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.

Good King Wencelsas: Champion of the Poor

The Good King

Tom Manoff filed an interesting story on NPR about The Duke of Bohemia, King Wenceslas. The carol has been one of my favorites for a long time. (even more fun than the wassailing tune). Wenceslas was an early advocate of social justice and an early Christian. The last line of the carol sums up the King's Christian mission. "Ye who now will bless the poor / shall yourselves find blessing." 

Perhaps, a good reminder for the 1%, or at least the politicians who seem to be their champions.
 
Take a moment to listen to Manoff's report on NPR.

The Evil Bother

According to an article in Wikipedia he was the duke of Bohemia from 921 until his assassination in 935. His younger brother, Boleslaus the Cruel, was complicit in the murder. A group of nobles allied with Boleslaus plotted to kill him. The King was invited to a feast. At the feast three of the nobles attacked him. His brother is said to have Wenceslas through with a lance.

Is it a case of no good deed goes unpunished? Boleslaus and his allies acted to take control at a time of increasing tensions with the German Provinces. Boleslaus may have also been influenced by his pagan mother in a reaction to the growing influence of Christianity. Boleslaus later repented and became a Christian.

There's more about Wenceslas and traditional caroling  at"On Point."

Public Broadcasting's Upward Trend

Data provided by the Pew Research Center shows modest yet steady growth among Public Radio's news oriented stations. Data shows increases from 2015 to 2016.

Take a look at these trends. How does the data from your station stack up against the benchmarks established by national trends?  (If you need help with that, let me know.)

• Listenership if up 11% among the top 20 station.

• NPR programming is up 14%.

• PRI Programming is up 12.5%.

• Public Radio's digital presence is on the rise.

• PBS NewsHour grew 22%.

• Revenue went up at the national level for NPR and PRI. APM saw a decrease. According to Pew, "At the national level NPR increased its total operating revenue in 2016 to $213 million, up 9% from 2015 levels. PRI saw gains as well, rising 26% to about $22 million in total revenue for 2016. APM’s total revenue, on the other hand, went down 6% year over year, accounting for $126 million in 2016."

• Locally, earnings have been relatively flat.

• News oriented station increased investment in their news gathering resourced about 5% from 2014 to 2015.

• Viewership for commercial network news declined 1% to 24 million viewers.

• Cable news networks increased 55% to 4.8 million viewers.

• Newspaper subscriptions dropped 8% between 2015 and 2016. Subscriptions are up slightly since the election.

Your Schedule Matters

I recently saw a posting from somebody in charge of content at a public radio station wondering about what program she could acquire to replace "Dinner Party Download." The question made me pause. As somebody who was once in charge of content at a small statewide network, I worked diligently to create a consistency in programming. The question for me was not about individual programs, but about the service as a whole.

Coming out of the 80's, public radio was in a quest to create a consistent appeal through the selection of content that had a affinity. Disparate programs could have that affinity, but that does not mean that all content worked well with other content. One of the discoveries was that patchwork programming resulted in barriers and rifts in the audience. The more programs in the daily program grid would likely result in audience churn and lower time spent listening and lower core loyalty. The idea was to create consistency across day parts. A question that was often asked of PD's in those early days was, "Can you tell me what is on the air at your station right now?" Programmers with a crazy quilt of programs had a hard time answering that question.

The big discoveries were the inconsistent appeals between news content and music programming like classical and jazz...and the opera with everything else in public radio. But, even content that on the surface seemed to have consistent affinity and appeal might not have. At a network in the Midwest with a consistent schedule of locally produced talk shows had problems of churn. The audience was not carrying over from program to program. The audience was defined by the programs not the programming. The loyalty was built among a micro-set of listeners and did not carry over to other programs or day parts. The host would sign-off and so would the audience.

The station mentioned above has been drifting toward patchwork programming with inconsistencies in program selection horizontally across hours. That's a problem because radio listening is habitual. Listeners tend to tune in at the same time everyday. If the programming they seek is not there, they tune away.

Public station that perform well with their audience have a consistency across day parts and even horizontally across hours.  Look at stations that perform well and take note of the consistency of their schedules.

Michigan Radio 

WAMU

WBUR

KUT
WHYY
KPCC
KQED

The question should be, "How can I best serve my audience and my community." There are so many good programs. How do you make room for them all? You can't. You're the gatekeeper. You need to make the decisions. It's never been easy. For example, What are you supposed to do with something like "Science Friday?" You can only answer that question by looking at the numbers. Make informed decisions and measure the results.