Radio tries contrasting flavors as it brings more news to town

Originally published in Current, May 30, 2006

By Mike Janssen

Concentrating on news has done wonders for the first public radio station to adopt it in a number of cities. Now a few big-market stations are seeing whether an alternative news format will do the same for a second station in town.

Chicago Public Radio and WETA in Washington, D.C., are entering relatively uncharted territory by targeting underserved audiences with different flavors of the news format. WETA won a larger piece of Washington’s news audience by devising a format with an international tilt, and the Chicago broadcaster is planning a news service with a radically different sound aimed at a younger, more racially diverse demographic. In Seattle/Tacoma, meanwhile, KUOW is considering courting younger listeners with KXOT, a full-power FM signal it will take over July 1.

Few stations have set out to become the second noncommercial all-news outlets in their markets, as these have, but public radio consultants argue that a coherent, systemwide strategy for differentiating news formats could expand audience and shield the system’s main franchise of NPR news from competition.

A 2004 Station Resource Group analysis argued that commercial outlets can supplant public radio’s music programming more easily than its news, at least for now. To stay on top with news, SRG said, public radio should attack its own news stations.

“Ten years from now, we envision two or more public radio stations doing complementary, differentiated news formats in major markets,” the report said. “The result would be dramatic increases in public service and public support.”

New audience for WBEZ?

Chicago Public Radio is developing its second news format, to launch early next year on a pair of stations south of Chicago. WBEW in Chesterton, Ind., and WBEQ in Morris, Ill., have repeated WBEZ, its main signal, since they were purchased in 2002 and 2003, respectively. WBEW will be upgraded from 7,000 to 50,000 watts, extending its reach to cover Chicago and its southern suburbs as well as northern Indiana. The Chesterton signal will cover a population of 4.4 million, overlapping the 7.7 million potential audience of WBEZ.

In 2004, management planned to program the two signals with eclectic music. But the licensee changed direction in February and began developing “a different way of doing public affairs,” says President Torey Malatia.

Malatia says changes in how people listen to music inspired the shift. Since his station announced plans for the music format in 2004, the Web and satellite radio have become far more popular as music outlets, and Chicago has “hundreds” of music stations, he says.

“The question was: Do we really have any hope of making a mark with an eclectic-music format or any kind of music format?” Malatia asks. “Terrestrial radio is seeing a great deal of its influence in drawing music listeners distilled by these other technologies.”

Although the decision angered some local musicians and jazz fans, Chicago Public Radio opted for a news format—but not a news station in pubradio’s typical style. It’s designing a news format for people turned off by conventional public radio.

“If you’re only reaching a portion of the people in your community, then something is wrong, and you need to find a way to reach more,” Malatia says.

For two years, Chicago Public Radio has studied its local audience with surveys and focus groups. People of color asked to sample WBEZ found it boring, self-righteous, too narrowly focused and detached from their everyday concerns.

“There is a kind of self-satisfaction that public radio communicates to its listeners about itself that I’m afraid we’re not very honest about with ourselves as broadcasters,” he says.

Identity workshops have not yet produced a name for the new service. But Daniel Ash, WBEZ’s v.p. of strategic communications, says its sensibility is captured by “The Street,” a moniker not available in the city.

As Malatia describes it—and the format is still under development—WBEW will try to reach new listeners by concentrating on local news and public affairs and covering  topics in a more approachable manner. The goal is to attract an audience 23 to 39 years old, compared with WBEZ’s current listeners, nearly three-quarters of whom are older than 35, Ash says. The listenership would be at least 45 percent nonwhite, reflecting the region’s population, he said.

WBEZ’s ethnic breakdown isn’t headed in that direction now. The black and Hispanic share of its Arbitron audience averaged 17 percent over the past five years but fell this winter to 7 percent, says Ron Jones, v.p. for programming. Dropping NPR’s News and Notes with Ed Gordon in December may have turned away some black listeners, he says.

The listeners targeted for the added news channel now get their news from commercial talk radio or morning shows on music stations. The people of color in the station’s focus groups favored a commercial radio blend of news and entertainment, delivered in a casual, vernacular style.

Though that news may be entertaining, it can also be inaccurate, poorly researched and inadequate for listeners’ decision-making, Malatia says.

WBEW will feature no distinct programs but instead present a series of hosts delivering segments that encompass news, humor, music, narratives, commentaries and call-ins. The service may also use programming from independent producers and the Public Radio Exchange. A website will extend the station’s programming,with blogs, discussion forums and social networking features to engage visitors.

The station will be eclectic, irreverent and energetic, Malatia says, with looser standards for audio quality if the content stands out. He cites MTV, Current TV, This American Life and WBEZ’s weekday morning magazine Eight Forty Eight as forerunners. The style will seduce listeners into caring about local issues they might otherwise ignore, he says.

“You attract them with other things . . . and they find themselves engaged by the mission,” he says. “The mission is always there and working, but it’s undercover.”

Web stream goes on air in Seattle

KUOW will start with a more tried-and-true approach with KXOT. The orphaned station went dark in January when another Seattle station, University of Washington-owned KEXP, was unable to continue paying to use it as a repeater. KUOW will take over payments to Public Radio Capital, which bought the FM channel two years ago to expand public radio service in Seattle/Tacoma.

