Public Radio, Under the Influence

“From Minnesota Public Radio--from Los Angeles, this is ‘Marketplace.’ ” For more than a year now, listeners of several local public radio stations, along with listeners across the nation, have heard this curious opening.

The unlikely geographical aggregate--from Minnesota ... from Los Angeles--glances quickly off the ears of those tuning in to the distinctive half-hour business magazine aired daily on KCRW and KPCC (see box, Page 71) and once carried on KUSC, where it originated, for 10 years. But, in fact, those quickly forgotten opening credits bear some scrutiny. They are a signpost to the changing world of public radio, both in Los Angeles and beyond, where many things don’t sound the way they used to.

Whether this is good depends on whether you miss the idiosyncratic music and talk shows of a public radio realm where small was a virtue and the personal was political, or you welcome the more commercial-sounding future being mapped by ratings strategists, MBAs and a nonprofit mogul named William Kling, whose Minnesota Public Radio last year took control of Pasadena City College station KPCC as well as KUSC’s Marketplace Productions.

Public radio, once the province of obscure college FM stations and grown to cultural prominence on the back of the National Public Radio network, celebrating its 30th anniversary this month, remains for many a salutary oasis of non-hit parade music and intelligent talk in the mostly conglomerate-controlled wasteland that is radio in general. Public radio’s audience has grown nationally from about 14 million listeners in 1990 to 22 million last year, and while that’s still small compared with what the commercial giants command, the public radio audience is disproportionately well-educated, influential and well-to-do--what high-end advertisers regard as a top demographic.

But the growth has come in part in response to the stepped-up financial challenge imposed by Newt Gingrich-era congressional cuts in federal funding for public broadcasting that pushed many listener-supported radio stations to seek programming with broader, more mainstream appeal designed by consultants. At the same time, they began soliciting increased corporate underwriting that has brought the unfamiliar sound of virtual commercials to all but the Pacifica Foundation’s independent-minded stations, which include Los Angeles’ KPFK. (Most public stations now have underwriting salesmen who, through commissions, can earn more than the on-air talent.)

In Los Angeles, the oasis of public radio is as wide as any place in America, with five major public stations on the left end of the FM dial, plus a couple of smaller ones. (New York has four major stations; Chicago, one.) But the competition among these stations to put up bigger audience numbers to qualify for Corp. for Public Broadcasting grants as well as attract local sponsorship has tightened in some cases the range of the voices and sounds once heard on their frequencies and altered their sensibilities. A lot is at stake here in the coming months as public radio proprietors everywhere look to Los Angeles for indications of what the future will be like for this distinguished medium.

Notably, KPCC has undergone a complete format change, from a mix of alternative music and talk to news and public affairs, following the model of Minnesota Public Radio’s successful St. Paul station, KNOW, plugging in many MPR-owned programs like “The Savvy Traveler,” “The Splendid Table,” “Marketplace” and “A Prairie Home Companion,” transferred from KUSC, where it had been heard for 20 years. Again, modeled after the way it’s been done in Minnesota and only now being tried in Southern California, KPCC has begun building a professional news department (it currently has five reporters) to do local stories for segments pinched out of NPR news shows “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.”

Meanwhile, gone are such home-grown programs as “The Friday Night Blues Revue,” with harmonica player John “Juke” Logan as host, and “The Sancho Show,” the Saturday-night celebration of Chicano culture hosted for years by popular local professor Daniel A. Castro.

Classical KUSC, recovered from its earnest but misguided multicultural experiment of the early ‘90s, has returned to the canon with a format, except for nighttime host Jim Svejda, that is so monotonous, it sounds as if it were programmed by robots. It’s no surprise to learn that this rotation of classical “hits” and canned commentary is the result of focus-group research aimed at reaching a consensus playlist that can be shared with stations in Denver and Boise. More startling is the fact that the Corp. for Public Broadcasting doled out an $850,000 grant to make it possible.

