READER COMMENTS

COMMENT ONE: FOR THE LOVE OF DOYLESTOWN

Downtown Doylestown

We received a comment from Marlin Taylor regarding our coverage of NPR’s CEO Jarl Mohn’s decision to leave his job as of June 30, 2019. Readers might recall our profile of Taylor we published last March [link]. Taylor had just released his book Radio…My Love, My Passion. In that story we wrote:

“Taylor is one of the radio industry’s Greatest Generation, the men and women who built the stations and formats after World War II. Taylor has been called The Father of Beautiful Music because of his groundbreaking work creating and marketing the format.”

We recommend Taylor’s book because it is a living history of the development and syndication of the format.  

The book also covers Taylor’s work as a programmer at SiriusXM.  

Radio…My Love, My Passion is available at Amazon [link].

In his comment Taylor told us something we didn’t know about Jarl Mohn:

Marlin Taylor

Taylor: Jarl’s first job in radio was at WBUX (AM) in his hometown ... Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania ... which lies a few miles north of Philadelphia.

Doylestown is also where an orphan boy named James would be raised by a lady named Michener ... this boy would go on to write "South Pacific" and numerous other great novels.

Just a few blocks away lived a man named Oscar Hammerstein II ... he would join with Richard Rodgers to write the Broadway play "South Pacific" as well as "Oklahoma, "Carousel" and several others.

It's even the hometown of current-day pop-rock star known as "Pink."

Yes, I'm proud to call Doylestown my hometown, even though I actually grew up a few miles to the south and now live in Silver Spring, Maryland.

COMMENT TWO: QUESTION ABOUT NIELSEN RATINGS FOR PACIFICA’S STATIONS

An anonymous reader wrote: New York and Los Angeles are the only markets where Pacifica subscribes to the Nielsen Audio ratings. Therefore, we don’t know what the audience numbers are for their other three markets. Am I correct in assuming the numbers for these markets are similar to NYC and LA?

KEN SAYS: You are correct that the PPM ratings for KPFA in the Bay Area, WPFW in Washington, DC and KPFT in Houston are not available from Nielsen. We combed our files to the most recent ratings that included those stations. The most recent report we found was from Spring 2007.

The chart on the left shows the data for four of the five Pacifica stations from Spring 2007 and New York and LA from November 2018. It is important to note that the 2007 numbers use Arbitron’s Diary methodology and November 2018 use Nielsen’s PPM methodology.

Since the November numbers show a 34% to 45% drop in estimated weekly listeners, use those percentages for a “ballpark” estimate for KPFA and WPFW in 2018.

Speaking of Pacifica, we’ve been watching the situation there since Maxie Jackson became the organization’s Executive Director. There hasn’t been much news which is probably a good thing.

Maxie Jackson

We heard a recording of Maxie at the Pacifica National Programming Committee meeting on December 4, 2018. We were impressed by what we heard.

The discussion concerned a resolution before the Programming committee to require Pacifica stations to say the station call letters several times per hour.

Jackson said this obviously should be done, but he said this type of operational matter should be handled by the Executive Director and qualified Program Directors at each station. Jackson said it is his responsibility to make certain that radio best practices are followed.

Jackson told the committee:

“For years Pacifica has used a “public access” model of programming. This is an outdated approach that is a major reason why Pacifica lies far behind other public radio broadcasts in audience.”

“What [public radio] is really about is public service – what is best for listeners. We are making a mistake when we cater to the whims of producers and forget the audience. To do things right, we need to adhere to best practices and use proven techniques to serve the public.”

COMMENT THREE: THE SATELLITE DISH WENT BOOM

We published a story on November 30^th about a satellite receiver dish near Anchorage that was allegedly demolished by KTNA-FM in Talkeetna, Alaska. We received this comment from Lowell Kiesow, Chief Engineer at KNKX in Seattle questioning the story’s accuracy:

KIESOW: From what I have read, the dish that was demolished had nothing to do with KTNA, other than it being a local news story. It was owned by AT&T. Satellite distribution of programming is still alive and well, both in public and commercial radio. While internet delivery of recorded content is growing, satellite is still the way live shows are delivered to large numbers of stations.

KEN SAYS: It appears that the source of our story was incorrect. Unfortunately we relied on a single source that wasn’t accurate. Thank you, Lowell for the correction. We have erased our report and we will be more diligent in the future.

COMMENT FOUR: YOU ARE BIASED!

We received a comment from a person who has contacted us several times in the past. We are not going to include this person’s name. Here is the comment:

I notice you like to use the term alt-right. It is such a loaded term and I doubt Sean Hannity and Ben Shapiro truly associate themselves with it. It the shows your bias towards them and who public radio’s audience really are. KEN SAYS: We call things as we see (and hear) them. We choose to live in fact-based reality, not in a hyperbolic world of opinions. Our perception is that talkers like Hannity and Shapiro are grifters who spread hate, stereotypes and dog-whistle “alternative facts” for financial gain. We are surprised that a Spark News reader is gullible enough to believe them. Senator Ben Sasse We agree with this comment made by Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) on Fox News Sunday recently [link]: “Language about enemies and treason, about policy and politics is pretty warped, and I think most Americans think it's weird. When you -- when you look at the small subset of people who put politics at the center of their lives, they tend to be really, really lonely.”