BuzzMachine

It looks like bad news for Public Radio and its fans: CEO Ken Stern has been forced out. It appears that the stations did him in as they gun for his digital strategy because they fear the internet will hurt them.

Well guess, what, local yokels, hate to tell you this but… You’re screwed! You bet the internet is going to hurt you. There is no need for you as a distribution arm anymore. Unless you add valuable local content and service to the mix, you might as well tear down the tower now. Or in a year or two. Getting rid of Stern et al won’t get rid of reality.

This is the problem I see in all media: They think that protection is a strategy. It’s not.

The story on NPR’s site explains:

In addition, Stern led a major push in digital ventures. It stemmed from his often-repeated conviction that the old way of doing business wouldn’t work. Other diversions — such as cable television, online news sources, iPods, books on tape, video games and social networks — are siphoning audiences away from traditional broadcasters, including public radio stations. Stern argued that NPR shows and news and cultural segments increasingly had to be available on whatever platforms people wanted to hear them.

NPR is considered a leader in news and music podcasts. And under Stern it has also struck deals to deliver its content new ways, such as through cell phones.

But that push has aggravated anxiety among local stations about their relationship to the network. NPR member stations rely heavily on popular shows, particularly Morning Edition, to generate donations. But if people can listen to them through NPR’s Web site or even their own cell phones, why would they stay loyal to stations still reliant on pledge drives?

Interviews with eight current and former public radio officials suggest Stern failed to convince local stations — and especially their representatives on the board — that he saw a clear and healthy role for them in the digital future.

That’s because there may not be one.

I said that at NPR sometime ago when I visited with other graybeards of the social media world, giving them our solicited advice. Here was my prognostication then about local radio. It was crystal clear to me at the time that the stations — especially those that served only as distribution outlets — had no viable future. I advised that they should figure out how to shift the local stations to new roles in their communities. I loved the NPR strategy — Stern’s strategy — of getting maximum distribution for programming. That, after all, is also part of the mission of a publicly supported broadcaster. Isn’t it?

And there are other models for local support. When I wrote about reverse syndication as a model for national coverage in newspapers, served up by the New York Times and its competitors, John Proffitt suggested that this could be a model for NPR.

I’ve begun to promote a similar idea, specifically in the public media world. Local public TV and public radio stations today pay hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions to NPR, PBS, APTS, PRI, APM and other content providers (with NPR and PBS being the most obvious). This has stifled the local public media companies’ ability to produce local content. They blow all their cash paying the networks.

Reverse syndication in this world, to my thinking, is to have the networks sell their content to the public (ads, membership revenue) and give all the content to the local media outlets for free — with the caveat that embedded ads pass through with the content. Local outlets could then produce local media and still pick from the best national media and arrange it into locally-relevant streams/blocks on the web, on transmitters, etc.

This would also clean up the nasty co-dependent relationships between the local stations and the networks, as it would clarify the roles of each.

That’s the kind of thinking NPR and its stations desperately need. Not protectionism of the past.

: Here’s Robert Patterson, who brought me to NPR, on today’s news.

: LATER: I don’t understand the politics of NPR that went into this. And I know there are visionary stations doing good and new things. I just fear that defining radio around towers and their location — like defining newspapers around presses and theirs — is dangerous.

So let’s get a discussion going on what NPR can and should do now for the future. What’s your vision? I’ll pipe in more later.

: LATER STILL: See the comment by Dennis Haarsager, interim CEO, below.

Seldom do you get it from the horse’s mouth, and this will be short, but go to my blog sometime tomorrow and I’ll publish a longer version. Until mid-day yesterday, I was chair of the NPR board, and since yesterday afternoon, I’m the new interim CEO. The scenario you outlined in your opening paragraph is dead wrong and so was the first part of the Washington Post story today. It’s what happens when speculators become sources. If station management wanted to kill off or slow down emerging media, their board picked the wrong boy. Read my blog archives for the past four years. More to come Saturday at http://www.technology360.com/. Regards, Dennis Haarsager

: A NOTE TO DENNIS: I would suggest that NPR and you should have announced this in your blogs and engaged in a conversation about this with your supporters — not just your fans, of course, but the people who give you money. You handed this story over to the press and you left your real board — the public — in the dark. The sooner that conversation starts, the better, because there are people who like NPR out here — and have ideas for its future — who are worried.

