One Year at Iowa Public Radio

Actually, it’s been a year and a few weeks. Time flies by and it feels like it’s been moving at  a much faster pace the past twelve months.

It’s been an exciting, and occasionally unnerving period of change. We’re still in the middle of the change, but we’re beginning to see external signs of success. Membership numbers have held steady across the network; our first audience data is now in-house, and it shows solid gains. We don’t live or die by a single book but now, when I’m asked how things are going, I say “very well” rather than “alright.”

What have we done? We (and by “we” I mean the 50+ employees of Iowa Public Radio) have accomplished a lot. We launched our unified statewide news network on January 1, 2007; created a single team covering Iowa news, which these days consists largely of chasing candidates; we continued the work of unifying the operations of three different station groups, and 13 stations; and we got approval from the FCC for eight new stations.

Our unified classical service will launch on September 10th across Iowa; and in the months to follow, we’ll be working on expanding our 10-hour a day triple A service to a new 24 hour a day home.

And, of course, when that’s finished, there will be several more layers to the onion. We’re working with Jim Russell on a careful rethinking of our talk shows; we’ll soon open the hiring process for a permanent news director; we’re devoting  more time to the “sound and feel” of the service, the micro-formatics of both our news and classical services. And since we’re participating in the CPB/PRPD Classical Study, we’ll be testing the results of that study over the next two years.

One area that hasn’t moved forward with anywhere near the speed at which I thought it would – our online effort: our web sites and social media. Eventually, our web sites will unify but that timeline has lengthened considerably under pressure from other higher priority deadlines and limited staff resources. Our experiments in social media will begin later and on a smaller scale than I expected, but such is the balancing act when you’re doing many things at once.

It’s easy to get immersed in the mundane and miss the miraculous. Iowa Public Radio is the result of three independent station groups deciding – in the absence of a financial or administrative crisis – that it was in their long-term interests to join forces, that the whole could be greater than the sum of the parts.

Those three station groups were, and still are, licensed to three universities, with three sets of institutional goals, university practices, and university politics. Amazingly, the three universities have worked together, clearing roadblocks for this new hybrid that crosses old boundaries. The state has done the same; this year, for the first time, the Iowa Legislature made a direct appropriation to public radio, providing support for the capital needs of the network.

The creation of Iowa Public Radio, and its early success, should send an important signal to a public radio system that is vastly overbuilt. Maintaining local public service is not the same thing as maintaining hundreds of independent stations. The duplication of Internal operations costs us millions of dollars each year – millions that we could invest in things our listeners really care about, if we’re willing to ask some hard questions, be creative, and resist maintaining old fiefdoms. For every KUOW-sized surplus, there are dozens of stations that are experiencing a slow but steady impoverishment; the end result of that glacial process won’t be good for anyone.

There’s no single answer; we don’t a dozen new Iowa Public Radio clones out there. But what we do need is a class of mature public radio managers and executives who will ask hard questions, question long-standing institutional frameworks, and define their legacy as the creation of a strong, stable public radio service, whatever that takes.