Poised to Spread an L.A. State of Mind
Is Los Angeles the public radio capital of the nation? And if not, will it be one day?
Anyone who seeks out local and national public (that is, noncommercial) radio programs such as “This American Life,” “A Prairie Home Companion” and “Le Show”) realizes that we have five major public stations on the FM dial in Southern California. Most big cities have only one or two. (New York has four.) Aside from the wide menu of commercial-free programs available on these five stations, you can hear multiple cycles of National Public Radio’s daily newsmagazines “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” simultaneously on two of them [KCRW (89.9) and KPCC (89.3)] and the business magazine “Marketplace” at three different times.
Yet public radio programmers from around the nation encountered at the recent Public Radio Conference in Seattle were hesitant to recognize Los Angeles as a mecca of the medium, primarily because so few national programs of any clout originate here. The exception is “Marketplace,” which is produced by Minnesota Public Radio from a studio in downtown L.A. and heard by 4.5 million people across the country.
“I think of New York, Boston, Chicago ahead of L.A.,” said Tish Valva, executive producer of talk programming at WBEZ, Chicago, where “This American Life” with Ira Glass originates.
Boston is home to “The World” and “Car Talk,” New York home to “On the Media” and the new hot show “Studio 360,” an hour of talk about the arts and ideas that stations coast to coast are clamoring to get on the air (and carried locally on KCRW on Fridays, 3-4 p.m.).
“How many national programs come out of L.A.?” asked Bill Buzenberg, the former NPR correspondent who is now vice president for news at Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul, where “A Prairie Home Companion” originates along with “St. Paul Sunday Morning,” the long-running chamber music program.
“Los Angeles?” said Emma Dunch, director of communications at WNYC in New York, with a look of disbelief. “No way is it a bigger market than New York.”
WNYC, with both an AM (talk) and FM (classical) station, can claim the largest listener audience of any single public station, even if it’s really two: more than 1 million, AM and FM combined. Los Angeles’ top-rated public station, KUSC-FM (91.5), has a listening audience of 422,000, according to the latest Arbitron ratings. But the total number of public radio listeners to all the stations in New York and Los Angeles is about the same: 1.2 million, according to Dale Spear, who keeps track of such numbers for Public Radio International, the Minneapolis-based program distributor.
The next biggest audiences are in Washington, D.C. (800,000), Boston (750,000) and San Francisco (700,000).
“The L.A. market is great,” Spear said. “That’s why MPR wanted to come in. You want more people to hear what you do.”
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If Los Angeles has not been a major producer of national programming for public radio, that seems to be about to change. Minnesota Public Radio, a growing national programmer with deep pockets, showed up in town last year to take out a long-term lease on Pasadena City College station KPCC, then acquired “Marketplace” while vowing to “establish Los Angeles as a new creative center for the development of public radio broadcasting,” in the words of MPR president William Kling.
“From the beginning, we felt that being on the West Coast would help us develop a fresher, livelier sound,” said J.J. Yore, executive producer of “Marketplace,” which originated at KUSC for 10 years before shifting to KPCC (and KCRW). “But after a while we needed to find an investing partner with the resources to get us new facilities.”
MPR recently built a $3.5-million downtown production facility to house “Marketplace” and the new KPCC news department.
Marketplace Productions now has 26 pilots for new shows in development, including “The Public Radio Movie Show,” “The Entertainment Desk” and “True West,” a magazine focusing on the Western way of thinking as a state of mind.
Not to be outdone, National Public Radio itself has announced plans to open a major West Coast production center in Culver City within a year, representing, in the words of NPR president Kevin Klose, “a programming initiative that recognizes the importance of California and the West to our audiences. There’s a robust and intellectual presence in the West, and we want to reflect that and draw on the creative community there for our newsmagazines and cultural programming.”
Public radio in Los Angeles through the years has spawned dozens of highly creative music and talk shows that were worthy of a national audience, whether public radio ever tried to get one--shows like Isabel Holt’s “Solo” jazz show and Rene Engel’s “Citybilly” on KPCC; Ian Masters’ inquiring public affairs hour “Background Briefing” on KPFK; Tom Schnabel’s “Cafe L.A.” on KCRW; and also on KCRW, Warren Olney’s daily news discussion “Which Way, L.A.?,” which recently did go national by changing its name to “To the Point.”
KCRW, the Santa Monica City College station, in fact is well known throughout public radio for its original mix of new music and smart talk shows, but for one reason or another has never exported them widely.
“KCRW is inspired from within,” says Ruth Seymour, the station’s general manager of 20 years. “We don’t need external validation.”
Seymour believes the unfamiliar pop music championed on shows like “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” “Metropolis” and “Chocolate City” has been too unusual to be embraced by many other stations.
“Until we launched ‘Which Way, L.A.?’ as a national program,” Seymour says, “I felt that we were too different from most NPR stations in this country to win acceptance.”
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She can cite Harry Shearer’s Sunday morning hour of critically acclaimed political satire, “Le Show,” as prime evidence. The show is carried by 70-odd stations and Armed Forces radio but is not on the air in sophisticated New York or Washington, D.C. “To the Point” is evidence that Seymour and KCRW are trying harder, perhaps influenced by all the activity in the market or motivated by the sense of pride in Olney’s show being too good not to be shared with the rest of the country. Distributed by PRI, “To the Point” is so far on the air in New York City; Buffalo, N.Y.; Seattle; Shreveport, La.; and some smaller cities.
“Sounds Eclectic,” a weekly version of Nic Harcourt’s daily morning music show, is also going national, joining “Le Show” and Michael Silverblatt’s “Bookworm,” which is on in 20 cities, including New York; Kansas City; Boulder, Colo.; and Berkeley, Calif.
Other local shows that have some national distribution include Jim Svejda’s classical music guide “The Record Shelf,” which is heard on KUSC and in 69 other cities, including San Francisco, Atlanta and Pittsburgh; and KPFK’s “Radio Nation,” Marc Cooper’s forum of writers from the Nation magazine, carried on 144 stations. Jazz station KLON at Cal State Long Beach claims to be “the most listened-to jazz station in the world,” according to general manager Judy Jankowski, as its basic 24-hour jazz and blues programming is being transmitted beyond L.A. via cable and satellite, reaching an untold number of listeners above its latest local Arbitron figure of 343,000 a week.
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If there is such a thing as a West Coast aesthetic, reflected in the creativity found in the best local programs heard in Los Angeles, the chance for those programs to reach a wider audience may come, inevitably, from the continuing population shift westward, which is now being acknowledged by the ranking leaders in public radio.
Bill Davis, president of Southern California Public Radio, the entity created by MPR to administer KPCC, and a former NPR vice president for programming, points out: “There is survey data to suggest that the further west you go in the country, the more irritation exists with the sound of NPR’s East Coast focus.”
NPR’s Klose says of the planned NPR facility, expected to have a staff of 40 to 50: “It will give us an ability to deliver programming with a better grip on what’s happening in the West.”