They’re Putting a Friendly Face on Financial News : Radio: For six years, ‘Marketplace’ has reached a literate, curious audience, but not one necessarily knowledgeable about business.
The letter read simply: “You seem to understand that business is important, but not as important as life itself.”
Coming, as it did, from a listener during the first year of “Marketplace,” the half-hour business show heard on 270 public-radio stations around the country, that correspondence served as a kind of gauge for Jim Russell, the program’s creator and executive producer, assuring him that he was having the intended effect.
Six years later, Russell is still comforted by that succinct message. “When listeners invent your credo, you know you’re hitting some kind of chord,” he said.
Produced in Los Angeles and funded and distributed nationally by Public Radio International (formerly American Public Radio), the daily half-hour program is designed to reach a literate, curious audience, but not one necessarily well-versed in matters financial.
“We just had a feeling that there are lots of people out there in much greater quantities who are very bright, very well-educated, that don’t know anything about business,” Russell said. “And in the past they could get away with it. In the past, if you wanted to be literate and plugged in, you spoke French. Now it’s not French you have to speak. Now it’s business and economics. And if you don’t speak any, you’re out of it. This is Language Skills 101.”
But it’s done with an engaging, irreverent, lively and probing style in the manner of “All Things Considered,” the National Public Radio afternoon news program that Russell--a former Vietnam War correspondent and a 26-year veteran in public broadcasting--also helped to create.
“Marketplace,” for example, features a business commentator who is also a waitress and aspiring musician. It plays “We’re in the Money” in the background when rising stock market figures are broadcast and “Stormy Weather” when the market is down. There is a “Customer From Hell” segment in which commentators from the service industry recount their nightmares, and “Between a Rock and a Workplace,” which ponders ethical career dilemmas.
“We like to tweak stuff,” Russell said. “We get a kick out of the connections, out of the odd little things that make people think.”
Though the show is targeted specifically to the layperson, the movers and shakers in the business world also tune in.
“In our first year we told GE, our major corporate funder, that we were not going after corporate CEOs and there was this freeze on their faces that said, ‘I thought that’s who the show was for,’ ” Russell said. “The bottom line is, six years later, even though we’re targeting the people who may not care day-to-day about some of these economic issues until it affects them, we have found they do listen on Wall Street.”
The host of “Marketplace” is David Brancaccio, a former rock deejay and reporter at San Francisco public-radio station KQED. He helped to open the show’s London bureau, then was chosen in September, 1993, to replace the original host, Jim Angle, who had left for a job at ABC.
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“Marketplace” now has bureaus in nine U.S. cities plus London, Berlin and Tokyo. About 75 commentators are drawn from the various cities to provide features. Some 18 full-time staffers and about another dozen part-timers help to produce, research and report the program, which is heard by an estimated national audience of 2.3 million.
Despite the audience’s apparent acceptance of the program, those in charge of “Marketplace” still marvel that they’ve managed to stay on the air as long as they have.
“NPR has been in business 25 years and they’ve had the time to build a network, an infrastructure,” Russell said. “We’ve been in business six years. We expected not to be here at all. We’re the show that happened because NPR missed a sea-change. They should have recognized the change from Wall Street to a global economy as a major change in journalism and public affairs. They didn’t jump on it quickly enough and they created a niche. Timing is everything.”
Industry officials have questioned the wisdom of originating a business show from Los Angeles, rather than New York or Washington. But Russell and Brancaccio believe that its geographic base is one of the show’s biggest assets.
“It is true that you get a different show than you get in New York and Boston and Washington,” Russell said. “There is some benefit to not being located in New York City, not thinking of yourself as the automatic center of the universe and taking yourself so deadly seriously. You just have a different view of the world here. I think it’s more dynamic.”
Russell said he identifies with the letter-writers who talk about their math anxiety and aversion to business matters.
“I got a D in college economics,” he said. “I think in the end that’s the reason I took this job: for the challenge of doing something in a subject that’s really, by most people’s standards, so deadly and impenetrable.”
* “Marketplace” airs weekdays at 6 p.m. on KUSC-FM (91.5) and at 2:30 p.m. on KCRW (89.9).
