tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2600560384355436278.post2153285982885790644..comments2024-02-24T15:19:02.095-08:00Comments on SPARK NEWS: PUBLIC RADIO NEEDS NEW HIT SHOWS BUT PAST FAILURES HAUNT THEIR DEVELOPMENT Ken Mills Agency, LLChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00792966356989583664noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2600560384355436278.post-22091857097549993582015-06-23T06:59:11.289-07:002015-06-23T06:59:11.289-07:00FYI Ken, some of those shows you list as not being...FYI Ken, some of those shows you list as not being in distribution anymore are, in fact, still available: I know TechNation, 51% and Inside Europe are, for example. But admittedly keeping track of all these shows could be exceedingly difficult.<br /><br />BTW, is "Weekly Edition" representing WESAT/WESUN? Or was that "Weekend Radio"? Either way, I had no idea that carriage of those particular shows was so low. Certainly it seems like all the major stations in the top 100 markets carry WESAT/WESUN...I wonder if, as valuable as this list is, it could stand to be weighted in favor of larger markets, and further weighted based on when it airs relative to more valuable dayparts? Annnnnnd before you know it, you're tumbling down a rabbit hole of statistical weighting! Oh well...<br /><br />FWIW, I think lousy timing is overlooked in how important a factor it was in these shows' demises. You can succeed quickly with a single-issue show. You can't do that with a generalist show. But you can ULTIMATELY succeed BETTER with a generalist show...it just takes a lot more time to build up an audience. And the Great Recession wasn't going to give those shows the time. Day2Day really stands out as an example of that in my mind: it was an excellent show but it was going to need a lot of time to establish itself in the midday lineup, and NPR wasn't able to financially give it the time.<br /><br />The Takeaway's first incarnation also comes to mind: it was a brilliant idea, if a little too East Coast-centric, and it worked very well at what it was trying to do. And it was starting to get a decent toehold as a good morning outlet for the #2 public radio station in each town, as a good way to compete with the #1 station and them airing Morning Edition. But the market dropped out and the time needed to gradually convince affiliates to pick it up wasn't there anymore.<br /><br />Bryant Park Project I'm not sure what was going on there. That always felt like a really expensive way of "throwing it at the wall and seeing what sticks." I think some people felt it was the way to get out ahead of HD Radio and be the prime tentpole for HD2 multicast channels, but then HD Radio never really took off. And even if it did, it was NPR explicitly competing with itself (the Takeaway was trying harder to go after a related-but-different audience, IMO) and that seemed doomed to fail. OTOH, I think looking at the new "podcast generation" of shows, you could argue that BPP was "ahead of its time" in many ways. I just don't think it was ever going to work as a morning drive outlet.<br /><br />Going further, a lot of stations got badly shaken up financially and psychologically by the Great Recession and, to be blunt, many of them needed to be shaken up. These stations were relying heavily on the "old standbys" of weekend programming because they had little incentive to change, and a lot of incentive to not change. Nowadays that's a lot less true; stations are realizing that they need to change or die, as the saying goes.<br /><br />I wonder if you introduced Weekend America again today if it wouldn't do a lot better than it did back then? Given the similarities between WA and Here & Now, I suppose you could divine some analysis from that...although H&N had the huge advantage of an established program (TOTN) being killed off and H&N explicitly being touted as a replacement. It'd be like NPR saying "we're going to make WESAT/WESUN be a one hour show but here's this new thing that'll fill the other hour plus one more hour."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com