Converge

You are browsing the archives of pubradio.

I meant to listen to these interviews months ago when the curtain rose on The Merlin Show, but I don’t feel too bad; Merlin Mann certainly intended to post six parts of his interview with Jesse Thorn of The Sound of Young America, but it’s stalled out at two. (Merlin is about to become a [...]

Bill Kling of Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media gave an inspiring (and rather tepidly received, in my opinion) closing address at the PRPD conference. He spoke about public media’s growing role in maintaining a democratic society, and the growing civic illiteracy that makes public media more essential than ever. He also emphasized the role we [...]

I moderated a really fascinating session today - “Building Audience Beyond Broadcast” - which, despite the title, looked at the new broadcast technology, HD Radio, as well as the strategic assessments that stations are making as they consider an array of non-broadcast channels to reach their audiences.
Robin Gehl of Cincinnati Public Radio, talked about the [...]

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 [...]

Updates:
American Public Media has announced the purchase of WMCU, a 100,000 watt FM station in Miami. At present, the Christian station is owned by Trinity International University. APM paid $20 million for the station, which it says will broadcast classical music.
PRI has named John Hockenberry to host the new morning program it’s creating, in association [...]

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 [...]

Brendan Greeley is leaving “Open Source with Christoper Lydon.” Greeley was the primary driver of a kind of deep audience engagement which was new to public radio when the show debuted. Interestingly, it’s still one of the only shows to obsessively nurture its online community - looking to it for topics, ideas, guests and opinions. [...]

Santa Barbara gets a lot of public radio signals… if you count the translators and the student stations. But, as Doc Searls notes, Santa Barbara has no local public radio.
I might be wrong, but I’ll bet Santa Barbara is the largest city in the U.S. with a major university and no local public radio station. [...]

Congratulations to Jon Hoban, who is joining the Public Radio Partnership in Louisville, KY as its new Deputy Director. Jon was previously station manager at Michigan Radio and, while there, was the executive producer of my syndicated show from 1998-2003. Jon is one of the most capable and hardworking managers in the system. His move [...]

Sometimes I write posts here that are less public statements than “waves of thinking” about a particular issue that I’m pushing around in my head. This is one of them. In other words, this is mainly about gathering the wisdom of others and ruminating. Add your own thoughts if you’d like.
Dennis Haarsager consistently fires on [...]

I’ve been thinking about something Nico Flores wrote a few days ago:
Content is nothing on its own. It only exists as part of conversations — understood not in the usual ‘blogsphere’ sense of deliberation, but as shared concerns (not my term), concerns that we must partake in to be part of communities. When I buy [...]

Stephen Hill challenges us to re-think the business model - develop a competitive value proposition and a new financial platform, to address our vulnerable revenue streams.

Todd, Mark:I couldn’t agree more with the spirit, the tone and the specifics of of what you have written here and I have been convinced of the absolutenecessity of offering [...]