COLORADO PUBLIC RADIO NEWS ADDS 17 NEW SHOWS • KGOU IS NOW THE TOPNEWS/TALK STATION IN OKC

CPR CEO Stewart Vanderwilt

On Monday (1/14) Colorado Public Radio's (CPR News) news channel debuted a revamped program schedule that added 17 new shows. 

As Michael Roberts observed in the Denver weekly newspaper Westword [link], CPR did it without dropping any existing programs. The key was avoiding repeats of programs.

Repeating popular programs is SOP at most public radio news/talk stations. Airing shows a second or third time is one way stations leverage shows that are good for pledging. Because stations can play most programs an unlimited number of times for the same carriage fee, there are cost-savings repeating shows.

The upside is listeners get a larger variety of shows but new programming usually needs time to develop and audience. This is probably not the case at CPR News.

CPR CEO Stewart Vanderwilt jokingly told Westword of an alternative plan he wished he could have used: “…we're just going to play everything faster, and that way we can fit it all in. We're going to bend the space-time continuum."

Back in reality, Vanderwilt provided the real reason for the changes:

"We eliminated repeats. For example, ‘Here & Now’ is a two-hour program that we were airing for three hours by recycling a previous hour. We had a lot of recycling throughout the day and on the weekends, and by reducing that recycling, we didn't actually eliminate a single show."

On the right is the new schedule for CPR News. New programs that were added include The Daily, the popular New York Times podcast, that was brought to public radio last year by American Public Media (APM).

Other new weekday shows on CPR News are 1A and The Takeaway. Both are solid hits on many other NPR News/Talk stations.

New weekend programs include How I Built This, Planet Money, Hidden Brain, Reveal, On the Media, Snap Judgment, The Moth and Live Wire.

Vanderwilt told Westword that adding the new programming will cost CPR around $50,000 during the current fiscal year (which ends on June 30^th). Vanderwilt believes the additional cost is justified because of the track record of the new weekend show.

KEN SAYS: Vanderwilt is correct when he says the new shows will quickly pay for themselves. However, we were surprised that many of these programs weren’t already on CPR.

NIELSEN AUDIO DIARY MARKET RATINGS

Each business day Nielsen Audio, via RRC, releases another batch of ratings from the Fall 2018 survey. In the three markets we have today, Nielsen uses its Diary methodology.

The Fall 2018 Diary and PPM ratings are important because many NPR News/Talk stations had record high listening numbers in Fall 2016.

Spark News is using the data to answer these four questions:

• How are NPR News/Talk stations doing in Fall 2018 compared to Fall 2016?

• Will AAA music stations remain the number three public radio format behind News/Talk and Classical music?

• Will Classical stations keep defying gravity by adding new listeners and maintaining current listening by folks in the older age demos?

• Will noncom stations see the same declines in estimated weekly listeners that are being observed with commercial stations? In other words, were there fewer people listening to radio in noncommercial stations in Fall 2018 than there were in Fall 2016.

KGOU IS THE NUMBER ONE NEWS/TALK STATION IN OKC

Congratulations to the folks at KGOU-FM in Norman, Oklahoma for becoming the top news/talk station – commercial or noncommercial – in the competitive Oklahoma City market. 

KGOU’s 3.3 AQH share led commercial news/talk KTOK-AM (3.1 AQH share) and noncom KOSU (1.4 AQH share).

KOSU did better with Total Survey Area results. Their estimated weekly listeners were up 11% in Fall 2018 over Fall 2016.

Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) station KXTH was up in both metrics. KXTH is known locally as The Love Station, so we guess they are spreading the love a bit wider and deeper.

The estimated number of weekly listeners for the four noncom stations in OKC was up 11% in Fall 2018 compared with Fall 2016.

In New Orleans, both NPR News/Talk WWNO and New Orleans Jazz station WWOZ had slippage in AQH share and estimated weekly listeners. 

Part of the reason may be that there are 5.75% fewer weekly listeners in Fall 2018 than Fall 2016.

WWNO’s Classical music service on WWNO-HD2 channel and a translator at 104.9 FM, was listed for the first time in a Nielsen report. 

However, Nielsen said they had a 0.0 AQH share.

WWNO has a ways to go to catch the commercial news/talk stations. In Fall 2018 WWL-FM had a 6.4 AQH share and all-talk WRNO had a 4.7 AQH share.

The Smooth Jazz format on WNOZ-LP was up in both AQH share and weekly listeners.

All three of the Nielsen Audio rated stations in Louisville are owned and operated by Louisville Public Media (LPM). Of the three stations, only Classical WUOL gained ground in AQH share and weekly listeners.

NPR News/Talk WFPL was down in both AQH share and estimated weekly listeners compared to Fall 2018.  Commercial station WHAS-AM was the top news/talk station in the market with a 7.2 AQH share.

The drop in both metrics by AAA WFPK is perplexing. The estimated weekly listeners to all three stations was down 8.2% in Fall 2018 compared with Fall 2016.