10 ms·

Ira Glass: Public radio can capitalize on its popularity without selling out

67 points by pwenzel 11y ago

tptacek 11y ago
Avid public radio listener, WBEZ member. I guess I'm not opposed to scaling up program underwriting, but I wonder what it is about the structure of NPR and program buying that prevents shows like Ira Glass's TAL from just making their money on "the back end". Long-term, FM radio NPR is not going to last. As radio shifts from FM to the Internet, local stations will matter less, and NPR/PRI will increasingly become a Knight Foundation-like seed fund for new shows. The ones lucrative enough to raise extra money can use all of the tools of the Internet to monetize and expand.
- lfowles 11y ago
  > Long-term, FM radio NPR is not going to last. I'm curious, what do you think will replace FM NPR in cars? In Wichita, KS, I'm lucky to get cell data service before I'm a mile out of the city. Maybe I'm reading too much into an "FM Radio will not last" interpretation.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    I've switched to listening to NPR exclusively using podcasts. I do find I'm behind on current events though, even major ones, such as riots, but I attribute that to me not having added any current event shows, such as morning edition, which I believe also comes in podcast form. I use Pocket Casts for android to handle automatic downloading of specific sets of podcasts when my phone is on wifi and plugged in, out of the larger set I've decided is interesting, so getting the content is really a non-issue for me (and I wholeheartedly recommend Pocket Casts!). It's worth noting that my lack of awareness of current events persists even though I get a good dose of random pop radio in the morning while dropping my children off at school, so I don't attribute that problem as much to a lack of FM radio as I do to a lack of news radio.
    - secabeen 11y ago
      You're also missing local news and much of the mid-tier state news. That doesn't always matter, but when it does, it really does.
  - derefr 11y ago
    Instead of the "directly-streamed linear programming" model, you could do radio audio broadcast the same way you do GPS: just have the local radio towers spraying some selection of podcasts on a loop (with high enough frequency+bandwidth+compression that the effective audio rate is faster-than-real-time, unlike satellite radio), and then have "radios" in cars (or wherever) which catch the files and cache them. You can build whatever you like on top of that—a hybrid device that will siphon up local OTA content along with arbitrary podcasts when it can find 4G, and then intelligently arrange the combination into linear programming, for example. (Really, though, you're just creating a weird sort of secondary internet that only allows retrieval of files relevant to the local area. In fact, you could make the "radio" into a 4G picocell that actually re-serves said limited internet to your phone, where the OTA content then shows up in your regular podcast app.) Effectively, this would be the over-the-air equivalent of how pay-per-view (not video-on-demand, the older one) worked, but with the client device then acting as a set-top box to turn the received broadcasts into something equivalent to video-on-demand. This would also be equivalent to how the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview received game programs.
    - NeutronBoy 11y ago
      That sounds super complicated compared to good old FM radio.
      - derefr 11y ago
        You're imagining FM radio as some magical simple system that turns audio files into airwaves. But guess what's in the middle? People. People making decisions about what airs, in what order, on a very limited amount of real-time audio band. This would move that decision-making to the client device, which could follow any algorithm the user preferred. There would be no people "working" at such a radio station. It would just be a box out on a hilltop with an antenna, retrieving files from an S3 bucket and spraying them—a bit like a numbers station. Now, there might be some curation going into what counts as "local content" for the box to download and broadcast, but it could be algorithmic or just economic. Picture something more like the "curation" that Public Access television gets: anyone who wants to show up at the station and book a booth for an hour for a fee can have a "TV show." In the same way, anyone who wanted to hand the maintainer of the box an RSS feed of their podcast could have a "local radio program" that cars could receive. The key, here, is that there would be an unlimited number of such "local radio programs." Don't imagine radio as it is today. Imagine driving into the vicinity of a city and "picking up" the YouTube channels of everyone who lives there.
  - rpcope1 11y ago
    I think a nice change for FM (and AM), rather than going away entirely, would be to turn over the bandwidth cheaply or freely to public radio, non-profits and other small time operators, maybe like college radio. I think it would be an excellent way to introduce more diverse and interesting programming without being totally beholden to the lowest common denominator, and kind of get away from the awfulness that is clear channel. Also having a more community focused bent would work wonders; CPR makes NPR even better around here (Northern Colorado), as it's not just national news, and you get a lot more really local stuff (including music). I think there's still a niche for FM out there, as I certainly enjoy listening to the lower end of the dial on my commute, as do many people I know.
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    > I'm curious, what do you think will replace FM NPR in cars? Time-shifted listening, like e-books, podcasts, etc. The real question is, why listen to Prairie Home Companion on their schedule. By the way, that's the killer app for FM in mobile phones: Time-shifting shows that are not available for downlaod.
- karmacondon 11y ago
  NPR sees itself first and foremost as a news organization, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Even if radio shifts from FM to Internet, there will always be a place for local news reporting and discussion. And that shift itself is probably still a long time coming. We HN types often forget that there are millions and millions of people who prefer to have Rush Limbaugh and others shout the "news" at them via pickup truck radios. There are still a lot of people who don't even know what a "podcast" is. The thing about pledge drives and member supported radio is that it's almost completely free and without obligation. No matter how much money a standout hit like TAL can make from underwriting, why would he ever stop asking people for money if they're willing to give it to him in record numbers year after year? I'm sure that WBEZ places some restrictions on their programming in return for using the public radio brand to solicit donations, but I doubt that it's anything onerous. FM radio, streaming, podcasts, it's all the same to the content creators of the individual shows. More underwriting will allow them to do larger things, but if that dries up for whatever reason they can just continue to make money directly from their fans. Public Broadcasting is like an Eternal Kickstarter. People will give you "donations" in return for a product, not just once, but every year for as long as they use your service. And they don't ask for any equity or voting rights or profit sharing, and you can sell ads to make extra money if you'd like. It's the best situation for a business to be in.