The BBC’s amazing Peter Day is the best reporter I know on the radio. As a story-teller, he stands alongside the U.S. radio icon, This American Life’s Ira Glass. But his shows are entirely different; Peter reports on business and the world but with stories instead of numbers. He is a great interviewer and a genius at tying together his questions, answers, facts, and observations into a compelling narrative. I listen to his show on my iPod every week and play it for my students at CUNY as an example of both good interviewing and effective radio.

The Daily Mail is properly impressed that Peter’s In Business podcast is the top among BBC ‘casts, outdrawing even entertainment shows with big and expensive names: “More than 730,000 people downloaded Mr Day’s weekly podcast during September – 110,000 more than those who downloaded the second-placed show, Best of Chris Moyles, a weekly highlights compilation of his Radio 1 breakfast show. . . . Stephen Chilcott, the editor of In Business, said: ‘Peter may not be a household name but he’s an institution inside the BBC. People rave about him in their blogs and young entrepreneurs talk about him in hushed terms, saying he’s changed the way they think about business.’ ”

In the same edition, Peter writes with characteristic humility about how he does it and with characteristic eloquence about what radio really is:

Until now listeners have been remote: all we had was ratings to tell us who was listening, and a few appreciative or moaning letters. Now we have a new democracy of broadcasting: listening habits made manifest, ratings created by listeners making an active desision to download a particular programme.

Radio is music, chat and news but most of all it is ideas, and podcasting is going some way to redefine the ideas that interest our listeners. Podcasting is a new kind of listening, much more active and involved than merely sitting back to wait for what comes next.

It makes us broadcasters think much harder about who what and why we are talking to. It moves broadcasting much closer to conversation.

I wonder how many broadcasters in the U.S. would think that radio is about ideas but, of course, it is. If it’s only about sound, as too many of our stations are, it’s boring.

(Here is Peter’s show about blogs, featuring me talking so fast I scared even myself.)

This American Life’s Ira Glass, who oversees what we journalists think is one of the last great hopes for “long-form journalism” (as it is so haughtily called), doesn’t necessarily call what he does journalism at all. From a Times Q&A leading up to his new Showtime video version of the show:

Q: How do you think your work differs from traditional journalism?
A; We’re taking the tools of journalism and applying them to people whom you wouldn’t normally apply them to — people who aren’t famous, people who aren’t powerful, people just like you and me.

Q; What are you talking about? Journalism has always had human-interest stories.
A; But a newspaper probably wouldn’t run an article where a cop remembers one weird incident with a squirrel when he was a rookie. That’s too far from any kind of normal news hook.

I’d say that’s false journalistic modesty. If journalists are storytellers, Glass & Co. are the masters of the craft.

Faith Salie has the most endearing voice on radio. Click below and listen to her on Fair Game, a new show aimed at a younger audience, and you’ll want to propose.

It’s not a voice or, for that matter, a personality we hear on public radio news shows, where the tones are stentorian and authoritative (hear: Nina Totenberg). Salie is relaxed and funny — though, as her radio bio emphasizes, she’s not dumbing down NPR stations; she’s a Rhodes scholar and Harvard graduate. I’ve been listening to her on my iPod, fascinated by the show’s attempt to liven up public radio (especially after visiting NPR last week). So I was delighted when a call came to appear on Fair Game and doubly delighted that it was to talk about my new endeavor, PrezVid.

Before I got on, they were talking about the Jesus bones, not afraid of rattling the cultural safety latch, doing a shtick about a Jesus Jurassic park with cloned Messiahs and speculating with a theology professor about how hard it will be to get Jesus DNA (Salie guesses that a communion wafer probably won’t do the trick).
It was daring without acting daring and what I liked best was that the intelligence comes out in the wit.

I wanted to video the interview but with Salie as a TV personality, that caused complications. So here’s just a snippet from the control room below. And here’s the interview.

Click To Play

Andy Carvin at NPR put up podcasts of part of last week’s discussion there about social media — two hours at an open session with NPR staff. Part 1. Part 2.

