But it is important to approach, eyes-wide-open, any solution for journalism that involves government, public money, or public institutions.

The political fight over public media is often framed in terms of government spending (Mitt Romney threatened to all-but-cancel Big Bird in 2012), even though direct government subsidies are tiny — 2020 estimates put federal funding at just $1.40 per capita, compared to $100 or more in the UK, Norway, and Sweden. 

But government funding is not the only way that political meddling can impact the editorial independence of public media.

About two-thirds of NPR’s 1,000-plus stations are licensed to or affiliated with colleges or universities. With higher education at the crossroads of the culture wars, public media is vulnerable to growing political interference over its operations.

As foundation funding and member drives pour money into the cause, strengthening the walls to protect editorial independence at member stations is perhaps more important than any reporting resource.

Even if a university is not providing direct financial support to a station’s operating budget, it may provide in-kind support such as buildings and facilities. At public colleges and universities, journalists may be considered state employees.

As local newspapers dry up, public media will become even more important to communities looking for local news and information. We’re already seeing the signs: In February, NPR announced its Stations Investigations Team, providing resources and reporting heft to member stations across the country, and ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network includes public radio stations.

While the stations see themselves as editorially independent from the schools they are affiliated with, there are early warning signs that the co-mingling of university resources with public media operations leaves them vulnerable to meddling — from right-wing political pressure to universities attempting to squelch unfavorable stories. Even previously good relationships with university partners might sour as the scope of what public media covers continues to grow.

Given how much conservatives have bemoaned the so-called liberal influence on public media — Republican presidents from Nixon to Trump have threatened to defund public broadcasting —it’s unsurprising to see this play out on a more local level.

Consider recent history at UNC’s North Carolina Public Radio (WUNC). In September, UNC Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees appointed two new board members to North Carolina Public Radio. While the rationale for the selections was not publicly discussed, the new appointees raise concerns about potential conservative pressure on the station.

In 2015, UNC Chapel Hill trustees created a separate governing board for WUNC, with the stated intention of serving as an oversight board focused on the station’s business operations. Even though WUNC is both financially and editorially independent from the university, the university’s influence is not so removed — the Board of Trustees owns its FCC license.

New member Allie Ray McCullen is the longest serving current trustee on the University’s Board of Trustees and voted against Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tenure case. He has also been outspoken about his support for the Confederate monument on campus known as Silent Sam and referred to student protesters as “criminals” and “entitled wimps.”

The other new member, John Hood, is the president of the John William Pope Foundation, a conservative foundation that has donated millions of dollars to UNC. His politics and policy newspaper columns are syndicated across the state. In a 2006 column, “Public, not government, radio,” he wrote that, while he is a supporter of public radio, it shouldn’t receive government support:

If only it did not subsist partly on funds forcibly taken from people who do not listen to public radio and never will.

It is true that the taxpayer subsidy for stations such as WUNC-FM in Chapel Hill and WFAE-FM in Charlotte is less egregious than it used to be. The state budget no longer includes direct appropriations to university-based public radio operations. But they continue to receive subsidy in the form of grants from the taxpayer-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The extent of subsidy varies widely according to the size and penetration of local markets. For example, WUNC pays for more than 90 percent of its annual operating budget with voluntary contributions, be they checks from individuals and institutions or underwriting contracts (essentially, short-form advertising) with businesses. But at other stations, the percentage of expenses paid by forcible expropriation is much higher.

It should be zero. It should be zero in the Triangle or Charlotte markets, where an end to government funding would almost certainly result in higher private funding to offset the loss (I’d be among the first donors). And it should be zero even in smaller markets, where philanthropy and entrepreneurial thinking should be harnessed to generate the necessary funds.

(Hood did not respond to a request for comment; we’ll update this post if we get one.)

Faculty, staff, and students at UNC are already concerned about political interference in campus decisions. These WUNC board appointments could be another reason to worry.

Public media’s editorial independence is a vulnerability that exists in red states and blue states alike. Journalists at NPR Illinois found themselves subject to a different sort of soft censorship when reporting out University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s spotty history of penalizing faculty for sexual misconduct.

NPR Illinois isn’t even the NPR member station on campus — it’s run out of the University of Illinois-Springfield. Still, the University of Illinois Springfield maintained journalists were “responsible employees,” according to its Title IX sexual misconduct policy, because they were University of Illinois system employees. This would mean journalists would have to name their sources and share information with the university.

Despite a shield law in Illinois that protects journalists from revealing confidential sources, the University of Illinois System’s Board of Trustees refused to grant journalists an exemption from the Title IX policy. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press went to bat for journalists, noting the move “undermine[d] both freedom of the press and campus safety.”

The reporting could have ended there, but NPR Illinois was partnering with ProPublica, and ProPublica was able to promise confidentiality to anyone who came forward. ProPublica could resist the university’s rules and regulations, but NPR Illinois was still subject to them.

In commercial news media, the line between editorial independence and business profit is often discussed as a wall between church and state — one highly imperfect but with predictable, profit-driven conflicts of interest.

If public media is to be part of the solution for helping to bolster the availability of local journalism at a time when the ad-supported model for local newspapers has all but imploded, there needs to be a stronger wall between who holds the license and who runs the newsroom.

Right now, we can act before we become overly reliant on public media filling the gaps. Shield laws exist to protect journalists from naming their sources in almost all states, but it’s not clear that journalists working for public media understand how to leverage them — and an unsupportive board won’t help them.

University faculty can take important steps by anticipating any carve-outs in university policy that might undermine reporting efforts, like the Title IX example at Illinois. Public media supporters can make sure that they push state legislators to affirm the editorial independence of local public media.

“We are all going to jump ahead three years,” Mike Orren, chief product officer of The Dallas Morning News, suggested to me last week.

At least. Ask an American newspaper exec a few weeks ago what they thought 2025 would look like, and they’d tell it you it would be much more digital, far less print, and more dependent on reader revenue than advertising. Some of them would have told you they think they had a plan to get there. Others, if they were being candid, would have said they didn’t see the route yet, but they hoped to find one in time.

The COVID-19 crisis has clearly accelerated that timeline — and may have ripped it to shreds altogether, depending on how long the shutdown lasts and how deep the resulting recession gets.

Make no mistake, though: Many of the decisions being made right now and in the next few weeks will be permanent ones. No newspaper that drops print days of publication will ever add them back. Humpty Dumpty won’t put the 20th-century newspaper back together again. There can be no return to status quo ante; the ante was already vanishing.

Will these decisions “save” the local press, as we’re bombarded with stories of systemic, perhaps irreversible failure in North America, the U.K., and Europe? One way or the other, these are now existential decisions that can no longer be avoided or postponed.

Right now, publishers are combing through Friday’s federal bailout legislation, “trying to determine if they qualify, for how much and when the money might be available,” David Chavern, CEO of the News Media Alliance, told me Monday. “That is going to take at least a several more days (if not a bit longer) — and I assume that some of these publishers are holding off personnel actions until they know the answers.”

Gannett, now by far the largest local news chain, has already announced pay cuts and furloughs, in both the U.S. and U.K. But all publishers, big and small, are now considering their options. Those include layoffs, rapidly eliminating several days of print publishing, reducing their ad sales staff, and questioning their need for large central offices as remote work becomes a workable norm.

All of those ideas have been discussed for years. But now they have to make decisions they’d hoped could wait a few more. The decisions they make, and how they can act on them, will tell us a lot about how much of the local press is left — and how much isn’t — come 2021.

That’s an internal view. Of course, local newspapers operate in a broader media world — including local public media, local TV, and local startups. In some larger cities, public radio stations are taking audience (and sometimes talent) from the dailies. Local commercial TV stations are feeling advertising pain too, but they still have more capacity to sustain themselves — and grab future market share. “They’re expanding more in digital and in social,” says TV business expert Bob Papper, who tracks the industry closely. That’s true even after Michael Bloomberg’s one-man subsidy of local TV ran its course.

Then there’s the nascent independent local press, from VTDigger to Berkeleyside, Charlotte Agenda to The Colorado Sun, The Memphian to MinnPost. Many of these green shoots are finding a little more sunlight — but they’ll be the first to tell you that it’s a tough road replacing their town’s flagging ancestral dailies. Meanwhile, amidst the carnage, some schemers and dreamers are strategizing about what they see as the detritus of a daily industry, waiting to be bought out or taken off by a new generation of local news builders. They’re early in that process; that’s a story for another day.

Let’s step back for a moment and consider the larger society in which local news — and all of us — now all operate. The double whammy of virus terror and economic calamity has made real a whole host of underlying issues — from generational equity to the ragged safety net, affordable child care to cramped housing, the entire panoply of inequities baked into our society.

Perhaps this will be merely a short bout of home detention followed by a fast, v-shaped economic recovery. Maybe these issues will dissolve quickly in the public discourse. For tens of millions, though, they will remain ever-present, defining their lives and their possibilities.

How will the local press of the 2020s cover these realities of life on the ground when we return, blinking, into the sunlight? Will journalism at all levels be strong enough to contribute the deep reporting and analysis that that intelligent fixes require? Will a society shocked by American incompetence in the face of an enemy find its future aided by the press it deserves and requires? Or will a nation of emptied-out newsrooms be unable to meet the moment?

As I wrote Friday, the biggest problem in America isn’t (yet, at least) newspapers going under. It’s ghost papers, strip-mined by ownership, disguised as news sources but actually offering very little in the way of local news or community leadership. The press, whatever its form, finds itself in a classic position: Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.

In the shorter term, though, the set of life-or-death questions local newspaper companies face right now is fairly clear.

• Will we keep seven days of print publishing?
• What does it mean to run a mainly reader revenue-driven business?
• How do we find the right people with the right skills to run a digital business?
• How many journalists will our new business reality allow us to pay?
• Will we still expect journalists to report to a central office every day?
• What do “advertising” and “events” look like?
• Should we merge or sell?

So let’s look at each of these more deeply to see what a prematurely arriving 2025 means to readers, journalists, newspaper employees, and publishers.

Nearly every publisher has looked at this question — and nervously stepped back, ever since Advance Local stepped out way ahead of the crowd in 2012. Their compelling fear: Would ending seven-day print be a final breaking point for the habits for decades-long subscribers — the ones now paying $400 to $1,000 a year for home delivery? How many of these customers wouldn’t even transition to a lower price point for some print and more digital? How many would, like so many newspaper subscribers before them, just go away?

McClatchy provided one of the best and most watched dress rehearsals in the trade last year. Last summer, I wrote about how the company began its program of dropping print Saturdays for a single weekend edition — something the Europeans did successfully ages ago. Now McClatchy’s little experiment has become the standard across the entire 30-title chain. And its results are clear.

“The retention from digital Saturdays has been nearly total,” Sara Glines, regional publisher for McClatchy’s Carolina properties, told me Monday:

We lost less than a dozen subscribers in each market, in some markets less than a handful. Digital activation went up immediately. E-edition usage went up on Saturdays. In today’s coronavirus environment, those digital activations have gone a long way in bringing more readers to our digital platforms for breaking news and updates. Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald were our last markets to launch digital Saturdays. Their first digital Saturday was March 21. It went just as smoothly as all other markets.

How well does McClatchy’s Saturday strategy translate to the broader industry? We know the lessons:

• Communication: Talk to readers early and often about why day-cutting is happening.
• Move relevant features and news into other products, digital or print, that make sense to readers. Reconfigure the Sunday paper into more of a week-in-review, stronger-in-features product.
• Set new pricing that customers think is fair.

But those essential-to-execute guidelines only tell us so much. Dropping Saturdays saves publishers some money — but not that much. With as much as half of their ad money evaporated by COVID-19, publishers will need bigger savings — which means cutting more days.

Readers who might easily adjust to the logic of a weekend paper might also think that saying goodbye to Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, all at the same time, is too much. If it’s too much for readers, and they drop their subscriptions entirely, then the local news business spirals downward even more quickly.

If it works, though, it can save a lot of money.

A huge portion of newspapers’ budgets remains tied up in manufacturing: presses, paper, ink, trucks, and all the people who handle them. (These are the often forgotten newspaper employees, the ones who realize their jobs are going away, but nonetheless like the idea of that happening in 2025 more than 2020. Let’s not forget them.)

“There are so many variables,” one veteran of the trade told me:

Most important: Do you outsource printing or not? If you do, then you can usually cut days and save money. If you own your own presses, it’s harder to manage. Pressmen don’t work just two days. What does it do to your distribution network; can they afford to operate just two days a week? Do you have an agreement to print and distribute other papers like The New York Times or USA Today?

That reckoning — to in-source or outsource — has led to much more regionalized printing, like The Columbus Dispatch being printed 175 miles away in Indianapolis. Those longer distances lead to much earlier editorial deadlines, which means missing late news or sports — often resulting in a print product that’s 36 hours behind the news we read on our smartphones. That’s part of this unending spindown of the newspaper industry.

What’s the 2025 business view here? Expect that most surviving dailies will offer as robust a Sunday print product as they can, and digital through the day, through the week. Or maybe it’s Sunday and Wednesday, for midweek print advertising, depending on individual markets. Or maybe the big Sunday paper shifts back to Friday or Saturday to capture more weekend reading and shopping. Done well, a publisher that shifts from seven days to a couple can expect to retain 75 to 90 percent of existing print advertising. But publishers have been properly wary of that ripcord now dangling in their corner office.

We’ve already seen several titles, most prominently the Tampa Bay Times, announced radical day cuts, within this crisis, and we’ll see more. The question is how many more, and how many days will they be cutting? Even in relatively prosperous California, major publishers are planning to drop Saturday print by early next year, knowledgeable sources tell me.

What does it mean to run a mainly reader-revenue-driven business?

The national news brands offer the best-practice playbooks here.

Business intelligence forms the foundation of their business, with an ever-evolving understanding of how to win — and keep — paying subscribers. That intel has then led to newsroom staffing expansion. They’re creating a virtual flywheel of more and better content and services to readers, who then pay for subscriptions and build a new — bigger — business.

For the locally oriented companies, though, that model is daunting. Do they have the will, capital, time, and talent to apply proven lessons?

How do we find the right people with the right skills to run a digital business?

Going digital (doesn’t that sound odd in 2020?) means committing to a business run by people with digital skills, and not enough publishers have truly done that. Time’s now up. As I noted in my start-of-the-decade Epiphanies piece: “The brain drain is real. What’s the biggest problem in the news business? The collapse of ad revenue? Facebook? Dis- and misinformation? Aging print subscribers? Surprisingly, over the last year numerous publishers and CEOs have confided what troubles them most: talent.” That truism makes the accelerated movement to “digital” even tougher.

How many journalists will our new business reality enable us to pay?

Some smaller chain newspapers were already down to the most skeleton of product-producing staffs, pre-COVID-19. We’ll now see tested the question of how low on staffing they can go — just to get a product out. The more important question, though, is: How many people do they need to produce something readers will pay for?

Will we still expect journalists to report to a central office every day?

Having learned that they can produce the news almost entirely remotely (other than printing and distribution), how much will news organizations want to reconfigure their workspaces to generate savings out of reduced office space?

“We’re 100 percent remote,” says Mike Klingensmith, publisher of the Star Tribune. “Nobody is in our office. I don’t know how we are doing it. Everyone may figure out we don’t need an office after all.”

About 20 percent of newspaper employees work in the physical business of print, manufacturing, and distribution. For the rest, this small unthinkable is now thinkable.

What do “advertising” and “events” look like?

Publishers have continued to make and re-make their ad priorities, staffing, and skills as The Duopoly and digital have forever changed the nature of advertising. This crisis — with some portion of that missing advertising likely never to return — will prompt more rethinking. How much inside sales versus how much outside? How much branded? How much direct versus programmatic?

The events business is also a big question mark, as Josh Benton explored last week. O’Reilly Media deciding to end its big event business was shocking. I agree with the sentiments of Rafat Ali, founder of travel B2B leader Skift: “If we ever give in to the idea that face-to-face events will be over, then we should also give up on the idea that people will travel again. We might as well give up on, well, everything.” Rafat-like, and as ever, to the point.

He expresses a global POV; let me add a local one. The future of the local press is in a deep and authentic relationship with its readers and communities. And that means people in close contact, post-coronavirus. Events of all kinds will be a major part of that future for the successful.

Will we have to merge or sell to stay in business?

The Olympics may have been pushed to 2021, but The Consolidation Games is going ahead as scheduled, virus schmirus. In fact, there’s good reason to believe this crisis is accelerating an M&A process that had already been moving fast.

Share prices for publicly traded chains have dropped dramatically, with Gannett floating just below $2 Monday. When GateHouse bought Gannett — just over four months ago! — this was the deal: “$12.06 a share in cash and stock, based on New Media’s Friday closing price, with a promise of $6.25 in cash and 0.5427 of a New Media share for each Gannett share.” From that to two bucks is quite a fall.

Depending on the duration of this crisis, Gannett’s shares are likely to rise eventually. But its big question remains the $1.8 billion in debt — at 11.5 percent interest — that it took on to make the merger work. Will Gannett be able to keep on schedule with those payments — while, you know, actually operating the company — if the ad exodus extends into summer or fall?

It’s not just future earnings that these companies need to worry about it. It’s also collecting on what’s already been sold, on ads that have already run.

“One of biggest issues is cash flow,” one news industry financial veteran told me. “What if all those SMBs [small to midsize businesses] don’t pay for January and February ads? Even if they have cash, they don’t want to cut checks. Even places like Macy’s may just not pay for January inserts.”

(Here we meet one of the great players in any crisis: attorneys. “In this whole mess, expect full employment of lawyers arguing ‘force majeure’ as a reason not to enforce contracts businesses want to get out of,'” that finance source continued. Is a pandemic an Act of God? It’s a legal “gray area.”)

These are more than abstract concerns. Metro publishers have already told me about major advertisers asking for givebacks and “accommodations.”

Some, including me and much wealthier investor Leon Cooperman, have long doubted Gannett’s ability to pay off that five-year loan while continuing to pay a hefty dividend to shareholders and keep enough people in its newsrooms with the cash flow it could expect.

This crisis only makes those doubts grow stronger.

It’s way too early to mention the “D” word — default — though it is being brought up offline.

Now consider the other drama that’s been submerged in the virus crisis. What will become of Alden Global Capital’s essential takeover of Tribune Publishing? It’s likely more “logical” — in terms of profit maximization — than it was before. Sources tell me a merger between Tribune and Alden’s MNG Enterprises is likely to be announced before the June 30 that is so pivotal in Tribune’s future.

One financial source tells me the deal will be a mix of cash and stock: “Tribune is the acquirer. That would leave them with more liquid security, a big beneficiary of all the synergies. Tribune can fit it into their balance sheet, since it has little debt, with no problem.” (At the moment, Tribune debt stands at $37.6 million.)

Tribune has already begun to look more like Alden’s MNG, notorious as the industry’s most aggressive newsroom shrinker. Tribune has been cutting costs, reducing management positions, and searching for efficiencies wherever it can find them. This current crisis only adds impetus to that work.

In that scenario, Tribune properties — in major cities like Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Orlando — will probably begin to look more like MNG papers The Mercury News and The Denver Post. Newsrooms cut to be the bone. Disinvestment from what Alden has always seen as a largely mythical digital future.

Financially, it’s a strategy that has worked for Alden. Enough older subscribers have accepted its higher pricing, and it’s found just enough buyers of its minimal digital products to keep the profits coming.

While its numbers aren’t as good as what I reported two years ago, its top properties still throw off (or did pre-coronavirus) margins of more than 20 percent. That’s unheard of among nearly all other publishers.

So what will this crisis mean to Alden and its president and chief dealmaker, Heath Freeman? “Heath could use this to run the table,” one observer said.

It’s easy to see why and how that indeed might be possible. Look at what the chain landscape may be by summer. McClatchy, one of the now lonely “independent” chains, will emerge from bankruptcy in four to six months (unless virus-driven delays lengthen the process). At that point, controlling owner Chatham Asset Management will look at its options.

One will be merging with the new Alden+Tribune.

Another, maybe, would be turning to Gannett. That would require a larger financially rejiggering, though, with lender Apollo a key player.

Either way, given the deep declines the industry faced pre-COVID, plus the unknown toll going forward, we could well see this reality: four hedge funds and private equity firms controlling a majority of America’s daily press as 2020 rolls on into darkness.

Chatham, Apollo, Alden, and Fortress Investment Group (which holds a contract to manage Gannett through 2021) may well get to decide amongst themselves how to divvy up the properties that deliver the local news most Americans get.

That’s not the picture Seattle Times owner Frank Blethen has in mind as he has launched his “Save The Free Press Initiative” in December. But it’s a reality we may all soon face.

This extreme moment is forcing publishers’ hands. Undoubtedly, some may look back on the other side of COVID-19 and say: “That worked well. We should have done it earlier.” Others will wish they’d had more time to think about jumping.

If publishers’ can still see any water in the glass at all — it seems to be emptying day by day — they might invoke Rahm Emanuel’s timely advice about the Great Recession at the start of Barack Obama’s presidency: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

This is a crisis. This is serious. And there’s no time left to waste.

What’s black and white and now deemed “essential”?

Newspapers, of course — the communications medium that, along with its media peers, has been formally recognized as a public good by cities and states trying to determine which slices of their economies not to shut down. Factual local reporting is indeed an “essential” in an age of fear and misinformation.

That’s the sliver of silver lining in this time of unprecedented financial stress. Our work, as journalists and as institutions, is being consumed and appreciated.

“We’ve gotten all these great letters that ‘Our respect and admiration for your work has never been higher,” says Star Tribune publisher Mike Klingensmith, whose Minneapolis daily has seen big spikes in readership as well.

