If you like public broadcasting, be customers, not just consumers

My log of listening to public radio in 2010. This was a project for getting listeners to know exactly what they listened to, and then to distribute payments on a pro rata basis, and do it easily. More about it below.

Public broadcasting has three markets:

Listeners and viewers.Philanthropies (wealthy individuals and foundations).Government agencies (primarily the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB).

I saw the writing on the wall for  #3 in 2010. (Actually much earlier, but that’s the oldest link I could find.) It has been clear for decades that Republicans have no appetite for public broadcasting and would throw up on it as soon as they had the chance. Now here we are.

The good thing for public broadcasting is that it still has #1.

That its consumers are also its customers is a huge advantage over commercial over-the-air broadcasting, which entirely serves the advertising market. (Meaning that’s what pays for it.)  But, there are problems.

First, over-the-air broadcasting is in decline, as listening shifts from live radio to podcasts and music streams, while TV shifts from over-the-air and cable (now together called “linear”) to paid on-demand streaming (now increasingly subsidised by advertising as well).

Second, public broadcasting’s alpha brands—NPR and PBS—sell their goods to stations, not to listeners and viewers. This puts them a degree of remove from market demand.

Third, like many on the political left, they don’t understand business.  Yes, they cover it. But if they really got business, they would know that their primary market is their listeners and viewers, who pay for the service. Yes, it’s volunteered payment, but it’s still money-for-goods, meaning business. There are better approaches to getting that business than begging constantly for contributions and calling everybody who contributes a member. (Not that having members is a bad thing. It just shouldn’t be the only thing.) More about this below.

Fourth, there are audience issues. The PBS audience is barbell-shaped: heaviest with the very old and the very young. NPR’s audience is middle-aged and up. It also leans toward the intelligentsia. Joe Colombe made Trader Joe’s a thing by aiming its stores toward what he called “the over-educated and underpaid.” At the heart of that were academic folk: people who worked in education or were just well-educated. This is why NPR is kind of the Trader Joe’s of broadcasting. Betcha most Trader Joe’s customers are Democrats too.

In Parliament of Whores, P.J. O’Roarke says, “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.” And right now they’re proving it by laying waste to everything that Democrats love, such as NPR and PBS. Here’s the White House’s bill of particulars against all three.

Never mind that the administration’s favored media, which I’ve been calling redstream, is as steeply biased as a cliff. But the White house does have a case. But that case isn’t really the one in their list. It’s what Matt Taibbi says in his latest newsletter (half-hidden behind a teasewall):

 The quintessential PBS show was informative and quirky without pulling ideological threads, even if its Masterpiece roster sometimes over-scratched the upscale viewer’s costume-drama itch. From nature shows to comedy to documentaries, PBS was a sound counterweight to the boobs-and-car-chase lineups on commercial TV, providing the most remote communities with quality programming.

It should have run forever. National Public Radio ruined the enterprise, turning the country’s signature public news shows into an endless partisan therapy session, a Nine Perfect Strangers retreat for high-income audiences micro-dosing on Marx and Kendi. Forget conservatives, NPR’s trademark half-whispered stylings linking diets to rape culture or denouncing white teeth as a hangover of colonialism began in recent years to feel like physical punishment to the most apolitical listeners, like having a blind librarian hacksaw your forehead. Even today’s New York Times piece couldn’t argue the bias issue, instead offering a mathematical deflection:

Matt’s paywall appears after that colon, but he’s talking about This Is Why America Needs Public Media, by the editorial board. (Also behind a paywall, but I subscribe, so I can see it.) Here are the money grafs:

The cut would also hasten the decline of America’s once robust media ecosystem. The number of local journalists has declined by 75 percent since 2002, and a third of American counties don’t have a single full-time local journalist, a study last week found. The United States spends less per person on public media than other wealthy countries, but even that limited funding has helped make public radio a resilient part of local news. To abandon it would be to accelerate a dangerous trend straining civic health.

Republicans complain, not always wrongly, that public media reflects left-leaning assumptions and biases. And they can fairly tell NPR and PBS to do a better job of reflecting the citizenry that is subsidizing them. Yet the “national” part of NPR (or National Public Radio, as it used to call itself) that chafes conservatives may well be just fine without federal funds. Only about 2 percent of its budget comes directly from the federal government, and it may have an easier time raising money from its many dedicated listeners if Congress punishes it.

A funding cutoff would damage valuable services that have little to do with ideology. Broadcasting local government meetings, as some public radio stations do, is neither liberal nor conservative. The same is true about public television shows like “Sesame Street” that help teach young children how to read and count. Local affiliates largely cover community and state issues that do not neatly fit national left-right divides, and they would suffer most. That’s one reason a number of conservative Republicans, such as Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, warn of the bill’s impact.

What they don’t mention is that small-market radio gets clobbered most, because they get much or most of their funding from the CPB. Links:

How Trump public broadcasting cuts could hit rural America — BBCIs Congress About to Kill This Local Radio Station? Cuts to public media could have the deepest impact in red, rural and Republican America. — The Daily, by the NY Times.Prairie Public expects ‘significant hit’ from federal cuts to PBS, NPR — Alaska Beacon
Opinion: For rural Alaska, public media isn’t a luxury — it’s a lifeline — Anchorage Daily News‘People will be less safe’: How public media funding cuts could hurt Kentucky — Louisville Courier JournalHow public broadcasting funding cuts would impact one rural Indiana station — NPR, via KNPR

So. What to do?

Well, philantropies and wealthy Democrats will probably take up some of the slack. But how about listeners? I think they can. Here’s why.

Back in public radio’s heyday, before the Age of Podcasts, when I would speak to a room full of people in a college town such as Cambridge or Santa Barbara, I would sometimes ask the room, “How many here listen to public radio?” Nearly every hand would go up. Then I’d ask, “How many of you pay for it?” About 10% stayed up. Then I’d ask, “How many of you would pay for it if paying was easy? The number would double, to about 20%. Then I’d ask, “How many of you would give more if they didn’t turn off programming twice a year to beg for funding?” Even more hands would go up.

So there’s a larger market here. This is one reason why, back in 2006, when I started as a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center, I launched ProjectVRM, I saw public radio as a vendor with which listeners could better relate as customers. Toward that goal, my first move was convening a bunch of public radio folk in a conference room at Harvard to talk about better approaches to funding than the usual. One of the attendees was Keith Hopper, who worked at the time for one of the organizations serving public radio. Together, Keith and I came up with the idea later branded EmanciPay, which last year I called An Approach to Paying for Everything That’s Free. I lay out the case for it there.

I should add that we had a trial run with a software project called ListenLog, which was a feature added to a phone app from PRX called the Public Radio Player. The idea was to show listeners what they actually listened to, and to provide an easy way for listeners to pay for the goods on a pro rata basis. At the top of this post is my log of listening while the project was active and funded, in 2010. It was waaay ahead of its time.

One problem back then, and still today, was that stations were all friendly with each other but not cooperative. Would they be willing to split a pie twice the size of the one they had? Not really. Or not yet.

It won’t be hard, however, to build a system today that does the same for all the media we consume, to do it privately, and to get EmanciPay on the road. Anyone wanna fund it?

Bonus link.