KCRW, still an influential powerhouse of talent in Santa Monica beaming a creative mix of cutting-edge music, smart talk and radio drama, nevertheless in recent years has added so many contests and promotional announcements as to risk sounding at times like a boutique Top 40 station. Nic Harcourt’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” no doubt influences discriminating film and television producers, and Warren Olney and Harry Shearer are masters of the interview and political satire, respectively, but they are buffeted by a clatter of repetitive station IDs and hype that take the cool out of what has often been the coolest of stations.

“Public radio feels the same pressures as commercial radio,” says Harcourt, who came to KCRW from a commercial station in upstate New York but grew up in England, he notes, on the noncommercial BBC. “You’re trying to attract listeners and build an audience.”

KCRW’s general manager, Ruth Seymour, known throughout public radio for her innovation, is also famous for suddenly yanking a program off the air if it does not pull its weight in pledges or sounds momentarily stale.

“What’s been lost in public radio is disinterestedness, doing something just because you thought it was good and not to get the biggest numbers,” says longtime public radio producer and host Larry Josephson, whose national programs have included “Bridges” and “Modern Times.” “We’ve become a kinder, gentler form of commercial radio, with the same measures of success: ratings, income, Web hits and spot sales. And we’ve lost our soul in the process.”

Josephson has emerged as a defender of a lost faith, doing battle with a group he calls “the numbers Nazis,” represented a little more than a week ago in Seattle at the annual Public Radio Conference by Richard Madden, the public broadcasting corporation’s vice president for radio. Madden, who along with National Public Radio President Kevin Klose, celebrated public radio’s spreading reach and ratings, told the assembled, “We must define success in a different way for a different time. We’re not a ‘smaller is better’ enterprise anymore, and none of us can think with that kind of mind-set.”

It would appear no one is thinking that way at Minnesota Public Radio, which sent a shock wave through the system last year when its parent company, American Public Media Group, stepped in to acquire (via long-term lease) financially troubled KPCC’s powerful signal, setting up a new entity called Southern California Public Radio as its proxy. Whether this was a high-minded rescue or an aggressive step toward building a network that could rival NPR in scope depends on who you talk to. Representatives of MPR and SCPR are sensitive about the issue and insist on the independence and local goals of KPCC under the new management. Insiders, however, say that staffers at KPCC often refer to MPR as “the Mother Ship.”

“Minnesota isn’t setting goals for the station,” says Martha McPhee, chief operating officer of MPR. “The local board does that. We’re there to further the mission of public radio for an area of 14 million people who were not being well-served by the previous public station, which had a hodgepodge schedule. We see it as an opportunity to do something that we already know how to do, bringing national, international and local news to people.”

People at KCRW are not so sanguine. Public radio colleagues have been asking Ruth Seymour how she’s holding up under the circumstances. “It’s because Bill Kling has such a fearsome reputation for swallowing anything in his path,” she says, “it’s assumed he will swallow KCRW as well.”

“KCRW is not on our mental map at all,” assures Bill Davis, president of Southern California Public Radio, which administers KPCC. Davis, formerly senior vice president for programming at NPR, downplays the competition between the two stations, claiming their audiences overlap by only a third. “I see us as complementary services. Our goal here is to be the best news and information station in the country.”

“We know that Kling is not doing this altruistically,” says another local station executive. “The question is, what does MPR take out of this?”

NPR’s Klose put his own spin on it when he said in an interview, “I think it’s a very good thing, Minnesota coming to KPCC. We want high-quality control of our assets--which is not to say KPCC wasn’t already a good station.”

NPR, a network of some 640 member stations, actually owns none, while MPR owns more than 30 stations in the upper Midwest that form a distinct network within and parallel to NPR. The two entities are not, then, direct competitors except as producers of national programming in search of time-slots, but at least one insider describes that competition as “corporate hardball.”