“Your reporting during the COVID-19 crisis has been top-drawer and inspired me, finally, to execute the much overdue annual subscription ‘donation’,” one new member wrote Colorado Sun editor Larry Ryckman this week. “Please keep up the good work and know that your reporting is incredibly valuable, not merely during this crisis.”

Colorado Public Radio also feels the love, including this heartfelt tweet:

So true. My auto-donation to @CPRNews came out of bank today & I admit I was tempted to cancel it before next month (husband lost job and our health insurance this week) but after 2-seconds I realized they’re some of my best friends right now and I’m happy to pay that bill https://t.co/AvnVUtghtQ

— KB (@kb80202) March 19, 2020

“Audience feedback and digital use has been tremendous, and the numbers are stunning,” sums up Colorado Public Radio head Stewart Vanderwilt.

A giant story like coronavirus is often when journalists feel most connected to the sense of mission that got them into this line of work. It’s the love — plus a much-appreciated viral bump in audience, subscriptions, and memberships — that is buoying otherwise overwhelmed publishers and newsrooms.

More bittersweet is how one innovative local news exec put it to me: “This may be our last chance to prove how valuable we are.”

CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, the AP, and more are providing the national reporting. They show us, through words and graphics and images, the scale of the tragedy and the many flaws in the federal government’s response to the crisis. But they can’t answer the fundamentally local questions urgent on minds nationwide.

How many people are sick near me? How well equipped is my hospital? Where can and can’t I go? What’s my mayor or my governor doing to help? Who can deliver what? Where can I get tested? And a hundred other perhaps life-or-death decisions as half of Americans nervously face indefinite home detention.

Many of the country’s 20,000-plus journalists have risen to the occasion, working the phones, filing remotely, and venturing out into the invisible threat to get the stories that require the sight or even touch of other humans. All while wondering: How long will I have my job?

That’s the terrible irony of this moment. The amount of time Americans spend with journalists’ work and their willingness to pay for it have both spiked, higher than at any point since Election 2016, maybe before. But the business that has supported these journalists — shakily, on wobbly wheels — now finds the near future almost impossible to navigate.

The question of the hour: How many journalists will still have jobs once the initial virus panic subsides? How much factually reported news — especially local news — will Americans be able to get in the aftermath of this siege?

The answer lies in great part on the people in those quotes above: It is readers and their willingness to support the news who increasingly distinguish the survivors from those facing the end of the road. Advertising, which has been doing a slow disappearing act since 2008, has been cut in half in the space of two weeks. It’s unlikely to come back quickly — the parts that do come back at all.

The problem is the same it’s been for years: The increases in reader revenue are outmatched by the declines in advertising. So this very welcome swell of support from audiences is being swamped by the much larger evaporation of ad revenue. News publishers nationwide are afflicted with existential gut checks — aches that get a little worse with each day’s new dot on the chart of coronavirus cases.

Let’s look first at the cliff-edge effects — which are dramatic — and then plumb the good news of reader engagement and subscription. In an upcoming piece, peering ahead five years or so, I’ll take a look at the big takeaways and likely longer-term impacts of this sudden twist of fate.

A profound advertising crisis

This event isn’t just a black swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s parlance for an unexpected happening that forever alters the course of history. For dailies — in the U.S., in Canada, in the U.K., and really globally — it’s a flock of black swans.

Why? The daily newspaper industry has been on a respirator of its own for more than a decade. Ever since the Great Recession sucked 17 percent of advertising oxygen out of the system in 2008 — then another 27 percent in 2009 — it’s been climbing uphill, its gasps growing more frantic as financial operators consolidate and stripmine what was once a profoundly local industry. All together, American newspapers have lost more than 70 percent of their ad dollars since 2006.

The industry enters this turning-point event with about $1 billion remaining in total annual profits. That’s a fraction of what it was at its height, but it’s still a lot of money — which is why the financial consolidation I’ve chronicled over the last year has continued.

If the massive ad losses we’re now beginning to see remain in place for months, all of that profitability will be gone, and then some. We’ll enter a new stage of loss: The news deserts will become the norm, the oases the rarity.

How bad is it out there? The overall ad business — call it advertising, sponsorship, underwriting — is in depression.

I’ve spoken with more than a dozen well-placed executives in the industry, and the consensus is that, in April, daily publishers will lose between 30 and 50 percent of their total ad revenue. Things are unlikely to improve until we’re past mass sequestration, whenever that is.

“We’re hitting the end of March,” one highly experienced ad exec told me. “We see what’s coming. Big, big misses [of revenue expectations].”

The numbers are necessarily imprecise, and they change daily. March, ironically enough, started surprisingly strong for some publishers. Several noted stable businesses, even a little growth here and there.

Then the virus. April will start off with many fewer bookings and many more cancellations. The second quarter is one big question mark, but publishers also know what a 50 percent drop isn’t even the worst-case scenario. Retailers are closed. Car dealers aren’t selling. Few people are hiring, and who’s brave enough to venture into a new house or apartment to look around?

Then there’s preprints. These Sunday circulars and inserts have remained a robust, high-margin product for many publishers. But many of the big-box stores that paid for them are now closed, including major (if perennially dwindling) retailer Macy’s. Those that remain open, the Targets and Walgreens and grocery stores, wonder what they can advertise; supply chains for both essentials and non-essentials remains uncertain, and people aren’t doing a lot of spontaneous shopping sparked by a deal in an ad.

Is anything holding up okay? The legal ads that newspaper carry of official government actions. Obituaries (darkly enough). And, where they’re legal (and have been allowed to remain open), marijuana dispensaries. (They deliver!)

But the uncertainty is near-universal. “Even those who have something to sell are really concerned about doing it,” one revenue exec told me. “They’re unclear on how to get their message right and not seeming to profiteer.”

Seattle Times president Alan Fisco provides detail:

We have seen deep losses, not surprisingly, in travel, entertainment, restaurant, auto advertising (particularly in our smaller markets, Yakima and Walla Walla).

Our projections show April to be significantly worse than the hit we are taking in March. The annual print declines look to be double what we were experiencing prior to this.

And in spite of significant traffic increases, while we are seeing an increase in programmatic [advertising], it isn’t enough to offset our O&O [self-sold advertising] losses and some of our audience extension product losses (search and social).

(The Seattle Times’ remarkable coverage of the country’s first hotspot was highlighted here.)

Most local dailies have entered this crisis still more dependent on ad revenue than on reader revenue, even though the percentages have moved closer to parity after three years of double-digit print ad decline. They have envied The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post for having achieved business models based primarily on reader revenue.

(Ironically, coronavirus will likely push a lot of local publishers into that elite club — but through cratered ad revenue, not soaring reader revenue.)

The devastation across news media is universal but, inevitably, uneven. All local sources of news — daily newspapers, local digital, public radio stations, local TV stations — are reporting deepening losses.

It’s those most reliant on advertising that are most at risk. As reported earlier here at the Lab, it’s alternative weeklies and other free papers that look to be in the first trench. Significantly, the alt-weekly trade entered this year weaker than it’s ever been; no more than a dozen of them nationwide could be called significantly profitable, sources tell me.

“Eighty percent of our advertisers are restaurants, clubs, performance venues and all that is gone for at least two months,” one alt-weekly publisher told me Thursday, underlining how alt-weeklies’ strength — their connection to a vibrant city life — has turned against them.

Among independent digital sites, many of them members of LION Publishers and/or INN, sponsorship/advertising has indeed taken a hit. But since few depend overwhelmingly on it, the effects are worrisome more than catastrophic.

“Ironically, the nonprofits we’re hearing from with struggles right now are those that have done a lot to diversify their revenue streams,” says Sue Cross, executive director of INN, the Institute for Nonprofit News. These are news organizations that were doing a lot of events — now cancelled and with a less-certain future. Or they had big in-person spring fundraisers now forced to pivot to virtual, but that doesn’t replace substantial sponsorship revenue.

Five years ago, Ted Williams founded Charlotte Agenda, one of the liveliest and most commercially savvy sites on the emerging landscape. CA is taking some fire, but has so far it’s been manageable:

Revenues are down around 25 percent. This decrease consists of the drop-in job postings, event listings, and short-term ad deals. We’re fortunate that over 65 percent of our revenue comes from 12-month sponsorship deals across 28 big brands, most of which are negotiated in late fall.

Public radio, too, which depends more greatly on membership revenue than on advertising (or underwriting, as they call it), is also taking a hit.

“On the revenue side, we could see a negative swing of as much as $2 million in the final quarter, ending June 30,” says Vanderwilt of Colorado Public Radio, which has seen a remarkable surge of online readership and radio listenership. “Thirty to forty percent of our sponsorship is from the categories most immediately impacted by the need for social distancing and actual shutdowns. Arts, entertainment, events, restaurants, clubs — and education. Just about all have cancelled/paused their schedules.”

“We have seen some upticks in unsolicited donations coming in,” says Tim Olson, senior vice president of strategic relationships at KQED, the nation’s biggest regional station. But it too has suffered some sponsor loss and is, for now at least, forgoing another tried-and-true revenue source:

Public media stations, particularly news and information public radio stations, have almost all cancelled their on-air pledge drives in order to continue uninterrupted coverage of COVID-19. On air drives are critical drivers of new donors, and reminder to current donors, so the loss of on-air drives is likely to have an effect.

Local TV stations are also assessing what the spring will look like. Several are forecasting a 20 to 30 percent loss at this point in advertising. While they don’t have reader revenue, their ample retransmission fee contracts provide a big steady source of income.

Even with record consumption of digital news, advertising there is fetching far less than you might think. The reasons are straightforward: Many advertisers specify that they don’t want their products to appear next to a virus-related story — and that’s where most of the traffic is, of course. And with all businesses on temporary hold, demand for advertising is down.

That has led programmatic pricing, several publishers say, to be down about 30 percent. One told me it’s now dropping closer to 50 percent as society closes more doors.

In any event, all legacy local media — newspapers, TV, and public radio — are still much more reliant on their core legacy revenue than on digital dollars. So even increases in digital revenue don’t do much to counter the current big declines elsewhere.

The public’s hunger for local news is proven

That’s a lot of bleakness in advertising. But amid it all, there’s a little sunshine in digital subscriptions — the closest thing to a path forward for local newspapers.

Mike Orren, chief product officer at The Dallas Morning News, ticks off these amazing numbers: “Pageviews are up 90 percent. Users are up 70 percent. New users are up 75 percent. Sessions are up 96 percent. Sessions per user are up 14 percent. Session duration is up 9 percent.” And all that has pumped up digital subs.

Digital subscriptions are way up at the strongest local newspapers, with new weekly signups up 2× to 5× over pre-virus times. That’s thousands of much-needed new customers.

(How well are the two general-news pay leaders, The New York Times and The Washington Post, doing? They won’t say. We’ll find out the Times’ experience at its next earnings report.)

That kind of digital subscription growth is widely reported among medium-to-large local papers that do two things well: (1) fund a newsroom able to cover the local crisis in knowledgable depth; (2) have a system in place that facilitates quick and easy subscription signups.

Many newspapers fail to meet both those criteria, and they’ve seen a flatter growth ramp.

Notably, several publishers say that lots of people aren’t waiting to hit a paywall and run out of free articles for the month — they’re hitting those Subscribe buttons earlier and unprompted. They’re acting on both the value of the journalism and the community service.

One other indication of increased loyalty: fewer subscription cancellations. Churn is down. “We’re adding 50 to 70 subscribers every single day and seeing very little churn,” Tampa Bay Times editor Mark Katches told the Local News Initiative. “Churn is as common as the sunrise, but we’re experiencing the lowest churn rate this month that we’ve seen since we introduced the pay meter about a year ago. We attribute that to high interest in our coverage.”

The New York Times requires a new user’s registration in order to have free access to its coronavirus coverage. But most publishers have just opened their coverage up without any friction.

The Dallas Morning News’ strategy is somewhere nuanced and in between. It requires readers to sign up for a virus newsletter in order to get to unlimited related coverage, but it doesn’t require any more information than an email address. “It’s less friction,” Orren says. The idea has paid dividends: That newsletter now has an astounding 334,000 subscribers.

Some of more ambitious local news startups also report impressive numbers. The 18-month-old Colorado Sun is seeing a spurt.

“We have had nearly 600 new members sign up so far this month,” editor Ryckman told me Wednesday. “We signed up 330 new members in February, so we’re easily on track to double that pace by the end of the month.” The site overall has more than 8,000 paying members, with about 1,400 of those at the premium level. “Our traffic has been regularly 3× a normal day — and has been has high as 10×,” he said.

The Daily Memphian, also about 18 months old, is seeing a response both to its coverage and to appeals from its editor Eric Barnes: “Sub starts have jumped 250 percent in the last 2 weeks. And that’s even though we’ve made all our COVID stories free (and that’s 80 percent or more of what we’re doing).”

Barnes underlines the need to remind readers of the costs of journalism. “But we’ve been very intentional with calls to action in stories and newsletters, along the lines of “Our articles are free — but covering the news is not. Please subscribe.” (Memphian sports columnist Geoff Calkins wrote his own direct appeal to readers, aiming to reach a different kind of reader-relationship connection.)

LION Publishers executive director Chris Krewson reports good uptake among his more aggressive member local news orgs. “Berkeleyside has signed up 267 new members since starting a campaign around the virus a few weeks ago, and also gotten donations from existing members, for a total of $50,000 in new-member revenue. The Berkshire Eagle launched a membership campaign and already has 300 members.”

“Many members are reporting huge increases in traffic — five, even ten times their normal pageviews, and also increases in community support and donations,” says INN’s Cross. “Even very small sites are hosting Facebook groups and seeing thousands join overnight, organizing collaboratives of all media in their towns.”

Pulitzer-winning Portland alt-weekly Willamette Week launched a voluntary membership program back in September. As of week ago, it had signed up 510 members. Seven days later and more than 1,100 new members have signed up. “In addition to the much-needed cash, those [and their comments] are tonic for the soul,” publisher and editor Mark Zusman told me Thursday.

For public radio, this crisis has been more about affirming its valued place in listeners’ and readers’ lives — in greater engagement — than in signing up new members. Over the past five years, most of the top 20 public radio stations have morphed more fully into “public media,” investing heavily in digital local news. Those that did are also reaping the returns.

“As of yesterday, CPR.org had over 2 million uniques and [on its separate site] Denverite 500,000,” says CPR’s Vanderwilt. That’s double and quadruple normal traffic, respectively. “The daily Lookout newsletter subs have grown 36 percent since March 1. We have also started publishing twice a day plus news alerts. Open rate has climbed from 32 percent to 41 percent.”

The public, for now, is eating up the added frequency and opening more of those newsletters. At KQED, pageviews have doubled and time spent on pages is up by a quarter. Overall, the public’s hunger for local news at this time is proven.

At metros, daily visits on digital are up an average of 122 percent as of the third week of March. And the pace is accelerating: “a 35% increase from Week 2 to Week 3 [and] no signs of slowing down as we enter the last week of March,” according to Pete Doucette, now a managing director at FTI Consulting. Doucette played a big part in building The Boston Globe’s digital audience and subscription business. His comprehensive take on digital subscriptions, and how to maximize both volume and pricing at this critical juncture is a must-read for all in the business. (The Local News Initiative at Medill offers an excellent roundup as well. )

These trends, we must underline, are global — both the traffic gains and the revenue losses. Major German publishers like Bild and Spiegel Online “all have huge gains,” according to journalist Ulrike Langer. “But none of these publishers have been able to monetize their huge rise in traffic volume in terms of advertising. Ad volume has sharply declined and most advertisers don’t want to see their ads next to coronavirus news.” Different continent, same issue.

What’s left to be “unthinkable”?

Humans are inherently adaptable. We have the life-affirming (and seemingly planet-destroying) capability of adapting to anything. We will adapt here too, no matter the human nor economic toll. A scale of destruction that would have once been “unthinkable” becomes quite thinkable indeed — then assessable, and then actionable. Those of us who’ve tracked the shrinking of the American press should have learned that lesson already.

We all expected a recession would arrive at some point, even if we thought of it kind of distantly, and we knew it would deal a new blow to the beleaguered newspaper industry. (In fact, I see that I’ve noted that possibility here at least three dozen times over the years — including this 2011 (!) entry, The newsonomics of the next recession.”)

Now that it’s arrived on our doorstep, our language has changed. Less “decline” and “deterioration,” more “annihilation” and “extinction“.

“Extinction” certainly draws a sharp picture, and it will be literally true for some of the press. But that picture may not be the most precise. More journalists gone. More publishers gone. Local news greatly reduced.

That’s all coming. But how do we — and the publics we serve — gauge what’s left?

The cuts at alt-weeklies and city magazines became public first. The earliest reports of cuts and layoffs at daily newspapers have begun to seep out. Expect a lot more of them. “Everyone’s making contingency plans,” one industry insider says. Layoffs, furloughs, salary cuts, four-day weeks — however it’s framed, cuts to staffing are on the way.

The fact that readers’ newfound appreciation of the local press is based on the work of those reporters and those newsrooms should limit the cuts. But they often won’t. And then there are the newspapers that have already been cut so much that they barely have enough people to put out a paper everyday. (And that’s before we see much of the most direct impact coronavirus can have on a news organization: sick journalists and other staffers whose extended absence from work makes everything harder.)

One wild card: the federal bailout, which features loans that can be turned into grants if companies maintain staffing. But it remains unclear if the scale of that help — and how accessible it is to publishers — will be enough to make a big difference.

Several years ago, Penny Abernathy’s mapping of America’s “news deserts” established a universal point of reference for discussions about local news. I’ve suggested that, for all the communities down to one or zero news sources, the bigger problem is the ghost newspapers that now pervade the landscape, stripped to the skeleton.

This crisis, like the declines of the past decade, will probably be less about pure extinction and more about new apparitions. Newspapers gutted in a way previously “unthinkable.” Badly wounded (but still faintly breathing) dinosaurs, if you will.

How do we judge if a newspaper is still “alive”? By most definitions, it’s the appearance of a product, usually in print but now digital, that carries a dignified nameplate, preferably in a familiar German blackletter font.

The financial companies that have and will continue to consolidate the local press — perhaps now at an accelerated pace — know that, and they’ve build a cynical strategy atop it. Keep the nameplate and fill the space between the ads with national wire copy, stories pretending to be “local” (but really from someplace three newspapers away), self-serving columns from mayors and local corporate leaders, and lots of low-cost calendar items.

“Fake news” is a truly odious epithet. But we’re now truly into the faux news era in local news. It’s a thin patina of fraudulent localness, packaged in the wrappings of a century ago, and priced at $600, $700, or $800 a year for seniors who nostalgically (or unknowingly, through the magic of the credit card) continue to pay until the day they don’t.

If we define “life” — or non-extinction — by the mere persistence of an old nameplate, we obscure the damage being done to local communities every single day. As we begin to list out the longer-term impacts of the current catastrophe, put that one higher on the list.

All of this — this March massacre of news revenue — is prologue, of course. We just don’t yet know what it’s prologue to. The 2020 calendar has never looked longer.

As one of the most successful, optimistic, and progressive of today’s publishers told me: “If it’s a couple of months, we’ll make it through. If it’s six months, all bets are off.”

When I spoke at state newspaper conferences five or ten years ago, people would say: “It’ll come back. It’s cyclical.” No one tells me that anymore. The old business is plainly rotting away, even as I find myself still documenting the scavengers who turn detritus into gold.

The surviving — growing, even — national news business is now profoundly and proudly digital. All the wonders of the medium — extraordinary storytelling interactives and multimedia, unprecedented reader-journalist connection, infinitely searchable knowledge, manifold reader revenue — illuminate those companies’ business as much as digital disruption has darkened the wider news landscape.

What is this world we’ve created? That’s the big-picture view I’m aiming to offer here today.

Those of us who care about journalism were happy to see the 2010s go. We want a better decade ahead for a burning world, a frayed America, and a news business that many of us still believe should be at the root of solving those other crises.

I call what follows below my epiphanies — honed over time in conversations around the world, with everyone from seen-it-all execs to young reporters asking how things came to be the way they are in this business. These are principles that help me make sense of the booming, buzzing confusion that can appear to envelop us. Think of it as an update to my book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get, now a decade old.

Here I’ve distilled all my own concerns and my understandings. I’ve taken a big-picture, multiyear view, knowing that like it or not, we’re defining a new decade. You’ll see my optimism here — both as a longtime observer and as a later-stage entrepreneur trying to build out a new model for local news. (I wrote about that back in October.) I do believe that we can make the 2020s, if not quite the Soaring ’20s, something better than what we just went through. But I balance my optimism with my journalism-embued realism. In many ways, 2020 stands at the intersection of optimism and realism — a space that’s shrinking.

So much has gone off the rails in the news industry (and in the wider society) over the past decade. Amid all the fin-de-la-décennie thinking, I think Michiko Kakutani best described the country’s 10-year experience: “the indigenous American berserk,” a borrowing from Phillip Roth.

So much of what happened can be attributed to (if not too easily dismissed as) “unintended consequences.” Oops, we didn’t mean to turn over the 2016 election to Putin. Gosh, we didn’t mean to alter life on earth forever — we just really wanted that truck. We just wanted to connect up the whole world through the Internet — we didn’t mean to destroy the institutions that sort through the facts and fictions of civic life.

As billions have disappeared from the U.S. newspaper industry, the words “collateral damage” served to explain the revolution that led digital to become the leading medium for advertising. That damage is now reaching its endgame.

The Terrible Tens almost precisely match the period I’ve been writing here at Nieman Lab. In that time, I’ve written enough to fill several more books — 934,800 words before this piece. Almost a million words somehow accepted by our loyal readers, who still, remarkably, laugh and tell me: “Keep writing long.”