At last week’s meeting of the minds at NPR, there was much discussion about the difficult position local stations find themselves in as the value of their distribution diminishes. And it was said, as an article of faith or perhaps reflex, that going local is the answer — the same answer given for newspapers these days. But as I thought about it on the train ride back, I wondered what that really means.

Obviously, it’s not easy for a radio station to get hyperlocal; it has just one big pipe and no resources to cover a market broadly. It’s not easy for newspapers, either, but they clearly have a headstart with a larger staff of reporters and the ability to slice their products into local zones. So I asked myself what the strength of a radio station is and the answer’s apparent: promotion. A station can drive a sizable audience to something new online. But what do they get when they get there? And what content on the radio station continues to draw the audience to give it that promotional power? Not easy questions.

I’d start and the end and say that a local radio station must stop thinking of itself as radio. It has the power to develop local communities of news, information, and interest. It can use its promotional power to drive people there. It could, for example, get people in a market to record every damned school board and town council meeting and put them online, served by the station. It could create the meeting place where people share news and information, competing with or even in cooperation with local papers. It could be a home for talk about local issues and news.

So what is the on-air content? It’s not hyperlocal. But it could be a meta version of that: talk about the issues that cut across the region with reporting from the best of the local communities. It could feature the best citizen critics giving you reviews of local arts and entertainment. I don’t come up with much here. So I’d say that the station has a limited time frame in which to use its promotional power.

Here’s Zadi Diaz’ take on the same issue out of the same meeting:

So why listen to radio?

There will always be a need to connect in real-time. To know that there is another person on the flip side that can give you perspective on the present and can communicate back to us. It’s a living, breathing thing. And in a world that becomes progressively automatic, the need to connect on a deeper level will grow.

People like to be social. Twitter is proof of that. To me twitter is the text version of a well-oiled ham radio. People sending out ideas, and questions, and mundane little things that may only be of importance to a handful. But it’s that instant live connection that makes it so special. You know what someone is doing at that very moment. And in a sense, it puts you there with them.

People also love to tell their stories. To each other. Conversation. The thing about Twitter that makes it electric is that there are multiple conversations going on at once. You become a receptor, a connector, and a storyteller all at once. I feel this is the key to the future of live broadcasting:

Becoming a converstation. No misspellings there.

Creating a converstation within NPR can only benefit everyone involved. Maria Thomas, who invited us to the panel discussion spoke about how NPR was born of storytellers. It immediately conjured images in my mind of people sitting around a campfire and sharing their stories. Around that campfire there is the storyteller and the people listening. The storyteller isn’t in a vacuum, there is ambiance, they occupy space, they are also listening to the listeners. The storyteller is the independent producer who is an expert in the story they tell. NPR can build small campfires and enable those storytellers to begin and ultimately develop the grandest story of all.

Local member stations+storytellers= campfires

Campfires can especially grow in a beautiful way online. The use of a website becomes less about providing news (we have feeds for that), and more about being a social hub where people can go to connect. There is a reason why there are so many social networking sites. Why can’t organizations think of their websites like they do their buildings?
- You have your reception area where the receptionist answers your FAQs
- Office spaces which are only accessible to employees
- Conference rooms where you hold meetings
- Mess hall where people from inside can congregate and speak to each other
- Lobby where people from the outside can talk to each other and to the employees
- Etc.. play room?

If you’re not afraid to open up your building to the public, there should be no fear of opening up your web site to a little one-on-one communication.

So what you end up with is an endless number of little radio stations making their own connections. The old radio station is some collection of the best or widest of that.

I’m still not satisfied that there is a great answer for local radio. But if the Siriux, XM merger (below) goes through, I think that creates more opportunities for local NPR radio. The rest of radio — from the big companies and from satellite — will be national. NPR member stations can be the last outpost of local radio. They can’t afford to get more local on their own but they can do it in partnership with their listeners.

: Zadi was nice enough to note:

- just googled the word “converstation” and realized Jeff had blogged about the word a while back. How funny.