It is widely believed that MPR’s move to Los Angeles, including the construction of a $3.5-million downtown production and news facility housing Marketplace Productions and KPCC’s news operation, is the reason NPR has announced plans to build a major West Coast production center in Culver City, the first outside NPR’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

According to Klose, who denies that MPR’s presence here was a factor, the new facility will be ready in early 2002 and have a staff of 40 to 50 producers and reporters, reflecting the westward population shift and “the importance of California and the West to our audiences.”

At KPCC, the numbers are going up, based on Arbitron ratings released a few weeks ago. KPCC’s weekly listenership for its new all-news and talk format jumped from 220,000 a year ago to 306,000, or almost 40%, while raising $586,000 in pledges, a 20% increase over the previous drive last fall. The most popular public station in L.A. is KUSC, with 422,000 metropolitan L.A. listeners a week, providing a twist perhaps on the old maxim--there are numbers in safety. “I hear from people that we’re not being as adventurous as we could be,” says KUSC general manager Brenda Barnes. “But we’re in this as a public service. If we’re not serving a significant number of Americans, we’re not doing our job.”

KCRW, meanwhile, saw a drop in its corresponding numbers, from 424,000 to 360,000, though the station raised an impressive $1.7 million in fund-drive pledges, a measure of the devotion of its audience.

Long Beach jazz station KLON jumped to 343,00 from 263,000 during the previous quarter, while politically charged KPFK clocked in at 170,000, up from 153,000.

KCSN, the Cal State Northridge station with a lesser signal and perhaps the most eclectic mix in the market of music, from classical to country, plus Rene Engel’s daily arts interview and NPR news, registered about 30,000 weekly listeners. (Engel, the station’s general manager, is leaving in July to become KLON’s program director.)

To the extent that Arbitron numbers are significant in public radio (opinions vary widely among managers), KPCC’s new format seems to be finding a greater acceptance than its previous, hand-tooled schedule. However, even its advocates point to the factor of adding “A Prairie Home Companion,” one of public radio’s two most popular non-news programs (“Car Talk,” which it also carries, is the other; both have national audiences of about 3 million).

The impact of the local news operation has been yet hard to measure, as the local inserts in “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” have been unremarkable, along with the increase in “jack-knifed big rig on the 210” traffic reports like those found everywhere else on the dial. The rest of each weekday is built around three lengthy middle-of-the-road talk shows, two of them local: “Talk of the City,” with L.A. native Kitty Felde; NPR’s “Talk of the Nation”; and “Air Talk,” hosted by KPCC fixture Larry Mantle. It was Mantle who five years ago, during the first purge of music programs at the station under manager Rod Foster, said publicly that talk shows “provided a much more valuable service than playing CDs” and were “much more the mission of public broadcasting,” a debatable presumption nonetheless clearly shared by his new bosses.

Skeptics have questioned the difficulty of even defining local news in the disjointed megalopolis of L.A., let alone covering it effectively with a small radio staff. KCRW ignored local news entirely until prompted by the ’92 riots to create Warren Olney’s landmark program “Which Way, L.A.?,” which continues to this day--though bumped from its original midday spot in the last year by Olney’s new national show, “To the Point,” and reduced to half an hour, beginning at 6:30 p.m.

At KPFK, politically involved afternoon talk-show host Marc Cooper, also a regular contributor to the left-of-center magazine the Nation and last year voted “radio journalist of the year” by the Los Angeles Press Club, pulls no punches when discussing the new KPCC. “KPCC’s attempt to distinguish itself with local news coverage,” says Cooper, “is a concept rather than a reality. Local news doesn’t mean a damn thing to the average listener. When you come to me and tell me you’re putting your focus on local news, I’ll tell you you’re from out of town.”

Cooper, who derides KCRW equally as “a campfire for a Westside-based cultural elite,” regards KPCC’s talk shows as “parochial and insipid,” and adds, “At KPFK, we’re trying to fill the holes that these other folks have left open.”