Let’s then start the 2020s off right. With one eye on the last decade and another on the one to come, let me put forward 20 understandings of where we are and how we build from here.

That felt like huge news — but what if it really only represents the beginning of a greater rollup? Last month, I sketched out how five of the largest chains could become two this year.

And yet there are even worse potential outcomes for those of us who care about a vibrant, independent press. What if a Sinclair, bent on regional domination and with a political agenda, were to buy a rollup, and keep rolling?

In a way, GateHouse’s builder Mike Reed has done a lot of the heavy lifting already. From a financial point of view, the CEO of New Gannett has already done a lot of rationalization. GateHouse bought up a motley collection of newspaper properties, many out of long-time family ownership, and brought some standard operating principles and efficiencies to them. We can ask whether his big gamble of borrowing $1.8 billion (at 11.5 percent interest) from Apollo Global Management will prove out over the next few years. Or we can think of that megamerger as just prologue.

After all, the same logic that drove the GateHouse/Gannett deal pervades the near-uniform thinking of executives at all of the chains. Job No. 1: Find large cost savings to maintain profitability in light of revenue declines, in the high single digits per year, that show no sign of stopping. And the easiest way to do that is merging. A merger can massively — if only once — cut out a lot of HQ and other “redundant” costs.

It buys some time. And newspaper operators are craving more time. “Ugly” is the simple description of the 2020 newspaper business offered to me by one high-ranking news executive. Revenue declines aren’t improving, so the logic remains. The only questions are: How much consolidation will there be, and how soon will it happen?

Heath Freeman, head of journalistic antihero Alden Global Capital, has already begun to answer that question. The hedge-fund barbarians aren’t just inside Tribune Publishing’s gates — they’re settled in around the corporate conference table. Alden’s cost-cutting influence drives the first drama of the year: Can Chicago Tribune employees fend off the bloodletting long enough to find a new buyer for their newspaper before it’s too late? They know that, despite a national upswell in public support for the gutted Denver Post in 2018, Alden was able to remain above the fray and stick to its oblivious-to-the-public-interest position.

Meanwhile, McClatchy is trying to thread a needle of financial reorganization. Then there’s Lee, operator of 46 largely smaller dailies. All of them are subject (and object) of the same financial logic.

While financing remains tough to get, at any price, there remains an undeniable financial propulsion to bring many more titles under fewer operations.

There’s no law preventing one company from owning half of the American daily press. And no law prevents a political player like a Sinclair — known for its noxious enforcement of company politics at its local broadcast properties — from buying or tomorrow’s MergedCo — or orchestrating the rollup itself.

After a decade where we’ve seen the rotten fruit of political fact-bending, what could be more effective than simply buying up the remaining sources of local news and shading or shilling their coverage? Purple states, beware! Further, the price would be relatively cheap: Only a couple billion dollars could buy a substantial swatch of the U.S.’s local press.

Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry.

It sometimes seems like we’ll run out of epithets — “the Thanos of the newspaper business,” “the face of bloodless strip-mining of American newspapers and their communities,” “industry vulture,” “the newspaper industry’s comic-book villain” — for Alden Global Capital. Then someone helps us out.

“Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry,” one very well-connected (and quite even-keeled) industry executive told me dispassionately. “It just destroys the story we try to tell of the great local journalism we need to preserve.”

Think about the big picture. The industry is flailing; behind closed doors, it’s throwing a Hail Mary, trying to win an antitrust exemption from Congress. It argues that in the public interest, it should be allowed to negotiate together (rather than as individual companies) with the platforms. It wants the big payoff they’ve dreamed of since the turn of the century: billions in licensing from Google, Facebook, and Co.

It pines for and makes comparison to the kinds of licensing revenue that both TV broadcasters and music publishers have been able to snag. But thus far, that’s been a heavy lift in terms of negotiation or public policy. But Alden adds more weight, letting governments or platforms say: “Wait, you want us to help them?”

Which leads to…

Can a duopoly licensing deal be the “retrans” savior of the local news business?

In 1992, local TV companies were in a bind. Cable and satellite companies had to pay the ESPNs and CNNs of the world to air their programming. But local TV stations — available for free on the public airwaves — got nothing for having their signal distributed to cable customers.

But that year, federal legislation allowed local TV stations to demand compensation from cable and satellite systems — retransmission fees. Essentially, distributors paid stations for the right to their programming, including local news — despite the fact that anyone with an antenna could get their signal for free.

What started out as a small supplemental revenue stream now amounts to about 40 percent of all local TV station revenue, according to Bob Papper, the TV industry’s keen observer and data/trend collector through his annual RTDNA survey. “Retrans money is skyrocketing, and that should continue until it levels off in 2023-24.” This year, it will likely add up to $12 billion or more.

Advertising revenue has been fairly flat for local TV companies (setting aside for a moment the two-year cycle in which election years pump them full of political cash). Digital revenue hasn’t been much better, accounting for only six or seven percent of station income, Papper says — way less than newspaper companies earn.

And yet these local TV businesses are stable, profitable, and facing nothing like what’s happened to newspaper newsrooms. Papper notes the wide variance across stations in the depth and breadth of their news products. While many still stick with the tried-and-tired formulas, his surveys of station managers list “investigative reporting” as their No. 1 priority. When it’s funded, it’s a differentiator in crowded TV markets.

It’s that retrans money that makes all the difference.

Clearly, the news industry is a major supplier of high-engagement material to the platforms — a supply that helps energizes their dominant ad businesses. While both Google and Facebook have deployed a motley fleet of news industry-supporting initiatives, they’ve steadfastly refused any large-scale “licensing” arrangements.

If there’s increased public pressures on the platforms as the society’s digital high turns part-bummer, and if the political environment were to change (a President Elizabeth Warren, for example), it’s not hard to imagine the tech giants ponying up a billion here or there for democracy-serving news, right? (Both Google and Apple count more than $100 billion in cash reserves, net of debt, with Facebook holding more than $50 billion.)

Google, when asked over the years why it doesn’t pay license fees, talks about the complexity of the news market, among other objections. Expect a new argument: You want us to pay an Alden, or a Fortress Investment Group?

The financialization of the press may indeed makes the daily newspaper “public service” argument more difficult to make. While still true — though now wildly uneven in its actual daily delivery — it might be an artifact of a bygone age. The question may turn from “Will platforms finally pay license fees?” to “Who can make a good argument that they deserve them?”

The first metric that matters is content capacity.

In our digital world, just about everything can be counted. So many numbers adding up to so few results for so many.

Look forward and we can see that content capacity is and will be among the biggest differentiators between the winners and losers of the news wars. In fact, I’d call it a gating factor. Publishers who can offer up a sufficient volume of unique, differentiated content can win, assuming they’ve figured out ways for their business to benefit from it.

People aren’t the problem, no matter what the headcount-chopping Aldens of the world have preached. People — the right journalists and the right digital-savvy business people — are the solution.

In models as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Athletic, The Information, the Star Tribune, and The Boston Globe, we see this truism play out.

Certainly, having more skilled journalists better serves the public’s news needs. But the logic here is fundamentally a business one. In businesses increasingly dependent on reader revenue, content capacity drives the value proposition itself.

Rather than reducing headcount — and thus spinning the downward spiral more swiftly — increasing headcount can lead to a magic word: growth.

The news business will only rebound when it seeks growth.

Across America’s widening expanse of news deserts, we don’t hear many whispers of that word, growth. The conversation among owners and executives is pretty consistent: Where do we cut? How do we hold on?

That’s meant more M&A. More cutting print days. More cutting of business operations. More cutting of newsrooms. All in an effort to preserve a diminishing business — whether the underlying mission is to maintain even a semblance of a news mission or just to milk the remaining profits of an obsolescent industry.

Of course, local news publishers poke at new revenue streams to try to make up for print ad revenues that will likely drop in the high single digits for the fourth year in a row. But the digital ad wars have been lost to Google and Facebook. Marketing services, a revenue stream pursued with much optimism a few years ago, has proven to be a tough, low-margin business. Digital subscription sales are stalled around the country, not least because of all that cutting’s impact on the product. Most see no path to a real “replacement” revenue stream. (Maybe CBD-infused newsprint?)

Cutting ain’t working. Decline feeds decline.

Only an orientation toward growth — with strategies that grab the future optimistically and are funded appropriately — can awaken us from this nightmare. Replace “replacement” strategies with growth strategies and these businesses look different.

Happily, we do have growth models to look at. Take, most essentially to the current republic, our two leading “newspapers.”

Today, The New York Times pays 1,700 journalists. That’s almost twice as many as a decade ago. The Washington Post pays 850, up from 580 when Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013.

The result: More unique, high-quality content has driven both publishers to new heights of subscription success, the Times how with three times as many paying customers as it had at its print apex. Readers have rewarded the investment, and those rewards have in turn allowed further investment.

It’s a flywheel of growth — recognizable to anyone who’s ever built a business, large or small. What it requires is a long-term view and patience. And, of course, capital in some form — which shouldn’t be a problem in a rich country awash in cash. But what it also demands is a belief in the mission of the business, an in-part seemingly irrational belief that the future of the news business can, and must, be robust.

Some big numbers tell the big story.

• We may have underestimated the dominance of the New Gannett. According to Dirks, Van Essen, Murray & April, the leading newspaper broker, the new Gannett now owns:
  • 20.4 percent of all U.S. daily newspapers
  • 26.3 percent of all U.S. daily print circulation
  • 24.8 percent of all U.S. Sunday print circulation

  So in rough terms, it controls a quarter of our daily press. The chart below, produced by the brokerage, compares the megamerger to the industry’s previous big deals on the basis of percentage of newspapers owned and percentage of circulation controlled. It should send a chill down every American spine.



• There are probably fewer than 20,000 journalists working in U.S. daily newspaper newsrooms. There’s not even a semi-official tally anymore, but that’s a good extrapolation from years past, given all the cutting since. That compares to 56,900 in 1990 — when the country had 77 million fewer people than today.
• The daily press still depends on the print newspaper for 70 percent or more of its revenue. That’s after 20 years of “digital transition.”
• The daily newspaper industry today takes in more than $30 billion less per year than it did at its height.
• $1 trillion: The market value reached by Alphabet (Google) last week.

The brain drain is real.

What’s the biggest problem in the news business? The collapse of ad revenue? Facebook? Dis- and misinformation? Aging print subscribers?

Surprisingly, over the last year numerous publishers and CEOs have confided what troubles them most: talent.

It’s hard enough to take on all the issues of business and social disruption with a staff that can meet the challenge. Increasingly, though, it’s hard for news companies to attract and retain the talent they need, especially in the business, product, and technology areas that will determine their very survival.

Who wants to work in an industry on its deathbed? Especially in an already tight job market.

What do the people who could make a difference in the future of news want? Fair compensation, for sure, and local news companies often pay below-market wages, on the TV side as much as in newspapers. Perhaps more important, they want a sense of a positive future — one their bosses believe in and act on every day. That’s a commodity scarcer than money in this business.

No industry has a future without a pipeline of vital, young, diverse talent eager to shape the future. And that’s especially true in the live-or-die arts of digital business. As the just-released Reuters Institute for Journalism 2020 trends report notes, “Lack of diversity may also be a factor in bringing new talent into the industry. Publishers have very low confidence that they can attract and retain talent in technology (24%) and data science (24%) as well as product management (39%). There was more confidence in editorial areas (76%).”

At the same time, we’ll be watching the flow of experienced talent as it moves around the industry. As Atlantic Media continues to grow and morph under the Emerson Collective, a number of its top alumni are moving into new positions elsewhere. Longtime Atlantic president Bob Cohn now takes over as president of The Economist — an early digital subscription leader, the storied “newspaper” now seeks growth. Meanwhile, Kevin Delaney, co-founder of Atlantic Media’s innovative Quartz, has taken on a so-far-unannounced big project at The New York Times’ Opinion section, where the appetite for impact has grown appreciably.

Finally, as The Guardian ended the decade with happy reader revenue success, Annette Thomas becomes CEO. Thomas has earned accolades for her innovative work in science publishing. These three, plus numerous others moving into new jobs as 2020 begins, can now bring their decades of digital experience to the job of getting news right in the ’20s.

Print is a growing sore spot; expect more daycutting.

Just for a moment, forget the thinned-out newsrooms and consider a fundamental truth: The physical distribution system that long supported the daily business is falling apart.

The paperboys and papergirls of mid-20th-century America have faded into Norman Rockwell canvases. As Amazon’s distribution machine and Uber and Lyft suck up available delivery people across the country, publishers say it’s increasingly hard to find paper throwers. (And why not? Paper-throwing sounds like a sport from another age.)

Why not just throw in with the logistics geniuses of the day, and partner with them to deliver the papers? The newspaper industry has indeed had talks with Amazon, buyer of 30,000 last-mile delivery trucks over the past two years. We’ll probably see some local efforts to converge delivery. But think about who still gets that package of increasingly day-old news delivered to their doorstep? Seniors — who want the paper bright and early, complicating delivery partnerships.

Not to mention that, with print subscribers declining in the high single digits every year, deliverers now need to cover a wider geography to deliver the same number of papers — and that problem will only get worse.

To add an almost comic complication to the challenge of dead-tree delivery: California’s AB5 just went into effect. Its admirable aim is to bring fairer benefits to those in the gig economy. But its many unintended consequences are now cascading throughout the state — spelling millions more in costs to daily publishers while wreaking havoc among freelancers.

Is seven-day home delivery now a luxury good? Or just a profit-squeezing artifact? Either way, it’s become clear that publishers’ years of price increases for seven-day aren’t sustainable. One of my trusty correspondents reported this last week that he’s now paying $900 a year for the Gannett-owned Louisville Courier-Journal. There are Alden-owned papers charging more than $600 a year for ghost titles, produced by a bare handful — sometimes two — journalists.

As print subscriptions have declined, publishers have continued to price up. That’s death-spiral pricing, with a clear end in sight and boatloads of money to be made on the way out the door.

Earlier this year, I wrote about “the end of seven-day print” and how publishers have been modeling and noodling its timeline. There’s been lots of trimming around the edges, mainly at smaller papers; McClatchy’s decision to fully end Saturday print is a harbinger of what’s to come. The company planned the end of Saturdays meticulously, with a keen eye toward customer communication, and proved to both itself and the industry that it can be done.

(Let’s allow time here for a brief chuckle by European publishers who have been successfully publishing “weekend” papers for decades.)

But cutting Saturday alone doesn’t save you a lot of money. Those twin pressures — on one hand, needing ever-larger cost savings, on the other, the collapsing distribution system — mean we’ll see more ambitious and adventurous cutting in the year to come. They’ll do while swallowing the existential fear one CEO shared: “They are scared to death this will end the habit.”

How big a deal is all this — the declining mechanics of print distribution? Very big.

Consider that The New York Times — the most successfully transitioned of newspaper companies — still only earns only 43 percent of its revenue from digital. Most regional dailies still rely on print for 75 to 90 percent of their overall revenue. If the physical distribution system starts failing faster, how much of that print-based revenue — circulation and advertising — can be converted to digital?

At a national level, the direct connection between readers and journalists has never been stronger.

Listen to the commercial breaks of The New York Times’ breakaway hit The Daily. A lot of them aren’t commercial spots, but what we used to call house ads in the print business. Maggie Haberman talking about Times’ reporting in the era of press vilification; Rukmini Callimachi sharing the danger and cost of reporting from terror-stricken parts of the world.

These ads aren’t about making the newsroom feel better — they work. The Times now has more than three times the total paying customers than it did at the height of print, with 3.9 million digital news subscribers paying the Times. Why? The journalists and the journalism.

In the halcyon days of print, advertising drove 75 percent of the Times’ revenue, a number that often hit 80 percent for local dailies. Now the digital world has forced — but also enabled — the Times to forge a very direct connection between its journalists and readers. Readers understand much more clearly that they are paying for high-quality news and analysis. They value expertise and increasingly get to know these journalists individually, whether through podcasts or other digital extensions.

Journalists believe more than ever that they are working for the reader, with the Times the trustworthy intermediary. The new more direct relationship between reader and journalist fosters growth. And the same is true similarly for The Washington Post, The Athletic, and The Information, in different forms.

If the local news world had followed suit, we’d say that the age of digital disruption has been a boon for journalism overall. Clearly, it hasn’t. This lesson is a guidepost for the decade ahead.

Advertising remains a vital — but secondary — source of revenue for news publishers.

The war’s over; the platforms won. With Google and Facebook maintaining a 60 percent share of the digital ad market (and 70 percent of local digital ads), publishers no longer expect to grab a bigger slice of the pie. The drama drawing the most attention: How much will Amazon eat into The Duopoly, as Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise summed up “the five trends that threaten the Google/Facebook duopoly” at AdAge.

Contrary to some of the conventional wisdom of the moment, that doesn’t mean advertising is no longer a part of publishers’ diversified revenue streams. Yes, reader revenue is clearly the driver for successful publishers of the ’20s, but advertising — best when sold and presented in ways that don’t compete directly with the platforms — will be in the passenger seat.

The evolving formula of the early ’20s is a mix of 65 to 70 percent reader revenue, 20 to 30 percent in advertising, and then an “other” that includes things like events. While this model may be more diversified, it’s not made of discrete parts. The better publishers get at profiling their reader-revenue-paying customers, with increasingly better-used first-party data, the better they can help advertisers sell. At this point, it’s a wobbly virtuous circle of money and data, and the successful publishers will find ways to round it.

A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension.

The word of the moment in almost every conversation about local news is “nonprofit.” At so many conferences and un-conferences about the news emergency, the notion that there’s a commercial answer to rebuilding the local business seems almost out of bounds.

What created this anti-profit sensibility? Acknowledging the power of the duopoly, to be sure. But that’s not the only rationale. For generations, many journalists considered themselves proudly unaware or uncaring about the business. Now the ascendance of Google and Facebook has given too many permission to eschew advertising as a significant, if secondary, support of reporting.

Secondly, the industry’s Heath Freemans and Michael Ferros, among too many others, have stained a local news business that was once both proudly profitable and mission-driven. Profiteering is now associated by many with local news.

Nonprofit news, too, though requires capital — just like any kind of growing service or product. Somebody has to actually pay journalists. So those advocating nonprofit news as the new future have turned to philanthropy. They look to foundations, national and local, to finance this vision. Nationally, more than $40 million has now flowed into the American Journalism Project, headed by Elizabeth Green and John Thornton. Most of that’s come from national foundations. The AJP announced its first grants in December, a down payment on what it envisions as a fund of up to $1 billion.

Now we’ll see if AJP can significantly move the needle on what is plainly needed: replacement journalism. As it tries to catalyze a movement, it hopes to multiply the philanthropic response to the news crisis. It’s a hope we can share. AJP’s pitch is straightforward: Communities should support news the same way they support public goods like the ballet and the opera, things that in many cities plainly couldn’t sustain themselves as creatures of the market.

That’s a worthy thought, but with two big issues attached.

One: There’s not much of a tradition of such support. Newspapers made so much money for so many years that they were the ones who started foundations, not the ones asking them for money. Relatively few communities’ foundations are oriented in that direction — and foundations don’t change direction or priorities speedily.

Two: Scale. So much local news coverage has been lost that it would take substantial and ongoing philanthropy to even begin to resupply community news. There’s not a lot of evidence yet of a readiness to do that.

To be sure, hundreds of dedicated journalists have build smaller operations in cities across the country. LION Publishers and the Institute for Nonprofit News are looking for new and better ways to support and nurture them. But the old world is disappearing far faster than a new one is being created.

Ace industry researchers Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb recently laid out their thinking, which should serve as a reality check for all who care about the next decade of local news.

Yet even with a game-changing funding renaissance in local news (which would require the significant participation of community foundations), it probably won’t be fast enough or big enough to refill the bucket as local newspaper talent and jobs continue to drain away. There may not be enough philanthropic capital, even on the sidelines, to support the scope and depth of local news-gathering that our democracy requires.

But it was the concluding paragraph of their Nieman Lab prediction that really best summed up this epiphany looking ahead to the end of this decade.

A New(s) Deal for the 21st century: If all forms of philanthropic support for local news are truly not enough, we predict that by the end of 2030, we’ll be seeing large-scale policy changes to publicly support more sources of local news. It may not seem like we’re that close on this one, but trust us, it could happen.

I know Hansen and Holcomb are trying to spark a note of optimism, but their realistic reading of the landscape should strike terror: A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension. Imagine this struggling country 10 years from now if the news vacuum has become the new normal and our communities are democratically impoverished.

My own view: All good journalism is good. Support it by philanthropy, advertising, events, reader revenue, or by winning lottery ticket. Given the peril, we all need to look more widely for support, not more narrowly.

The free press needs to be a better advocate of free peoples in the 21st century.

The Wall Street Journal has long proclaimed itself the paper of free people and free markets. That formulation has made a lot of sense over time in the face of state-run economies of various flavors. But it’s insufficient to meet the demands of today.

Free peoples — those able to speak, write, assemble, vote, and retain some dignity of privacy — make up an uneasy minority of the world’s population. Now the twin dangers of growing strongman despotism and tech-based surveillance societies threaten us all.

Most recently, The New York Times’ investigative report on facial recognition painted a deeply disturbing dystopian portrait. The piece came on the heels of many beginning to describe China’s “surveillance state,” an ominous system intend to enable lifelong tracking and rewarding of state-approved citizen behavior.

We’re moving from a decade of cookies gone wild to what until recently seemed to be Orwellian fiction.

Combine the tech with the spreading rash of authoritarianism afflicting the globe. From Russia to Hungary to Turkey to Brazil to the Philippines to, yes, our current White House, the 2010s produced strongmen who we thought had been relegated to the history books.