  - tbirdz 11y ago
    >Public Broadcasting is like an Eternal Kickstarter. So, like Patreon?
hoopism 11y ago
Naive question... with the influx of cash from larger and larger underwriters and the public funds becoming a smaller and smaller % of overall funding how does public radio handle the natural tendency to chase the big funds? What's the % breakdown today? I don't think it's evil, but when 80% of funding starts rolling in for projects like invisibilia I could see it as tempting to head more into a "reality show" type programming to chase big donors / big audience... again, that's not to say that is wrong... but it certainly isn't the mission. Big dollars brings big pressures.
- fleitz 11y ago
  The key is to limit advertising to the point where there is always demand for the spot, and/or not reliant on major sponsors. eg. If coke is willing to spend $15 million and pepsi $10 million if you sell the ad to coke for $10 million you know you can always sell to pepsi for $10 should you piss coke off. Ideally you should have a bunch of smaller advertisers such that it's easy to find another person to take the spot. It's an issue for any business and something DHH talks about regarding not getting big clients which you inevitably end up becoming beholden to.
  - hoopism 11y ago
    Thanks. That's a great explanation.
pervycreeper 11y ago
Hard to take the message seriously when his show, This American Life, is so incredibly bland. In my appraisal, it does nothing but pander to its "middlebrow" audience, never daring to tell them anything they don't already know. Maybe he's just not aware of it.
- kbenson 11y ago
  Do you listen to TAL much? I ask because if you find it bland when you do, I can't imagine you listening to it much, and if you don't listen to it much, I'm not sure I trust your appraisal to be accurate. Not every episode is interesting to me, so I skip some, but others I find extremely interesting (Radiolab, Planet Money and Freakonomics are my bread and butter NPR shows). To me that just indicates that have a fairly wide set of topics. Generally I find they try to go fairly deep on both sides of topic where they can, or at least put disclaimers in that there may other explanations for what they are reporting. The recent multi-part set on police is a good example, they spent a fair amount of time talking about the police perspective on some recent events, and how and why it diverges from public opinion. To me, assuming it's pandering to a "middlebrow" audience would have me believing in a much more informed public than I think actually exists.
  - dublinben 11y ago
    >Radiolab, Planet Money and Freakonomics are my bread and butter NPR shows It's interesting that you list those three (excellent) shows as examples. Only Planet Money is actually produced or distributed by NPR themselves. Radiolab and Freakonomics are both productions of WNYC.
    - kbenson 11y ago
      I imagine it's not quite as simple as that. I imagine NPR member stations that broadcast those programs kick back some portion of their donations/underwriting to help fund them, and that gets passed along to WNYC/Radiolab/Freakonomics. I know there are some programs that bill themselves as joint ventures of the local station and NPR, PRI, or APB.
  - 11y ago
nosuchthing 11y ago
Does anyone here know of fundraising systems or lists of different micro-economic models?
mc32 11y ago
Public radio is a mixed bag. It's better than most but I dislike the pretense of being better, because in my view they are only marginally better when presenting news. One of the things I'm most disenchanted with is how on uncontroversial things they'll offer an opinion. "lack of oversight is bad". But on controversial issues they tend to appear neutral (offering no opinion) while at the same time couching the questions and loading their questions. So when it comes to controversial subjects they take a position, but they try to hide it, which, to me, is more perverse than the blatant left and blatant right, who at least aren't pretending to be objective. That's to say nor, while marginally better, comparatively, isn't all that good and show bias in their reporting and choice of news. For example, the strife in some inner cities was cast as police vs population when in reality government is at greatest fault. They put the police there to mop up after their failed or non existent policies to better peoples desperate lives. So the police are their last desperate attempt at controlling a situation for which they fell asleep at the wheel then blast police for the situation.
- derefr 11y ago
  > they take a position, but they try to hide it Of course they do. That's what the public actually wants when they say they want "intelligent reporting"—an opinion they agree with that they can pretend is unbiased fact-based reporting. (It's the same idea as sarcasm: it's a display of intelligence to be able to signal one thing to your friends and another to the general public.) True fact-based reporting, on the other hand, gets blasted by both sides of a debate for "supporting the other guy"—because any statement that's not explicitly in favor of them, even a statement making an orthogonal point, is against their agenda. > the strife in dome inner cities was cast as police vs population when in reality government is at greatest fault Most problems come down to systems of incentives spiralling out of control when nobody is watching, that create principal-agent problems when agents do what the incentives tell them to do. My favorite piece of NPR is Planet Money, because economists tend to at least be attuned to the "incentives" framing for most subjects, even if all they get to talk about is monetary incentives. I'd love to see regular reporting done by economics-trained (and maybe game-theory-trained) journalists, though.
- zipwitch 11y ago
tofupup 11y ago
Folks seem to forgotten what happened to the Appalachian Community Service Network. We know it as TLC and while a fortune was made off of honey bobo the folk in Appalachia still have one of the lowest educational levels of working Americans. As much as I love capitalism you have to admit it does not play well with the commons.
- joshuapants 11y ago
  I don't know that you could count on TV programming to have an appreciable impact on education levels. Additionally, TLC was good for years before it fell into reality show garbage, so it's not like the lack of results is the fault of capitalism.
lvs 11y ago
This strikes me as naive and wishful, bordering on ignorant. Perhaps /he/ knows how to act ethically and idealistically despite relying advertising money, but he must see how the entire remainder of the news/media industry is not able to do so. This suggestion comes at precisely the wrong time, when the ideal that media should be for a common good is utterly gone beyond lip service now and then.

