What will happen to public radio?

There’s a long and interesting post by Doug (IT Conversations) about the future of public radio. He says that the costs and structures of the current public radio station model in the US is probably unable to innovate and survive in a new world. He also goes in to what both prx and open source radio are doing in boston to try and save public radio and innovate.

I’m not a radio person really, but i’ve build a low power fm transmitter, been interviewed plenty of times for various radio programs, produce two short pieces for freespeech radio news, developed a calendaring service for commercial music stations, and in general through my activities with indymedia i’ve been around a lot of radio.

What will happen to radio in general?

The question about what happens to public radio is part of a larger question, what happens to radio. What happens to public, which we mean state supported radio, what happens to college radio stations, what happens to community radio stations such as pirate stations and pacifica stations, what happens to the huge number of christian stations, the commercial stations which are independent, and what happens to the big chains?

There’s a tremendous amount of embedded history, fights, and power structures which are build up around radio. Commercial radio, but really public radio too, is very very conservative. They don’t experiment, they move in hurds. They have a local community which they cater to just enough that they can continue to sell their listeners to advertisers.

For the most part public radio is just a commercial radio for the college educated set. It’s more tasteful, the ads are shorter, they don’t yell out, the conversation is more intelligent, but it’s the same basic thing. In other countries radio is different, but I’m talking about radio in the United States. So the problem applies to most radio stations here.

So what should a radio station do? Well some are adapting their content to podcasting and other mediums. WFMU, KCRW, and Democracy Now! are all good examples of ‘noncommercial’ radio stations or programs who are pushing their same programs on to many new mediums.

Their programs still fit and are build for radio as a medium. Broadcasting quite different from on demand or time-shifted media. The difference goes well beyond just how you listen to it. Broadcasting is a very constrained medium. There are only a couple dozen frequencies in any given area open to use. Those are divided up in to stations, and each station then chunks up the time in to programs. The programs are very time sensitive because there is no way to find out what’s on, except knowing it’ll be on the same time tomorrow or next week. The interface just lets you choose what to listen to, and you can choose when you do that.

There are advantages to the simplicity. Radio is a medium which works to access communities where you have high illiteracy or linguistic groups who do not have their own written language. That’s not the case in the US where you don’t have concentrations of those groups in sufficient numbers to make a difference. It’s easy to turn on and leave going in the background. Radios are cheap, and they work most places. For example i have two radio stations i like a lot, one is KMUD which serves rural parts of northern california and the counter culture communities who live there. Most of the listeners don’t have phones or electricity, so radio is the fundamental string which holds the community together. Another station is a pirate station in Montevideo, Uruguay Radio Contonia which serves the poor bario, ciudad vieja. The station has music, radio theater, locally produced programs, international politics, and covers local events for the community and is a major force for bottom up social organization and community events in a poor and violence plagued neighborhood. The station streams over the net, some of the time, so that former residents of the bario can listen and keep in touch with home even though they were forced to become economic migrants in Brazil, the US, and Europe.

Those stations will not be hurt by the collapse of the traditional broadcast radio revenue model. They can adopt podcasting, streaming radio, and the like which extend their reach. But they are funded by some small donations, and holding fundraising events like street parties. In some ways they are best able to transition to the ‘new radio’ because they know how to tell a compelling story with audio.

What does radio mean without broadcast? That’s a good question. There are a few basic things which happen.

Format & Show Length

First the format constraints get removed. You can do a 3 minute or 18 minute program. You can do readings of essays from an 19th century anarchist magazine, or 30 seconds of sounds to make you laugh. You could have a podcast version of post secret. Conference sessions like IT Conversations does, or Alternative Radio could do are a great example of longer format shows.

Time and the Archive

One of the big things which comes up when we think about podcasting, is we think, but it’s not live. It’s true, i doubt i’d got to a podcast to get the latest news about election results. But there is surprisingly little which is so time sensitive. There are plenty of other, better, ways to get breaking news. And anything important finds alternate news sources such as phone calls, sms, and face to face conversations spread news really fast if it’s actually important and relevant.