Who best to represent free people in the coverage of would-be despots and in the tech-driven threats to several centuries of hard-earned Western rights? A free and strong press.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Czech novelist Milan Kundera memorably told us in his 1980 book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. (John Updike’s masterful review of it is here).

Memory. Our job as journalists is to remember. To connect yesterday to today to tomorrow.

Like the climate crisis, the threat of a surveillance society registers only haphazardly among the American populace, even as California’s government and others begin to take it on.

We’ve seen the beginnings of a backlash against tech run amok, with Facebook’s role in the 2016 election a seeming turning point. But here we are again, as Emily Bell points out, going into another election with the same issues — and huge questions that go well beyond the social behemoth.

If news companies are, at their base, advocates for the public good, news companies must lead in securing a free society in the face of technological adventurism. Media needs to get beyond its self-interest — ah, first-party data! — and focus on the bigger picture.

Who better to take that stand than those who’ve long advocated free peoples and free thinking? Who better to do that — and perhaps be rewarded for it in reader support — than mission-oriented news media?

The press’ business revival is part and parcel of its advocacy for the people it serves.

Australia is burning, and Murdoch’s newsprint provided the kindling.

For years, Australian press watchers have pointed to the dangerous slanting of environmental news by much of the nation’s press. A majority of that press is controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s empire. And those papers, joined too often by other media, have long skewed the facts of climate change. The result is a society ill-prepared for the nightmare that’s befallen it.

While this month has seen more complaints about Murdoch publications’ coverage, they’re in line with what that coverage has looked like for years. Now even scion James Murdoch has spoken out, as have some of Murdoch’s employees, seeing the heartbreaking, country-changing toll the fires have taken on Australia.

History will record Rupert Murdoch’s three-continent toll on Western civilization. The Foxification of U.S. news, Brexit support, and Australia’s inferno serve as only three of the major impacts Murdoch’s press power has had around the world. It is a press power weaponized and then turned on the very societies it is supposed to serve.

And don’t let the whirl of events let you forget the odious phone hacking scandal. “The BBC reported last year that the Murdoch titles had paid out an astonishing £400m in damages and calculated that the total bill for the two companies could eventually reach £1bn,” former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger reminded us this week in discussing the British press’ tawdry history with the royals.

Disney, for one, has recognized the toxicity of Murdoch’s remaining brand. Fox Corporation now owns the Fox broadcast network, Fox News, and 28 local Fox television stations, among other media assets. But “Fox” is no longer part of Twentieth Century Fox, the storied studio, and related assets that Disney bought from Murdoch last year. Now it’s only out of sync when it comes to time: 20th Century Studios. (Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton offered up a wonderful history of the Fox brand in the U.S., beginning with a third of a Brooklyn nickleodeon 115 years ago, on Twitter.)

The Murdoch empire has generated plenty of good entertainment outside of its own brands — witness the Emmy-winning “Succession” and last month’s Bombshell. But we haven’t yet come to grips with how his publications’ fact-slanting has literally changed the faces of free societies.

Expertise rises to the top.

The end of the print era is killing off the generalist. Every daily newsroom has its legend of the reporter who could cover anything. Wake him up from a drunken stupor, point him (almost always him) out the door, and you’d get your story.

Great stories there sometimes were, but the legend exceeded the truth: Too much news reporting was a mile wide and an inch deep.

Flash forward to today: Ruthless digital disruption — of both reading and advertising — means that inch-deep stories have less and less value. (Remember back at the start of the last decade, the content farms — Demand Media, Contently, Associated Content — that were going to revolutionize journalism?)

If commodity journalism and sheer volume are out, one the most refreshing trends into the 2020s is single-subject journalism. It needs a better name, but the results have been profound. In topic after topic, the focus on expertise — in reporting, writing and increasingly presentation and storytelling — have produced their own revolution.

In health, we see Kaiser Health News excelling and expanding. In education, Chalkbeat (with its new five-year plan) and the Hechinger Report drill into the real issues of the field. They’re now being joined by the university/college-focused OpenCampus.org, seeking to bring the same level of experienced, knowledgeable journalism to the often-cloistered academy.

The Marshall Project squarely meets the many mushrooming questions around criminal justice in our society. InsideClimate News is growing to try to meet the interest, and panic, around a warming earth. More-than-single-subject-oriented ProPublica’s investigations, often done with partners, have done what great work is supposed to do: set and reset agendas. There are many more, including at the regional and state level, led by The Texas Tribune and CALmatters.

All together, they may add up to fewer than a thousand journalists at this point. But their impact is great, and I believe it will become greater as awareness and distribution increase.

As Google and Facebook have won the ad wars, pageview-thirsty commodity journalism has largely (and thankfully) met its demise. Now we’ll see how much the market — not just those foundations — will support real expertise in reporting.

Free media has better tech skills than state media.

While Iran’s state media was spending days denying any possibility its military had shot down the Ukranian airliner, The New York Times found the likely truth early on. It assembled its own small group of experts. It used the best tech available. And it could report (under an increasingly common four-person byline) that an Iranian missile had in fact likely done the deed.

It wasn’t about suspicions, guesses, or bombast. It was about finding a truth in plain sight — given the human and technological resources to do it.

At first, Iranians believed their own media, as NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reported from Tehran, that the downing was U.S. propaganda. But then, amazingly and overnight, Iranian citizens responded to the American-driven truth. They piled into the streets, seeing the mistake and its coverup for what it was: another sign that their government, without its own checks and balances, couldn’t be trusted.

Watch what privately owned newspapers do.

By necessity, we pay a lot of attention to the industry’s M&A mating games. These largely involve the dwindling number of publicly owned newspaper companies, which struggle both with operating realities and the need to convince shareholders to hang on through short-term earnings and dividends. They’re the biggest players, the most riddled by financialization, and the ones who have to report numbers publicly.

But given today’s realities, the stock market really isn’t the place for newspaper companies to be. Only long-term, strategic, capital-backed, and for the most part private or family-controlled businesses can make it successfully to 2030.

In the middle part of the 2010s, those papers got more focus. John Henry with The Boston Globe. The Taylor family with the Star Tribune. Frank Blethen, fighting the long fight in Seattle. And then they were joined by Patrick Soon-Shiong with the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune.

For the most part, we don’t hear much news out of these enterprises. They don’t have to report to markets quarterly, and they’ve taken more of a no-drama-Obama approach to the tough business. They are also, not incidentally, the leaders in digital subscription among local dailies. They remain important to watch.

Just as importantly, consider two newspaper chains that keep their heads down: Hearst and Advance. In the early 2010s, Advance made lots of news by cutting print days at its papers in New Orleans, Portland, Cleveland, and elsewhere. It will likely soon get a fresher look: Long-time Advance Local CEO Randy Siegel announced last week that he’s stepping down. No successor has yet been named.

Hearst also remains intriguing. A very private company — and one now that now generates less than 10 percent of its revenue from newspapers — its very name bespeaks a long commitment. But the top two executives of what now is a profoundly diversified media company both grew outside of the news trade. Will it stand pat in its markets? Will it look for acquisitions? (The old GateHouse was its nemesis outbidding Hearst for the Austin and Palm Beach papers in 2018, but the Gannett deal should keep it out of the buying game for a while.) With antitrust enforcement apparently on the wane, will it try to build a cluster in the Bay Area around its San Francisco Chronicle? Or complete a Texas big-city triangle by adding The Dallas Morning News to its Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News?

Bankruptcy is nothing new in the newspaper industry.

McClatchy’s pension-led financial crisis in November surprised many. The words “potential bankruptcy” tend to focus the mind.

But consider this: By one close observer’s account, more than 20 daily newspaper companies have visited the bankruptcy courts since the Great Recession a decade ago.

Ironically, two of the ones that emerged became acquisitive consolidators. Today’s MNG Enterprises, driven by Alden’s in-court and out-of-court strategy, in fact declared bankruptcy twice in its various corporate iterations. GateHouse, re-birthed by Fortress Investment Group in 2013, was able to restructure debt totalling $1.4 billion — double what McClatchy now owes — and has gone to become the biggest newspaper company in the land, even able to buy the better-known Gannett name in the process.

So if McClatchy does indeed go into a pre-pack bankruptcy, the news won’t be that filing. It’ll be what the company does — as a business and journalistically — afterward.

We have to find a way to keep trillion-dollar stories in the public eye.

Through a year full of remarkable stories, perhaps the most remarkable was one that’s gotten little continuing attention.

In December, The Washington Post published “At War With The Truth.” It took the paper three years to pry loose the trove of documents through Freedom of Information requests. It is remarkable reporting, and one that put a price tag on our ignorance.

Here’s the lede: “A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

The eerie parallels to the Pentagon Papers — a previous generation’s documentation of enormous waste, financial and human — were obvious. And yet it seems to have caused only small ripples in public discourse.

Politicians drive the daily news cycle, wielding wedge attacks on those — disabled, immigrant, poor — already falling through the now-purposely cut safety net. They say they do this in the name of saving taxpayer dollars. And yet this literal waste of $1 trillion pops in and out of the news in a politician’s second. This isn’t a question of politics; it’s a question of the public purse, and performing that watchdog role is our birthright as journalists.

As we reform and rebuild the journalism of the 2020s, we need to use the digital and moral tools of the day to hold power accountable and keep big stories alive over time. So far, we’ve barely touched the surface in connecting the latest happening to its deep historical context, making readers realize how a story connects to a larger issue or narrative, in ways both intuitive and knowledge-building.

I have confidence we’ll figure out how to do that in the 2020s.

“Mediatech” may be the new “convergence.”

There’s a new word taking hold out there: “mediatech”.

That’s how German behemoth Axel Springer is rebranding itself. CEO Mathias Dopfner and his team have rigorously pursued a transition away from print for more than a decade. “Mediatech” tells us both what they’ve learned and where they are going. In August, Dopfner’s new partner KKR bought out a minority interest in the company, taking it private and preparing it to be a bigger player this decade.

Springer, like its sometime partner Schibsted, will be one the big survivors in the brutal media game. Both have learned that modern journalism is now driven by both journalists and by technology. It’s the melding of the two — in audience definition, targeting, and service, and in product creation and delivery — that will determine the winners ahead.

Springer’s question for the ’20s: How much will the company keep investing in journalism itself, as it also pursues other digital business byways? Dopfner laid out the strategy, in friendly but direct sparring with Mark Zuckerberg, here.

Ah, life remains better in Perugia!

Travel coincidentally brought me to the doorstep of the most you-gotta-go-there journalism conference a couple of years ago. The name says most of it: the Perugia International Journalism Festival. Not a conference, or even an un- one, but a festival, inviting, of course, allusions to Nero fiddling. The truffled pasta and the views can’t be beat. The Sagrantino was magnificent.

The conference’s agenda and its exhibitor halls said it all. Walk into the main hall and Google and Facebook offered dueling expanses, with many enthusiastic company-clad representatives touting their latest and greatest. And half the agenda seemed to be, in apparently unintentional self-parody, sessions on how to work with…Facebook and Google. It’s the very best setting for platformitis.

In the time since, we’ve seen an even greater proliferation of news-aiding initiatives out of both companies. The new Reuters Institute study corroborates my own reporting, among publishers, of how that work is going and how it’s seen:

Google’s higher score [in the Institute’s own surveying] reflects the large number of publishers in our survey who are current or past recipients of Google’s innovation funds (DNI or GNI), and who collaborate with the company on various news-related products. Facebook’s lower score may reflect historic distrust from publishers after a series of changes of product strategy which left some publishers financially exposed.

The overall sense from our survey, however, is that publishers do not want hand-outs from platforms but would prefer a level playing field where they can compete fairly and get proper compensation for the value their content brings.

Short of that business-changing historic payout — see above — it’s unlikely that platform aid to publishers will itself significantly alter any of the trendlines in place.

There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscriptions.

Imagine if Reed Hastings has gone with advice of management consultants in the early 2000s, who might have “sized” the market for “on-demand” video and likely found it negligible. Netflix, nurtured on red envelopes, instead created a whole new category of customer demand — and willingness to pay.

As the company has grown, analysts have consistently undershot its growth potential, in the U.S. and globally. The company that was once asked “Will people really subscribe to on-demand movies?” reported on Tuesday that it now counts 167.1 million subscribers, and added 8.8 million in Q4 2019.

Upstart Disney (two words that don’t seem to pair) has already had its Disney+ app downloaded 40 million times. Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Apple TV+, CBS All Access, Peacock, and more are all opening wallets.

What’s instructive to the future of the news business here? There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscription, though media reporters love to ask me that question. Create a value proposition that works and consumers will pay. Obviously, national and global scale — what the Internet provides — are hugely helpful. It is though the product proposition that drives payment.

For a moment, consider all the digital subscription success stories in news: The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Athletic, The Boston Globe, the Star Tribune, and more. What if this is just prologue? Could better products — with more and more useful content, priced, sliced, and diced smartly — reproduce some of the scale success of streaming?

In a word, yes. And that’s our best hope for the decade ahead. Into the 2020s, bravely!

NPR is often mocked — perhaps most memorably in a series of Saturday Night Live sketches featuring Alec Baldwin — for its staid sound production and its hosts’ carefully modulated vocal quality. But its commitment to including those “many voices” hatched a small sonic revolution on the airwaves.

As a historian of radio, I’ve written about the medium’s unique blend of intimate voices and public address. As the 50th anniversary of public radio draws near, I’m interested in NPR’s contradictory legacy of both sonic innovation and monotony.

One of the first voices to become associated with NPR’s flagship evening news program All Things Considered was Susan Stamberg. Hired in 1971, she became the first woman in U.S. history to co-anchor a national nightly newscast on radio or television.

William Siemering, the network’s first program director and the author of “Purposes,” wanted the voice of the network to communicate curiosity rather than authority. Stamberg, 31 when she was hired, brought youthful exuberance to the job. And in another departure from newscasting’s baritones, with their supposedly neutral Midwestern accents, Stamberg’s voice was “nasal, quizzical, and unashamedly female,” as Lisa Phillips put it. It came, she said, “with a hometown — New York — and an ethnicity — Jewish.”

The decision to stick with young and relatively unproven voices came at a cost, according to Jack Mitchell, the original director of All Things Considered. In his account of NPR’s beginnings, Listener Supported, Mitchell recalled how Siemering has passed on Ford Foundation funding that was tied to hiring the proven and respected newscaster Edward P. Morgan, a white man originally from Walla Walla, Washington.

Instead, NPR stood by the less “authoritative” and more engaging voices of Stamberg and her peers, even if they sometimes sounded “less than professional.” “Masculine, commanding” voices were “exactly how we DON’T want to sound,” Siemering told his staff, as Stamberg later recalled in This Is NPR: The First Forty Years.

Early feedback on Stamberg from station managers around the country wasn’t encouraging, according to Mitchell. She sounded too New York, too Jewish, too off-putting. Siemering hid these negative reviews from Stamberg as she found her own broadcast voice, which would go on to win her many prestigious journalism awards. The network regards her as one of its “founding mothers.”

NPR has continued to speak with many voices that would sound out of place on the air anywhere else. Many, if not most, have been female. As hosts and anchors, correspondents and reporters, women have played a key role in giving NPR its distinctive sound. Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer, and Cokie Roberts brought hard-nosed journalism and an inside-the-Beltway sensibility to the fledgling network in the 1970s. In the process, these white women changed what the news sounded like.

Curating distinctive voices “rich with the rhythms and accents of their regions” was another explicit way in which All Things Considered initially sought to sonically mark its difference from what had come before, according to Stamberg.

By the time Wertheimer took over as an All Things Considered co-anchor in 1989, it was no longer controversial to hear women deliver the news of the day. But on network television, most of the early stints for the first women to anchor daily news programs were short-lived. Barbara Walters lasted two years in the mid-1970s as an ABC Evening News co-anchor. Diane Sawyer co-anchored the CBS Morning News, from 1981 to 1984 and Katie Couric spent five years, starting in 2006, as the sole CBS Evening News anchor.

NPR’s commitment to many voices included those who brought regional, as well as gender, diversity to the airwaves. Occasional commentators Baxter Black, a cowboy poet from Texas; Vertamae Grosvenor, a culinary anthropologist born in the Gullah community of North Carolina; and Kim Williams, a naturalist, checked in during the late 1970s and early 1980s, with field reports from their corners of the country. Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian-American artist living in New Orleans, began to bring his thickly accented English and droll humor to NPR in 1983.

Putting these folks on air seemed to address the network’s vision of speaking in many voices and accents. The intent, Mitchell wrote, was explicitly democratic, to be “representative of the nation. That meant white, black, Hispanic, Asian and as many women as men.”

NPR’s growth led to the opening of foreign bureaus, even as print publications hemorrhaged these expensive positions. International coverage further expanded its vocal range. Some of the women now working as the network’s anchors got their start as foreign correspondents. Doualy Xaykaothao spent years reporting from Asia and Lulu Garcia-Navarro covered Latin America and the Middle East for NPR.

Other women with nonconventional news voices, including Eleanor Beardsley in Paris, Sylvia Poggioli in Rome, and Ofeabia Quist-Arcton in Dakar, are still overseas. Their signature approach to signing off with their name and locale is a sonic pleasure for many NPR fans.

Favorite @NPR pronunciations:

—Ofeibea Quist-Arcton saying “Dah-KARR.”

—Michele Kelemen saying “Wash…ing…ton.”

—Eleanor Beardsley saying “Paris” with that flat “a.”

—Sylvia Poggioli saying “Sylvia Poggioli.” https://t.co/SH4wA4CVlG

— Paul Farhi (@farhip) May 19, 2018

Even so, by the turn of the century, the network faced complaints about its tight control over pronunciation, cadence, and accent, especially for women and people of color. Critics denounced a sense that the voices of NPR’s female journalists sounded “alike in their sober nasal condescension,” as the writer and actor Sarah Vowell put it — hinting at a class-related critique along with a gendered one.

Some of these naysayers contend that NPR’s women have low-pitched voices that sound too much like men, and that NPR voices in general sound more like each other than everyone else. Writer Scott Sherman calls it the “NPR drone.” Even Stamberg said in a 2010 interview that one price of NPR’s success was that listeners weren’t “hearing great voices anymore.”

Another round of criticism, this one aimed primarily at younger women, identified “vocal fry,” a low creaky way of speaking, as an irritating feature of public radio voices. The critique, which comes mostly from men and older folks, suggested that despite what other critics claimed, NPR’s sound was not static but evolving.

NPR’s sonic palette and its range of voices has broadened in recent years, especially through its podcasts and on weekends — when Navarro, who is Latina, and Michel Martin, an African American woman, are two of the network’s main three news anchors. Sam Sanders, a gay African American man, hosts a cultural talk show branded with his own name. Programs like Alt.Latino and Radio Ambulante, which are either in Spanish or in English punctuated with Spanish words, indicate that the network aims to serve new listeners.

As NPR looks forward to the next 50 years, its decisions over whose voices belong on the air will determine how well it lives up to its founding commitment to sound like America. And it is likely that criticism of how those voices sound will continue to reflect dominant attitudes about who gets to speak.

The public radio business model — built on a mix of corporate sponsorships, foundation grants, and individual memberships — is still relatively strong. But both journalists and business folks in the industry can see the writing on the wall and want to avoid the newspaper industry’s fate, said Joan DiMicco, executive director of BizLab at Boston public radio giant WBUR. That’s why the time to innovate is now.

“Because we’ve been in a relatively protected space, I think one of the challenges is that there’s not always the urgency to change, and public radio doesn’t have a culture of trying new ideas,” DiMicco said. “It’s a more traditional environment that’s less comfortable with the idea of launching a new product in six months.”

To address those cultural challenges, BizLab — a standalone team within WBUR that experiments with projects to increase revenue — has been working with six public radio stations on revenue-generating projects of their own. They presented their findings at the BizLab Summit in Boston Tuesday. Their projects:

• DCist: a monthly membership program for readers after being acquired by Washington’s WAMU
• Louisville Public Media: exclusive memberships and events for members of do502, a local event-listings platform that LPM acquired
• WDET (Detroit): promoting local businesses to the station’s audience through paid social media
• Capital Public Radio (Sacramento): a new underwriting sales strategy with other public radio stations in California
• WLRN (Miami): a membership donation channel through an email newsletter covering environmental issues
• Vermont Public Radio: increasing donations by engaging listeners in Southern Vermont with local coverage

Once selected, each station sent staff (from business, editorial, or both, depending on the project) to spend three days with BizLab developing their ideas to take home and implement. At the summit, DiMicco said, across the six stations, these new experiments project to bring in $600,000 in new revenue in 2020.

Here are a few of the biggest takeaways from the summit. You can also watch video of the entire day here.

The wall still needs climbing

Whether you call it “the firewall” or “church and state,” the idea that collaboration between business and editorial has to compromise journalistic integrity is remarkably persistent. Attendees who work on the business sides of their stations expressed how hesitation from reporters and editors can be limiting.

“At Vermont Public Radio, first and foremost, my team and I believe very strongly in protecting the firewall, because we understand that editorial integrity and the trust of our audience is our bread and butter,” said Brendan Kinney, its senior vice president for marketing and development. “The suspicion that we are in any way trying to figure out a way around that isn’t the case. At VPR, the reporters and development people would try not to make eye contact in the hallway…But there is a way to coordinate our efforts without breaching the firewall in a way that would diminish the reason that people believe in VPR and trust our content.”

Kinney’s team worked with Southern Vermont reporter Howard Weiss-Tisman on his social media presence and community engagement strategies to better reach his audience — and, in turn, increase donations. After looking at research about what works on Facebook, they discussed what Weiss-Tisman’s boundaries were. They had him share stories on Facebook and post to different local Facebook groups. Eventually, they saw increased audience engagement.