67 points by pwenzel 11y ago

Avid public radio listener, WBEZ member. I guess I'm not opposed to scaling up program underwriting, but I wonder what it is about the structure of NPR and program buying that prevents shows like Ira Glass's TAL from just making their money on "the back end". Long-term, FM radio NPR is not going to last. As radio shifts from FM to the Internet, local stations will matter less, and NPR/PRI will increasingly become a Knight Foundation-like seed fund for new shows. The ones lucrative enough to raise extra money can use all of the tools of the Internet to monetize and expand.

lfowles 11y ago
> Long-term, FM radio NPR is not going to last. I'm curious, what do you think will replace FM NPR in cars? In Wichita, KS, I'm lucky to get cell data service before I'm a mile out of the city. Maybe I'm reading too much into an "FM Radio will not last" interpretation.
- kbenson 11y ago
  I've switched to listening to NPR exclusively using podcasts. I do find I'm behind on current events though, even major ones, such as riots, but I attribute that to me not having added any current event shows, such as morning edition, which I believe also comes in podcast form. I use Pocket Casts for android to handle automatic downloading of specific sets of podcasts when my phone is on wifi and plugged in, out of the larger set I've decided is interesting, so getting the content is really a non-issue for me (and I wholeheartedly recommend Pocket Casts!). It's worth noting that my lack of awareness of current events persists even though I get a good dose of random pop radio in the morning while dropping my children off at school, so I don't attribute that problem as much to a lack of FM radio as I do to a lack of news radio.
  - secabeen 11y ago
    You're also missing local news and much of the mid-tier state news. That doesn't always matter, but when it does, it really does.
- derefr 11y ago
  Instead of the "directly-streamed linear programming" model, you could do radio audio broadcast the same way you do GPS: just have the local radio towers spraying some selection of podcasts on a loop (with high enough frequency+bandwidth+compression that the effective audio rate is faster-than-real-time, unlike satellite radio), and then have "radios" in cars (or wherever) which catch the files and cache them. You can build whatever you like on top of that—a hybrid device that will siphon up local OTA content along with arbitrary podcasts when it can find 4G, and then intelligently arrange the combination into linear programming, for example. (Really, though, you're just creating a weird sort of secondary internet that only allows retrieval of files relevant to the local area. In fact, you could make the "radio" into a 4G picocell that actually re-serves said limited internet to your phone, where the OTA content then shows up in your regular podcast app.) Effectively, this would be the over-the-air equivalent of how pay-per-view (not video-on-demand, the older one) worked, but with the client device then acting as a set-top box to turn the received broadcasts into something equivalent to video-on-demand. This would also be equivalent to how the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview received game programs.
  - NeutronBoy 11y ago
    That sounds super complicated compared to good old FM radio.
    - derefr 11y ago
      You're imagining FM radio as some magical simple system that turns audio files into airwaves. But guess what's in the middle? People. People making decisions about what airs, in what order, on a very limited amount of real-time audio band. This would move that decision-making to the client device, which could follow any algorithm the user preferred. There would be no people "working" at such a radio station. It would just be a box out on a hilltop with an antenna, retrieving files from an S3 bucket and spraying them—a bit like a numbers station. Now, there might be some curation going into what counts as "local content" for the box to download and broadcast, but it could be algorithmic or just economic. Picture something more like the "curation" that Public Access television gets: anyone who wants to show up at the station and book a booth for an hour for a fee can have a "TV show." In the same way, anyone who wanted to hand the maintainer of the box an RSS feed of their podcast could have a "local radio program" that cars could receive. The key, here, is that there would be an unlimited number of such "local radio programs." Don't imagine radio as it is today. Imagine driving into the vicinity of a city and "picking up" the YouTube channels of everyone who lives there.
