|
<advertisement>
|
 |
 
|
|
media search: |
 |
Chronicle
Fox is a writer and editor who lives in Bass Harbor, Maine.
Deregulation left commercial radio news gasping for air. In 1981, the Federal Communications Commission lifted the requirement that stations broadcast nonentertainment programming -- otherwise known as news and public affairs. Since local news is expensive to produce and listeners to all-music stations seldom demand more than headlines, that change helped slowly strangle local radio reporting.
The big radio networks are still supplying national news, but executives fret that little of it actually gets on the air. "We put out an excellent product. Not much of it gets cleared," says Larry D. Cooper, vice-president of CBS News, Radio, which has the potential to reach nearly twenty-eight million listeners.
Commercial radio's troubles left an opening for public radio. National Public Radio, which produces and distributes All Things Considered and Morning Edition, among other programs, spotted the opening early on and dropped its alternative image for something more mainstream (see "Has Success Spoiled NPR?" CJR, September/October 1990). Its audience has grown steadily and is now up 18 percent from just a year ago.
And as more and more news junkies.turn to public radio -- a trend variously attributed to the gulf war, the deteriorating quality of TV news, and the lack of news elsewhere on radio -- competition is heating up. The result: a polite but serious air war.
American Public Radio, NPR's chief rival in the distribution of public radio programming, now distributes a slew of alternatives to NPR news shows. When it was founded in 1983, APR agreed to stay out of the news business and concentrate on music and cultural programming -- or at least that's how Bill Buzenberg, vice-president for news and information at NPR, remembers it. Stephen Salyer, who became APR's president in 1988, disagrees: "NothingI've ever read suggests that APR made any promises about what it was going toget into."
Despite NPR's umbilical attachment to its member stations, station mangers have always been free to affiliate with APR too. While they once had few choices, now they have more options than they know what to do with.
Building on the residual popularity of its gulf war national phone-in show, NPR launched The Talk of the Nation in November. The two-hour show is hosted four days a week by John Hockenberry, and on Fridays by Ira Flatow, who turns to health, technology, and science. One day each week is devoted to politics.
APR countered with Presidential Choices, a series of ninety-minute specials, to start this January and lead up to the 1992 elections. The program combines discussions of a hypothetical but realistic presidential decision with a national call-in segment.
Even without the new offerings, there has been growing competition between older shows. Monitor Radio, a news show produced by The Christian Science Publishing Society and distributed domestically by APR, used to come in one-hour morning and afternoon drive-time offerings that seemed designed to fit neatly around NPR's most popular time-slots for Morning Edition and All Things Considered. NPR announced last summer it would add a half-hour to All Things Considered in the fall of 1992 and begin airing it an hour earlier, describing the change as a response to requests from station managers. But it looked as if the network was taking dead aim at the Monitor slot. APR and Monitor, meanwhile, had already taken the offensive by offering an additional seven A.M. airing of their Early Edition (carried by ninety of the 431 NPR member stations), thus going up directly against NPR's Morning Edition. "As long as public radio can only run one news program at a time, there is going to be competition," says David Creagh, Monitor's executive producer
Even the small and left-of-center Pacifica Radio News, which has been gaining listeners and respectability recently, is weighing a "considerable expansion" that may include moving to a morning position or two broadcasts a day, according to Bill Thomas, director of program service. Pacific has hired a national development director to raise money.
APR, meanwhile, has hired its first-ever vice-president for news. The network does not anticipate going beyond distribution and into production "at the present time," according to APR president Salyer. Still, APR had already taken at least a step toward production in 1989, when it provided more than half a million dollars in startup funding for its financial news program Marketplace (see "TV's Econ 101," CJR, July/ August 1990). The program, produced by the University of Southern California Radio, is supported by General Electric, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, station user fees, and foundations.
APR also offers full shows from the venerable BBC World Service (see "The British are Coming," CJR, July/August, 1991), and from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), as well as Germany's Deutsche Welle.
With all these choices, stations are finding it easy to custom-design their news coverage. Many stations combine NPR, APR, and other offerings. But KUMD in Duluth, Minnesota, has dropped its NPR membership, which it says was too expensive. The cost of NPR programming is based on a formula related to a station's size and ability to pay. If KUMD had opted for the full NPR news package in fiscal year 1992, it would have paid $ 47,332. Instead, the station created a package using the AP wire services ($ 5,123), the radio AP News Network ($ 4,903), Pacific ($ 3,000), and the BBC, which comes free with APR affiliation.
Economics plays an especially complex role in this public radio marketplace. NPR is quick to point out that the BBC and Monitor Radio each have an advantage -- the first is subsidized by the British government, the second by the Christian Science Church. Monitor is a bargain for APR affiliates; the BBC is free.
NPR funding comes from member stations and from foundation, corporate, and association grants. Despite a jump in member dues and contributions, the network suffered a $ 1 million shortfall in fundraising last spring, forcing some painful cutbacks.
NPR's approach to newsgathering, which favors bureaus and full-time correspondents rather than stringers, is costly. But Jon Schwartz, program director for Boston's WBUR, which recently went to nearly fifteen hours of news a day, says that when it comes to U.S. news, "no one can compete with All Things Considered and Morning Edition."
NPR's Buzenberg contends that when stations like KUMD opt for the cheaper alternative they are being short-sighted, taking away money that could go to produce solid but expensive NPR programming. He would like to see regular, dependable financial support for NPR news -- possibly coming from a tax on the sale of commercial broadcasting licenses -- that would free the network from its constant fundraising and quasi-advertising in the form of on-air credits to corporate underwriters.
"They [the stations] know they need us," he says. "We do the best job." "The public needs more news, not less," counters APR's Salyer. "There's room and demand for other players."