But in the case of Miami’s WLRN, its fundraising arm, Friends of WLRN, is a completely separate organization. Director of strategic initiatives Giselle Reid said a WLRN newsletter was the first time the newsroom and development were able to truly collaborate. Reid said that when they settled on launching a monetized newsletter, she told newsroom leadership that she would volunteer to curate it — something they immediately objected to. Instead, they assigned engagement producer Katie Lepri to the project. Lepri said one of the benefits of working with development was that she was able to get stories published earlier and faster so that they could be included in the newsletter. The end result? An open rate of 30 percent.

Business messaging can help shift culture

Tamsen Webster, a brand and message strategist and former TEDx executive producer, led a workshop at the summit about how to get leadership to agree to and buy into a new project. She said the biggest barrier to innovation often isn’t just a station’s culture or leadership, but also poor communication between staff and management.

“In business messaging, there’s no sad ending, because everyone should get what they want,” Webster said. “How do we script the story that people will tell themselves about your idea?”

She appealed to traditional journalistic instincts and made the distinction that, when pitching a new idea or product, you have to connect your idea to its impact on something they care about. Webster distributed a script to attendees focused on framing a pitch around how a project will fulfill a mission in content creation and increased revenue to continue that content creation.

BizLab experience strategist Sarah Bloomer described design thinking as just a fancy term for continuously exploring a problem space. The innovation processes for the six stations included six phases: coming up with an idea, identifying the audience’s needs and desires, testing, revising the product, launching the product, and generating revenue. While each station’s needs and ideas varied, what was common among them were requirements to speak directly speak to their audience through intercept interviews, synthesize the data from their analytics, and make changes their product ideas based on their findings.

Small experiments > big experiments

Not every project or experiment has to be complicated and expensive. That’s why BizLab gave each station just three days to develop their ideas from their applications and a plan to execute it. Working quickly lets you fail quickly, learn quickly, and adjust strategy accordingly.

Louisville Public Media’s project with BizLab was to launch its do502 event series. The goal of the first event ($5 entry, free beer) was to have 50 people attend through one week of promotions. But complications meant LPM and do502 could only start promoting the event 24 hours ahead of time — and yet they still had 35 people attend. BizLab considered that a win.

During a panel on podcast-driven donations, Glow co-founder and CEO Amira Valliani said her clients are often concerned about when, exactly, to ask their listeners for donations. She advises them to start at the very beginning, in the first episode: “You have nothing to lose.”

WDET in Detroit wanted to work with small local businesses that aligned with its mission but couldn’t afford the station’s usual underwriting pricing. So instead they worked with those businesses to develop branded social media posts for Facebook and Instagram, platforms that both WDET and the businesses were already using. WDET was able to develop an affordable underwriting product as a result, and while building meaningful relationships in its community.

The project will focus its efforts on sustained, deep coverage on solutions to gun violence in America and highlighting underreported perspectives, and is supported by a $5.3 million dollar grant from an Atlanta-based private family foundation, The Kendeda Fund. WAMU will devote a five-person production team to the collaboration. The initiative will bring on 10 reporting fellows, who will each be embedded within the participating public radio stations.

(The partner stations are: WAMU in Washington; Boise State Public Radio in Idaho; KCUR in Kansas City; KERA in Dallas; KUNC in Greeley, Colorado; OPB in Portland, Oregon; WABE in Atlanta; WCPN ideastream in Cleveland; WNPR in Hartford; and WUNC in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.) The WAMU-led collaboration will be adding to the corpus of reporting on gun violence from other initiatives like news site The Trace.

From WAMU’s announcement:

The national collaborative will report for two years on the many ways that firearms are intertwined in American life, from the cultural significance of hunting and sport shooting, to the role guns play in suicide, homicide, mass shootings and beyond. The inaugural cohort of Audion Fellows will increase the capacity for in-depth reporting and infuse public media newsrooms across the country with digital and multimedia skills. Reporters at the ten stations will begin filing their first stories in June 2018.

Beyond the announced two-year Guns & America reporting collaborative, the Audion Fellowship is expected to be an ongoing program, poised to tackle future endeavors on topics of national interest and critical importance.

Here’s more information on how to apply to the Audion Fellowship. All the reporting from this initiative can also be found here starting in June of 2018.

A couple of tidbits and trends from the two posts:

— All nine public radio stations that Gupta spoke with run pledge drives at least once a year. But pledge drives don’t have to be long:

New York Public Radio (WNYC) told us about the abbreviated, “warp speed” pledge drives the station hosted before and after the 2016 presidential election. Anne O’Malley, vice president of membership, said that as part of these pledge drives the station was open about why they shortened the pledge drive. “In response to needs from our newsroom we cut the time, and we used that in a very transparent way [to tell listeners] ‘you guys are depending on us to make a decision in this critical election,'” Anne says. The subsequent pledge drive broke a record that had been standing since 9/11.

— The shift toward online listening and donations changes the relationship that public radio stations have with members. Pledge drives don’t work well in the podcast world: “No one would download it,” said O’Malley. (That said, Slate has experimented successfully with urging listeners to subscribe to Slate Plus within its own podcasts.)

— Some work can be outsourced, but listener relationships should be managed by individual stations. WGBH’s Michal Heiplik is also the executive director of the Contributor Development Partnership, a collective that currently runs 19 membership programs (“direct mail, pledge processing, pledge gift fulfillment, canvassing, and other practical elements”) for about 130 stations. But, Heiplik said: “We can’t replicate relationships at a national scale and we’re not trying to…Just because someone responds to your renewal mail, that isn’t a relationship.”

— Stations should rely more on their listeners’ professional expertise. As Osnos surveyed 50 public radio stations, she found that most of them aren’t looking for non-obvious ways their listeners could help them. Instead, “volunteering” tends to mean things like answering phones at pledge drives or mailing thank-you gifts. But could listeners help in different ways, too? “We’re hopeful that more station staff will get creative about how they might strengthen their journalism by bringing listeners closer to the work as sources, volunteer fact-checkers, and more.”

The posts are here and here.

• The choice to target the evening commute is a really, really smart one. I’ve argued this before, but I think it’s safe to assume that there might be considerable overlap between the audiences of The New York Times and Vox.com. As such, a move to complement The Daily is significantly more prudent than engaging it as a direct competitor. In any case, even if the overlap was small, the evening commute remains untapped by the daily news podcast to begin with — aside from Mike Pesca’s The Gist, of course, which isn’t really playing the same game anyway. It’s a safer, and therefore more reliable, base to build from, and besides, Today, Explained could always expand with an a.m. version at some point in the future. (Same goes with The Daily and a p.m. version, a prospect that it has previously explored with breaking news specials.)
• In case it fully doesn’t come across in the writeup: I think Today, Explained’s success will mostly hinge on Sean Rameswaram’s personality — more so, I’d argue, than how Michael Barbaro fits into The Daily as a presence. Which is, I suppose, kind of the point when you bring in someone with a specific sense of showmanship like Rameswaram to headline a project.

And two more things I’d like to add to the preview:

• Here’s Vox.com general manager Andrew Golis, responding to an inquiry about how the podcast fits into the company’s overall business goals: “It gives us an opportunity to have an audio daily presence in our audience’s life in the way our website does in text and our YouTube channel does in video. That persistent relationship and trust is a powerful platform for building our business…we believe ‘Today, Explained’ will give us a new way to introduce audiences to a growing network of Vox podcasts as we continue to expand our ambitions and programming.”
• I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss Midroll Media’s involvement in the production. The Scripps-owned podcast company serves as the exclusive advertising partner for Today, Explained, but I’m also told that they provided upfront investment to help assemble the team and build out the production. Chris Bannon, Midroll’s chief content officer, was also involved in the development of the show. “Creatively speaking, I spent a day in D.C. with the Vox team, and together we started sourcing host and staff candidates,” explained Bannon over email. “Right now we’re in the fun part, listening to show drafts and sharing notes. They’re alarmingly well-organized, cheerful, and efficient.” Bannon, by the way, worked with Rameswaram back when he was still at WNYC. (He left for Midroll in early 2015.)

When asked about his perspective on the potential of Today, Explained, Bannon offered an analogy. “I think we want Today, Explained to be All Things Considered to the The Daily’s Morning Edition,” he said. “Except that we will be more like All Things Considered’s smart, funny, well-informed, and streetwise uncle.”

“Streetwise uncle” sounds about right.

On a related note: I heard there’s some big news coming later today on The Daily. Keep your eyes peeled.

What comes next for the Fusion Media Group. Last week, The Onion binge-dropped A Very Fatal Murder, the satirical news site’s first stab at a long-form audio project. The show was designed to parody the wildly popular — and eminently bankable! — true-crime podcast genre, which is an appealing premise right off the bat: indeed, there’s no team I’d love to see interpret the phenomenon more than the brains behind The Onion. A Very Fatal Murder turned out to be enjoyable enough, no more and no less, though I did end up thinking it didn’t come anywhere close to realizing its promise as podcast satire.

But there’s a thing, and then there’s everything around the thing. And despite the minor swing and miss of A Very Fatal Murder, I was nonetheless left quite excited about the prospect of future projects from The Onion, and curious about what’s going on with the audio team at The Onion’s parent company, Fusion Media Group (FMG).

So I checked in with Mandana Mofidi, FMG’s executive director of audio. In case you’re unfamiliar, FMG is the sprawling, multi-tentacled corporation best known in some circles — mine, namely — for absorbing the remains of the Gawker empire post-Terry Bollea lawsuit in the form of the Gizmodo Media Group that spans Gizmodo, io9, Jezebel, and others. A television arm factors in somewhere, as does the city of Miami.

Anyway, Mofidi tells me that since her team kicked off operations about a year ago, they’ve been playing around with a couple of ideas and formats to see what would stick. Weekly interview and chat shows made up the early experiments, which apparently ended up working well for Lifehacker (The Upgrade), Kotaku (Splitscreen), and Deadspin (Deadcast). But following the reception they received for A Very Fatal Murder as well as Containers, Alexis Madrigal’s audio documentary about the sexy, sexy world of international shipping from last year, more plans have to been put in place to build out further narrative projects.

Mofidi’s overarching goal this year, it seems, is to ensure that each of FMG’s properties gets a solid podcast of their own. To that end, they have several projects in various stages of development, including:

• A six-part narrative series from Gizmodo about “a controversial and charismatic spiritual guru who uses the internet to build her obsessive following.” That show is being developed with Pineapple Street Media, which appears to be really carving out a niche around themes of obsession, charismatic leaders, and the followings they spawn, following Missing Richard Simmons and Heaven’s Gate.
• A show for Jalopnik called Tempest, which will examine “the funny and at times tragic intersectionality of people and cars.”
• A series that “explores the connectivity of our DNA” — which evokes memories of Gimlet’s Twice Removed — featuring Grammy Award-winning artist René Pérez, a.k.a. Residente. Gretta Cohn’s Transmitter Media is assisting with this project.
• A collaboration with The California Endowment that’ll produce stories on young activists “who are using their platforms to promote solidarity between different communities and causes.”

Mofidi also talked about an intent to dig deeper into events. “We recently did a live taping of Deadspin’s Deadcast in St. Paul before the Super Bowl. We were expecting to sell about 200 tickets, but ended up with over 360 people,” she said. The smart speaker category is also of interest, along with figuring out ways to collaborate with FMG’s aforementioned television arm.

I asked Mofidi if she had any dream projects that she’d love to produce in her role. “A daily show,” she wrote back. “It would be ambitious, but with so many passionate voices across our sites it feels like something we could do in a way that was distinct.”

Related reading: Publishers with TV ambitions are pursuing Netflix.

We’re back with this nonsense: “Public media again in bull’s-eye in president’s FY19 plans.” Re-upping my column from the last time we were in this mess, on why it’s bad in ways you already know and in more ways you don’t.

And while I’m linking Current, the public media publication just announced the new host for its podcast, The Pub: Annie Russell, currently an editor at WBEZ.

Pod Save America heads to HBO. Surprise, surprise. Crooked Media’s flagship podcast is heading to the premium cable network with a series of hour-long specials that will follow the Obama bros — that’s former Obama aides Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, and Jon Lovett, in case you’re unfamiliar with the deep-blue podcast phenomenon — as they host live tapings on the campaign trail for what will most definitely be a spicy midterm election season this fall. This is the latest addition to the newly buzzy trend of podcasts being adapted for film and television, and the deal for this adaptation in particular was handled by WME.

Over at Vulture, I tried to turn a series of dots into a squiggly shape linking this development, the recent debut of 2 Dope Queens’ HBO specials, and HBO’s relationship with Bill Simmons to say something about the premium cable network’s potential strategic opportunities with podcasting. Put simply: Traditional standup comedy programming is getting more expensive due to the pressure of Netflix’s infinitely large war chest, and one could argue that certain types of conversational podcast programming offer HBO an alternative resource to adapt and develop content that can potentially hit the same kind of experience and pleasure beats you’d get from conventional standup TV specials.

But sometimes dots are just dots, and those aren’t really constellations in the sky — just random, meaningless arrangements of stars that are indifferent to your experience of them.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Meanwhile, in the nonprofit world. This one’s pretty interesting: Tiny Spark, the Amy Costello-led independent nonprofit news outfit that covers the world of philanthropy and nonprofits, has been acquired by Nonprofit Quarterly, which is…well, a much larger independent nonprofit news organization that covers the world of philanthropy and nonprofits. “Amy…has done an exceptional job building the audience for her podcast. We are excited not only to add this new media channel to our organization, but also to collaborate with Amy to expand our reach into public radio,” said Joel Toner, NPQ’s president and chief operating officer.

As part of this arrangement, NPQ owns Tiny Spark’s intellectual property and Amy Costello is brought on as a senior correspondent to lead the organization’s investigative journalism work, podcast development, and public radio outreach. “Tiny Spark’s work fits very well into the topics we cover at NPQ,” said Toner, when asked about the strategic thinking behind the acquisition. “Additionally, our 2017 annual audience survey confirmed that our readers had a significant interest in having us develop a podcast channel.”

I’d like to point out just how much this arrangement reminds me of the one that was struck between USA Today and Robin Amer, which I profiled last week. Speaking of which…

A quick update to last week’s item on The City. In the piece, I talked a little bit about the USA Today Network’s podcast plans for 2018, chiefly drawing information from a summer 2017 press release the organization circulated when they first announced the acquisition of The City. The plans mostly involve launching more podcasts across its properties.

The company reached out to let me know that their thinking has since evolved. “The network already produces dozens of podcasts across its 109-plus sites, but is now focusing on a handful of those shows to support with resources and marketing à la The City,” wrote Liz Nelson, the USA Today Network’s vice president of strategic content development. “At the time [the press release] was written, we did have 60-plus podcasts — most of which bubbled up organically at the local level. We’re closer to 40 now. That number will continue to ebb and flow and we encourage experimentation at the local level, which gives our journalists the space they need to experiment in the medium.”

Nelson added: “But from a network level, we are not putting the same amount of resources we’ve put into The City into every single show. We’re concentrating on a smaller set of shows we believe can have national impact.”

Hold this thought. We’re going to talk about other stuff for a bit, but we’ll get back to this notion of resource focus.

“It amuses me,” wrote Traug Keller, ESPN’s senior vice president of audio, in a corporate blog post touting the sport media giant’s podcasting business, “when I read about podcasting in the media with references to it being ‘new’ or ’emerging.'”

Keller continued:

As ESPN has done with other technologies — be it cable TV in 1979, the Internet in the ’90s, HD television or mobile initiatives more recently — we embraced podcasting as soon as we could and ran with it — even if we didn’t always know where we would end up! We launched our first podcast way back in 2005. A head start is often critical in a competitive business environment.

I also chuckle when people refer to podcasting as some mysterious new format to figure out. I’ve spent a career in audio, and I can tell you the key ingredients for compelling audio are constant…

Yeah, I don’t know, dude.

The borderline condescending tone of the post isn’t exactly something I’d want to hear from a company whose public narrative is one of crisis on multiple fronts — from the disruption of its cable-bundle–reliant business model to layoffs to its uneven handling of social media policies to the uncertain future of a gamble on OTT distribution — let alone a podcast publisher whose Podtrac ranking placement (as always, disclaimers of that service here and here) is powered by what is still largely a spray-and-pray strategy, in which 82 shows are deployed to bring in 35 million global unique monthly downloads. For reference, the infinitely smaller PRX team gets 4 million more with less than half that number of shows (34 podcasts), while NPR bags three times more downloads with just 42 podcasts that don’t at all traffic in naturally addictive sports content.

To be clear, I am, very generally speaking, more appreciative of a world with a strong (and better) ESPN in it than one without. And let me also just say that I really like some of its recent moves in on-demand audio, namely the creation of the 30 for 30 Podcast and having Katie Nolan launch her own show.

But I just don’t think very highly of this whole “oh we’ve been doing this for a long time/we were doing this first therefore we are super wise” mindset that either mistakes early sandbox dabblings for meaningful first-mover value creation or simply being first for being noteworthy. To be fair, this isn’t a knock that exclusively applies to Keller’s blog post; that thinking governs an alarming share of press releases and huffy emails that hit my inbox. But here’s the thing: I really don’t think it matters whether you did first. What mostly matters is if you did it right. Which is to say: If you invented Facebook, dammit, you’d have invented Facebook. Furthermore, as it stands, if there’s anything I’m acutely aware of writing this newsletter every week, it’s that, much like everywhere else, nobody really knows anything. It’s just a bunch of people working really hard, trying to figure this whole podcast thing out.

Anyway. I normally try not to be too worked up about anything, but this stuff really bugs me, and goodness, there’s nothing I would love more than to take this mindset, strap it onto the next Falcon Heavy rocket, and launch it straight into the dying sun.

Still, credit should be given where’s credit due: The post goes on to discuss what I think is a really positive development for ESPN’s podcast business:

To get there, we pared our lineup — once numbering in triple digits — to about 35, focusing on the most popular offerings (NFL, MLB, and NBA) and other niche topics where we can “own” the category. It’s a “less is more” strategy, where we can better produce and promote a smaller lineup.

Which reminds me of something…

After spray-and-pray. ESPN’s move to pare down and focus its overflowing podcast portfolio reminds me of another podcast publisher that’s been pretty active since the first podcast boom: NPR.

NPR’s podcast inventory, too, once numbered in the triple digits. In August 2005, its directory housed around 174 programs, 17 of which were NPR originals while others were shows from member stations that the public radio mothership were distributing on their behalf. (That practice has since been terminated.) The show number peaked around 2009, when the directory supported about 390 podcasts.

“Back in those days, podcasts were hard to access and only the really digitally savvy listeners could find and download them,” an NPR spokesperson told me. “We were experimenting and we were excited with the possibility of putting out NPR content on-demand, repackaging content that had aired about specific topics, seeing what the audience would like…It also allowed for additional creativity in programming, podcasts could be a sandbox for piloting new ideas.” Some of those ideas eventually grew into segments and radio shows of their own, but these podcasts mostly ended up being an unruly system of small, quiet, under-the-radar projects.

All that changed with this most recent podcasting boom, which started in the latter half of 2014. Around that time, a focused effort was made to identify and retain shows that fit a certain set of criteria that included having a native podcast experience (and not just recycled segments from existing shows), strong listener communities, an alignment with the organization’s business needs, and so on. The rest were culled. By the end, NPR was left with 25 shows. “Our thinking was that by having a smaller portfolio, we could draw more attention to them, serve them better, cross-promote, bring sponsorship support, create significant reach,” the spokesperson said.

The move felt like a gamble at the time, but it paid off. “While everyone expected our downloads to go down, within two months, downloads were somewhere near 50 million a month,” remembered Audible’s Eric Nuzum, then vice president of programming at NPR. “Within a year, it was over 80.”

That number is now 110 million. The point of this little parable is…well, I don’t think I have to spell it out. You get the picture.

Call Your 2018. There are few teams I admire more than the trio behind Call Your Girlfriend, the podcast for long-distance besties everywhere: journalist Ann Friedman, international woman of mystery Aminatou Sow, and radio producer Gina Delvac. The show has, over its nearly four years of existence, evolved from a fun side project to stay connected into something so much more than that. It is, in equal parts, a platform, a community, and an ever-growing resource. And if the enthusiasm of some friends of mine who consider themselves devout CYG fans are any indicator, Call Your Girlfriend is also damn close to being a full-fledged movement.

Last year was a difficult one for the team, given the political environment, but it was also a call to arms to which they responded with vigor. “Despite the trash-fire that was 2017 in America,” they wrote me, “Better yet, because of it, we wanted CYG to function as a place of refuge for our listeners, and for ourselves.” This translated into an interview schedule that was dense with guests that spoke directly to the moment — including but not limited to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Kirsten Gillibrand, Margaret Atwood, and Ellen Pao — as well as a multipart series on women running for office that featured sit-downs with first-time candidates and organizations that support women seeking political office. The team also worked to push the show creatively, producing a special episode on pelvic pain and trauma and occasionally handing the mic over to other podcasting teams, like Who? Weekly’s Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger along with Good Muslim Bad Muslim’s Tanzila Ahmed and Zahra Noorkbakhsh.

The year was also fruitful for Call Your Girlfriend’s business. Though specific numbers were not disclosed, I’m told that the show’s revenues — which come from a combination of ad sales, live events, and a healthy merchandising arm — far exceeded their original targets. More ambitious goals were set for the new year.

We’re neck-deep into the second month of 2018, so I thought it was a good a time as any to check in with the team about their plans for the coming months, their thoughts on how the industry has changed, and their commitment to being independent. They were kind enough to oblige:

A discussion of the Berlin state secretary’s proposal that all immigrants to Germany, including refugees, visit former Nazi concentration camps. An interview with the Berlin DJ duo SpatzHabibi. A profile of the Benjamin Franklin Hospital in West Berlin, designed by New Orleans architects.

