A couple of months ago the future looked bleak for KBCS
[link], an old-school community radio station in Seattle.
In early June it looked
like the station was going to layoff its Program Director and News Director
because the licensee is cutting off its funding for the station.
The good news is listeners and community organization opened
their hearts and their wallets and saved the jobs and gave the station some
time to keep operating.
The bad news is that that KBCS’s licensee, Bellevue College, announced that they will be cutting off funding for the station. According
a report in The Watchdog, the campus newspaper, the college provides 19%
of the station’s annual operating budget. Now KBCS desperately needs to plan
for a sustainable future in a dicey time.
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KBCS has an excellent signal that
blankets Seattle
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This will be big task because KBCS is a small player in the
highly competitive Seattle noncommercial radio market. In a place where
everything is an alternative to something else, KBCS has remained stuck in the
1970s.
KBCS was born during the turbulent times of the late 1960s
and early 1970s.
The station signed on in 1973 after protesting students at Bellevue
College, a commuter campus that is part of the State of Washington’s Community
and Technical College system, called for a radio station that would present the
news and music of the day.
Since the 1970s, KBCS remained a quirky community
station with"Pacifica style" programming politics and engagement.
According to Nielsen, KBCS had a 0.2 AQH share and 33,100 estimated weekly listeners in January 2019, the last "book" where KBCS appeared.
In early July, KBCS began a Sustainability Campaign with the
goal of adding 1,000 new members by July 1, 2021. Cash support from Bellevue is
scheduled to end on June 30, 2021.
According to the station’s audited financial report for 2019
[link], KBCS received $1.3 million in cash and in-kind support.
Donations from members and other listeners was approximately $580,000. Underwriters provided about $149,000.
CPB added $114,000. The rest of the revenue came from Bellevue College and
other sources.
In January 2018 Spark News published a “case study” of KBCS [link]. When we checked KBCS’s website when we were
preparing this post, we found that little had changed since 2018.
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Slide from our 2018 Case Study
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KBCS continues to program “Political Talk” and eclectic
music. Weekly mornings are filled with the Thom
Hartmann Show and Democracy Now.
On the weekends KBCS airs narrow-appeal music and
ethnic programs such as tunes from Hawaii, Portugal and Brazil.
You could describe KBCS as “radio for old hippies” because
that reflects the mindset of the station’s hosts and listeners. This approach was working when Bellevue paid bills. Now KBCS needs to be relevant to wider group of people.
Pretty sure I already know the answer to this (i.e. "very hostile") but what, if any, is the relationship between KUOW and KBCS?
ReplyDeleteI am no expert on the Seattle market, beyond having visited Seattle several times in my life (albeit not since 2001) and knowing a few people at KUOW and KNKX. But it would seem that all the obvious program format alternatives to KBCS's current lineup are already being done by other stations that have the resources to do them much better: mainstream NPR news/talk? KUOW. News & Jazz? KNKX. Triple A? KEXP. Classical? KING-FM. Absent something obvious I'm missing, like a particular foreign-language format, it would seem that perhaps the best bet to make KBCS sustainable and preserve some aspect of its hippie history & audience would be some kind of absorption of KBCS into KUOW and the operation of a more, shall we say, "alternative" news outlet could be done. Something that's still news, but not reliant on the usual NPR tentpoles. Think more Vocalo or PRX Remix. Assuming KUOW is able and willing to do something like that, of course...as we've seen with Vocalo, it can be a fantastic money pit if you're not careful.