The classical stations have a thread going strong on the Listserv for the Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio (AMPPR). They’re discussing whether stations should air public service announcements (psa’s) for free, for a fee, or not at all, and in the same vein how to decide who gets on-air interviews.
Without naming names, there are quite a few posts from program directors who will only air psa’s for organizations that buy time on the station. Interviews suffer a similar fate. Some stations will only do interviews for organizations that buy time.
Three program directors in particular had great responses and I’d like to thank them for what I consider best practices at stations that have “public” in their title. First of all, from David Roden at WKSU in Ohio:
Perhaps I’m old-fashioned. I’ve been in public radio for over 30 years now, and I know times have changed. But in my book, making sponsorship a prerequisite for interviewing a person is still “pay to play.”
Perhaps it’s unrealistic in this brave new pubradio world, but I think that programming decisions – especially those related to information – should be made on the basis of audience service, and not in any way influenced by whether the subject of the piece or story has paid for a sponsorship.
A special bravo to Ellen Rocco at North Country Public Radio in Canon, NY:
It’s an investment in the community–both presenters and audiences–and it’s a mission thing. We do a brief on air calendar and refer listeners to our website for the more detailed calendar. We consider it something us dinosaurs call “community service.” We do NOT do paid announcements.
… We offer something called “media sponsorship” as well: in exchange for the station being listed as a media sponsor on all of the presenter’s publicity materials and at the actual event, we give these events a brief on air mention 3-5X a day for about a week prior to the event. … It’s an investment–takes the equivalent of at least a half-time person to manage this content for both on air and on line.
It’s the mission. We’re not commercial. We’re public.
And from Greg Keeler at WSKG in Binghamton NY:
I edit the Arts Calendar at WSKG. We use Public Interactive’s web products, and their Public Events module is our online Arts Calendar… We stick to our editorial guidelines that the event must be artistic in nature (no spaghetti suppers)… When a listener submits an Arts Calendar announcement, the “thank you” page mentions that we also offer paid spots for arts events, but there is no “pay to play” requirement for Arts Calendar or arts interviews.
From the online Arts Calendar we select a few announcements to record into a rotating “cart” in AudioVault that is scheduled with a similar priority to run-of-schedule promos. An individual announcement may be heard anywhere between once and 10 times over the course of the week depending upon how many announcements are in rotation at any one time.
We defend that to the listeners, saying that if they want more control over the schedule, they need to buy a paid spot.
This system has worked pretty well for us, especially since we control how much time we spend on recording the arts calendar announcements. Some weeks, more are recorded than others, depending upon our work load.
I’d love to hear from more of you. I personally think the survival of your station may some day depend on how responsive you are to the arts organizations in your community. In one city I’m thinking of, the station won’t air psa’s unless the orgs buy time, and consequently the station has become almost irrelevant to the arts community. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we’re interdependent. We need each other.
Happy Monday, everybody.
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Thanks for summarizing the ongoing discussion. I’d like to share our (Vermont Public Radio) take on it: “public service announcements” are different from calendar event listings.
VPR is two dedicated services, news and classical music. I’m speaking to how PSAs and calendar information is handled on our classical service only.
PSAs are public service in nature. They may include brief messages from the Red Cross (home fire prevention, flu prevention, giving blood); local not-for-profit arts and cultural organizations; and state departments like the Dept. of Public Safety and VT Emergency Management. PSAs are read once per live shift at pre-determined times, they’re logged and included in VPR Classical’s quarterly Public File.
Community calendar events include art gallery openings, library programs, musical events, book and poetry readings, cultural festivals, etc. These listings are submitted by various community entities, they’re screened internally for language and content, and then added to the active paper file in the studio (organized by date). These listings are available for air at the local host’s discretion, as time and other programming considerations allow. There is no fee to organizations for these messages to be read on the air, and they understand that submitting materials in this way is not a guarantee that the information will be aired. But we do our best to be inclusive within reason.
If an organization wants to guarantee their message gets on the air, we also have paid underwriting and Media Sponsorship spots available for various amounts depending on the frequency and duration of the message’s run.
I wanted to make the distinction clear between “PSA”, which has come to be a catch-all name for all kinds of messages a station may air, and the less formal arts calendar listings. “True” PSAs serve a specific purpose, they’re the only ones we schedule in our traffic logs and include in our Public File.
Cheryl Willoughby
Music Director, Vermont Public Radio