't Use Listens to Measure Success 
5. Distribute - Promote - Embed 
6. Benchmark 
7. Master the Audio 

Longer isn't always better. In fact, longer doesn't seem to work for readers on the web. Slate found in 2013 that readers can't stay focused. About 5 percent of people who land on Slate pages and are engaged with the page in some way. Attention span is way down. A survey of Canadian media consumption by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span had fallen to eight seconds, down from 12 in the year 2000. We now have a shorter attention span than goldfish.

The #Cost of #Air #Pollution

What if we focus on policy and it's impact on the quality of life?

Easing the Standards

The EPA wants to ease the standards on air pollution. The reasoning is the standards get in the way of economic growth, but there's a trade off.  There's a cost much greater than the cost of clean air standards impose on industry.

According to the World Bank...

Air pollution costs the global economy more than $5 trillion annually in welfare costs, with the most devastating damage occurring in the developing world, according to a new World Bank report. The welfare figure incorporates a number of costs associated with air pollution like health and consumption.Sep 9, 2016

Bad air also costs lives...

What If We Focused on Issues and Policy?

Focus on the event...not the person.

When teaching students about road rage, I counsel, focus on the event instead of the person. The strategy diffuses the rage. The same strategy can be applied to the policies that are coming out of the Trump Administration. By focusing on the issues and coming up with next steps, there can be room for common ground and a way forward.

Recently HUD announced it wants to raise rent for those getting housing assistance. Those getting assistance fall well below the poverty line.

Rents Are Up...Income Is Not

Household Income Not Keeping Pace

Pew Research and APM's Marketplace are reporting that household income is not keeping pace with increases in rent. According to Pew, after the recession of 2007 - 2009 fewer people were able to transition from rentals to home ownership. Add to that the influx of millennials into the workforce increasing the demand for rentals, and the supply of rentals is down while demand is up.

The Rent Is Too Damn High

Millennials are taking a double whammy. Home prices stagnated and fell during the recession and its aftermath have rebounded to the higher prices seen during the bubble of 2007. Millenials are priced out of the market. Millennials aren't the only demographic facing the financial pinch.

American Families Face a Growing Rent Burden

17 million are rent burdened and the numbers keep going up. Rent Burdened is defined by HUD as cost-burdened families. Those “who pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing” and “may have difficulty affording necessities such as food, clothing, transportation, and medical care.” Severe rent burden is defined as paying more than 50 percent of one's income on rent.

The Pew study finds 38 percent of all renter households are burdened. Severely rent burdened households—spending 50 percent or more of monthly income on rent—increased by 42 percent. It is now 17% of all renters.


The chart below demonstrates that the problem has been getting worse since 2001.

Less Disposable Income

Households that are rent burdened have fewer dollars to spend. They often make choices between healthcare, food and education. 
According to Pew's findings:
Rent-burdened families are also financially insecure in many other ways:

• Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) had less than $400 cash in the bank; most (84 percent) of such households are African-American-headed.
• Half had less than $10 in savings across various liquid accounts, while half of homeowners had more than $7,000.

The growing disparity is leading to a growing underclass that is on the outside looking in with little hope of reversing their situation.  Our economy is stronger when our citizens are able to participate as individuals and as consumers. Keeping large portions of the population on the outside will only further divide us. 

And there's a growing cost of poverty. The cost of child poverty: $500 billion a year. The United States has the second-highest child poverty rate among the world's richest 35 nations, and the cost in economic and educational outcomes is half a trillion dollars a year, according to a new report by the Educational Testing Service.

End the disparity. Offer hope through living wages, educational opportunities and affordable healthcare.

Music Makes the Workload Easier

This blog isn't about what you and I might think our listeners ought to be hearing. It is about how a portion of our listeners spend their time listening to the music.  I've been through this discussion many times, but in order to serve your audience, you must have your audience in mind. You are here to serve the audience. There is no service of nobody is listening.

Core Values of Music

If you were part of the discovery of the Core Values Project, you might remember the revelation that the classical core used music as a way to help them concentrate on work and other tasks. Classical music has intensive and ambient qualities depending on what the listener brings to the music.

There's plenty of research to support that assumption.

The research was done by the Public Radio Program Directors Association. If you look at Qualities of the Heart and Spirit notice the top two qualities.

• Internal State (peaceful, soothing, relaxing)
• Inspired by Beauty and Majesty (of the music)

Head Clearing Experience

The Station Research Group published listener comments from the focus groups. Among them:

(3. CLASSICAL MUSIC CLEARS THE MIND AND HELPS LISTENERS FOCUS ON THEIR TASK)

• Classical music does alter your brain waves. 
• Has anybody else seen that? it has a physical reaction 
• …Lowers your blood pressure. 
• Yes, you can concentrate better. 
• ...Or whether it’s writing a poem and you just need the feeling. So then you want to listen to feeling. 
• It seems to be enjoyable yet you can achieve what you want to. 
• It just seems to help clear the way and make it easier. 
• It gives me something to focus on; it brings order into chaos. 
• If you listen to Bach, it just orders your mind. For some reason, if I have to do a lot of paperwork I love classical music
• I've heard they’ve done studies like Mozart stimulates your intellect or something.

Music Helps You Concentrate

Chad Grills, CEO of the Mission and publisher of the podcast The Story, wrote and article about 

The Science Backed Ways Music Affects Your Brain and Productivity

Among his findings:

• Music with lyrics works better with mundane tasks.
• Ambient music works better with more challenging tasks.
• Music can help relieve negative emotions like stress, anxiety and depression. 
• It can even decrease instances of confusion and delirium in elderly medical patients recovering from surgery.
• For the most part, research suggests that listening to music can improve your efficiency, creativity and happiness in terms of work-related tasks.