With an upgrade to 40,000 watts, the added channel will reach more than half of KUOW’s coverage area. It will air a new version of KUOW2, a news/talk schedule that KUOW now provides as a web stream and digital multicast channel. The stream features national programs not carried on KUOW, including Fresh Air, The Diane Rehm Show and Talk of the Nation.

Jeff Hansen, KUOW’s p.d., says KXOT will air news because that’s what public radio listeners most want to hear. Listeners ask why the station doesn’t carry certain national shows, he says. Furthermore, public radio’s primary music formats—jazz, classical and Triple A—already air on several commercial and noncommercial stations in Seattle.

KXOT is likely to appeal to KUOW listeners, at least initially. But Hansen and colleagues are thinking about pursuing younger listeners. While music is the lure for most pubradio stations with younger audiences, such as KEXP and KCRW, Hansen says, “we want to see what we can do with news and information.”

Hansen admits he doesn’t know yet how to tailor a news schedule for younger listeners, but he suspects one attraction might be KUOW2 Presents, a showcase for independent productions culled from PRX, some by young producers. No major national programs are tailored especially for the demographic, however.

“The system is kind of schizophrenic about this,” Hansen says. “It wants to serve a younger demographic better, but it doesn’t really want to do what you have to do.” He cites the example of Pop Vultures, a national show that had the potential to reach younger listeners but fizzled because few program directors carried it.
That may not be surprising, since some pubradio execs believe they should concentrate on serving their core audience, expecting that younger generations will come around. Other programmers fear pubradio will stagnate without an infusion of young listeners.

In coming years, Hansen says, KUOW could start producing KXOT shows aimed at twenty- and thirty-somethings, and perhaps by then national producers will be ready to follow suit.

Global news boosts WETA

At WETA-FM in Washington, the switch to news was regarded as a matter of survival. The audience for its news-classical format was falling, along with audience support, and station executives decided that only a format change would reverse its fortune.

At the time, February 2005, competitor WAMU-FM already offered a strong lineup of national news shows
WETA opted to drop weekday classical music and pursue a news audience that was not fully tuned into pubradio—the area’s large immigrant and diplomatic communities. The station added several daily news programs from the BBC World Service, as well as a selection of PRI and NPR talk shows that had poor hours, if any, on WAMU. (Included now are On Point, News and Notes with Ed Gordon, Day to Day and Fresh Air.)

The switch appears to be working in terms of audience size. WETA’s cume in fall 2005 was 346,300, up 7 percent from a year before, and its average quarter-hour audience was 13,800, up 19 percent from fall 2004. The station’s membership churned significantly, however, as some music fans stopped donating, and the winter pledge drive was off 15 percent compared with last winter, according to Dan DeVany, v.p. and g.m.

But DeVany is cheered by informal talks with new members in their late 20s to mid-30s—he says the new donors tend to skew younger than WETA’s previous audience. They’re also more racially and ethnically diverse. “They really understand what we’re trying to do,” he says. “They like the different perspectives on the news.”

Both WETA and WAMU also face new competition from the Washington Post and Bonneville Communications, which launched in March what a Bonneville exec predicted would be “NPR on caffeine.” But despite respect for the two partners, DeVany has become less concerned since hearing the AM/FM combo, which launched in March.

“What they’re doing is talking to Post reporters about stories they’re working on,” DeVany says. “That’s about it.”

WETA, meanwhile, plans to add local perspectives to its mix. A weekly arts and entertainment magazine, Out and About with 90.9, now airs on Saturday with a Sunday repeat, co-anchored by former classical host Nicole Lacroix and critic Joe Barber. But the station’s big investment is its first daily talk show within memory, The Intersection, coming in July.

DeVany says the station will spend an extra $500,000 a year to add seven editorial staff members for The Intersection. Rebecca Roberts, a talk host from San Francisco’s KALW-FM and daughter of pubcasting regulars Cokie and Steve Roberts, will host the show, and Julie Drizin, former senior producer of the national issues program Justice Talking, is managing producer. Two reporters, who will provide taped reports to kick off discussions, and three additional producers are in the budget.

Up against Diane Rehm’s second hour on WAMU and a lifestyle talk show on Washington Post Radio, The Intersection will add the local element to WETA’s morning talk lineup, says DeVany. The one-hour show will be sandwiched between its national counterpart On Point, from Boston’s WBUR, and the BBC World Service global talker World Have Your Say.

By bringing in the sounds of the street, the reporters will help create a distinctive, energetic show, Drizin says.

DeVany believes stations in other cities will have to follow the example set by WETA-FM and Chicago Public Radio. “If public radio is going to continue to be relevant and is looking to develop audiences, it’s going to have to reach out to nontraditional public radio audiences on a local level,” he says.

Targeting new listeners by age and race is just one approach, however, and SRG’s 2004 study proposed that it may not be the best one. For example, analyzing audiences psychographically, using tools such as the VALS [Values and Attitudes] system, has helped NPR understand its appeal to certain audiences, the study said.

To make progress in differentiating news formats, the system must put some thought into the basis of differentiation, says Tom Thomas, co-c.e.o. of SRG. Rather than taking the “easy out” of demographics, he says, it may be more useful to consider how listeners use all-news services and the settings in which they use them. They might prefer a just-the-facts headlines service or one with a more relaxed and companionable tone.

“We’re at the very earliest scouting stage, before we even start hunting and gathering in this process,” Thomas says.