Choosing to grow still isn’t easy in community radio

7 April 2008

Choosing to grow still isn’t easy in community radio

Originally published in Current, April 7, 2008
By Karen Everhart

At least in theory, the tradeoffs aren’t pretty. If you stick with traditional community-radio thinking, you might please an array of under-served interests, though you risk losing CPB aid in the five or six figures.

And if you keep the money, you can expand your professional staff and tune up the schedule, possibly satisfing a single audience more deeply and winning their allegiance and pledges — along with bigger CPB grants. But you’d surely lose some old friends and fear for your soul.

Yet there was a room full of community radio people contemplating Option No. 2, meeting in broad daylight at the Community Radio Conference in Atlanta last month.

“I would get death threats if people knew I was here listening to this,” confessed one programmer attending the session.

Also present were reps from two stations that have taken the fork in the road toward growth and professionalism — KRCL in Salt Lake City and KDHX in St. Louis. Both are at risk of losing annual Community Service Grants if they don’t meet CPB’s audience service criteria—minimum audience or fundraising figures for their area populations. And both are getting help in finding their way from CPB’s Station Renewal

“We saw ourselves headed toward bankruptcy or something really terrible like that,” said Ryan Tronier, KRCL p.d., during the March 28 presentation.

The Salt Lake station plans to switch to a Triple A music format May 5, replacing its eclectic schedule and volunteer weekday deejays with a consistent sounding music mix presented by professional hosts. It hopes to emulate the successes of Philadelphia’s WXPN and Seattle’s KEXP, but some volunteers and listeners say it’s selling out its community radio values.

CPB created the Station Renewal Project grants in 2006 to help what it calls underperforming radio stations assess their strengths and weaknesses and work with consultants to address the problems. Public Radio Capital, the Denver-based nonprofit that works with stations to acquire new frequencies and expand services, manages the project.

During the project’s first phase, completed early last year, Public Radio Capital evaluated the operations of 10 stations that weren’t reaching the audience service criteria. For the second phase, five of the 10 stations were selected last summer to receive grants, putting them through what KDHX Executive Director Beverly Hacker described as “the process of transformative changes.” The two-year grants, which must be matched with local funding, provide roughly $200,000.

CPB essentially had the stations compete for the aid “to see who was really serious about making changes,” said Bruce Theriault, senior v.p. for radio.

KDHX has been falling below CPB funding criteria for a decade, Hacker said. Its federal aid had dropped to $15,000 annually — $74,000 less than what it would receive if it met CPB’s criteria. The renewal project helped the station bring in consultants, re-evaluate its mission and plan how to pursue it, Hacker said.

With less than 1 percent of St. Louis’s 2.4 million potential listeners tuning in, KDHX made audience growth a key element of its strategy. “We knew we had issues, and we had to deal with those issues,” Hacker said.

Many community radio programmers at the Atlanta conference were familiar with the dilemmas created by KDHX and KRCL’s schedules — block-formatted with numerous musical genres, programmed by scores of volunteers, heard by shrinking numbers of listeners.

An element of self-delusion sometimes protects the status quo, according to panelist Peggy Berryhill, a former community radio programmer who is now director of services and planning for Native Public Media. “A lot of us came from stations where we presumed we knew our audience,” Berryhill said. “We talked amongst ourselves and with our friends, and we thought we were doing a great job, but we weren’t looking at the numbers.”

“It is now time to stretch the boundaries and ask if there are other ways to do this,” Berryhill said.

“Whatever you’re doing is a community service, but isn’t it better to do it for as many people as you can?” asked Hacker. “By raising the bar in programming to attract more people, you’re more able to do what you want to do.”

Only one attendee in the room spoke up against the stations’ plans — specifically criticizing KRCL’s decision to follow other outlets’ paths to Triple A success.

“I know the stations that went through these changes,” the unidentified speaker said, “and that’s when I stopped listening to them and supporting them.”

Others commended KRCL and KDHX. “You’re using commercial principles, and I’m trying to do the same thing as a former commercial broadcaster,” said another attendee. “There are some things from the commercial realm that just work, and I applaud you for recognizing that.”