So many pieces had to fall into place to produce the unusual amalgamation that is KCRW Berlin, Berlin’s newest English-language radio station that covers Berlin affairs exclusively in English — and they did.

First, there was a vacancy: NPR, which had operated a station called NPR Berlin as its only non-U.S. affiliate, closed its operations at the end of last summer after more than a decade. (NPR had already been evaluating its Berlin station’s “long-term financial sustainability” and finally appeared to have decided the station was too costly to continue running. It was the only station in the world actually operated by NPR, as opposed to being an NPR affiliate.)

The Friends of NPR Berlin group, which included people like former ambassador John Kornblum, had been in touch with KCRW before seeking help improving NPR Berlin’s offerings. (Step one: Probably don’t play a ton of bluegrass music in a city famous for its EDM scene.) Nearly a dozen groups ended up applying for the frequency NPR Berlin was vacating (it would be going to “one of the allied powers“). Then KCRW Berlin won a seven-year license. It went live with its first broadcast in mid-October.

“Berlin is a gathering place for people to come from all over Europe to start art careers, which reminded me of Los Angeles,” KCRW’s CEO Jennifer Ferro said. “I think a lot of our programming at KCRW already translates there — we’ve always had international reach with our music, for instance. We want to get it known as a community institution — to do events, to partner with people who are doing events, to bring Berlin voices in.”

KCRW Berlin sends pieces of content to L.A., where KCRW handles the actual programming and sends it back to Berlin, where it’s then broadcast. But now the Berlin station has a studio — in an office center where several other German radio stations are also based — so now “we’re working on being able to transmit from there, and developing local programming in Berlin, finding hosts that are local,” Ferro said.

An initial grant from major donors is keeping KCRW Berlin going in its “startup” period, as the team figures out the needs of the Berlin-focused shows it wants to launch and what funding it will need to support each. A four-person team in Berlin (only one full-timer), a journalist on a Fulbright through this summer, and a coordinator based out of Santa Monica in California are putting together all the station’s programming, KCRW Berlin COO Susan Woosley, previously with NPR Berlin, told me. Currently, it’s airing short daily local segments, but it’s planning for daily newscasts and a current affairs and culture show, gradually “inserting local shows as we go along and as we get more funding and add more team members.” (Currently at 104.1 FM you might hear NPR news shows and KCRW shows, as well relevant programming from other NPR affiliates like WNYC, or shows from PRI, APM, and PRX.) Both Ferro and Woosley spoke excitedly of a potential show focused on techno music.

Berlin is a city full of English speakers, native, bilingual, or multilingual. But “because of the European Union situation, many thousands come to Berlin each year, but many don’t come speaking German fluently,” Woosley said. “We also want to help integrate the English-as-a-common-language community, by giving them needed news and information about Berlin, who might otherwise remain siloed. The more information they have about their city, the more they fit in with their city.” Outside of KCRW Berlin, the BBC has a frequency in Berlin and broadcasts in English, though it isn’t based in the city.

“When NPR Berlin was still airing, we put out a question on Facebook asking our followers what they thought of [Germany’s Social Democratic Party leader] Martin Schulz, and someone wrote, ‘We’d love to tell you, but we don’t have enough information in English to let you know,” Woosley recalled. “So we took that as a sort of mandate that we really inform the people in this city about what moves it, from issues local to national.”

Ferro and Woosley mentioned leaning heavily on events at the Berlin station in the future, particularly music-related ones. They also discussed continued, and more frequent content-sharing between KCRW in Kalifornien and KCRW Berlin, including a sort of exchange program for hosts — swapping DJs between the two stations, for instance.

“We look to L.A. for a number of things, for their technical expertise, for their general radio knowhow,” Woosley said. “We have daily contact with all different facets of the station. They’ve really opened their doors to us. They’re helping us build a stellar station, and we want them to be proud of us!”

Whatever WBUR finds out, they can definitely add another feather to their cap of respectable partnerships, which the station’s podcasting operations, led by the formidable Jessica Alpert, appears to be turning into a core program strategy. Season Ticket comes out of a collaboration with The Boston Globe — it’s hosted by Chris Gasper, a sports columnist for the paper — and a quick overview of WBUR’s listings on the Apple podcast directory show that Season Ticket is one of three such projects now out in the open. The other two are the aforementioned Modern Love, with The New York Times, and the upcoming Edge of Fame, with The Washington Post. More, I’m told, are on the way.

With this partnership-driven orientation, WBUR finds itself in the position where it could give Panoply — whose content strategy was once premised on such collaborations with media companies — a run for its money. But the challenge, as always, will be whether the station is able to draw talent to Boston as it grows its podcast team commensurate with demand…and, more importantly, whether it can retain them. It’s probably worth recalling, at this point, that Modern Love was originated by Lisa Tobin, who left WBUR last summer to be the executive producer of audio at The New York Times. Talent acquisition and retention is a problem for all in the industry, but one imagines it’s doubly so for any non-New York, non-Los Angeles shop at this point in time — even if Boston is a sub-four-hour train ride north from the self-declared Podcast Capital of the World. That’s a toughie.

Non sequitur, but this line of inquiry also pleasantly evokes the whole Amazon HQ2 dance, of which Boston is a participant. Man, what a weird thing to watch.

Cults! So, I’m keeping an eye on Heaven’s Gate, the 10-part documentary about the cult infamous for perpetrating the largest mass suicide ever to take place in the United States back in the nineties. The podcast, which launched last week, seems pretty spicy, and it happens to double as the sophomore effort for the creative team behind Missing Richard Simmons, the duo of Pineapple Street and Midroll. It’s worth pointing out, as I did with my Vulture writeup, that Midroll is more creatively involved this time around, with the company originating the show’s concept. (That wasn’t the case with Simmons. Dan Taberski, via First Look Media, had that honor. Taberski is listed in the Heaven’s Gate credits, though.)

But of course, the focus here is on Pineapple Street, who leads production. (Ann Heppermann, the cofounder of the Sarah Awards who is now on the company’s payroll, helms the rig.) The primary question here is whether Pineapple can go two-for-two with a hit feature. Which, I imagine, will help us attend to some other interesting questions: Was Missing Richard Simmons a fluke? Can Pineapple reliably stretch beyond its go-to move of extracting value from the star power of larger brands and celebrities, which appears to be its primary strategic angle? Aside from Missing Richard Simmons, the company’s portfolio is made up of shows built around The New York Times’ Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris, Lena Dunham, Janet Mock, Aminatou Sow, Matt Bellassai, Preet Bharara, and, obviously, Hillary Clinton. (Though, I suppose, you could argue that Missing Richard Simmons’ appeal was principally built on the draw of the titular celebrity, which cast a Godot-like shadow over the proceedings. In which case, there’s an argument to be made about Pineapple’s principal occupation being the interlocution of celebrity. It’s not a particularly strong argument, but it’s workable.)

Aaaanyway. You want to talk benchmarks? Let’s talk benchmarks. Figuring out a true number to beat is a little tough. Looking back at my notes, the clearest baseline for Missing Richard Simmons given was: “On March 28, a little over a month after the show first debuted, First Look Media told me that the podcast had been downloaded on average more than 1 million times a week since its release.” I guess that’ll have to serve our touchpoint for the first month.

The New York Times’ The Daily hits a milestone, outlines its future. Last week, the news industry analyst Ken Doctor pumped out two pieces on The Daily, one for Nieman Lab and one for TheStreet, and they give us a good snapshot of where the Times’ audio team currently sits and where it wants to go.

To begin with, Doctor reports that the morning news podcast has officially surpassed the 100 million download mark. As of the article’s pub date, October 17, The Daily had delivered 186 editions, which means the show has a 530,000~ download per episode average. Add to that two other key data points from Doctor’s piece in The Street — that The Daily was estimated to have hit 3.8 million unique visitors in August, and that the company is able to command ad rates comparable to pivot-inspiring levels of digital video — and you have an editorial product that stretches widely and draws deep dividends, both right now and in the days to come.

Doctor’s reporting also gives us a sense of NYT Audio’s immediate next steps: further expanding its headcount (now 16 full-time employees strong, seven of which hold production duties on The Daily according to Barbaro’s recent Longform interview), slapping on a digital engineering development arm to the team (!), stretching out The Daily to six editions per week, and rolling out more “extensions” of the program (presumably in the vein of The New Washington). He also notes two more things that I think are especially worth tracking: firstly, that the team is working on a “big narrative project” (isn’t everybody, though?), and secondly, that “within the next several weeks, Times readers will be able to access The Daily directly from their apps and browsers without using a separate podcast app.” This is incredibly significant, in that it illustrates a team meaningfully working to bypass the cumber of dedicated podcast apps to deliver its product to consumers. And it just so happens that, in doing so, the company will be able to keep those audiences within the universe of its primary mobile app, which puts them in a better position to spread the value generated by the podcast around the other aspects of the business. Further, it doesn’t take much to imagine the various audience and listening behavior analytics tools that will be layered on that built-in player, which will better aid the Times in carrying out the primary business goals of the podcast: to convert new subscribers, to retain existing subscribers, and to gather even more intelligence that will help them to do both those things.

I’m noodling on two more thoughts:

• This quote provided by Sam Dolnick, the paper’s assistant editor and one of the long-running champions for the audio division, stands out to me: “This is the birth of a franchise for us that can live on and on in many different mediums for a long time.” A bold statement, though it does support any such suspicion that, when it comes to organizing NYT Audio, you have The Daily on one side, and everything that’s not The Daily on the other. Recall that the audio team still ships other non-Daily-related podcasts: Still Processing (with Pineapple Street), Modern Love (with WBUR), Popcast, and The Book Review — none of which were mentioned in either piece by Doctor. Which raises the question: What are the futures of these shows? And what is the future of non-Daily podcast programming? Will that aforementioned “big narrative project” be rolled out under The Daily banner, or not? Question marks!
• I was chatting with a public-radio station operative at ONA a few weeks ago, who shared a sentiment that I’ve taken the liberty to brand on the back of my skull. To liberally paraphrase: Getting your first hit is one thing, what happens after is a whole other bag of bananas.

Three notes on measurement.

• I have a mea culpa for you. Contrary to what I noted in last week’s issue, the Apple in-episode analytics was never pegged to the iOS 11 release, with the upgrade always being slated for a vague “later in the year” target date. That’s a note-taking fumble on my part, and I regret the error. The deployment timeline makes sense, even if I airballed: For there to be workable and reliable in-episode listening analytics, iOS 11 adoption needs to achieve critical mass, and that often takes some time following iOS rollouts. Again, my bad.
• Keep a lookout: I’ve been getting sporadic reports from some publishers and independents that are experiencing rocky metrics readjustments well before this anticipated Apple change. The destabilizing shifts are thought to be tied to two other measurement changes, specifically: (1) Libsyn’s stats overhaul to become more compliant to IAB reporting standards, which took place in mid-September, and (2) Stitcher’s implementation of several changes — including a stats adjustment to fit IAB compliance, along with the presentation of “Front Page Impressions” as a separate metric — that kicked in earlier this month. For at least some publishers, the combination of the two have resulted in serious drops in performance data, though I have also heard of some upward revisions. I wasn’t able to pin down a specific change range that I’d be comfortable printing just yet, though. I’ll be keeping an eye on this.
• I suspect we’re in the midst of a situation in which various podcast platforms are moving to adopt the IAB standard, but are doing so at different rates. While this will ultimately lead to a more cohesive and accountable ecosystem in the long run, the uneven adoptions have immediately cultivated some serious dysfunctions and pitfalls for individual publishers — particularly those that are interested in switching vendors. A publisher recently opined to me about the drastic performance data readjustments it experienced after migrating from Audioboom to Megaphone earlier this year, which fundamentally threw off its revenue projections. That’s bad enough, but the publisher felt that its ordeal was further exacerbated by a lack of vendor transparency. “I have a bunch of theories as to what happened, but the fact that podcast platforms are so cagey about their measurement standards drives me insane, and it impacts the work we do,” that publisher told me. Audioboom tells me that the platform adheres to the first version of IAB standards that was published last year — which is distinct from the newer edition that was circulated last month for public comment — but also notes that podcasts that move away from Audioboom’s platform will no longer have access to additional listenership facilitated through the company’s app. Nevertheless, the larger issue remains: For some, it’s still hard to tell what’s what, and that’s a big problem.

I imagine it would be prudent to anticipate more turbulence to come.

Career Spotlight. I love running this feature, mostly because it’s often a miracle that even a fraction of anything ever happens the way you hope it would. This week, I traded emails with Robin Amer, a Chicago-based journalist, editor, and audio documentarian who is in the midst of leading the development of a long-form investigative podcast, The City, that she sold to the USA Today Network over the summer. Amer’s on the up-and-up, and it’s great to catch her at this point in time.

Bites:

• Radiotopia has kicked off its annual fundraiser. The campaign runs from October 23 to November 10, and its explicit goal is to increase its donor base to 20,000. (Campaign page)
• ESPN has cancelled Barstool Van Talk, which the company had adapted for its ESPN2 channel from Barstool’s Pardon My Take podcast. Apparently, they got what they thought they were getting, but realized it wasn’t something they actually wanted, I guess? (Variety)
• The Dinner Party Download has parted ways with American Public Media. The show was first launched as a podcast 10 years ago, and spent the last six being syndicated as a public radio weekend show. It will run its last broadcast on December 1. A sad development, but not to worry: details about the podcast future of hosts Brendan Francis Newnam and Rico Gagliano are “forthcoming.” Phew. (Announcement)
• With a $100,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, the Charlotte, N.C. public radio station WFAE has “announced a plan to better connect with its audiences and develop fresh content using NPR One.” The station has hired Joni Deutsch, previously at West Virginia Public Broadcasting, as the on-demand producer to implement these efforts. It’s possible this might end up being the model of how most public radio stations will interface with the NPR One platform being positioned as “the (potential) future of public radio,” but who knows with these things really. (Press release)
• Speaking of NPR One, the platform makes an appearance in this stellar article about news personalization by Adrienne LaFrance. (The Atlantic)
• The CBC’s true crime podcast, Someone Knows Something, returns for a third season on November 7. It has reportedly garnered 32 million downloads across its first two seasons, which is made up of 27 dispatches. (Press release) As an aside, a cry for help.

can someone make something that isn’t a true crime podcast at some point please

i already hate people

— “Nick” (@nwquah) October 23, 2017

• The podcast adaptation of the L.A Times’ Dirty John helped drive 21,000 additional signups to the paper’s Essential California newsletter. (Digiday)
• LeVar Burton is now legally cleared to use his catchphrase from Reading Rainbow for his podcast with Midroll. You don’t have to take my word for it — you can find the background for this weird but entertaining story here.

If these don’t seem like questions we need to worry about yet, they should, according to Umbreen Bhatti and Kristen Muller. Bhatti, the manager of KQED Public Media for Northern California’s innovation lab, and Muller, the chief content officer at KPCC Southern California Public Radio, have for the past several months begun studying the role that public radio will play in a world of self-driving cars. (“Autonomous vehicles” is the preferred industry term.) “It feels distant for people,” said Muller. “But for Umbreen and me, it felt very much like a now question.”

California, where both women live and work, has granted 42 companies permits to test autonomous vehicles on the road. Bhatti and Muller see driverless cars on the road regularly (which surprised me, an East Coaster). They especially saw them around Silicon Valley when they were Knight Fellows at Stanford (Bhatti in 2014, Muller in 2016). “I instantly made the connection: That person is reading while their car is driving. I can’t read and listen to the radio at the same time. The car is where I listen to the radio, as do many of our audience members at NPR,” said Muller.

They and Liz Danzico, NPR’s creative director, received a $9,500 Jim Bettinger News Innovation Fund grant to start thinking about how driverless cars will disrupt public media. They’d expected to find some existing conversations to join, but soon realized that most conversations about driverless cars have centered around repercussions for traffic, urban planning, and car companies, and most of the focus is on getting the technology right.

“You can’t mess this up,” Bhatti said. “One mistake — one self-driving car’s technology is hijacked by a hacker and someone dies — [these companies] can’t risk that. When you’re prioritizing the safety experience, you’re not thinking so hard about the entertainment experience.” But, she added, “the connection between cars and public media is so strong. What happens when that connection is shaken a little bit?”

It’s still not clear what the entertainment systems in driverless cars will look like. The women have seen mockup designs that are very preliminary. “We don’t know if we’re essentially going to be presented with a platform from car companies where they’ll say, like, ‘Here’s your screen. Put what you want to put on it’ and now we’re competing with Netflix and Hulu,” said Muller. “Or is there a way to be part of the conversation, help shape what the entertainment experience is like for people?”

(There was a small stir in car circles yesterday when several sources reported that the new Tesla Model 3 — which has limited self-driving capabilities — comes with no AM/FM radio at all. Tesla later said FM radio, at least, would be turned on via software update at some point in the future. But the company is also reportedly negotiating directly with music labels to create its own proprietary streaming service for its cars — more evidence, if we still need it, of the power technology companies have over media consumption decisions.)

The women have talked to researchers and transportation and design experts, including those at Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design, which has the leading automotive design program in the country. “We’re exploring what this means for consumers by talking to experts first — this is such a new technology that it’s hard to ask [consumers] what they might want, or how they might think about something that they can’t even really wrap their minds around,” said Bhatti.

An MIT survey of about 3,000 people earlier this year found that 48 percent said they would never purchase a car that “completely drives itself.” Then again, there’s that off-cited Steve Jobs quote: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research.” It’s hard to know how consumers will react to autonomous vehicles until they actually have the opportunity to ride in them. “Is this really that different from a bus or a train or a plane? We don’t know yet,” said Bhatti. “We’ve circled around that a bit.”

“It’s very difficult to anticipate how people will adapt to this,” Muller said.

And so when Muller and Bhatti have brought the topic to people in public media, they’ve started breaking the question down. Asking “what opportunities do driverless cars represent for public media?” is too overwhelming a question. Instead: “How do we reimagine what the morning commute looks like?” “How do we help people feel prepared for this new technology?” “What programming opportunities do autonomous vehicles present?”

The team has had a couple of useful realizations. “We heard repeatedly from people that maybe they don’t want something that immersive, that the car is a sanctuary,” Bhatti said. This again seems like an area where people’s minds might change quickly — people who take public transportation to work seem to do just fine catching up on Netflix — but if it’s true, there might be ways to make the audio experience better instead of “just producing a whole bunch of video,” and ways to make the car “continue to feel like a sanctuary.”

Another way to think about autonomous vehicles is through the lens of community. “We think of people as lone commuters in their cars, but I think that we’re going to see autonomous vehicles alongside the rise of ridesharing,” Bhatti said. “Hardly any of the prototypes envision somebody by themselves in a car.” That means opportunities for connection. And then there are possibilities in biometrics. Could your car “know” the stressful point in someone’s commute, delivering content that addresses their moods and emotions in that moment?

“There are a lot of people who are not very excited about this transition to autonomous vehicles,” Muller said. “That means there may be a role for us to play in getting our audiences more familiar with the idea,” even just through reporting — KPCC is already covering it a fair amount, but Muller suggested public radio could be a guide to help audiences get ready.

Muller and Bhatti’s research continues, and they’re looking to hear from people in other parts of media who are interested in joining their conversation. “When walked into this thinking about the opportunities for serving audiences in driverless cars, and the dimensions really are so much more vast,” Bhatti said. “It’s about helping people feel prepared for a new technology, which includes just simply reporting on it. It includes this convening of communities. It includes things, physical structures — so much more than we initially thought.”

Oh, and it includes nausea. “One of the insights we got from a couple of the designers was that no matter what the technology is, humans are humans and motion sickness will persist,” Muller said. “If X percent of the population still gets motion sickness whether they’re driving or not, the audio will still be their friend. Video’s not gonna help them.”

Sean Carr, Art19’s CEO, tells me that the new funds will primarily be used to increase its headcount and reach. “We’re going to accelerate product development by hiring more designers and developers,” he said. “And we’re going to expand our business team so that we can continue offering high touch support to our U.S. customers and start expanding into international markets.”

I asked if Art19 was going to maintain its focus on bigger clients (its customer list includes Wondery, the New York Times, and DGital Media, among others, and it’s also the default hosting choice for Midroll Media’s network) or whether there were plans to open up its platform for the broader self-serve, plug-and-play market that’s primarily cornered by older companies like Libsyn, which continues to grow. (Libsyn’s revenues grew 22 percent between 2015 and 2016, up to about $8.8 million, while its number of hosted podcasts grew 24 percent in that same time period, according to its 10-K.)

“We work with some smaller shows and individual users now,” Carr tells me. “It’s not our focus now, because we want to offer white glove support to our customers and that’s tough to do with a lot of volume. But as we scale our business, we will definitely broaden our product offering and our target market.”

That’s one way to do it, I guess.

A rose by any other name. DGital Media, the podcast company that provides production and ad sales support to organizations like Crooked Media and individual talent like Tony Kornheiser, is undergoing a substantial rebranding. It will now go by the name of Cadence13, and the company accompanied this announcement with news of several additions to its leadership team. You can find the full list of those people in the press release. Nothing really stands out to me in particular, other than the detail concerning the company’s intent to cultivate more logistics-related capabilities throughout the country.

They’ve also moved their offices to midtown Manhattan, in case anybody cares about the significance of corporate real estate. (FWIW, I totally do.)

