No Commercials!
Public/Community Radio Rides Roaringly; Roger Dodger
A "Pledge Week" Pitch
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One of our Albuquerque Public Radio Stations (we have two!) is KUNM. I have been involved with the station in various ways for years. I helped conduct focus groups with their listeners and I served on their board for four years. It's a really good station, something of a hybrid that may be unique in the country in that is is a "Public" station and a "Community" station. (Don'tcha see?)
This has been pledge week, and they manage to make it quite interesting - a creative challenge.
As an exercise in keeping it interesting, I wrote this little ditty:
We don’t say it enough, but what we are asking you to support is a non-commercial station. One of the biggest differences between commercial and non-commercial stations are their business plans - how they pay all the costs of running a radio station. Both privately or corporately owned and public stations very successfully fund their endeavors (including stockholder profits for commercial stations), but there are hugely different business plans for commercial and public stations.
With KUNM, one of the greatest benefits to you as a listener is programming that is not interrupted by commercials. Whatever you think about commercials - they inherently interrupt whatever program content the station is presenting. These constant interruptions are to many listeners very irritating. Market research indicates many people switch around stations during commercial breaks, mainly looking for somewhere with no commercial playing.
It is quite obvious that irritation with commercials is one of the motivating forces for the growth of subscription radio from the satellite services. Non commercial radio you can get… but of course you have to pay for it. Some people cannot afford satellite radio. And except in the monster cities, there is very little local content on any satellite channel. People value local information and involvement a lot. As a community public station, KUNM is non-commercial, has a lot of local content and involvement, and is available to people of every economic status. The public business model is to seek support from people who can afford it in return for no commercials and the kind of programming the commercial-free system allows.
Commercial interruptions limit the variety of programming. Longer form things, like an in-depth investigative news piece, or long cuts of jazz and classical music, or a fervent discussion of important issues… are pretty much limited when you must run a lot of spots. The “sample around during commercials” phenomenon causes some folks to lose the thread. Stations that work hard on their programming don’t want you to lose the thread; it diminishes their ability to serve your needs .
Undeniabley, content on radio stations is influenced by the sponsors who put on all the commercials - thus all the income - for the station. Sponsors decide what kind of stations they want their commercials on. Of course one of the best audiences from an advertiser point of view is a large group of that sponsor’s potential customers.
You can bet the station owners want to get good ratings with the target audiences their sponsors want. That has a huge effect on how that station is programmed. Highly targeted stations… take hit country music or traditional country, and conservative talk or liberal talk, urban, hip-hop, rap… on and on, commercial radio is highly defined on a station-by-station basis, and that’s a result of their business plans. They must have an adequately salable audience, so they specialize their programming specifically for that. Commercial radio is programmed to bring an special audience to its sponsors so they will continue to buy commercials. Clearly it can be said that they program for their sponsors.
Non-commercial stations, public stations of various sorts, have a whole different take on programming. They are much more broadly “aimed.” They can serve the whole public with entirely different broadcast services, because they don’t have to run armloads of commercials, and since there are no sponsors to program for, all attention can go to programming for the public, their listeners. For you, in other words, not for the sponsors.
As a non-commercial public station, KUNM provides a huge variety of music programs, for instance. Every one of those programs has several live hosts. Some are “disk jockeys” in the old school. Others are excellent interviewers and critics. Most are quite expert in the variety of tunes they present; some have extensive personal music collections to add to the huge KUNM libraries. (Imagine the NPR programs like Morning Edition and All things considered, chopped up by dozens of commercials an hour.) KUNM also has the largest local and state news department in the state. All this with no commercials to interrupt or skew the coverage.
(How do we do it? Personnel costs at KUNM are kept to a level where all of this is possible by the fact that dozens and dozens of dedicated volunteers contribute their time and talent, something that gives you the listener more bang for your pledge buck. Most of these volunteer broadcasters are deeply involved in aspects of our local communities.)
This soliloquy is just to remind you of the great benefit the non-commercial, public-supported radio business plan is to you as a listener. It not only lets you enjoy commercial free programming, it actually makes this kind of radio possible. THAT’s one of the main listener benefits we ask you to support.
There! Don't you feel like calling in a pledge? Make it a "Radio Frequency" pledge, you know, a bit every month.
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...and
KEEP LISTENING TO PUBLIC RADIO!
p.s. Our other public station here in Albuquerque is KANW, and it's wonderful too.
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