Though some might dismiss Cooper as an ideologue, others would concede that KPFK’s coverage of last fall’s election was always interesting and that its lineup of informed afternoon talk hosts (including print journalists Jon Wiener, Joe Domanick and Suzi Weissman) offers a bracing antidote to the usual topic-of-the-day talk show drone.

However, KPFK has been beset by organizational turmoil. (Witness the recent controversial exit of the station’s venerable “Folkscene” program after 25 years and continuing listener protests over what they believe is programming censorship by KPFK parent Pacifica.) But the station has smoothed out a few rough edges and stands out as the only local station not peppered with corporate sponsorship promos, a trend that has undercut the original idea of public radio being financed primarily by the public.

“It’s disingenuous of the public stations to call themselves ‘commercial-free’ anymore,” says Matt Wright, a former program host at KPCC who now produces radio commercials for a living. “The FCC has been looking the other way on things that the stations couldn’t have gotten away with 15 years ago.”

When Congress, alarmed by the supposed liberal bias of NPR, threatened to eliminate funding for public broadcasting in the mid-’90s, it also enacted “enhanced underwriting credits” that loosened FCC restrictions on how much a public radio corporate underwriter could go on about itself and its products beyond what was once simple name identification. Now are heard slogans (“At Fannie Mae, we’re in the American Dream business,” “At GE we bring good things to life”) not unlike those found on commercial radio and television.

“It’s become a place for image-laundering for the great corporations,” observes Larry Josephson. “It’s a form of lobbying. A lot of these companies have PR problems.”

NPR President Klose defends this. “We’re not 100% federally funded as we were 20 years ago,” he says. “The money has to come from somewhere. In the marketplace of ideas, if someone wants to pay to get a corporate identity credit, I think they should be able to do so. It has not impinged on our public-service mission.”

Judy Jankowski, general manager of KLON, agrees that the money has to come from somewhere but believes “it should have an affinity for what you’re doing, be something of interest to the jazz listener. We do concert spots and other ads that provide information valuable to our listeners.”

Jankowski has turned down some underwriters who’ve approached her, including cigarette maker Philip Morris. “I told them I didn’t think it was in the best interests of the station.”

Even before Congress started threatening to wipe out subsidies for public broadcasters, one person who figured out how to turn a profit in this nonprofit world was William Kling. The founder of Minnesota Public Radio, Kling, in the early 1980s, recognized the star potential of the man who would become public radio’s best-known personality, Garrison Keillor, then a local phenomenon in Minnesota. When NPR’s inside-the-Beltway executives balked at taking “A Prairie Home Companion” national, Kling went around them and started a rival distribution network, American Public Radio (now Public Radio International) to make Keillor available outside the Midwest. Then he finessed the tax laws in creating a for-profit company marketing Keillor’s hugely popular mystique and his quaint small-town dreamscape through T-shirts, mugs, tapes and other merchandise, with the result that Kling and Keillor and Minnesota Public Radio got rich, at least by public radio standards.

In 1998, Kling sold Rivertown Trading, MPR’s allied mail-order catalog business, to Dayton Hudson Corp., owners of Target, for $120 million, creating a self-sustaining endowment for MPR and pocketing what was reported to be $2.6 million himself.

Kling’s unorthodox business model has made him a controversial figure in Minnesota, and at least once he replied to critics who questioned MPR’s relationship with its for-profit businesses with the statement, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Rarely available to the press, he was traveling in Europe and not available to speak for this article. Others in public radio, some who requested anonymity, speak for him and about him.

Bill Buzenberg, a former NPR foreign correspondent and managing editor of NPR News whom Kling hired to run the MPR news division, says, “With L.A., we’re becoming multi-regional. Who knows if L.A. is the last place we go? Maybe if it works, there can be other stations down the road.” Buzenberg also says, “I have no influence at KPCC on a day-to-day basis. I’m a consultant. You can’t run it long-distance.”

