Todd Mundt

This year’s PRPD conference is taking a couple whacks at the not-so-great performance of local talk on public radio. This afternoon at the pre-conference News/Talk group, Leslie Peters of ARA talked about some CPB-funded research looking at the performance of local talk shows.

The news isn’t new; and it’s not very good. Broadly, listening to local talk around the country is dropping, even as the number of local shows is increasing. (180 shows now, up from 160 in 2004) Loyalty to the local talk lags the overall loyalty for news/talk stations (27, compared to 31.7). Of all the shows studied, only 6 shows have higher loyalty than the average loyalty for that station.

If that’s just not surprising enough: out of the current roster of 180 shows, just 20 stations with 38 programs account for 81% of all listening to local talk shows. The rest of us? Pretty much nowhere in sight.

The study tried to get at what’s not working, and there don’t appear to be any easy answers: the financial investment in each of the top shows varies widely; the producer “body count” varies widely, too; time of day isn’t a factor. The years of experience a host has had does seem to correlate to success, but not always.

What about the other side of the coin - the intangible benefit a station gets from having a local talk show, beyond the quantifiable performance? The study tried to develop a way of measuring the “core power” of local talk and arrived at what it calls “Community Value Ratings” - basically, is the core listening for the program above or equal to the core listening for the station over a seven day period?

The study identified a number of keys to community value - the usual suspects: personality of the host, topic selection, community connection, host/producer relationship, core values.

How do we do by this benchmark? Still not good: only one out of 3 talk shows in the sample surpassed the community value benchmark.

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We’re currently looking very carefully at our local shows, none of which meet or exceed this benchmark. We could probably defend them on the basis of the intangible benefits they bring us, and we have no intention of turning away from local talk. But we also have to invest more in them. “More” doesn’t always mean more money; certainly that can help, but we’re also discovering that we need to invest more time and energy to invigorate the shows: make them more compelling, to become less reliant on the standard model of a couple guests plus call-in, to develop segments that give us more options to explore a variety of topics, without compromising too much on depth.

I think the intangible benefits of local talk, and the drive to re-imagine ourselves as public media, will push more of us to get into the business of local talk. But it’s already apparent that most of us have a real problem on our hands: the local talk shows we’ve created to meet community needs, are not producing a tangible audience increase; and one may conclude that some of these shows actually work against our effort to increase our core loyalty and, in turn, our membership revenues.