KUSC sees no evil in alliance

In a move skeptics might call a deal with the devil, but those involved see as a match made in heaven, public radio station KUSC today is announcing a partnership with the nation’s largest radio company, Clear Channel Communications.

KUSC-FM (91.5) relies on underwriting -- those on-air blurbs saying, “this program is being brought to you by” so-and-so -- for 18% of its income, with the rest coming from member donations and grants (the station gets about $400,000 of its $5-million annual budget from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting). But station general manager Brenda Barnes said her marketing staff is too small and has too much turnover to drum up those sponsorships effectively. So she has outsourced the job to Clear Channel, which owns eight commercial stations in the Los Angeles area and about 1,200 nationwide.

“It’s not a huge effort for them, but it makes a big difference for KUSC,” she said. “The bottom line is: Nothing changes for the listener.”

She said the volume of announcements will remain capped at a minute and a half per hour. Currently, only about half of those are underwriting messages, while the rest are various placeholders.

Clear Channel will get commissions for every sponsor it signs, with the percentage increasing if it’s a new client.

KUSC retains right of refusal on sponsors and messages, and each side can bow out of the deal with 60 days’ notice. As an ancillary, both sides agreed to work together promoting music education in public schools. Barnes said that she was skeptical going in, but that Clear Channel accepted all her contract requirements. “They’ve gotten a lot of publicity that isn’t positive,” she said. “If I was under as much scrutiny day to day as Clear Channel, that would be a difficult position to be in. But that goes with the territory. Believe me, they’re not doing this for the money.

“It’s a small percentage of what we’re bringing in. For them, it doesn’t even register,” Barnes said, adding that she hopes the arrangement will add about $250,000 annually to the $1.5 million the station takes in from underwriting.

Charlie Rahilly, Clear Channel’s West Coast senior vice president, said he’s confident his company will find sponsors eager to reach KUSC’s listeners, who tend to have higher-than-average incomes and education. The move also can help revitalize a genre that’s vanishing from airwaves nationwide, and reverse Clear Channel’s image as an agent homogenizing the airwaves.

“If we can generate meaningfully higher revenue, their interests are very well served,” he said. And “if we can use our resources to help maintain and fund broadcast diversity, that’s really going to the heart of it.”

But he also makes no bones about the move being good P.R. for the company, and a chance to show it being a good corporate citizen. “It’s no secret our company’s been banged around in the press,” he said.

After Congress loosened station ownership rules in 1996, Clear Channel grew from a small San Antonio-based company with four dozen stations to the broadcasting behemoth it is today. Along with that came the perception of the company as a corporate bully, flexing the muscles of not only its radio empire, but also its concert-promotion and outdoor advertising businesses as well.

So what of the public-radio purist, wary that KUSC will be corrupted by its relationship with the “Evil Empire,” a common epithet for Clear Channel?

“If that person really wants to ensure their public radio station will remain unsullied and viable into the future,” Rahilly said, he or she should cheer the partnership, which both sides hope will generate enough revenue to allow the station to create its own endowment. “Ultimately, that should provide for the station’s survival into perpetuity.”

KUSC’s partnership with Clear Channel is one solution to a problem that public broadcasters are grappling with nationwide. Not only are bad economic times drying up support from individuals, foundations and federal, state and local governments, but the stations also face an expensive, mandated changeover to digital broadcasting in the next few years, said Frank Cruz, a member of the KUSC board of councilors and of the board of directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

“Public broadcasting,” he said, “due to a combination of reasons, is probably facing its most difficult financial situation in history.”

Barnes said the station has about $750,000 toward the tens of millions it probably will need for an endowment, an idea that’s catching on in public broadcasting. She said stations WBEZ in Chicago, WNYC in New York and Vermont Public Radio are also trying to free themselves from the vagaries of the economy and live off the interest from a large, secure account.

“This strikes me as an innovative business decision, though another sad indicator of how everything is becoming commercial in one way or another,” said Christopher Sterling, professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

He added that the KUSC deal with Clear Channel shouldn’t set off any red warning lights about the commercialization of public radio, “but perhaps yellow ones.”

The details of the agreement ensure KUSC won’t lose control of what goes out over its airwaves, Barnes said. If there is a conflict, Sterling said, it might be on the part of Clear Channel, selling time on KUSC while simultaneously seeking advertisers for its own stations.

With public broadcasters searching everywhere for new revenue sources, it’s not surprising that some of the ventures have drawn fire. Later this month, National Public Radio debuts “Day to Day,” a midday Monday-to-Friday program that it is producing in collaboration with Microsoft’s online magazine, Slate. It’s the first time in NPR’s 33-year history that the network has joined forces with a commercial entity to create a program. Critics howled, objecting to an intrusion of the corporate world into public broadcasting, and questioning whether the program could be trusted for objectivity in covering Microsoft.

Still others have criticized underwriting messages themselves, saying they’ve crossed over to blatant advertising. Some NPR stations have edited a spot for the heartburn pill Nexium, because they contend that the tag line “ask your doctor” is a call to action. That, along with pricing information and quality comparisons, are specifically prohibited in Federal Communications Commission guidelines for sponsorship messages on public broadcasts.

The sales staff of Clear Channel’s traffic division gets the task of drumming up underwriting support for KUSC. Because local public stations KKJZ-FM (88.1) and KPCC-FM (89.3) subscribe to the traffic service, the sales staff already knows what types of messages are compatible with public-radio stations. In addition, the length and tone of the underwriting messages are very similar to the sponsorship announcements tagged onto the traffic reports.

“When you drill down you see the synergy there,” said John Quinlan, general sales manager for Clear Channel Traffic. “We’re used to dealing with nonprofit radio stations, so we understand the limitations with messaging. It’s not a real standard advertising message: ‘Go out and buy a 99-cent cheeseburger.’ ”