Anyway, this development comes shortly after the announcement earlier this month that the company has received investment from (and is entering a strategic partnership with) the corporate broadcast radio giant Entercom. Specifically, Entercom paid $9.7 million for a 45 percent stake in Cadence13, and the former will also provide “‘significant’ annual marketing and promotion” across its broadcast infrastructure for the latter. I wrote about that situation, and provided some long-term analysis for the company, here. My thinking on the matter remains largely the same.

Also interesting, I suppose: The company’s client list now includes Girlboss Media, which recently relaunched its podcast. That podcast was once part of the Panoply network, curiously enough.

Can I get a topic, any topic? Podcasting has long been good shelter for the comedy world, consistently proving itself able in taking on many parts of that ecosystem. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that (really longform) improvisational comedy would make its way into podcasting and germinate into a budding sub-genre of its own. Hello from the Magic Tavern, a child of the Chicago Podcast Collective and now a fully grown teenager under the auspices of Earwolf, is perhaps the first prominent example of (excessively longform) improvisational comedy distributed through RSS feeds, and it appears that its success is breeding successors.

Described as an “improvised sci-fi sitcom,” Mission to Zyxx is an upcoming podcast project that seeks to blend the instant world-building tasks inherent to improv with aggressive editing and creative sound design. It’s being spearheaded by one Alden Ford, a New York-based comedian, who currently serves as the show’s executive producer, and the podcast is staffed by a team principally drafted from the New York comedy scene — the press release makes some hay about its distinction from the more prominent Los Angeles scene — including Jeremy Bent, Allie Kokesh, Winston Noel, Moujan Zolfaghari, and Seth Lind (who, by the way, also serves as This American Life’s director of operations).

Somewhat more germane to our interests is the fact that the project is part of Audioboom’s initial foray into original programming, whose rollout is well underway. That slate also includes: another podcast from the Undisclosed team called The 45th, which is another Trump analysis show, and a new upcoming project by the team behind Up and Vanished, called Fork, among others.

What does being part of Audioboom’s network mean for the Zyxx team, exactly? I’m told that the deal involves Audioboom paying an advance to offset production costs, along with generally being responsible for a substantial marketing push around the show’s launch. (Which is table-stakes stuff, as far as such arrangements go these days.) And in case you’re wondering, the Mission to Zyxx team is compensated based on a revenue split, as is customary.

Facts and figures and trust. Last week saw the publication of two documents — one from the research firm Nielsen, one from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) — that are both meant, in their own ways, to increase trust, familiarity, and the general level of knowability in podcasting among advertisers. (They’re also meant to increase the profiles of their respective publishers within their respective functions; for Nielsen, it’s to serve as a prime provider of business intelligence for the industry, and for the IAB, it’s to serve as a reliable advocate for the industry, in so far that it can.)

Nielsen’s document, “Podcast Insights Report,” is the first podcast-related inquiry for the research firm, and it attempts to say something about the shopping habits of the average podcast consumer in relation to particular item categories. Specifically, it examines the preferred brands and spending volumes of podcast listeners in bottled water, beer, and baby food categories (a curiously alliterative mix). It’s a useful tool for sellers to add to their kit, but it’s also fairly interesting to skim through if you’re a civilian — there are tidbits like “the podcast audience influences over $2.8 billion of bottled water sales annually,” and “popular beer brands among podcast consumers include Sam Adams and Coors,” stuff like that.

Also interesting in the report: a more general demographic finding that non-white podcast listenership has increased over the past six years, from 30 percent in 2010 to 36 percent in 2016.

Published ahead of its third annual podcast upfronts, the IAB’s document is a “playbook” designed to introduce potential brands, advertisers, and marketers to the basics of buying into the medium. In other words, it’s another primer for the space, albeit one with the officiating stamp of a fairly well-known trade association.

I wouldn’t underestimate the marketing value that these documents provide the podcast space as a whole. The world is big and complex and made up of many, many little bubbles, and such badges of honor go a long way in opening up the podcast industry’s relationships with new companies in previously untouched sectors.

On a related note: While we’re talking about intelligence reports, you might be interested in a recent study conducted by NuVoodoo, a research and marketing firm, and Amplifi Media on podcast discovery and consumption that was presented in last week’s Podcast Movement conference. InsideRadio has a full rundown of the findings, but remember: Take the study as one piece of a much larger mosaic. (Or, you know, one of those color dots that collectively make up like a more tangible image. Or TV pixels. Whatever. You know what I mean.)

Speaking of the IAB, just got this info from a Midroll Media rep last night:

In October, Stitcher will be making changes to align its downloading definitions with some of the emerging standards put forth by the IAB. This will give podcasters more standardized, accurate, and granular data about their shows…As part of this change, some podcasters may see an increase or decrease in the downloads attributed in Stitcher. Ultimately, the data podcasters receive from Stitcher will be more accurate and more useful for shows looking to grow, work with advertisers and gain insight into their performance.

Take note.

Preamble: All right, before I move on to the next story, which is about the way we read metrics, impute success, and orient shows in relation to one another — a story that somewhat continues last week’s discussion on daily news podcasts, The New York Times’ The Daily and NPR’s Up First — I have to first establish the following:

The New York Times’ The Daily averaged more than 750,000 downloads every weekday in August, a spokesperson from the organization told me. Which, you know, is pretty remarkable growth from the 500,000 number that was listed in the Vanity Fair feature from last month.

And as a reminder, last week NPR informed me that “Up First currently reaches a weekly unique audience of almost a million users,” with “97 percent of Up First listeners say that the podcast is part of their morning routine and 80 percent say that they listen every day.”

With that out of the way…

Safety in numbers. I’m going to preface all this by saying the following discussion may come off as a tremendous bit of navel-gazing — even by the standards of this newsletter — but I nonetheless think this story has a lot to say about measurements, milestones, and the way we think about “success” in an emerging industry still in need of public serious arbiters of value.

So, for last week’s issue of Hot Pod, I wrote up this whole thing about Vox Media’s upcoming daily news podcast, the strategic openings in that product genre, and drew pretty heavily from the adventures of NPR and The New York Times in that arena. It was, I thought, a wide-ranging and interesting discussion that examined the question of how best to design your way into a field that’s competitive and, in some ways, already pretty well defined.

But it seems that readers were most compelled to the off-handed statement I made pitting Up First against The Daily — which, of course, is a tricky proposition given that each uses different metrics to publicly indicate performance and therefore lacks a fundamental baseline of comparison. The Daily has been using the download to convey its size, while Up First has been using a “unique weekly audience” metric that they gleaned off an in-house analytics tool from an outside company called Splunk, a move that falls from NPR’s broader commitment to move beyond the download. “The differences in metric might make an apples-to-apples comparison complicated for those interesting in doing so,” I wrote. “But I think the victor is pretty clear.”

The reader reaction to that off-handed sentence was exceptionally voluminous, and that indicated two things to me: (a) I was quite wrong in thinking that the victor was all that clear, and (b) people really, really wanted to know who won.

I quickly grew doubtful of my original assessment on the matter, so I felt it appropriate to dig more deeply into the question and explore the shape of its context a little further. And to do that, I traded emails Velvet Beard, the vice president of podcast analytics at Podtrac, which verifies audience sizes and download performance (using its own “unique monthly audience” metric) for a lot of major podcast providers — including both NPR and The New York Times.

You might know Podtrac from the public-facing industry ranker they publish every month — which I have some issues with as an exclusive conveyor of value for the podcast space as a whole due to its somewhat incomplete participant pool, as I wrote about when the ranker originally rolled out last year, but which I have eventually come to accept the ranker as a useful reference sheet for generally assessing what’s up with the market. In my correspondence with Beard, I wanted to learn two things: What should be the right metric to make evaluative comparisons between shows, and what was her opinion on the matter of Up First vs. The Daily?

To begin with, Beard dismissed the notion of ranking one over the other, arguing that the emphasis shouldn’t really about who “won” but rather about how there’s room in the market for two large competitive shows. (An overwhelmingly reasonable point.) And with respect to the question of the appropriate comparative metric, she expounded upon Podtrac’s choice to go with a “unique monthly audience” paradigm as opposed to, say, downloads: it better controls for varying publishing schedules, because you can’t meaningfully compare a daily show with a weekly show with a weekly show that’s deploys more than a few bonus episodes. In her reply, Beard also brought up a range of other valuable points, including how an open conversation about relative successes might disincentivize publishers from verifying their measurements and the differing definitions of “success” in the industry. (It’s a really interesting discussion, and I’ll run the full Q&A after this.)

Beard is, of course, absolutely correct in her assertion that the notion of who “won” shouldn’t be all that important, because it’s not like we exist in some zero-sum, winner-takes-all market. (Nor would we want to. Good lord no.) But I do think it’s somewhat useful to make direct comparisons between shows and to determine who’s serving more audiences (and how deeply) — particularly when you’re able to appropriately match up the two editorial products as exactly as we can with The Daily and Up First. From matchups like these, we can say something about the efficacy of each player’s choices and their capacities to make choices, and we can further draw other actionable lessons like:

• Did NPR’s straightforward adaptation of Morning Edition pay off better than the more experimental machinations of the Times’ audio team? Or did they pay off equally, and if so, what’s the significance of that?
• Which type of design gambit better resonated with the current composition of overall podcast listenership, the answer to which could be useful for future show development?
• Was NPR able to maintain its various competitive advantages as the incumbent in the audio medium, and what we can say about its decision-making and creative leadership as follows from that question?

So, that’s my broader thinking about the premise of this inquiry. But, returning to the original inquiry itself, was I able to come up with a clear victor between the two shows? Let’s break it down:

• As mentioned earlier, The Daily received at least 750,000 downloads every weekday in August. That’s tremendous, indicating some measure of high engagement.
• We don’t have a way to figure out The Daily’s listenership on a weekly unique audience paradigm, but we can work from the other direction. Up First reports having “a weekly unique audience of almost a million users,” and that “80 percent say that they listen every day.” If we’re being fairly conservative and peg the weekly uniques to, say, 950,000, we’re talking about a volume of at least 760,000 every weekday — comparable to the level The Daily topped each weekday in August.

It’s close! You could theoretically call this close to a neck-and-neck draw, or even a slight advantage to Up First despite launching three months after its competitor. But then again, you could also say that it sure is something that a relative newcomer to the audio space — admittedly, one with the resources and pedigree of the Times — has been able to pretty effectively match the public radio mothership, whose incumbency is built on decades and decades of experience in audio news. Further, you could say that there’s a sense that the terms and outcome of this matchup are far from being finished; as previously established, The Daily’s growth in recent months, from a daily average of 500,000 in June/July or so up to a daily minimum of 750,000 in August, suggests a show that’s coming further into its own and increasingly reaping the benefits of self-discovery.

As always, I’ll be keeping my eye on this.

Q&A with Velvet Beard. As I mentioned, here it is in full:

Bites

• Gimlet Media has announced its latest podcast: Uncivil, which seeks to “brings you stories that were left out of the official history of the Civil War, ransacks America’s past, and takes on the history you grew up with.” It will be hosted by Chenjerai Kumanyika and Jack Hitt. You might remember Kumanyika from the great Scene on the Radio series Seeing White, and Hitt is a longtime journalist whose works have appeared on This American Life and in The New York Times Magazine. Launches October 4. (Uncivil)
• ESPN has makes two additions to its podcast portfolio ahead of football season: one new college football show and one new weekday NFL show. They’re also rolling out “bonus” conversation episodes in the 30 for 30 feed. (Press release)
• For some reason, I’ve been asked multiple times this week whether I had any intel on when WNYC’s More Perfect will return for a second season. I don’t know much beyond what’s publicly available, which is that it’ll be back sometime in fall. That team takes its time, y’know? (Twitter)
• Hmm. “Leela Kids opens up the world of podcasts to children.” (TechCrunch)
• This is fascinating: “Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio.” (Current) As an aside, while reading this I couldn’t stop thinking about the coming effects of automation on those jobs. (Quartz, The Atlantic)
• Remember, the Channels initiative isn’t Audible’s only foray into original content. “Mother Go is an audio-first novel that harkens back to the golden-age of sci-fi.” (The Verge)
• Reveal’s Al Letson is an American treasure. (Reveal)

Gimlet’s diversity report. The company revisited the issue in a recent AMA-style episode of StartUp — after its first dive into the topic back in December 2015 — and the big picture is more or less what you’d expect: still not great, but better than the last time. Poynter has a good summary of the segment, and I’d like to state here that it’s interesting how you can basically evaluate the company based on two public fronts: There are the numbers, and there’s the way Alex Blumberg, as CEO and narrator and one of the producers of the episode (presumably), talks about the numbers. For what it’s worth, I’m still mulling over what both things tell us about how the company thinks about diversity, and the extent to which we can productively regard them as adequate or insufficient. The reality is what it is — imperfect. But more importantly, do we trust the process?

Notably, Gimlet followed up the segment with a more productive move: They posted the hard numbers and statistics on the company website. It gives us specific insight into how the company thinks about diversity in policy and on paper at this point in time. And so we’re able to go a little deeper beyond “still not great, but improving”; indeed, Gimlet’s makeup is still fairly homogenous in that the staff remains heavily white, and though it does appear that the company’s breakdown skews more female, front-of-mic talent still skews white and male. (For a company in the content business, that front-of-mic representation really matters.) The numbers also let us see how they track the metric, and there’s room to take some issue here: personally, I’ve always found that broadly tying the classical demographics — male and female, different census categories of ethnicities, and so on — is incredibly limiting, given the shifting, intersectional, and multi-dimensional nature of power positions and many permutations of diversity that fall from it. For what it’s worth, the company acknowledges that in the segment (and further, when we spoke about it over the phone), and again, the question remains whether you, personally, trust the process.

In any case, credit should be given where due: Thanks to Gimlet, we now have a public baseline for the rest of the private podcast industry. The public posting of the report is good practice for an ecosystem frequently criticized for being overwhelming white and male, and I highly encourage other companies to conduct similar publicly-available reports on their own operations. I will, for what it’s worth, be poking around to check on whether other companies will be doing so.

What happened the last time. Nieman Lab ran this great piece by Gabe Bullard last week: “Here’s what happened the last time audio producers got better data,” which sought to tell the story of broadcast radio when it experienced its own step-up in metrics to say something about what’s going to happen to podcasts. There’s not much in here that hasn’t already been talked through in previous Hot Pod issues (show resizing, over-emphasis on metrics concerns, and so on), but it’s still cool to see the story from the other side.

That said, it’s worth pointing out two governing themes that loom large over these narratives about data. On the one hand, there’s a general feeling of anxiety over the change it brings; on the other hand, there’s a specific concern about opening the system up to being deleteriously gamed. I don’t think much of either theme. Change is a constant, as they say, and the podcast ecosystem in its current state is already well gamed on its own terms. We see this even in something like the widespread presence of the true crime genre and the cottage industry of podcasts about Serial, and in the many ways the Apple podcast charts have been worked. Further, the gaming of systems is a constant through human endeavor, one imagines. We already see that with Spotify and television ratings, though you can’t quite make the argument that it significantly compromises the business of music or television. The bigger story, I think, should be less about the changing systems and more about building structures of collective responsibility around those systems; less about how the system shifts, and more about what we should be doing in response.

SoundCloud is laying off 40 percent of its workforce, the company announced in a blog post last Thursday. The cuts are apparently a defensive move to maintain its independence in the face of an increasingly difficult online music market, as The New York Times notes. The company provided assurances that it will remain in business, but whether that’s really the case for the platform remains to be seen. In the meantime, it might be a prudent move for publishers using SoundCloud as their primary hosting platform — of which there are many, from small independents to the Loud Speakers Network — to consider contingencies.

Career Spotlight. There are freelancers, and then there are podcast showrunners. This week, I had the pleasure of running this Q&A with Gina Delvac, the L.A.-based producer who quarterbacks the popular Call Your Girlfriend podcast.

Gimlet makes a curious acquisition. In what is probably a sign of the times, Gimlet announced this week that it’s bringing on a new show from outside its trendy Gowanus walls: The Pitch, which is basically Shark Tank but a podcast. The show is made and hosted by Josh Muccio, a Florida-based entrepreneur.

The Pitch was first published in 2015, when Muccio developed the show in partnership with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sheel Mohnot. The show was able to carve out a niche audience during its initial run, and as the story goes, after the first season, Muccio decided to take it in a different direction, redeveloping the concept and raising a small production team around the enterprise that included, among others, Devon Taylor, a freelancer who worked on Radiotopia’s Millennial.

Muccio shopped the second season around different networks — a common practice these days, in case you weren’t aware — before Gimlet ultimately moved to pick it up. That happened earlier this year, and I’m told that the acquisition process took about three weeks after Gimlet officially expressed interest in the project. As part of the deal, Muccio joined the company full time in early March, and Taylor, who by the way cofounded the now defunct podcast review site The Timbre (R.I.P.), was brought in full time as well.

The Pitch marks the first independent podcast that Gimlet has absorbed into its ranks, though it isn’t the company’s first acquisition. (The network brought over Science Vs, along with host Wendy Zukerman, from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last year.) In many ways, it’s a bit of an unexpected addition for the nearly three-year-old company, which has thus far built a strong reputation off a portfolio of highly produced, narrative-driven programming — you know, the kind of stuff you’d lump into a pile with This American Life and 99% Invisible. The Pitch feels considerably different from the rest of Gimlet’s portfolio…though, if pressed, I’m not quite sure what I mean by that. I quite enjoy the podcast, but I have a bit of trouble seeing how it fits into the Gimlet brand and house sound. And as I dig deeper into my gut reaction to the news, I can’t quite tell whether my response says more about my prejudices about reality programming — which I have a distinct palate for, by the way, one that I keep separate from the rest of my entertainment diet — or my own conceptions of what the Gimlet house style is supposed to be.

Matt Lieber, president of Gimlet, appears to hold a broader definition of that house style than I do. “I think it’s pretty consistent with our strategy,” he said when we spoke by phone Monday. Gimlet shows, according to Lieber, are largely defined by, among other things, a sense of curiosity, high production quality, and a strong point of view — all things, he argues, that The Pitch shares. Plus, the ambition of the whole reality programming dimension, and how it mingles with these core Gimlet principles, is a big part of what drew Gimlet to the project. “It combines the best of reality TV — that tension and excitement — and the best of narrative storytelling,” Lieber said. “Reality has always been a category we’ve been intrigued by. If you think about it, the first season of StartUp had some of those qualities.”

That StartUp connection, I think, is pretty meaningful. One way of reading the company’s history is to see it as having built an initial core audience off a show, StartUp, that appeals to those who are drawn to stories about entrepreneurship and technology. From this position, The Pitch, then, is an expansion of that genre offering within Gimlet’s portfolio, one that deepens the available product range for the entrepreneurship-oriented audience — and, subsequently, its extractable value for advertisers. Think about the kinds of people who listen to StartUp and podcasts about entrepreneurship, and then think about the types of advertisers who value that set of ears, and then think about capitalism and the resulting CPM rate. (Speaking of which, I’d love to tie NPR’s How I Built This into this somehow.)

One more thing before I move on. I was curious as to why Muccio decided to move onto a network, why he eschewed independence. Here’s his response:

1. The #1 way people find out about podcasts is on other podcasts. So the right network presents an opportunity for audience growth that would take years to build as an independent.

2. Advertising. Some networks have horrible CPMs and are known for really bad ads. But Gimlet is not one of them. They’re one of the best in the biz. If not the best. We sold our own ads for The Pitch. It’s really REALLY hard to do well. This wasn’t an area I was willing to compromise so I’m lucky to be joining a network that is really crushing it on the advertising front. Bottom line? Ads on The Pitch are higher quality and more profitable.

3. Focus and specialization. I wore all the hats as an independent producer. I did pretty damn well considering, but still you can only be so good at any one thing when you have 50 other things you also need to be good at. Joining a network has allowed me to focus on building a great show, refining my skills as a host and building a team that can carry the vision of the show with me. Ultimately building something with a team of amazing people is more fulfilling to me than building something in a silo.

The Pitch debuts under new management on June 14. There will also be a crossover episode with the StartUp podcast on that day.

Side note. Deadline reported a new development on the upcoming Homecoming TV adaptation: Julia Roberts is currently in talks for the lead role, which was played by Catherine Keener in the podcast. The project looks like it’s still in its pretty early stages, so fans shouldn’t get too attached to the prospect of an adaptation just yet.

A directory, a list, a market. “Podcast discovery is broken,” goes the familiar critique, the opening gambit of most product pitches that hit my inbox. And it was as true two or three years ago as it is now — though as longtime readers might know, I’m wont to think of it mostly as a secondary issue, not one that’s fatally prohibitive to the long-term fate of the space. I imagine some will disagree. In any case, I still read every email that hits my inbox on the matter.

The latest of such gambits is something called PodSearch, and there is some reason to pay attention here. A project of Patty and Dave Newmark, proprietors of Newmark Advertising and longtime audio advertising operatives with strong relationships on the advertising side of the industry, PodSearch boasts a premise that’s so straightforward as to be blunt: It’s the Yellow Pages, but for podcasts.

There isn’t a ton about PodSearch that’s interesting from a design perspective, particularly on the business-to-consumer side. A lot of its touted features — search, personalization, top-show categorizations — are table stakes as far as digital products in 2017 are concerned, and there are some things about the interface that create an unnecessarily high level of friction for potential users, like requiring visitors to make an account before being to actually use the platform.

I see the theoretical value of the product for consumers, of course. Having a consolidated point of reference for the whole space that’s marginally more organized than Apple Podcasts (née iTunes) is nice, though perhaps not quite the drop of water in the desert it’s made out to be, and I’m partial to the view that more competition on the directory and search portal-level is always good for podcast discovery. However, execution matters more than ideas, as the old adage goes, and there’s a long road ahead for PodSearch to make a good first impression. (And second, and third, and fourteenth.)

