Todd Mundt

Wired News created waves yesterday with its story about podcasting and its effect on public radio fundraising.

The idea that podcasts are going to reduce contributions to public radio is a bit far-fetched. Dennis Haarsager argues, rightly in my opinion, that having favorite programs on-demand increases audience loyalty and helps to extend the programs to others who haven’t heard them before. I won’t even get into the ways you can use podcasts as tools to generate corporate support or as tools to encourage on-demand users to become members. Suffice it to say, podcasts drawing away support from public radio is a low-level threat.

If you read that Wired article a little more carefully, you can see the real threat - to business-as-usual in public broadcasting. Public radio in America is an uncommon mix of national networks and program producers, with local stations and producers, and local control as the central feature. Ask most American public radio listeners and they think this is the best possible solution; many in public radio agree.

But this model rests on a set of assumptions and compromises, including that local public radio stations are the sole purveyors of “NPR” or public radio in their respective areas. This worked for a long time, until the natural barriers began falling: other distribution paths opened up, beyond the radio signal. Streaming brought distant public radio stations to computers everywhere; streaming now extends non-radio public radio listening to your handheld or your smartphone. Podcasting brings listeners their favorite programs on-demand, freeing them from their local station’s schedule. And satellite radio has opened up an opportunity for public broadcasting to offer multiple flavors of nationwide service.

This is disruption. It worries us and it should. But how we respond to it determines whether we ride the wave or get buried beneath it.

So far, we’ve seen two categories of reponse from public radio (besides the classic ignore it and hope it will go away): 1) it’s paramount to preserve the current model and any new technologies we embrace must adhere to the model; and 2) an embrace of change, acceptance and assimilation of new technologies, and experimentation.

Who is doing #1? Well, let’s not start a fight. Let’s talk about who is pursuing #2: KCRW, WGBH, KQED, WNYC, Northwest Public Radio, Michigan Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, NPR, PRI - by no means a complete list.

The disruption has brought new experimentation to public broadcasting, on a level that we haven’t seen in a long time. It’s producing good data, some great early success stories, and potentially some new business models for the industry.

But the disruption is just beginning.

The technologies continue to develop. My Sprint card frees me from WiFi and lets me listen to uninterrupted Internet streams while I drive. When I stand in line at Starbucks, I might be listening to Morning Edition streaming on my cellphone, but it doesn’t have to be my station - WNYC or Minnesota Public Radio or WCPN or KPBS might be just as enticing as choices for Morning Edition.

And the biggest disruption of all is likely to be to our way of doing business - that strange, special, often dysfunctional, but viable model we fashioned out of national producers and local stations. And that’s why, yet again, we’re hearing some local managers use public radio’s dreaded word: bypass.
John Sutton wasn’t the first to throw down the gauntlet, but his provocative post about access to Morning Edition and All Things Considered on satellite radio frames the issue very well, and he makes his biggest and best point in another post:

It’s not bypass, it’s listener choice.

The disruption we face now is driven by technology and by listener choice. Meeting these new challenges requires serious and deep discussions within public broadcasting - discussions that may topple our safe, decades-old business model. But if we try to maintain our old way of doing business at the expense of service to our audience, we will pay a huge price.

It’s time to start talking.