There are even some lines in the article you might want to borrow for your next fund raiser. The benefits of music could be applied to any format and platform.

Building Barriers

Do good fences make good neighbors?

Jericho  -  Divine intervention brings down the wall.

Troy  -  Greeks bearing gifts breaks the deadlock.

Korean DMZ  -  The DMZ has not brought peace, just an uneasy truce and continuous threats of war.

Vietnam DMZ  -  ummm...the North won.

Great Wall of China  -  At several points throughout its history the Great Wall failed to stop enemies, including in 1644 when the Manchu Qing marched through the gates of Shanhai Pass and replaced the most ardent of the wall-building dynasties, the Ming, as rulers of China. (Wikipedia)

Berlin Wall  -  A failing economy and the internet brought the wall down.

Maginot Line  -  The Germans went over and around the wall like it wasn't even there.

The Siegfried Line  -  On the Western Front, but Hitler had a two front war.

Trump's Wall? Why? What's the point?

iHeartMedia Bankrupt

What Happened?

• Huge Debt
• Weak Revenue
• 2008 Recession
• A Decade of Losses
• Digital Platforms

iHeartMedia is filing for Chapter 11. That means they want to halve the debt load down to $10 Billion.

IHeartMedia, largest U.S. radio station operator, files for bankruptcy to cut huge debt load

In Connecticut, iHeartMedia owns 9 stations including KISS, The River and Country 92.5.

Perhaps they paid too much when they bought all these stations? 

Inflated Value

In 2004, a decent FM signal was selling for $20 million in the Hartford Market. We were looking for a signal at that time to split our news and classical formats. The price was too high for us to move forward. The price was inflated because of demand and a hot market driven in part by Clear Channel buying up available frequencies. We found that servicing the debt would have been too big of a load. Looking back, it was the right decision.

Why Weekends Don't Work

Think Audience

Ever think about why your public radio weekends don't seem to attract an audience? Look at your churn.

Look at the Numbers

Check out your Morning Edition Numbers. If you have a daily cume of 36K and an AQH of 12K, your turnover ratio on that particular day is 3 to 1. The audience churns three times. 

If your cume on a Tuesday between 6a and 7p is 70k and your AQH is 10k, your turnover ratio is 7 to 1. The audience churns seven time

If your cume on a Saturday from 6a to 7p is 50k and your AQH is 5k, your turnover is 10 times.  

If you cume weeknights is 35k and the AQH is 1k, your turnover is 35 to one. 

Delivering an Audience

Given these numbers, how effective is to place a program initiative during the evening or late in the day on Saturday or Sunday? If you have ever wondered why so many programs fail, it is because you're not delivering an audience to that program. 

And...consider what audience churn means to fundraising. If your audience is constantly churning, there is no loyalty to the programming. Your ability to raise funds from listeners diminishes. That's why it is so hard to raise member dollars at night and most of Saturday and Sunday.

What's the Hang Up?

It's pretty simple. That crazy quilt of patchwork programming is causing all sorts of seams and barriers to listening. Each program says hello and goodbye with theme music wrapped around the edges. About the time a program starts to build an audience, it's over. You're starting fresh with each new element.  Also consider that radio listening doesn't start conveniently at the top of the hour. Listeners are loading in and out all the time. Without consistency, building audience becomes difficult.

10 Billion Strong

Dwindling Resources

Estimates are out from the United Nations that the earth's population will be 10 billion by mid century. Can that be sustained?


According to research published in 2011 by Live Science, 10 billion people is the uppermost population limit where food is concerned. Because it's extremely unlikely that everyone will agree to stop eating meat, Wilson thinks the maximum carrying capacity of the Earth based on food resources will most likely fall short of 10 billion.


By the middle of this century parts of the world will be experiencing some serious shortages. According to a report on NPR, "Already, roughly 800 million people go to bed hungry, according to this 2015 U.N. report. It says a full one-third of the world's food is wasted every year. If just a quarter of it could be recovered, it would be enough to feed 870 million people."

Income Inequality

To survive it is going to take a greater sharing of resources, but is that really going to happen? USA Today reported a couple of days ago that a new billionaire is created every other day. "Previous Oxfam reports have shown the world's richest 1% own more wealth than the rest of the global population combined, a trend that is reaffirmed in the latest report from Oxfam. "Oxfam said the massive inequality is being driven by factors that include excessive financial returns to company owners and shareholders at the expense of ordinary workers and the rest of the economy; the ability of rich individuals and corporations to use tax havens that allow them to evade or shield trillions of dollars from tax authorities; public policy that permits market conditions that push down wages and infringe on labor rights; and extreme wealth that is inherited, not earned." (USA Today - Inequality Crisis)


Previous reports from Oxfam show the world’s richest 1% own more wealth than the rest of the global population combined, a trend that is reaffirmed in the latest edition. A report from The Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank, warned in November that President Trump’s tax reforms would “exacerbate existing wealth disparities.”

Investing in Ourselves

Sharing the wealth is a big part of the discussion in Davos this week. French President Emmanuel Macron told the global elite to invest, share and protect to reign in the excesses of global capitalism. He stated the framework should be on cooperation and multilateralism.

You can read more about his speech at Bloomberg's website.