Putting the Public in Radio

My post about radio yesterday spawned more conversations that make me think that audio is a simple network service. And that's what it will be in the long run, when what we call "radio" today will be an anachronism, like steam ships and flintlock rifles.

I just got off the phone with Doug Kaye, whose collection of IT Conversations only gets better and better. (Not sure if the conversatoin he just recorded wth me will advance that trend, but we'll see.) The last thing Doug and I talked about was our common background in radio. Doug was at KALX at Berkeley when it was a 15-watt FM campus station that also broadcast through the dorms on what was called "carrier current" transmission on the AM band. With carrier current, the electrical system of the building serves as an antenna. I imagined that lots of these transmitters must still in the basements of dorms across America. Then I remembered the name of the company that made most of them: LPB, for Low Power Broadcasting. I just looked on the Web and, sure enough, they're still alive, selling transmitters. Amazing.

Anyway, on a less than entirely unrelated matter, Big Rick takes exception to KQED/88.5, the giant public radio station in San Francisco, horning in on the turf of Capital Public Radio in Sacramento, which operates two stations there, KXJZ/88.9 and KXPR/90.9 (plus two others in Groveland and Tahoe City). Public radio tends to be a college thing, or a regional thing. NPR and PRI may be national program sources, but "NPR stations" are not run by NPR. They're run by local outfits like KQED and CPR.

So anyway, KQED, which is the most popular public radio station in the country, reaching over 745,000 listeners per week, and which is grandfathered with a way-above-the-limit 110,000 watt transmitter atop Mt. San Bruno (giving it the biggest FM signal, by far, in Northern California, and quite audible in Sacramento) went and bought a small FM in North Highlands, a Sacramento suburb, renamed it KQEI, and began simulcasting from there. KQEI's signal isnt' the equal of KXPR or KXJZ, but it's big enough.

The whole move was, like, very not done in public radio. It violated the collegial spirit behind the implicit territoriality of the nonprofits that own the stations.

Rick's problem is with a lack of original local programming. Why have yet another station broadcasting All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Car Talk and the rest of the standard lineup of national shows? Well, because they're popular, and help raise the money that ends up paying for them. Call the cycle vicious or virtuous, it's still a cycle. And, after 25 years or whatever, it's getting old.

What's new is public stations buying other public stations. KQED paid $3 million in a sealed bid for the station, beating Capital Public Radio's offer. The station had been KEBR, one of many owned by Family Radio, a worldwide religious broadcaster in Oakland, CA. Family Radio continues to serve large regions from its flagship station, KEAR, plus a huge portfolio of other stations and translaors (which rebroadcast originating stations on other channels). It According to this story from February, 2003, KQED is committed both to expansion and to local programming on KQEI. We'll see about the latter. About the former, public radio stations have been eating the dust of religious broadcasters for a long time.

Only in the last few years have public broadcasters like KQED become hip to the possibility of what can be done with translators, for instance. They're a great way for noncommercial stations to broadcast outside their home coverage areas (commercial stations are not allowed the same privilege). Unfortunately for public radio, most translator possibilities have been discovered and squatted upon by religious broadcasters, which are far more resourceful about low-budget engineering. There are also opportunities on AM, especially for a station like KQED, which broadcasts mostly spoken programming. Look at KEBR, for example. Family Radio remains on the air in Sacramento on 1210 AM with 5000 watts by day and 500 at night, using two different transmitters. AM stations sell cheap these days.

Public radio broadcasters could leapfrog religious broadcasters (and commercial broadcasters too) by moving into an area where channels aren't scarce and competition isn't a zero-sum game: the Internet. They can do this two ways: 1) by broadcasting in MP3, which is the only popular open format; and 2) by pioneering the use of RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a perfect companion for information radio, because it infoms listeners, or devices that serve listeners, or software on those devices, about the content of broadcast programs. And since countless blogs and other journals are in positions to serve as sources of broadcast information — to be stringers, as it were — information stations like KQED could obtain a torrent of local and timely material from out in the listeners' world.

As Feedster's Scott Rafer tells Harold Check in therssweblog, "In aggregate, what RSS covers out there is much closer to accurate, not in the individual posting, but overall, than any single news outlet going to be." So why not aggregate RSS feeds? Why not become a clearing house inside a new broadcast regime in which anybody can send out signals (which, in a way, RSS notifications are) to anybody?

Craig Burton has been saying for a long time that it's better to concieve of the Internet as a collection of services, than as a system of pipes and protocols. What kinds of services does "public" radio provide? Don't just ask listeners. Listen to what they're saying, out loud, through their own RSS feeds.

Posted by dsearls, June 17, 2004 11:10 AM | | TrackBack