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

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 Knight Foundation-like seed fund for new shows.

The ones lucrative enough to raise extra money can use all of the tools of the Internet to monetize and expand.

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 fairly wide set of topics.

Generally I find they try to go fairly deep on both sides of topic where they can, or at least put disclaimers in that there may other explanations for what they are reporting. The recent multi-part set on police is a good example, they spent a fair amount of time talking about the police perspective on some recent events, and how and why it diverges from public opinion. To me, assuming it's pandering to a "middlebrow" audience would have me believing in a much more informed public than I think actually exists.

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 questions and loading their questions. So when it comes to controversial subjects they take a position, but they try to hide it, which, to me, is more perverse than the blatant left and blatant right, who at least aren't pretending to be objective. That's to say nor, while marginally better, comparatively, isn't all that good and show bias in their reporting and choice of news.

For example, the strife in some inner cities was cast as police vs population when in reality government is at greatest fault. They put the police there to mop up after their failed or non existent policies to better peoples desperate lives. So the police are their last desperate attempt at controlling a situation for which they fell asleep at the wheel then blast police for the situation.

I've switched to listening to NPR exclusively using podcasts. I do find I'm behind on current events though, even major ones, such as riots, but I attribute that to me not having added any current event shows, such as morning edition, which I believe also comes in podcast form.

I use Pocket Casts for android to handle automatic downloading of specific sets of podcasts when my phone is on wifi and plugged in, out of the larger set I've decided is interesting, so getting the content is really a non-issue for me (and I wholeheartedly recommend Pocket Casts!).

It's worth noting that my lack of awareness of current events persists even though I get a good dose of random pop radio in the morning while dropping my children off at school, so I don't attribute that problem as much to a lack of FM radio as I do to a lack of news radio.