I was on a panel at the 2011 Public Radio Programming Conference. The topic was "Can Public Media Journos Step Up?" Moderator Jessica Clark said there have been many studies and commissions and professors all pressing the point that public radio and television need to play a bigger role in journalism these days because of the catastrophic loss of journalists in newspapers.
Below are the slides I used to make the case that 1) public media news is on the upswing, but 2) it's hard to imagine how we'll grow it really big in any short period of time.
The title slide above was a word cloud derived from my experimental research site: localnpr.org.
I started the talk like this:
"Something happened since I was last on a panel for PRPD. That was a number of years ago… I was still at KPBS in San Diego… and just elected president of PRNDI. What happened is that LOCAL NEWS is now COOL!"
I explained that it wasn't always cool. There was plenty of debate about whether it was worth the investment in local news. Some researchers didn't think audiences cared for it... although plenty of stations did it because it was so obvious a part of their local mission.
Next slide...
"...what made it officially cool was this. The CPB plan assembled by Terry Clifford, Tom Thomas and a cast of many more.
And as you know… one of the key planks in this “master plan for our future…” is an ambitious goal for news…"
Those are gratifying words.
I turned to my fellow panelist Bill Buzenberg at this point and shrugged a quick aside comment, "Of course Bill and I have been saying stuff like this for years… but… at least now it’s official!"
And the reason for this, of course, is that audiences are hungry for news…
"This is a chart -- from the aforementioned report – starting in 1997 showing almost 50% audience growth for public radio between then and 2008… and a projected doubling by 2014.
And apparently it won’t take that long to get to 40 million… former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller said earlier this year that we may already be close to 40 million… (by including online users) which would be twice that of 1997… and triple the audience of around 1990.
News is the primary driver of this growth. Clearly news is our main mission now. The more and better we do it – not only do we grow the audience and grow the revenue (oh yes, revenue is going up, too) but most importantly for any nonprofit enterprise: the better our public service outcomes like making our communities more informed, livable and self-determined.
So local news is not just cool… it’s an essential element to each of our stations.
But local news still has quite the hill to climb."
"This is data from cpb… showing staffing levels of all the stations reporting to CPB. The clump on the left is 1997. The clump on the right is 2009. 2001 is in the middle. Blue is radio. Red is TV. And Green is both of those combined. These are FT positions only.
You'll recall that radio has been growing its audience by 50%... and here we see the corresponding growth of station jobs -- by 36%. TV meanwhile shed jobs. And the net effect is slight growth overall for public broadcasting.
One quick note about this data. There are radio jobs blended into the red TV column… because the CPB lumps all dual licensees into the TV data. So I think we can surmise that TV’s decline was actually steeper and radio’s increase was actually even bigger.
This TV vs radio thing is not just an interesting aside. Many talk about “public media” today and lump all the stations together… and include many other non-broadcast non-profit news organizations – which I’m fine with… but when CPB, by statute, splits the federal allocation 75-25 with the big share going to TV… it’s a bit annoying -- unless radio and TV really are working as combined services, which is happening but not very rapidly. (See KPBS as very good example.)
"I just think it is remarkable what public radio is doing. In 2009… radio employed 34% of public broadcasting’s FT people.
But let’s get back to the local news piece of this… "
"Last year, I undertook a survey of local public media newsrooms. Thanks to Ken Mills and Steve Martin for helping me on that. And to PRNDI for backing it.
Here we see how many full-time employees at public broadcasting stations have what they consider a primary role in producing local news or public affairs. You can see I refrained from lumping the joint licensees in with the TV. The bottom line is that news people amount to only 13% of the total pubcasting workforce. Put another way, 87% of the people working full-time in all of the stations out there do something other than the journalism."
To get a sense of how our workforce compares to what's out there commercially, this graphic shows that we are still small in comparison. (Bigger in trust, however. Public media has been found to have very high levels of trust.) But staff wise, we are still outnumbered. In radio, the gap is shrinking fast.
This chart used recently by the FCC report on local news shows the dramatic drop in radio news staffing over a 30 year period. And of course the 2012 installment missing from this chart would show the column below 10,000 now.
This is another look at the same phenomena... only this is the drop in the median size of radio newsrooms in the USA. Over the past decade, due to rapid consolidation in commercial radio, the typical radio newsroom is now only one person and that means lots of rip & read newscasts.
Of course, what I have found in my survey work is the opposite trend in public radio: we're growing our newsrooms and our national median is 3 journalists per stations.
This chart from 2010 and the next one looking ahead to 2011 show most stations just trying to maintain their staffing during the bad economy... yet a healthy chunk in both years are GROWING their news staffing.
And here's one more eye opener. Remember how all-news radio used to dominate the major markets in America. Now, they still do, except they aren't commerical stations, they're public radion stations...
TO BE CONTINUED......
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