Digital radio

More From Jack Allen and KBPS in Portland

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Yesterday I promised you more about Jack Allen who is moving from KMFA in Austin to KBPS in Portland, OR. I asked him a bunch of questions about his plans for KBPS, and I’ll just quote his answers verbatim.

What is your overall vision for KBPS?

Vitality, service, reach, value, preeminence, prosperity, flexibility, and whimsy.

Do you think the station should be all local, or should it have a mix of the best from the rest of the country and local?

Local is important, critical in fact, but a mix is desirable. If folks come to rely on KBPS as their link and gateway to all things classical, the mix must include carefully selected programs and insights into events and ideas from around the region, US and globe.

How do you feel about airing live local concerts?

I believe in order to truly be local and relevant, we must seek out strategic partnerships and find those special events that put our regional and global audience in the front row of live & local performances. KBPS will be a unique ticket to all things, great things, local and regional, and sometimes global. The gal tuning in online from Berlin doesn’t want to hear musical selections (necessarily) from the Berlin Philharmonic. What’s the point? She may stay tuned if Robert McBride says, “…sit back and relax, sink your ears into this…performed here in the shadow of Mt. Hood, steps away from the Willamette River, at the juncture of the Oregon Trail…a new recording of the Portland Symphony Orchestra bringing to life the very American, the very adventurous and noble Symphony No. 9 by Antonin Dvorak, known as the ‘New World’ …enjoy.”

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Dual format out in Alabama

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Authormike72x72_3 News surfaced recently of some fallout from the upcoming cancellation of Classical Public Radio Network. WBHM, a news/classical station in Birmingham, Ala., announced last week that it would stop airing classical music during middays Monday to Friday, and has replaced the music with news programs. The changes took effect yesterday.

Station execs indicate that they had anticipated dropping midday classical sometime within the next few years, but that the impending demise of CPRN hastened those plans. In local press and on WBHM’s website, they cite several reasons for the change, many of which echo the weaknesses of the dual format that we’ve been discussing here at Scanning The Dial.

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One network’s success with ending the dual format

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I’m just about to move on from discussing the nuts and bolts of public radio’s dual news/classical format. But I did want to add this footnote about Vermont Public Radio after a recent chat with Jody Evans, the network’s program director. I’d called her about Classical Public Radio Network, in fact, because the network relied heavily on CPRN when it was getting its first all-classical stations on the air four years ago.

For several years VPR chugged along with a dual news/classical mix on seven stations across the state. But like other broadcasters, VPR was seeing its dual-format approach lose steam. When classical came on after NPR News, news listeners were fleeing to other news/talk stations.

“We had done well with the dual format,” Evans said. “But our audience was holding steady—it wasn’t growing.”

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The dual format: neither fish nor fowl

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In my last post about broad trends in classical radio, I started to examine the odd beast known in public radio as the “dual format.” A dual-format station airs both news and classical music on weekdays, with NPR’s morning and afternoon newsmagazines, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, sandwiching a midday block of music.

Many stations in public radio adhere to this format — a little more than half of the 450 stations airing classical are dual-format. Most of them serve small- and medium-sized markets where the smaller number of public-radio listeners makes being “all things to all people” more feasible. But a considerable number of dual-format stations have been cutting back on classical in recent years or dumping it entirely, in part due to the thorny problems posed by airing two different kinds of programming. Research shows that most listeners who enjoy classical avoid news programming and vice versa, which forces a dual-format station to try to serve two different audiences. What’s more, stations have found greater success raising money around news programming than around classical.

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