Rural Programming Initiative
Summary #1, KCHO

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What did you learn about listening to your station and your research?
The results of the first round of research proved to be problematic for us. We learned that the main reason listeners tuned in to Northstate Public Radio was for our music. The traditional "tent poles" NPR stations have reported for more than two decades-strong listening during Morning Edition and All Things Considered-did not materialize for us. Instead, the opposite was apparently the case-our strongest listening occurred during our music blocks, while listening during the NPR News Programs was relatively low.

Since the early 1980s KCHO has purchased the CPB subsidized Arbitron ratings data through the Radio Research Consortium. For most of that time we have conformed to the public radio "tent pole" phenomenon, so being faced with this contradictory data was quite a surprise. When the A&A representative was unable to suggest the reason for this great discrepancy during our consultation call prior to the Cohort #3 meeting, we participated in that meeting with serious doubts about the validity of the data. It was not until near the end of our two day meeting that Ginny Berson figured out what had occurred. While we have always targeted our cities of license, Chico and Redding, the telephone exchanges that were designated were weighted more to the rural communities of our coverage area.

In terms of what we learned (apart from the need to more carefully designate phone prefixes according to our targeted audience) the data apparently shows the difference in listening behavior between urban and rural residents. Our urban listeners do not depend on us for news, but rather are attracted more to our music. Furthermore, it was not our classical music-the predominant music format we offer-but music in general, which attracted the most rural listeners. Probably the best thing we can take away from this data is that we compared favorably overall with the other stations in our cohort, even though our principle talk and music formats were not the most preferred by the listeners surveyed.

Where are your programming strengths and weaknesses?
Again, due to the confusion other this data which contradicted our long standing Arbitron data, we came into the meeting without much confidence that we could learn much about our strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, because our most recent Arbitron "book" indicated consistently increasing listening, we emerged from the meeting with little sense of urgency concerning weaknesses. In retrospect, our only weakness, as such, is that the average age of our audience is older than we'd like. We need to work on attracting younger listeners.

What process are you using to decide on program changes?
We are not anticipating any major programming changes. Once we settled on our primary program schedule, we determined to stay with it as long as our listenership kept growing, which it has. Any change in our programming would be determined by several factors pointing consistently toward or away from a specific program or format. These would include research data, listener contacts, financial support (or lack of it) and our professional sense of what new or necessary programming might be added or modified.

What program changes have you made?
The most recent change we have made was to switch to CLASSICAL 24 for our weekday music block. This was done in part to try and attract younger listeners to the format. We had been programming and playing the music locally, using volunteer announcers. Library limitations, time intensive programming, and inconsistent, largely older sounding announcers were the main factors in this decision.

What have you learned about these changes so far?
The listener-jury is still out on this. We began using C24 at the beginning of February. We've had maybe a dozen complaints (mostly about missing our local announcers. However, most of those complainers were hard pressed to name the individuals they missed.) We've had about the same number of complements on the increased variety of the music being presented. Our first real test is about to come, with our Spring on-air pledge drive.