Rural Programming Initiative
Summary #2, WKMS

Back to Rural Programming Initiative

September 2002

First, we thank our colleagues for helping us think through some of the changes we've made to the schedule, by sharing observations and insight. Your perspective and experience lend support and expertise. Getting to know you has proven most productive and leads me to suggest that rural stations should consider the African American stations' group model, which has been credited with moving NPR to bring Tavis Smiley to the air. Before discussing how we might serve as a sustaining force for the improvement of rural public radio services, we want to express appreciation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's generosity and concern for rural station services. CPB has manifested its concern for rural public radio listeners through rural service incentive grants, bonuses, and the recently announced million dollar fund for proposals to address sustainable solutions to critical needs at rural stations. Thanks to all who helped create the newest fund, especially Ellen Rocco of our group. We should reaffirm CPB's investment by continuing to meet, even by conference call, to discuss common concerns and to press the rural issues to the forefront nationally, consistently.

One project that could help all of our stations might be CPB's continuing investment in more precise audience research for rural stations. Comparing the results of this NFCB project to two years of the Arbitron spring book has not resulted in a demonstration that we are on the right track for increased audience service. We haven't seen a consistent pattern of growth that would indicate we have "broken out" of the ups and downs of the last decade.

To be specific, on September 24, we received our Spring 2002 Arbitron primary signal report. It showed WKMS cume had fallen back to the 19,000+ figure of 2000 from the 2001 report of 29,000+. This swing in numbers, something WKMS has experienced from year to year over the last decade, stymies efforts to describe, define, project and realize benefits of change, unless the station happens to generate more robust fundraising returns. How then do we understand, define, and communicate increased audience service when the only numbers we have continue to be inconsistent? Should WKMS buy the fall Arbitron PSA in addition to the spring? Would that be throwing money away?
Since our last project report we have changed the WKMS schedule to deal with an apparent erosion of the Sunday morning audience. We put a new schedule in place August 1: we removed Harmonia and St. Paul Sunday from the lineup; moved With Heart and Voice to 6 a.m.; added Sunday Baroque at 7 a.m.; moved WESUN to 9 a.m.; opted to rerun APHC at 11 a.m.; moved Riverwalk up one hour; removed This American Life at 6 p.m.; replaced TAL with Comedy College followed by NPR 100. We consolidated our local blues to a four-hour block on Saturday nights, moving Sounds Eclectic to 9 p.m. Friday. We have increased the scheduling of network and custom promos.
Our audience has been characteristically reticent about sharing its reactions to our changes, except for the continuing objections of classical listeners to the diminution of that genre on our air. We will fundraise in mid-October and expect to hear more then whether we've struck the right chord with the various changes. Over the period of this project we have continued to grow fundraising returns in small increments. We have held ground in underwriting. While making these changes, we also redesigned our program guide. The new guide has met with hearty approval.

CONSIDERATIONS:

Thinking about what might be useful to other stations contemplating change leads me to suggest that networking with other program directors and managers is probably the best thing for change agents, and should probably happen early on, before consensus building with staff. It also seems logical, but easily overlooked, that decision-makers need to collaborate early on with operations, traffic, and promotion staff whose jobs are affected by the schedule change. Decision makers should consistently develop local programming to ensure that stations do not begin to sound like "anywhere" distributors of network programming, rather than providers of quality public radio programming produced by both station and network.
Along with maintaining a stream of important station-produced and nationally produced programs, a station should be able to use nationally developed promotional efforts. We maintain a trade relationship with all of our region's newspapers, acknowledging each on air in return for display ad space. These look local, even though we use the space to promote national programming like APHC and CAR TALK. Perhaps we could revisit the old "tune-in" grants from CPB that gave stations matching money for television buys. Even in our market, television is too high priced for us to use for promotion.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR and PRI would do well to produce simple advertising campaigns annually. Nothing cutesy, please, but honest public awareness campaigns to keep pushing new listeners to the stations.