Torey Malatia, general manager of Chicago’s powerful WBEZ and co-producer of Ira Glass’ “This American Life” (carried on 433 stations and distributed by PRI), says he too wonders if MPR’s Southern California foray is the mark of an expanding empire. “That’s a good question,” Malatia says. “I’d say it’s certainly a first step, wouldn’t you?”

“I’ve known Bill Kling for 25 years,” says Jim Russell, founder and general manager of Marketplace Productions, “and I know he’s been feared and admired, frankly because he’s accomplished so much more than anyone else. He’s an extraordinary entrepreneur.” Russell repeats that MPR’s acquisition of “Marketplace” was mutually beneficial. MPR had the money to make additional investment in the show, while USC retains a name-only association with it. “It’s a situation that we courted and one that we wanted.”

Another public radio producer who has watched Kling for years says, “What he wants to do is cover the Earth with his vision, but it’s more of a business vision than a creative vision.”

The extent to which public radio, once regarded by many of its programmers as a “secular church,” has become a business was very much in evidence in Seattle as panels buzzed with terms like “branding,” “re-purposing,” “strategic positioning” and “platforms,” while marketing executives from ESPN, Oxygen Media and other for-profit companies offered tips from “the real world.”

A couple of public radio’s biggest stars, Glass and “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross, grumbled about such talk. “I keep hearing about ‘content distribution,”’ Gross said. “I don’t really like that term. To me it’s ‘programming.”’ Glass joked that the only platforms he wanted to talk about were platform shoes.

Noted producer Jay Allison, now a station manager in Woods Hole, Mass., said he worried that public radio was in trouble if in an effort to market its image, “its image becomes the substance.”

“What I heard in Seattle that troubled me,” KCRW’s Seymour says, “was this message of ‘Let’s do better what we already do well.’ That was shocking to me. It didn’t used to be this way.

“We used to talk about finding new programs and younger audiences and increasing diversity. Now, you’ve got stations trying to duplicate themselves and take over other stations. I’ve always said every station has its own song to sing. The question is, is it going to be your song or someone else’s?’

Almost 20 years ago, when “A Prairie Home Companion” was new to the nation, Garrison Keillor was asked what hopes he had for the program’s success.

Ironically, considering how things turned out, he answered, “The best thing that could happen would be for other people around the country to start shows just like it in their own towns, and those shows would eventually replace it.”

Clearly it was a different public radio world in which such a thought was possible. But you wonder, even then, if he cleared that answer with his boss at Minnesota Public Radio.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Tuning In: A Guide to Key Forces in Public Radio

The Players

Corp. for Public Broadcasting: A federal agency that reports to Congress and is charged with dispersing tax money allocated to public radio and television broadcasting.

National Public Radio: A nonprofit, Washington, D.C.-based corporation that provides news and cultural programming to its 640 member stations.

American Public Media Group: The umbrella organization headed by William Kling that oversees both Minnesota Public Radio, a St. Paul-based network of 31 stations in the upper Midwest, as well as Southern California Public Radio, a nonprofit corporation that holds a 15-year lease on Pasadena City College’s KPCC.

Public Radio International: Minneapolis-based distributor and co-producer of programs (“The World,” “Marketplace,” “This American Life”).

And locally

* KCRW-FM (89.9): Based at Santa Monica City College. General manager, Ruth Seymour. Broadcasts NPR and local news, talk and music.

* KCSN-FM (88.5): Based at Cal State Northridge. General manager, Rene Engel (leaving to become KLON program director in July). Music, news and talk.

* KLON-FM (88.1): Based at Cal State Long Beach. General manager Judy Jankowski. Jazz.

* KPCC-FM (89.3): Based at Pasadena City College. General manager, Cindy Young. Talk.

* KPFK-FM (90.7): Pacifica Foundation. General manager, Mark Schubb. Music, talk and public affairs from a left-of-center perspective.

* KUSC-FM (91.5): Top-rated local public radio station, based at USC. General manager, Brenda Barnes. Classical music.