Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ira Glass: Public radio can capitalize on its popularity without selling out

current.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 56 posts

Re: Ira Glass: Public radio can capitalize on its popularity without selling out

#11

Post by karmacondon »

tptacek wrote: post #2

Avid public radio listener, WBEZ member. I guess I'm not opposed to scaling up program underwriting, but I wonder what it is about the structure of NPR and program buying that prevents shows like Ira Glass's TAL from just making their money on "the back end". Long-term, FM radio NPR is not going to last. As radio shifts from FM to the Internet, local stations will matter less, and NPR/PRI will increasingly become a K…

NPR sees itself first and foremost as a news organization, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Even if radio shifts from FM to Internet, there will always be a place for local news reporting and discussion. And that shift itself is probably still a long time coming. We HN types often forget that there are millions and millions of people who prefer to have Rush Limbaugh and others shout the "news" at them via pickup truck radios. There are still a lot of people who don't even know what a "podcast" is.

The thing about pledge drives and member supported radio is that it's almost completely free and without obligation. No matter how much money a standout hit like TAL can make from underwriting, why would he ever stop asking people for money if they're willing to give it to him in record numbers year after year? I'm sure that WBEZ places some restrictions on their programming in return for using the public radio brand to solicit donations, but I doubt that it's anything onerous. FM radio, streaming, podcasts, it's all the same to the content creators of the individual shows. More underwriting will allow them to do larger things, but if that dries up for whatever reason they can just continue to make money directly from their fans.

Public Broadcasting is like an Eternal Kickstarter. People will give you "donations" in return for a product, not just once, but every year for as long as they use your service. And they don't ask for any equity or voting rights or profit sharing, and you can sell ads to make extra money if you'd like. It's the best situation for a business to be in.

Re: Ira Glass: Public radio can capitalize on its popularity without selling out

#12

Post by tofupup »

Folks seem to forgotten what happened to the Appalachian Community Service Network. We know it as TLC and while a fortune was made off of honey bobo the folk in Appalachia still have one of the lowest educational levels of working Americans. As much as I love capitalism you have to admit it does not play well with the commons.

Re: Ira Glass: Public radio can capitalize on its popularity without selling out

#13

Post by fleitz »

hoopism wrote: post #3

Naive question... with the influx of cash from larger and larger underwriters and the public funds becoming a smaller and smaller % of overall funding how does public radio handle the natural tendency to chase the big funds? What's the % breakdown today? I don't think it's evil, but when 80% of funding starts rolling in for projects like invisibilia I could see it as tempting to head more into a "reality show" type p…

The key is to limit advertising to the point where there is always demand for the spot, and/or not reliant on major sponsors.

eg. If coke is willing to spend $15 million and pepsi $10 million if you sell the ad to coke for $10 million you know you can always sell to pepsi for $10 should you piss coke off.

Ideally you should have a bunch of smaller advertisers such that it's easy to find another person to take the spot.

It's an issue for any business and something DHH talks about regarding not getting big clients which you inevitably end up becoming beholden to.

Re: Ira Glass: Public radio can capitalize on its popularity without selling out

#14

Post by derefr »

mc32 wrote: post #8

Public radio is a mixed bag. It's better than most but I dislike the pretense of being better, because in my view they are only marginally better when presenting news. One of the things I'm most disenchanted with is how on uncontroversial things they'll offer an opinion. "lack of oversight is bad". But on controversial issues they tend to appear neutral (offering no opinion) while at the same time couching the questi…

> they take a position, but they try to hide it

Of course they do. That's what the public actually wants when they say they want "intelligent reporting"—an opinion they agree with that they can pretend is unbiased fact-based reporting. (It's the same idea as sarcasm: it's a display of intelligence to be able to signal one thing to your friends and another to the general public.)

True fact-based reporting, on the other hand, gets blasted by both sides of a debate for "supporting the other guy"—because any statement that's not explicitly in favor of them, even a statement making an orthogonal point, is against their agenda.

> the strife in dome inner cities was cast as police vs population when in reality government is at greatest fault

Most problems come down to systems of incentives spiralling out of control when nobody is watching, that create principal-agent problems when agents do what the incentives tell them to do. My favorite piece of NPR is Planet Money, because economists tend to at least be attuned to the "incentives" framing for most subjects, even if all they get to talk about is monetary incentives. I'd love to see regular reporting done by economics-trained (and maybe game-theory-trained) journalists, though.

Re: Ira Glass: Public radio can capitalize on its popularity without selling out

#15

Post by zipwitch »

mc32 wrote: post #8

Public radio is a mixed bag. It's better than most but I dislike the pretense of being better, because in my view they are only marginally better when presenting news. One of the things I'm most disenchanted with is how on uncontroversial things they'll offer an opinion. "lack of oversight is bad". But on controversial issues they tend to appear neutral (offering no opinion) while at the same time couching the questi…

NPR: quietly polite apologists for the status quo.

