At Wits End

All Things Millennial?

I don't have much to say about the cancelling of Wits. It was touted as A Prairie Home Companion for a younger crowd.

I listened...sometimes. It was on Saturday night. That's not exactly prime listening time for radio. Even in its heyday, A Prairie Home Companion lost over half its audience in the last half hour on the stations where I worked.

Wits had its moments, but not enough to draw me in every week. I only listened if I happened to be in the car.


Wits was an attempt to find a new hit to replace Public Radio's aging stars like Wait, Wait, Car Talk and APHC. Those programs were anomalies. Most attempts to create the new shining star have failed, especially one hour programs. It is hard for a program to gain audience...unlike programming. Listeners have trouble finding a single program. Landing on, and listening to, a program stream with a consistent appeal is much more conducive to habitual listening. Being able to listen to programming that consistently meets a listeners expectations on a regular basis can lead to greater loyalty and a large enough audiences to support the programming.

There's a difference

Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition and Marketplace are programs that work well together and resemble programming. Wait, Wait, Car Talk and APHC appeal to the same core audience. It just seemed like Wits, with it's out of the way scheduling, was trying to change the way people listen to radio. That's an uphill battle. We had a music director at one of the stations I worked for who vowed he was going to change the way people used radio. All he managed to do was drive the audience away.

I was at a PRPD retreat in 2002 when a network exec stopped by to give us an update on the status of public radio programming. He told us there were a handful of programs that were breaking even or better. There were over 350 programs being offered at the time. The odds of success weren't good...even when times were good.

Location Matters

All of the public radio hits mentioned above air when people use radio...except for APHC. The programs are all well produced and appeal to the lifestyle and values of the public radio audience. They also air during times when listening to radio reaches its peak. They air during morning and afternoon drive, or during the midday bulge on the weekend. A Prairie Home Companion is the exception. We aired APHC twice on WNPR. We carried the live broadcast on Saturday evening. We repeated the program Sunday at noon. It was not long before the Sunday broadcast outperformed the Saturday broadcast. The reason...The potential for an audience was greater on Sunday at noon because more people use radio at that time.

There is no shame or blame. The effort to create something new and vital should be encouraged. We should endeavor to create new audiences and, more importantly, reengage the audience we already have with new ideas and perspectives.

Garrison Keillor 'Rethinking' Retirement Plans | AllAccess.com

It has to be hard to leave this all behind. Stay tuned. There will be more before 2013.

What's your thinking on this?
Should he stay?

Will he be on the road more? Less?
What's APM's take?

Are still able to raise member dollars around APHC?

Before you jump that shark (take it off the air)...find out what your core audience thinks. Don't base your changes merely on your fund drive.

I've made some hasty decisions in the past. Two were additions to the schedule and one was a deletion from the schedule. All three led to decreases in the core audience (P1 listeners). In the core there were fewer occasions and shorter duration per occasion. The result was a decrease in listener sensitive income (A combination of member dollars and underwriting revenue). The decreases were overall...not just during those programs.

In each case we made changes. We added back the show I dropped. We made a big deal about it with a special event, letters to members and an OES (Optimum Effective Schedule) promotional run. We were pretty quiet about the two shows we dropped. We had calls and letters complaining about the changes but, we were prepared with bullet pointed talking points. In the end we increased our core audience and increased occasions and duration.

Garrison Keillor 'Rethinking' Retirement Plans | AllAccess.com

Tom Keith Unexpectedly Passes Away

The Minneapolis Star Tribune is reporting that Tom Keith, the sound effects master of A Prairie Home Companion died after collapsing in his Woodbury Home this weekend.
Kieth was also responsible for some memorable characters on the show. They included Larry from under the basement, Maurice the maitre d from the Café Boeuf and Timmy the teenager.
There's a tribute on the Prairie Home Website. The show will have a tribute on the broadcast this weekend.

KCET drops PBS

KCET drops PBS, risks viewer loyalty to avoid $6.8M yearly dues

It's a risky decision indeed.

One of the questions we faced on a regular basis at Connecticut Public Radio was the high cost of National Programming. Was the programming really worth it? Could we cut our losses if we just cut a few of the really expensive programs like Car Talk or A Prairie Home Companion. It was even suggested briefly that Morning Edition was too costly. Couldn't we just cancel these programs to reduce our expenses? Surely there must be something almost as good that costs a lot less? If we do that can't we put some of the savings into local efforts?

Fortunately, we took a careful look at how our audience was using the station. I even wrote an article about it for Audience 98, Public Service Economics.

We used listener hours to determine how the audience was using our programming. We then compared revenue per listener hour against cost per listener hour to determine our return on investment. The three programs mentioned above generated a large portion of Connecticut Public Radio's listener hours. The costs per listener hour were more than offset by the way our listeners used the station.

For the sake of argument, suppose we took A Prairie Home Companion and Car Talk off the air to save $32,000 in 1998. Because those programs were carried by two other public radio stations, we would have lost most of those listener hours and the revenue they represented.  In 1998 Car Talk represented about $68,000 in listener sensitive income. A Prairie Home Companion represented about $110,000 in listener sensitive income. Listener Sensitive Income is a combination of the revenue from listeners, local underwriters and local foundations. The combined return on investment was $106,000.

These numbers are a lot smaller than the $6.8 million in dues paid by KCET. The number of viewer hours represented by KCET audience is a lot larger than the 56 million listener hours generated by WNPR.  KCET has probably put a lot of thought into their decision, but they are likely to lose several million viewer hours to the other PBS stations that serve the LA Basin. The drop in viewer hours will represent a drop in viewer sensitive income. The question is, did the viewer sensitive income offset the cost of the PBS programming?
Will the new local focus generate enough viewer interest to offset those costs?

'Prairie Home Companion' Host Garrison Keillor Suffered Stroke.

Sometimes I wonder about the fragile state of Public Radio’s hit shows. A Prairie Home Companion still matters to public Radio’s core audience. When I worked for WNPR fundraising around the program was often hit or miss. That didn’t mean the audience did not appreciate the program. The weekly audience was usually around 40,000 persons. The average audience was usually over 12,000. Core loyalty was usually over 70%. A Prairie Home Companion was a destination for the core audience. The core is the group of listeners most likely to give to public radio.

So what’s the big deal if Garrison decides in two years he wants to retire? Or, what if the Tom and Ray decide, because of failing health, to hang it up? It means that the audience that is most likely to contribute will be spending less time with their public radio station. The less time these listeners spend with their station, the less likely it is they will give.

The new compelling programming that draws in the core and creates new audience is in short supply. The latest public radio hit is Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! WWDTM is at least ten years old. It took a few years before it developed into the show it is now.

Garrison says he'll be back in just a couple of weeks. For now public radio does not have to face this issue.

What happens if public radio loses a hit like A Prairie Home Companion? Is there something in development that can replace it? I hope so. Like A Prairie Home Companion and Car Talk the go to place for the core might have to develop locally first.



You can read more about Garrison’s stroke in the Huffington Post.