It’s great news that Sirius and XM have agreed to merge — and the FCC has every reason to approve the move. Without this, one of them would likely fold anyway. With it, we get the best of both their talent and technology and they can compete with terrestrial radio — which, Lord knows, needs the competition — and iPods. I’m a Stern fan and Sirius stockholder and satellite user and I’m all for this.

In the U.K., they are beginning to debate the death of AM radio.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of assholes*. Clear Channel, the radio monster, is looking to sell itself to go private, according to the Times. Why? Because the radio business sucks.

This is why I have not feared media consolidation. Clear Channel, the poster child for evil media conglomerates, bought up stations and sucked cash out of them but now there’s not much left to suck. Consolidation is the act of a dying industry. Well, broadcast won’t die. But it sure as hell won’t grow.

At an NAB/RTNDA panel yesterday in front of mainly local TV news execs, I said their salvation will be in being very local and in using the asset of broadcast, while it is still an asset, to drive people to new and local services online that take advantage of the disarray in the newspaper industry to lurch ahead of them in citizen collaboration for hyperlocal news and in hyperlocal and directory advertising to support it.

I think the same may be true of radio, which is ironic, being that Clear Channel, et al, leached the local out of the medium. As the value of broadcast licenses falls, I’ll bet we’ll start seeing the deconsolidation of some of these companies as radio and TV stations, like newspapers, are sold off one-by-one (see the post directly below). If the FCC had lifted crossownership restrictions, as Michael Powell tried to do a few years ago, those stations would have been bought up by newspapers, or vice versa. But now, with the value of both in free fall (see that post below), I’m not sure that local consolidation will pay anymore (see also the disintegrating Tribune Company, which did benefit from crossownership… until now).

So, to bring the parlor game to the radio business now, what would I do with Clear Channel? I’d plan on an imminent future when people will get their programming delivered to them by the internet and mobile and satellite and I’d use local promotional power to drive the business there. As I said above, I’d make some set of the stations very local and I’d use that to drive local businesses that grab marketshare of news, audience, and local advertising from panicked newspapers. Or I’d just sell to the next idiot.

* The real reason I’m happy to see the owners of Clear Channel retreat is because they fired Howard Stern and did not stand up for free speech and the First Amendment against the FCC and a tiny band of reputedly religious nuts.

Tomorrow and Thursday, the world will be able to listen to Howard Stern for free again. And it’s going to be a good two days with a radio sitcom by Sam Simon of The Simpsons and a Gary Dell’Abate roast.

It’s a brilliant marketing move to push not only Stern on Sirius but also a new offering: an internet-only subscription to 75 of the channels online, no radio or antenna required. Note that subscribers with radios also get the internet feed included. But if you want to listen in an office or in Munich, like a letter-writer on this morning’s Stern show, you can.

More than a year ago, I argued in an open letter to Mel Karmazin (cheeky bastard, I am) that he should be doing just this: Don’t be trapped by your distribution, don’t think of yourself just as a satelllite company, be the radio company of the future.

There’s still one more thing I want: Howard as a paid podcast. As part of my subscription, I want to be able to catch up on Howard on my terms, without having to go to the hassle of recording or buying the new radio that can record. I missed the amazing show when Artie Lange talked about his heroin use and kicked myself. Thanks to a fellow Stern fan — a media exec in a suit; there are more of us in this club than you dare to imagine — I got to listen because he recorded it so he can listen to the whole show in his car. Now that Stern is being repeated around the clock, I actually find myself timing my commute so I hear different parts of the show in the morning and evening. I’d rather listen to it all on my iPod.

Once Stern et al are available however, wherever, and whenever I want them, then Sirius will truly be the radio company of the future.

Next: video.

At last, This American Life has thrown off the limitations of being sold on Audible. It’s now a free podcast.

Doc has a wonderful list of suggestions for newspapers. As a preface, he asks and answers why Wall Street hates the LA Times: “Simple: Because newspapers are a rusty industry. They have tail fins. They print lists of readers every day on the obituary page. Worse, as a class they are resolutely clueless about how to adapt to a world that is increasingly networked and self-informing. And Wall Street knows that.” I’ve been working on my own list. Bonus link: Doc’s prescription for his beloved radio.