- rpcope1 11y ago
  I think a nice change for FM (and AM), rather than going away entirely, would be to turn over the bandwidth cheaply or freely to public radio, non-profits and other small time operators, maybe like college radio. I think it would be an excellent way to introduce more diverse and interesting programming without being totally beholden to the lowest common denominator, and kind of get away from the awfulness that is clear channel. Also having a more community focused bent would work wonders; CPR makes NPR even better around here (Northern Colorado), as it's not just national news, and you get a lot more really local stuff (including music). I think there's still a niche for FM out there, as I certainly enjoy listening to the lower end of the dial on my commute, as do many people I know.
- Zigurd 11y ago
  > I'm curious, what do you think will replace FM NPR in cars? Time-shifted listening, like e-books, podcasts, etc. The real question is, why listen to Prairie Home Companion on their schedule. By the way, that's the killer app for FM in mobile phones: Time-shifting shows that are not available for downlaod.
karmacondon 11y ago
NPR sees itself first and foremost as a news organization, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Even if radio shifts from FM to Internet, there will always be a place for local news reporting and discussion. And that shift itself is probably still a long time coming. We HN types often forget that there are millions and millions of people who prefer to have Rush Limbaugh and others shout the "news" at them via pickup truck radios. There are still a lot of people who don't even know what a "podcast" is. The thing about pledge drives and member supported radio is that it's almost completely free and without obligation. No matter how much money a standout hit like TAL can make from underwriting, why would he ever stop asking people for money if they're willing to give it to him in record numbers year after year? I'm sure that WBEZ places some restrictions on their programming in return for using the public radio brand to solicit donations, but I doubt that it's anything onerous. FM radio, streaming, podcasts, it's all the same to the content creators of the individual shows. More underwriting will allow them to do larger things, but if that dries up for whatever reason they can just continue to make money directly from their fans. Public Broadcasting is like an Eternal Kickstarter. People will give you "donations" in return for a product, not just once, but every year for as long as they use your service. And they don't ask for any equity or voting rights or profit sharing, and you can sell ads to make extra money if you'd like. It's the best situation for a business to be in.
- tbirdz 11y ago
  >Public Broadcasting is like an Eternal Kickstarter. So, like Patreon?

hoopism 11y ago

Naive question... with the influx of cash from larger and larger underwriters and the public funds becoming a smaller and smaller % of overall funding how does public radio handle the natural tendency to chase the big funds? What's the % breakdown today? I don't think it's evil, but when 80% of funding starts rolling in for projects like invisibilia I could see it as tempting to head more into a "reality show" type programming to chase big donors / big audience... again, that's not to say that is wrong... but it certainly isn't the mission. Big dollars brings big pressures.

fleitz 11y ago
The key is to limit advertising to the point where there is always demand for the spot, and/or not reliant on major sponsors. eg. If coke is willing to spend $15 million and pepsi $10 million if you sell the ad to coke for $10 million you know you can always sell to pepsi for $10 should you piss coke off. Ideally you should have a bunch of smaller advertisers such that it's easy to find another person to take the spot. It's an issue for any business and something DHH talks about regarding not getting big clients which you inevitably end up becoming beholden to.
- hoopism 11y ago
  Thanks. That's a great explanation.

