Todd Mundt

Iowa Public Radio announced to staff and to the media today that it will be creating a unified News and Information Service on January 1, 2007. We also presented the staff with their first official view of the new program schedule for the News stations today. The schedule will go public on the Iowa Public Radio web site on Monday, November 20th. I’m blogging the announcement and the aftermath here.

I’m proud of the schedule - we set out to create the best possible schedule of news and information programs for Iowa, and I think we got pretty close. We’ll watch audience reaction and tweak the schedule in the coming months.

All of these stations have offered news before during the daytime hours, some of them 24 hours a day. But they operated in competitive environments. They programmed their stations and counter-programmed each other. The result was more choice for listeners when it comes to talk programs, but it also meant the focus wasn’t necessarily on creating the best schedule - it was on creating a different schedule. Unifying the news stations allows us to focus on the best possible service, and it allows us to operate more efficiently, in terms of program acquisition costs and staff devoted to announcing breaks, etc.

This schedule represents a certain amount of dislocation for listeners, as they get used to new programs and new times for some favorites. It also means some local productions are going away. Individually, Iowa Public Radio stations do a lot of local production, more than many stations their size. Some of it is quite ambitious. We want to remain committed to local programs, and we want to increase our investment in local programs, and over time, increase the amount of content we create; but our commitment to excellence in local production means we need to focus our efforts on programs directly related to the core mission of the network, and that means not every local show is going forward. We also made a couple of program cuts based on the need to make some cutbacks now, in order to focus on future growth.

This has a direct impact on staff, who have done good work on these programs over the years, and on listeners who have built relationships around them. One of the toughest things to talk about internally is ending programs that aren’t bad. If they were terrible, it would be easy. I think we’re asking a lot of our hardworking staff - we’re asking them to endure difficulties and uncertainties now, and to trust that we’ll hold to our stated commitments around formats and services.

I feel very strongly about this idea of stated commitments. In making this round of changes, and in beginning the planning for our Classical and our Triple A services, I’ve set one firm rule for myself: if I need to end a local program or a network program, if I need to cut out a block of programs, whatever I need to do, I will do it, and I will do it now. Of course, circumstances can change, and a program I think is a valuable addition to our schedule today might not be valuable a year from now. But I won’t squeeze programs out of existence; I won’t marginalize them and then kill them; I won’t bleed them to death after inflicting a thousand cuts; and I certainly won’t allow them to remain in the schedule, just because they’ve been there forever. If a program needs to go, I’ll cut it now and take the heat - from fellow managers, from staff, from listeners, from the media.
I’m not exactly sure how that makes staff feel. I hope it gives them some assurance in times of change. Ultimately though, it’s the way I want to conduct the business of programming Iowa Public Radio.