The future of public radio isn't its past

A couple of weekends ago, I attended "Radiolab Apocalyptical," a live show presented by Radiolab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich at the landmark Chicago Theatre. For those of you who aren't familiar with Radiolab, it's a weekly hour-long public radio show that covers science topics in an incredibly engaging way. The Chicago Theatre was packed, but what was really interesting was who it was packed with. The audience was young--most of the people I saw were in their 20's and 30's--not at all what you'd expect from a public radio audience in the U.S. Cast and crew members from NBC's "Chicago Fire" and "Chicago PD" tweeted pictures of themselves backstage at "Apocalyptical."

For much of the last two decades, public radio has been wrestling with a big problem: Its audience, while growing, is getting older. Twenty years ago, I was a member of one station's "big donor" club, and I attended several of its events. Other than the radio station's staff, I was by far the youngest person attending; most of the attendees appeared to be in their 60's or 70's. The public radio audience is, quite literally, dying off. Listeners have historically been older, well-educated and high-income. That's great when you're seeking donations, but not so good when you're trying to attract younger listeners and get them to become members for decades.

Public radio stations have been torn between keeping their older audiences and attracting younger ones. That becomes more difficult when even the hosts of shows that attract older listeners start retiring. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the hosts of "Car Talk," one of the most popular shows on public radio, retired last year. Instead of cancelling the show or taking a chance on new hosts, WBUR Boston and National Public Radio (NPR) decided to rerun old episodes. Some of the episodes being rerun are 20 years old, and since they cover car repairs, Tom and Ray are talking about cars that many listeners may not have ever heard of. (Geo Metros, anybody?) Just about every public radio station runs Car Talk at least once a week; some run it several times a week.

Another show that's very popular with older audiences is "A Prairie Home Companion." Creator and host Garrison Keillor caused panic at public radio stations when he told the AARP in March 2011 that he planned to retire from the show this year. In December of that year, he changed his mind, and now says that he'll keep doing the show as long as he "love(s) doing it."  "Car Talk" and "A Prairie Home Companion" are two examples of public radio shows that appeal almost entirely to an older audience, but they're far from the only ones.

There are shows on public radio that draw younger audiences; "Radiolab" is one, along with "This American Life," "The Moth Radio Hour," "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and Roman Mars' "99% Invisible." But, shows for younger listeners are far outweighed, both in number and in scheduling, by those that target older listeners. If public radio stations are serious about attracting younger listeners, the first thing they can do is cancel "Car Talk" and put a show for younger listeners in its place. There's no excuse for giving prime radio time to 20-year-old reruns of a radio show that many listeners found banal when the shows were new.

And, while we're at it, let's get rid of pledge weeks (a misnomer, because most of them now run two weeks.) Pledge weeks give regular listeners to public radio a strong disincentive to contribute, because everyone has to put up with having their favorite shows interrupted whether they pledge or not. With the wide availability of smartphones that can receive streaming audio, public radio stations can offer subscribers apps that would enable them to listen to uninterrupted programs, so long as they maintain their subscriptions. Pledge weeks would continue on the broadcast station, but paid-up members could avoid them by listening through their smartphones. That's what younger listeners are doing already with Pandora, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Slacker and other services. These services typically offer free and paid versions; with the paid version, subscribers have to sign in with a username and password, but they get their music or talk commercial-free.

Public radio already has the shows to attract younger audiences (although it could have a lot more,) and it has the technology to do away with pledge weeks for listeners on smartphones. If public radio stations are serious about getting younger listeners to become members, the ball is in their court.

The Zero Option

In business, as in life, we often keep doing things because we've been doing them for a long time. It's habit and past practice converted into a self-fulfilling rationale for why things shouldn't change. "We've always done that." "We can't stop doing that." The result is that we keep doing things that we should have stopped doing years ago. This mindset is probably responsible for the failure of more businesses than anything else, but we can't get rid of the mindset, so we keep repeating the mistake.

I suggest a new approach called "The Zero Option." Take something that you're doing--even if it's still working, even if it's still profitable--and stop doing it. Do something else. Here's a few examples from media companies:

• How often have you seen an ad on television for a movie that's bad--obviously bad, just from the commercial--but it's still booked into theaters for national distribution? I'm not talking about bad movies that will still make a lot of money, like the "Transformer" series, or a blockbuster bomb like "John Carter" where there's so much money at stake that the studio can't afford to walk away from it. I'm talking about movies in the $50 million dollar and below budget range that tested poorly and might have gotten mediocre or bad reviews from early showings at film festivals. These are often the movies that have their titles plastered at the top of the screen throughout their television commercials, as if seeing the title for a full 30 seconds will make a bad movie more desirable.
  
  Instead of spending a few tens of millions of additional dollars to promote a movie that's an odds-on turkey, why not kill it? Write it off. Sell it (even at a loss) to another distributor. Get back into the business of dumping stinkers into the direct-to-video market. Don't throw good money after bad.
• Local television news is a dying business. It's still profitable for most stations, but the audience is dying off, as younger viewers switch to "The Daily Show", watch something on their DVRs at 11 p.m. or get their news from the Internet. U.S. television stations used to be required to show news programs by the Federal Communication Commission, in order to fulfill their obligation to operate "in the public interest." Today, fulfilling the public interest requirement has become little more than a joke; many stations do it with a few hours of children's cartoons on Saturday morning, between the early-morning infomercials and the early-afternoon sporting events.
  
  Rather than run news programs that have turned into a nightly cavalcade of murders, fires and crying mothers, where most of the audience is only interested in the weather report or sports, why not try something else? At the 11 p.m. hour, instead of producing a news report, how about replacing it with a local nightly talk show, perhaps hosted by a local radio talk show host with a strong following? Bring in a studio audience and talk about some of the local events of the day. Let viewers call in. You can still have weather and sports segments (or the entire show could be focused on sports.) Instead of being an also-ran for the "between 60 and dead" audience for local news, you could build a younger, more valuable audience for a locally-produced show.
• Radio stations in the U.S. have been adding commercials to their broadcasts for years. It sometimes sounds like there's more commercials than content. That's led to the growth of satellite radio and streaming services like Pandora and Spotify, which have fewer ads or none at all. Broadcasters are wringing their hands about the growth of streaming media in particular; Clear Channel, which owns more radio stations than any other company in the U.S., has launched its own streaming service called iHeartRadio. But, why are consumers shifting away from broadcast radio? The answer is too many commercials. Yet, there's a radio in just about every car sold in the U.S., and it doesn't cost anything to turn it on or to keep using it.
  
  Instead of trying to push as many ads into each hour as you can, why not cut back on the number of commercials played each hour, and promote that as a differentiating factor? In the short term, your ad revenues will drop, but if your audience expands, you can charge more.

The Zero Option means making a deliberate decision to change something that you're doing, even if it appears to be working. It doesn't mean making a change because you're forced to by new technologies, competitors or governments--those aren't proactive, voluntary changes. It's about actively driving the rate of change in your industry instead of letting others drive it for you.