So most radio programs have been thought of in terms of their first airing, and the rebroadcast. The value is put in to the first time it’s made available to listeners, broadcast, and then after that it’s less valuable. Some companies restructure their whole licensing structure around this, such as the BBC which only owns it’s own rights for 7 days from first release, after that the ownership transfers to an associated entity which tries to sell the content for rebroadcast.

What we should be thinking about is something more like a good comic book store. Sure they have the latest issue, but people go there to find the back copies. The archive is where the value lies. New episodes need to come out, but that’s to build a richer archive and satisfy regulars who might be waiting for the latest.

When you look at PRX, IT Conversations</>, or Alternative Radio you can see they all are directories which are designed around showing what is new, and promoting people to find the old stuff where the real ‘meat’ is. Towards that end, IT Conversations now has a feed of it’s complete archive as well as more limited feeds.

Open Source Radio, the podshow podcasts, and to some extent Odeo don’t do as good a job and following the comic book store model. The archive is more interesting that the latest show. If i haven’t heard a program it doesn’t matter if it was made yesterday, last year, or in 1965.

Democratization of the means of production

Radio is a less both a more and less democratic medium than writing. Speaking is something we almost all do, yet being able to speak well is a definite skill, and having a good radio voice is a talent. That said, we have tens of thousands of years of experience learning how to be good story tellers. What isn’t democratic is access to the equipment and the ability to transmit what you create.

When radio was first setup in the US it was an open space. Anybody could easily setup a station. RCA and others setup lots of stations and then rented out the time to program producers to air their shows. This practice meant you didn’t have to own a station, but you just rented airtime. The existence of this open ‘rent time’ system is part of how the privatization of US radio airwaves was justified. That system is long gone in the US, but it still exists in other parts of the world. In Uruguay the Testimonios produces wonderful radio documentaries, until recently they rented time on the public and commercial radio stations. Today they have build up a network of community and pirate radio stations which air the programs for free.

The cost of audio recorders which work well enough are dropping rapidly. Today in commercial radio and TV the journalists are getting stripped of their teams because they can now use all the equipment themselves. The embedded journalists in Iraq just had high end consumer video cameras and powerbooks. This means that the rest of us, given some money and time to learn techniques, can produce similar quality programs. The authority which is rested in quality production values is starting to fade away.

With that diminished authority of the traditional media, we gain greater democracy. More control by people to cover their own lives, to become the media, and less power in the authoritative voice. With that central power dissipating, the need of people to go back to the large media companies few flagship programs decreases and with fewer listeners / viewers the ability to sell those viewers to advertisers goes down. I’ve heard that Infinity, Clear Channel’s little brother, is loosing %3 of it’s revenue per year.

This shift will change radio in ways we can’t really understand how. At best we can build tools to hasten the process and through networks like indymedia tie the process to social movements.

What does it mean?

We don’t know what it means. Public radio may be able to survive, or it may disappear. The community, err demographic, who wants the public radio style content will continue to exist. There will be people who want to listen to it, and more ability for people to produce it, then it will continue to exist. What happens to the big buildings and transmitters? I don’t know. The people active in public radio today know best how to tell and produce radio programs. They can produce the best shows on podcasting too. The question is will they.

Advertising right now in radio is a very hand held process. It was that way for web advertisements until the adoption of text ads. Currently the way advertising is happening with podcasts is labor intensive. If advertising could be figured out, then it has to be cheap to produce sufficiently good quality ads, and it has to be easy to get those ads in to the podcasters shows who want to run them.

If advertising isn’t possible down the long tail, then perhaps most podcasts will be like photo sharing online and blogs where they money isn’t in selling the readers to the advertisers, but in selling services to the producers. Or perhaps the ads stuff can be figured out, and it’ll be a combination of both. Either way, it’ll be interesting.