pervycreeper 11y ago

Hard to take the message seriously when his show, This American Life, is so incredibly bland. In my appraisal, it does nothing but pander to its "middlebrow" audience, never daring to tell them anything they don't already know. Maybe he's just not aware of it.

kbenson 11y ago
Do you listen to TAL much? I ask because if you find it bland when you do, I can't imagine you listening to it much, and if you don't listen to it much, I'm not sure I trust your appraisal to be accurate. Not every episode is interesting to me, so I skip some, but others I find extremely interesting (Radiolab, Planet Money and Freakonomics are my bread and butter NPR shows). To me that just indicates that have a fairly wide set of topics. Generally I find they try to go fairly deep on both sides of topic where they can, or at least put disclaimers in that there may other explanations for what they are reporting. The recent multi-part set on police is a good example, they spent a fair amount of time talking about the police perspective on some recent events, and how and why it diverges from public opinion. To me, assuming it's pandering to a "middlebrow" audience would have me believing in a much more informed public than I think actually exists.
- dublinben 11y ago
  >Radiolab, Planet Money and Freakonomics are my bread and butter NPR shows It's interesting that you list those three (excellent) shows as examples. Only Planet Money is actually produced or distributed by NPR themselves. Radiolab and Freakonomics are both productions of WNYC.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    I imagine it's not quite as simple as that. I imagine NPR member stations that broadcast those programs kick back some portion of their donations/underwriting to help fund them, and that gets passed along to WNYC/Radiolab/Freakonomics. I know there are some programs that bill themselves as joint ventures of the local station and NPR, PRI, or APB.
- 11y ago

nosuchthing 11y ago

Does anyone here know of fundraising systems or lists of different micro-economic models?

mc32 11y ago

Public radio is a mixed bag. It's better than most but I dislike the pretense of being better, because in my view they are only marginally better when presenting news. One of the things I'm most disenchanted with is how on uncontroversial things they'll offer an opinion. "lack of oversight is bad". But on controversial issues they tend to appear neutral (offering no opinion) while at the same time couching the questions and loading their questions. So when it comes to controversial subjects they take a position, but they try to hide it, which, to me, is more perverse than the blatant left and blatant right, who at least aren't pretending to be objective. That's to say nor, while marginally better, comparatively, isn't all that good and show bias in their reporting and choice of news. For example, the strife in some inner cities was cast as police vs population when in reality government is at greatest fault. They put the police there to mop up after their failed or non existent policies to better peoples desperate lives. So the police are their last desperate attempt at controlling a situation for which they fell asleep at the wheel then blast police for the situation.

derefr 11y ago
> they take a position, but they try to hide it Of course they do. That's what the public actually wants when they say they want "intelligent reporting"—an opinion they agree with that they can pretend is unbiased fact-based reporting. (It's the same idea as sarcasm: it's a display of intelligence to be able to signal one thing to your friends and another to the general public.) True fact-based reporting, on the other hand, gets blasted by both sides of a debate for "supporting the other guy"—because any statement that's not explicitly in favor of them, even a statement making an orthogonal point, is against their agenda. > the strife in dome inner cities was cast as police vs population when in reality government is at greatest fault Most problems come down to systems of incentives spiralling out of control when nobody is watching, that create principal-agent problems when agents do what the incentives tell them to do. My favorite piece of NPR is Planet Money, because economists tend to at least be attuned to the "incentives" framing for most subjects, even if all they get to talk about is monetary incentives. I'd love to see regular reporting done by economics-trained (and maybe game-theory-trained) journalists, though.
zipwitch 11y ago

tofupup 11y ago

Folks seem to forgotten what happened to the Appalachian Community Service Network. We know it as TLC and while a fortune was made off of honey bobo the folk in Appalachia still have one of the lowest educational levels of working Americans. As much as I love capitalism you have to admit it does not play well with the commons.

joshuapants 11y ago
I don't know that you could count on TV programming to have an appreciable impact on education levels. Additionally, TLC was good for years before it fell into reality show garbage, so it's not like the lack of results is the fault of capitalism.

lvs 11y ago

This strikes me as naive and wishful, bordering on ignorant. Perhaps /he/ knows how to act ethically and idealistically despite relying advertising money, but he must see how the entire remainder of the news/media industry is not able to do so. This suggestion comes at precisely the wrong time, when the ideal that media should be for a common good is utterly gone beyond lip service now and then.