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| University police change the lock on the door at KHSU |
A
headline in Saturday’s North Coast
Journal [link] said it all: Last
Employee Leaves KHSU.
That
now-former employee, Morning Edition host
Natalya Estrada, was one of two people on the KHSU staff chosen to remain after the
mass termination of employees and volunteers last Thursday (4/11).
Estrada resigned
on Saturday. The other employee who was
“spared,” David Reed resigned on Friday.
With
the departure of Estrada and Reed, there are no remaining employees or
volunteers at KSHU.
Observers say this is probably the largest mass termination
in public broadcasting history.
The
licensee, Humboldt State University (HSU), has made no announcements about who
is now operating the station. KHSU is on the air using the audio stream of
KCHO-FM, Chico, a city approximately 250 miles from HSU.
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MORE 20-YEAR COMPARISONS OF
RATINGS DATA
We
had several requests to show more 20-year comparisons of ratings from 1999
Arbitron surveys and the most recent Nielsen data. Please keep in mind that
Diary methodology and Nielsen PPM methodology are different. So, at best, these
comparisons are “apples and oranges.”
One
requested market was Chicago. There
isn’t much to talk about because Chicago then and now has few noncommercial
stations that reach the full metro.
Two
that do are WBEZ and WDCB and both have significantly more weekly listeners in
February 2019 than they had in Spring 1999.
We
don’t have commercial station ratings from 1999, so we are unable to compare
WFMT’s audiences sizes.
Boston
is another requested market. The biggest change in ratings over 20-years is by
WGBH. In 1999 WGBH had a dual format of
NPR News and Classical music, plus several specialty shows that were hard to
categorize.
About
a decade ago Classical WCRB was sold to WGBH and became a noncommercial station.
WGBH dropped Classical and other music and became 24/7 NPR News/Talk. This was, and continues to be, major
competition for WBUR.
KERA
has made amazing gains in estimated weekly listeners since 1999. In 1999 there
were two stations that later left the public radio orbit.
KEOM,
licensed to the Mesquite, Texas, School District in suburban Dallas, has a
helluva signal the cover virtually the entire Metroplex. KEOM currently has
students playing oldies from the 1970s and 1980s. We guess no other stations in
Dallas play oldies from this era.
KNTU
[link] is based in Denton, Texas, about 50 miles north of Dallas. The station’s
format is primarily jazz, but also includes Tejano and classical music
programming Saturday and Sunday mornings, respectively. Think of KNTU as
“almost public radio.”
Frequent
Spark News readers may like this comparison of rated stations in Memphis.
We
call WKNO public radio’s “weakest link” because it is the poorest performing
NPR News station in Nielsen’s PPM markets.
But things were better from WKNO in 1999.
Twenty
years ago, WKNO had two stations serving Memphis. If we recall correctly WKNO
aired Classical music and NPR’s two big newsmagazines. WKNA, we think, was all
news.
The
two stations together had more than twice the number of estimated weekly
listeners in Spring 1999 than they did in February 2019. WKNO sold their second
FM frequency in the early 2000s to a religious broadcaster. Bad move!
The
mystery station in Memphis is WYPL, licensed to the Memphis Public Library.
WYPL [link] has an awesome coverage area but apparently no one there can see
the potential if they became an NPR News/Talk station.
During most of the broadcast week WYPL is a “radio reading service” for folks who are
blind or have low vision. This is nice service but putting it on a 100,000 signal
is a major waste of resources. Most “reading services” are now online.
There
is also a problem between serving people with visual impairments.
Below we have
WYPL’s program schedule as it appears on the station website. Ask yourself: Can
you read it? It is totally useless for a
person with vision impairments.
Hi Ken, one thing that occurred to me: do the Nielsen numbers account for the growth/contraction of the population in each of these markets? According to wikipedia...Dallas/Fort Worth, for example, had 3.86 million population in 1990, 5.22 million in 2000, and 6.23 million in 2010. That's a huge increase. So if a given station's cume has increased at a rate SLOWER than the growth rate of the market, then in a way they have LOST audience.
ReplyDeleteObviously it's more complex than that, since at some levels a listener is a listener is a listener. But you see what I mean?
Also, FWIW about WYPL and radio reading services...I've recently had a lot of interaction with one of our local RRS providers (Audible Local Ledger out of Cape Cod) as we air their content on the 67kHz SCA of WNPN. There's not a whole lot of receivers out there, just in numeric terms. I think fewer than 200. But for those 200 people, these radios are often their only option. While a lot of "low vision" folks CAN see well enough to use a smartphone or a computer (usually with some kind of magnifier) there are some people who just can't see it at all. Most computer websites aren't very friendly to someone with zero vision; the concept of CSS layers doesn't play nice with text-to-speech software. And a smartphone with a touchscreen is almost completely useless.
For these folks, a simple SCA radio (or an FM radio) with a tactile interface is a godsend. It may well be their only link to the outside world.
I say this to remind people that when it comes to services like these, "good enough" isn't good enough. You have to read up on your "power law" distribution curve and how difficult it can make a workable solution for EVERYONE you're trying to serve. It can be pretty easy to make a webcast that serves 90% of that low-vision population, but that last 10% will likely require comparatively far more effort and resources than the 90% will.
One can say, with justification, that simply putting an RRS on WYPL is a waste of resources. But one has to remember that trying to serve ALL of the population of low-vision and zero-vision people will require a lot more resources to accomplish the mission.