“Train wrecks on the air are very difficult to tolerate, even though we are the counter-culture part of the radio industry,” he said.

Three additional stations — KVCR in San Bernardino, Calif.; WIPR in San Juan, Puerto Rico; and WUMB in Boston — also are participating in phase two of the Station Renewal Project.

In March, WUMB, the University of Massachusetts’ professionally staffed folk-music station, broadened its music mix, shuffled its lineup and dropped “folk radio” from its branding, according to Pat Monteith, g.m. Apart from complaints from a few dozen Celtic music fans, the schedule changes have been well received, she said, adding, “If you listen to the flow of the station, it makes so much more sense now.”

WUMB launched its spring fundraiser last week and midway through had seen a 35 percent increase in pledges and a 25 percent boost in donors, she said. “Apparently, people are speaking with their wallets,” she said.

Maverick eyes success stories

The changes have yet to be heard on KRCL’s airwaves, but the Utah station already has been through a firestorm.

Founded in the 1970s as a freeform music station, KRCL always had a “maverick philosophy about it,” Tronier said. It now plays an eclectic mix of music, programmed in 20 different genre-specific blocks across the week. “When we turn over those slots, the audience turns over, and it creates an unreliable sound for the listener.”

Despite dramatic population growth in Salt Lake City, KRCL is losing audience, said its programming consultant, Peter Dominowski, president of Market Trends Research. KRCL’s Arbitron ratings and Audigraphics data show “all the hallmarks of inconsistent programming”—low loyalty and wild swings in listenership within an hour or half-hour.

“With the station having different hosts on different days of the week, it’s not hard to see how that would happen,” Dominowski said.

But in focus groups, both core and fringe listeners said the variety of music broadcast by KRCL and its noncommercial, community-based approach were its strong points, he said.

Based on the research findings, KRCL decided to adopt a Triple A format and replace its corps of volunteer weekday programmers with paid staff. The new KRCL will be modeled on music-mix powerhouses KEXP and WXPN, as well as two newer players, Radio Milwaukee and Minnesota Public Radio’s The Current. Tronier visited these four stations to learn their programming techniques.

“We selected stations that were models of change — and whether you like these stations or not, you see proof of concept there,” he said. “It’s hard to argue with the scoreboard,” Tronier said.

After KRCL announced the format change early this year, its volunteers and listeners did argue — fiercely — about the station’s chosen direction. Meetings to explain the decision to KRCL volunteers were opened to the public and became heated venting sessions.

“This is the progressive community, and they were trying to tear down the station because it was going to change,” said Donna Land Maldonado, g.m. She credited the KRCL Board for standing solidly behind the changes and the staff for enduring angry complaints. “Luckily, our office manager is a pacifist vegetarian and was able to talk a lot of people down.”

Both of the deejays hired for weekday air shifts on KRCL — David Perschon and Brad Wheeler — previously volunteered as programmers, Maldonado said. “They had the most name recognition in our survey and raise a lot of funds during pledge.” KRCL also hired Ebay Hamilton, a volunteer for 17 years, as music director.

In St. Louis, KDHX is still working out details of its new program schedule. It aims to build continuity among weekday dayparts, focusing primarily on drivetime, Hacker said.

“We have a whole bunch of individual shows that don’t flow well,” Hacker said. “There’s no continuity across days—or even through the days.”

“You have to program radio like people listen to radio, and people need a certain amount of continuity and familiarity,” Hacker said.

Volunteer programmers will stay on the air at KDHX but will receive training in on-air presentation. “Our volunteers are incredibly talented and have a good feel for the music, but they’re not necessarily trained in the craft of radio,” Hacker said.

KDHX began its renewal project by working with a media values researcher, not an audience researcher, to identify its core service. The consultant, Oregon State University Associate Professor William Loges, conducted surveys and focus groups and worked with the station’s board and staff to define the values that characterize KDHX’s community service. They are: localism, community, entertainment, independence, creative expression and diversity.

“Our goal is to be a significant community resource for our region that’s financially sound and professionally managed,” Hacker said. “We’re going to do that with a larger audience.”