Re: Ira Glass: Public radio can capitalize on its popularity without selling out

#16

Post by derefr »

lfowles wrote: post #9
tptacek wrote: post #2

Avid public radio listener, WBEZ member. I guess I'm not opposed to scaling up program underwriting, but I wonder what it is about the structure of NPR and program buying that prevents shows like Ira Glass's TAL from just making their money on "the back end". Long-term, FM radio NPR is not going to last. As radio shifts from FM to the Internet, local stations will matter less, and NPR/PRI will increasingly become a K…

> Long-term, FM radio NPR is not going to last. I'm curious, what do you think will replace FM NPR in cars? In Wichita, KS, I'm lucky to get cell data service before I'm a mile out of the city. Maybe I'm reading too much into an "FM Radio will not last" interpretation.

Instead of the "directly-streamed linear programming" model, you could do radio audio broadcast the same way you do GPS: just have the local radio towers spraying some selection of podcasts on a loop (with high enough frequency+bandwidth+compression that the effective audio rate is faster-than-real-time, unlike satellite radio), and then have "radios" in cars (or wherever) which catch the files and cache them.

You can build whatever you like on top of that—a hybrid device that will siphon up local OTA content along with arbitrary podcasts when it can find 4G, and then intelligently arrange the combination into linear programming, for example. (Really, though, you're just creating a weird sort of secondary internet that only allows retrieval of files relevant to the local area. In fact, you could make the "radio" into a 4G picocell that actually re-serves said limited internet to your phone, where the OTA content then shows up in your regular podcast app.)

Effectively, this would be the over-the-air equivalent of how pay-per-view (not video-on-demand, the older one) worked, but with the client device then acting as a set-top box to turn the received broadcasts into something equivalent to video-on-demand.

This would also be equivalent to how the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview received game programs.

Re: Ira Glass: Public radio can capitalize on its popularity without selling out

#17

Post by dublinben »

kbenson wrote: post #6
pervycreeper wrote: post #4

Hard to take the message seriously when his show, This American Life, is so incredibly bland. In my appraisal, it does nothing but pander to its "middlebrow" audience, never daring to tell them anything they don't already know. Maybe he's just not aware of it.

Do you listen to TAL much? I ask because if you find it bland when you do, I can't imagine you listening to it much, and if you don't listen to it much, I'm not sure I trust your appraisal to be accurate. Not every episode is interesting to me, so I skip some, but others I find extremely interesting (Radiolab, Planet Money and Freakonomics are my bread and butter NPR shows). To me that just indicates that have a fair…

>Radiolab, Planet Money and Freakonomics are my bread and butter NPR shows

It's interesting that you list those three (excellent) shows as examples. Only Planet Money is actually produced or distributed by NPR themselves. Radiolab and Freakonomics are both productions of WNYC.

Re: Ira Glass: Public radio can capitalize on its popularity without selling out

#18

Post by NeutronBoy »

derefr wrote: post #16
lfowles wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Long-term, FM radio NPR is not going to last. I'm curious, what do you think will replace FM NPR in cars? In Wichita, KS, I'm lucky to get cell data service before I'm a mile out of the city. Maybe I'm reading too much into an "FM Radio will not last" interpretation.

Instead of the "directly-streamed linear programming" model, you could do radio audio broadcast the same way you do GPS: just have the local radio towers spraying some selection of podcasts on a loop (with high enough frequency+bandwidth+compression that the effective audio rate is faster-than-real-time, unlike satellite radio), and then have "radios" in cars (or wherever) which catch the files and cache them. You ca…

That sounds super complicated compared to good old FM radio.

Re: Ira Glass: Public radio can capitalize on its popularity without selling out

#19

Post by [deleted] »

derefr wrote: post #16
lfowles wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Long-term, FM radio NPR is not going to last. I'm curious, what do you think will replace FM NPR in cars? In Wichita, KS, I'm lucky to get cell data service before I'm a mile out of the city. Maybe I'm reading too much into an "FM Radio will not last" interpretation.

Instead of the "directly-streamed linear programming" model, you could do radio audio broadcast the same way you do GPS: just have the local radio towers spraying some selection of podcasts on a loop (with high enough frequency+bandwidth+compression that the effective audio rate is faster-than-real-time, unlike satellite radio), and then have "radios" in cars (or wherever) which catch the files and cache them. You ca…

[deleted]

Re: Ira Glass: Public radio can capitalize on its popularity without selling out

#20

Post by rpcope1 »

derefr wrote: post #16
lfowles wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Long-term, FM radio NPR is not going to last. I'm curious, what do you think will replace FM NPR in cars? In Wichita, KS, I'm lucky to get cell data service before I'm a mile out of the city. Maybe I'm reading too much into an "FM Radio will not last" interpretation.

Instead of the "directly-streamed linear programming" model, you could do radio audio broadcast the same way you do GPS: just have the local radio towers spraying some selection of podcasts on a loop (with high enough frequency+bandwidth+compression that the effective audio rate is faster-than-real-time, unlike satellite radio), and then have "radios" in cars (or wherever) which catch the files and cache them. You ca…

This sounds like a ton of work to do what FM already does reasonably well; if anything I'd like to see the amount of funding, variety, and _bandwidth_ for public radio increased, hopefully breaking some of clear channel's grip. I know everyone likes technologically advanced solutions, but honestly for anything that isn't straight broadcast, such as your suggestion above, the amount of work needed to workably implement it on the surface appears huge; why replace what just works with something else that doesn't have a immediately distinct advantage?
Post reply on HN