That said, here are two things to consider:

(1) PodSearch has potential to create genuine value for advertisers. In researching this story, a few people brought up the way in which it might quietly solve a discovery problem of another kind: Advertisers and agencies, I’m told, currently have to do a fair bit of manual digging around to generate a list of podcasts (and their respective contact information for sponsorship inquiries) to potentially buy spots off, and so a directory that’s able to provide an easily digestible serving of the menu on offer, with the relevant contact information, would be useful for this community. And given the Newmarks’ expertise and history, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re able to create a decent market on the advertiser side of the equation.

(2) One way that PodSearch is interesting to me is how it can serve as a vessel to get the most utility out of search engines for its listed podcasts writ large. When I spoke with Dave last week, he spoke of a meaningful volume search queries for terms relating to podcasts on a general level — “What is a podcast?”, “How do I listen to one?”, and so on — and how there isn’t much incentive for individual publishers to aggressively capitalize on those generic paid search terms. And so, by assuming the position of a wholesale podcast directory, PodSearch is able to make those spends on behalf of publishers and extract value from those broad queries for its listing participants. There’s a lot of juice in this fruit, and I’m compelled to see if the utility here can be appropriately realized.

In sum, I really do think there’s a lot more value for PodSearch to pursue a more explicit business-to-business path than one that also tacks on a business-to-consumer dimension. Solving discovery for everyday users is a tough and deeply nuanced problem in 2017, and as far as digital media categories are concerned, we live in a world with high thresholds for user experience expectations — and it’s only going to get higher.

Two more things to mull over in your own assessment about the service:

• There’s a cost associated with listing on the directory ($9.99 a month, which might feel steep for most that are already paying comparable amounts for hosting), and a small cost for advertisers to access the aforementioned point-of-contact information ($19.99 a year). I’m told that the costs are to qualify leads on both sides, and I imagine it also generates revenue for the platform to keep the lights on, which is fair.
• The Newmarks are kicking off PodSearch with some major publisher partnerships already in the bag; in the press outreach email, I was informed that the company is fielding sales chiefs from National Public Media, Public Media Marketing, Midroll, and Panoply to talk on the record about the initiative. We’re talking institutional support here; let’s see how that shakes out.

Developments over at HowStuffWorks. Back in March, it was reported that Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur, who founded the online curiosity Mental Floss back in 2001, were leaving the company to develop a new podcast for HowStuffWorks. That project is now public: it’s called Part Time Genius, and it appears to be some combination of game show and a piece of education media. In other words, the show sounds a lot like Stephen Dubner’s Tell Me Something I Don’t Know, and it fits into HowStuffWorks’ wheelhouse pretty neatly.

Part Time Genius will launch with four full episodes in the feed. That happens on June 7.

Meanwhile, HowStuffWorks has also relaunched its popular Stuff Your Mom Never Told You podcast, almost half a year after the show’s previous hosts, Cristen Conger and Caroline Ervin, left the show to launch their own independent media company, Unladylike Media. (You can find my story on that, which touches on questions of ownership and network arrangements, can be found here.) The new setup features Emilie Aries and Bridget Todd in the hosting seat, and they will be based in Washington, DC.

“Replacing a host or hosts is not easy, especially when you consider that so much of what makes podcasting great is the personal connection between listeners and the hosts,” wrote Jason Hoch, the chief content officer of HowStuffWorks, through a PR rep about the transition. “We really wanted to take our time finding new hosts that could continue on with the show’s message, but we also wanted to make sure we were pushing ourselves to continue to evolve the show. We felt from the get-go that it was better to take our time finding the absolute best hosts for the show instead of rushing into this.”

Hoch added: “For any podcast, it does take some time to settle into a rhythm and build chemistry between co-hosts, producers and listeners. But this is also what makes podcasting so special — it’s analogous to finding a new friend. It builds over time.”

An uptick in support for a new podcast delivery format. I don’t spend a ton of time digging into the technical and infrastructural end of podcasts, and I’d like to be clear here that I only have a pedestrian understanding of the issues. But a recent string of announcements have caught my eye: Over the past week or so, a few third-party podcast apps, including Breaker, Fireside, and Cast, have all added support for the JSON Feed format. JSON is a data-interchange format, a way in which computers exchange information with one another, and JSON Feed is an RSS-like feed format built on top of it. The trend was written up by noted technology writer John Gruber at his site Daring Fireball, which is how I initially bumped into the story.

As far as I can tell, there’s some philosophical significance here among technologists who are developing tools for the podcast space. But I wanted to get a broad sense of what it means for those outside that category of people, and so I reached out to Leah Culver and Erik Michaels-Ober of Breaker to help explain some things to me.

The main takeaway? It’s largely a matter of efficiency, as the argument goes.

“JSON is generally more compact than XML,” the team wrote back. (XML is the format that provides the foundation for RSS which, as you might know, is currently the primary format of the podcast space.) “All things being equal, the JSON Feed could be transferred between two computers 27% faster and the transmission costs would be 27% lower. In a competitive marketplace, these types of cost savings are typically distributed in one or more of three ways: (1) returned to consumers, in the form of lower prices, (2), returned to shareholders, in the form of a dividend, and (3) reinvested in the business. Each of these has either direct or indirect benefits to consumers and podcasters. Essentially, the argument here is that efficiency is an end in itself. There no reason for computers to communicate more verbosely when they could communicate more concisely.”

They added: “Beyond efficiency, there are no new capabilities unlocked by JSON Feed. If all goes according to plan for JSON Feed, consumers and podcasters won’t notice that anything has changed—other than the podcast services they use have become cheaper or better, due to improved resource utilization.”

So, what’s listed here is actually an abbreviated version of a much longer Q&A with Michaels-Ober and Culver, which gets fairly wonky and technical. You can find the full discussion in this Google Doc.

Bites:

• NPR’s Invisibilia returned for its third season last week, and this time around it boasts a unifying season-wide structure: playfully tethered to the idea of a “concept album,” this chunk of episodes will all revolve around the theme of concepts. (NPR)
• Feral Audio, home of Harmontown, recently launched a comedy podcast focused entirely on stories and the happenings that go on in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz. It’s a curious take on the whole locally-minded media thread; we’ll see if they actually harvest anything interesting out of the conceit. (Feral Audio)
• Kids Listen, the loose collective that advocates for children’s programming in the podcast space, has a website now. Watch the space for upcoming initiatives and roster expansions by the group. (Kids Listen)
• AudioBoom recently commissioned a study with Edison Research on listener demographics. It’s worth checking out in full, but here’s a data point that caught my eye: Only 22 percent of respondents reported that they currently have mail-order subscriptions to companies like Blue Apron, Birchbox, and Barkbox. That’s a lot lower than I would ordinarily think. (LinkedIn)
• Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has a podcast now…and, uh, I didn’t think much of it. (WBEZ)
• Not directly podcast-related, but I loved reading this: “In well-mannered public radio, an airwaves war,” a story about WBUR and WGBH, which have struck up a fascinating coexistence in the public radio-friendly city of Boston. (The Boston Globe)

$19.8 billion — that’s how much revenue resulted from participating broadcasters selling parts of their broadcast spectrum to wireless carriers hoping to expand their nationwide reach, as part of the Federal Communications Commission’s first-ever spectrum auction, which has just closed.

$10.05 billion — that’s how much 175 broadcasters will be getting, total, from the auction. ($7.3 billion is going toward reducing the federal budget deficit.)

$194 million — that’s the largest payout for a single public broadcaster participating in the auction: It’s going to WNJN, the New Jersey public television station. Here in Boston, WGBH is getting $218.7 million, total, to move WGBH and WGBY in Springfield to lower frequencies.

More than 30 noncommercial TV stations participated in the auction, and 23 of them are officially listed as going off-air — but, as Current points out, “a station’s signal going off the air does not necessarily mean that all of the broadcaster’s stations are going dark.” (Current has been compiling details about the non-commercial stations that sold here.) Not all stations sold: Howard University had been considering selling its license for WHUT, the only black-owned public media station in the U.S., but withdrew from the auction in February.

It’s a windfall, and comes during a time when the president has threatened to eliminate all federal funding for public broadcasting. But how are these stations planning to use the money? Most public media stations that participated in the auction seem to be putting it toward toward endowments, more educational programming, much-needed maintenance, and technical upgrades.

In New Jersey, advocacy group Free Press continues its campaign to push New Jersey lawmakers to use the revenue from selling WNJN and WNJT to fund community-oriented news and information projects (the local news ecosystem in New Jersey is ailing, following years of acquisition, layoffs, and existing between New York and Philadelphia).

“When local stations go off the air, news coverage disappears. That means people are less informed, civic participation drops, and political corruption increases,” Mike Rispoli, Free Press’s New Jersey director, said in a statement. Many of the public stations participating in the auction have a channel-sharing agreement, so they won’t be going completely dark. The impacts elsewhere are clear: WBIN, one of the two commercial TV stations in New Hampshire, was sold in the FCC auction, and canceled its newscasts in February.

“Spectrum revenues must be used to support those who rely on locally produced news and information to engage with their neighbors, learn about volunteer opportunities, make decisions about voting, run for public office, get information about small businesses, and support their children in local schools,” he said.

Ideas for how to use the spectrum auction proceeds include funding digital startups, building apps centered around processing FOIA requests and public data, community engagement projects, initiatives in underserved areas, and media literacy efforts.

Save for when its politics podcast went daily leading up to last year’s election, the absence of a rundown of each day’s biggest events to watch out for, available through a listener’s podcast app of choice, has left an opening for other news operations. The reason why NPR’s flagship shows like Morning Edition and All Things Considered are not also immediately available as podcasts to the car-less, radio-less, digital native set has had less to do with technical obstacles and more to with NPR’s organizational structure and its relationships with member stations. (The two tentpole shows bring in the largest audiences — and account for the largest slice of revenue — for NPR.)1

On Wednesday, NPR will start offering Up First, a 10-minute weekday morning news podcast built off the top news from Morning Edition. (The trailer dropped today and leans heavily on trustworthiness.)

“As you can imagine, this is something that the people at Morning Edition have been talking about for a while, kicking around and working through a lot of ideas, and it took us until just before Christmas,” Sarah Gilbert, executive producer for Morning Edition, said. “We conceived of [the show] as a welcoming, 10-minute digestible companion to a very busy period of the day, and infused it with a conversational, accessible sensibility.”

Up First will contain the “A segment” of the 5 a.m. ET hour of Morning Edition with its cast of hosts David Greene, Steve Inskeep, and Rachel Martin. It’ll then be spruced up with a “more podcast-y tail and top” and released as a podcast at 6 a.m.

“The podcast version will have a top that tells you what’s in that day’s episode, and we’re also going to have language in the episodes that tells listeners — many of whom will be new to public radio content — about the public radio system, the availability of all kinds of incredible programming on our stations, guiding them in finding ways to donate, if they want to donate to their local stations,” Neal Carruth, NPR’s general manager of podcasting (a new position as of last fall), added. “We’ve learned through our research that this younger and more diverse demographic often makes up a discrete audience from the Morning Edition audience. The podcast will point them back to public radio ecosystem.”

NPR is clearly keen on keeping up with the news preferences of younger listeners, spinning out new shows and reworking the sound of old standbys. More than half of the total audience for NPR’s slate of podcasts is between the ages of 18 and 34, according to NPR survey data. For the Morning Edition radio broadcast, the audience is “more evenly split” across all the age groups, according to a spokesperson, but a quarter of those 18- to 34-year-olds report listening to NPR offerings via podcast (“half those also then started listening to a broadcast station”).

What does the existence of Up First — and Morning Edition material — as an on-demand podcast mean for local stations who pay (a lot) to be able to distribute shows like Morning Edition and All Things Considered? (The NPR-and-member-station dynamic produces interesting tensions. See here or here or here or here or here.) Gilbert and Carruth both gave rosy replies.

“A lot of station managers we have spoken to in preparation for this launch have expressed genuine excitement about the possibility of reaching a new discrete, younger audience, and finding a way to invite them into the public radio system, and building that loyal relationship which has sustained us for such a long period of time,” Gilbert said.

“Safe to say, [the podcast] is something we’ve thought about well before last December, when it really moved into high gear. That’s just a function of finding a way to do it that makes sense for the whole system,” Carruth said. “It’s central to the project that we’re enhancing and improving Morning Edition, while at the same time, connecting with this emerging digitally native on-demand audience.”

“There’s an interplay here with the conversational values of the on-demand space,” he added. “You’ll hear an ongoing evolution of the sound of Morning Edition, influenced by its being available in the on-demand space.”

1. Yes, there are ways to get these shows on-demand. If you have the NPR or NPR One app, for instance, you can tap into a feed.

The truck was the central component of a project launched by Mador along with WUOT, the public radio station in Knoxville, to get out into the community and reach new listeners. They travelled to street festivals, community health fairs, and other local events to interact with people throughout the region.

“There’s something disarming about the truck; it’s a physical, tangible engagement tool…that’s eye-catching and fun, which was part of the idea behind its design,” Mador said recently. “We were able to build buzz and excitement for TruckBeat, and people seemed to want to be part of what we were doing in a different way than with a conventional journalism project where you’re not able to bring your storytelling into the community in quite the same three-dimensional fashion.”

Mador was one of 16 independent producers who in November 2015 embedded themselves with 15 public media outlets across the country to report on underserved communities and to introduce storytelling methods as part of the most recent edition of Localore, a program run by the Association of Independents in Radio that works to connect stations and producers throughout the public media system.

This round of Localore, which operated under the theme “Finding America,” featured a wide array of initiatives — from a plan to launch a bureau in Anacostia, a historically black area of Washington, D.C., to a project in Tucson that placed mailboxes to collect stories in Spanish and English “in corners of Tucson where public media doesn’t often visit.”

The Finding America projects wrapped up last November, and on Friday AIR is releasing a survey and a report that share lessons learned from the initiative, offer best practices for other news organizations, and also examine who the Localore projects reached. The survey was conducted by Edison Research; the report was written by lead researcher Mallary Tenore and AIR executive director Sue Schardt and was being published Friday by The American Press Institute.

AIR’s Finding America coverage received 48.3 million total impressions, up from 26.8 million in the previous iteration of Localore. A majority of those impressions came over broadcast, but 5 million were digital and 67,369 came from live events throughout the country.

Tenore and Schardt’s report outlines some of the challenges the producers faced:

Some of the obstacles below involve finding ways to challenge traditional journalistic practices and mindsets. Others relate to assumptions about what public media should sound like, and whom it should serve. Still others are institutional — making and sustaining change is hard. These obstacles were identified through our research into the Finding America projects and, specifically, our inquiry into how producers found creative workarounds. The obstacles, and tactics to defeat them, are meant to help you move from breaking news to breaking form — to step away from the conventions of daily reporting and learn to embrace new and innovative forms of storytelling that will engage communities and strengthen the way you approach.

Both documents are worth reading in full, but here are some highlights:

Rely on the community

With newsrooms strapped for resources, it can be a challenge for producers to break out of their day-to-day coverage to pursue slower coverage. The report suggests letting the community help drive reporting. TruckBeat at WUOT ran a program called Tenn Words that invited listeners to submit answers to the question “What keeps you up at night?” in 10 words or less. Health was a major concern in the 750 responses collected online and at live events:

“People expressed fears about heart disease, obesity, memory loss, lack of health care services, and the widespread opioid epidemic in Southern Appalachia” — slow-simmer topics that might not ping on a radar tuned to more urgent events. “We identified health disparities as an important, underreported area for TruckBeat to explore.”

The producers also all identified “community collaborators,” influential community members who helped them connect with their larger communities. The report emphasizes that it’s critical for producers to take their time to get to know community members and earn their trust.

In Kansas City, producer Steve Mencher launched a religion initiative called Beyond Belief. As part of his reporting process, he created a steering committee of religious leaders from various faiths: “These were people who I could check in with and also who would challenge me to do better. We adapted where we could, and I used their experience and wisdom to guide the project toward our goals.”

It was sometimes difficult to integrate community collaborators into the reporting process:

There was sometimes confusion around roles and expectations, and uncertainty about how to work with the lead producers’ community collaborators — many of whom didn’t have any previous journalism experience — in a way that wouldn’t be perceived as generating biased coverage. Additionally, some of the lead producers wished they had more support from, and interaction with, their stations.

Reflect a community’s diversity

Finding America’s lead producers ranged from 24 to 62 years old; 44 percent were people of color and 73 percent were women. In comparison, NPR’s staff, according to a 2015 survey, is 77.6 percent white and 54.7 percent female.

They tried also to reach people from different background in the communities they were covering; 39 percent of the community collaborators were non-white, according to Edison. 63 percent of the community collaborators were women, and 54 percent earned less than $75,000 annually.

In 2015, NPR undertook a study to examine the makeup of the sources on its weekday magazine programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered. They were 73 percent white, down from 80 percent in 2013.

“Public media has developed this segregation of cultures; it seems like an encouragement for all the other cultures to tune out,” said Rachel Hubbard, associate director/general manager at KOSU in Oklahoma. “I feel like it doesn’t start a conversation about sharing culture and creating understanding across boundaries.”

Use live events to reach new audiences

Live events were a pillar of the Finding America program, and a key mechanism for trying to reach communities that don’t typically listen to or watch public media. “Many public media events are geared toward making work that suits a core audience that is predominantly white, older, and affluent,” the report’s authors note. But 36 percent of Finding America’s live event attendees were non-white, Edison found; 35 percent were between the ages of 25 and 34; and 60 percent made less than $75,000.

Finding America events were held in unusual places frequented by people in the community: a drive-in theater in Watertown, New York, a roller skating rink in Baltimore, Maryland, and an elementary school in the heart of New Orleans — where Unprisoned lead producer Eve Abrams held an event in partnership with “Bring Your Own,” a popular roving storytelling project. Perhaps more importantly, Finding America teams brought together people who aren’t usually in the same room — public media’s traditional audience and community members who don’t tune into public media.

One of those events was put on by Every ZIP, a project based out of Philadelphia’s WHYY. Producer Alex Lewis and Jeanette Woods, the station collaborator, held a storytelling block party at The Village of Arts and Humanities, a community arts organization. Woods:

“At WHYY, the only reason a reporter might go to The Village would be to do a piece on conflict or the effects of poverty or crime. WHYY staff and audience went to that neighborhood as neighbors. People were not thinking of that neighborhood through the lens of its stereotype — even for some reporters — as a scary and crime-ridden place. Everyone there was on the same footing, enjoying a very different kind of relationship. And WHYY helped bring that about.

That kind of integrative interaction, a true creation of community, at least within the scope of the event, has always been my goal in public media…People who had never been there — and would never go to that part of the city — got to see it as just another part of the city. People who lived there, who had never heard of WHYY, discovered that the station is a place where their voices were valued, where their experiences could be heard without the filter of ‘reporting.'”

CPB has an annual budget of $445 million that it uses to support PBS, NPR, and local public broadcasters across the United States, and cuts to it and other agencies are being proposed to offset, among other things, Trump’s planned $54 billion increase in defense spending. (The Washington Post reported that the requested boost in Pentagon funding would fund CPB at its current levels for the next 121 years.)

“Viewers and listeners appreciate that public media is non-commercial and available for free to all Americans,” CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison said in a statement Thursday. “We will work with the new Administration and Congress in raising awareness that elimination of federal funding to CPB begins the collapse of the public media system itself and the end of this essential national service.”

There’s still a long way to go before the budget is finalized — it’s Congress that passes the budget, and it’s under no obligation to take up Trump’s priorities — and we don’t know yet how CPB’s funding will ultimately be affected. But we do have some sense of what the public broadcasting system might look like if the budget passed as Trump has proposed it.

A 2012 report by consulting firm Booz & Company, commissioned by CPB, forecast what would happen if the system lost all its federal funding. It concluded that “there is simply no substitute for the federal investment to accomplish the public service mission that Congress has assigned to public broadcasters and that the American people overwhelmingly support.”

The funding cuts would affect the system at multiple levels, the study found. Many of the larger entities — such as Boston’s WGBH, NPR, and American Public Media — “would be forced to cut already lean production budgets,” cutting back or raising prices for local stations that want to air the material.

“These outcomes are likely to happen in some combination, with negative consequences for the quantity and quality of public broadcasting content,” the study’s authors said. “That, in turn, would impact the remaining stations, further undermining their ability to attract viewers, listeners, and support.”

More than 70 percent of CPB’s appropriation is distributed to local stations, most of them in small markets or rural areas. These stations are heavily dependent on federal funding because they can’t generate enough revenue through pledge drives or other means to keep them going. “In a world where Congress no longer provides funding for public broadcasting stations, the public television and radio stations (and the related national organizations) would ultimately not be able to raise the funds necessary to replace the federal appropriation,” the report said.

The 2012 report estimated that within three years of losing federal funding, 76 public radio stations and 54 public TV stations would be at “high risk of simply closing.” Of the radio stations it identified, 47 serve rural communities, 46 were the only public radio station available in their market, and 10 were the only broadcasters of any medium in their market. If the 54 TV stations went off the air, the report estimated that more than 12 million viewers would lose their ability to watch over-the-air public television:

Ultimately, the system itself would be at serious risk of collapse. Even if it would survive, the public broadcasting system in the United States would suffer with reduced numbers of stations resulting in gaps in service, and the remaining stations would be impoverished. This would dangerously impair public broadcasting‘s ability to help create and maintain the educated and informed citizenry that is required for a healthy democracy and civil society.

While it remains to be seen whether CPB’s federal funding will be eliminated, a proposed similar loss of state funding is already impacting at least one public broadcasting system.

West Virginia Governor Jim Justice has proposed eliminating state funding to West Virginia Public Broadcasting. WVPB is planning to lay off 15 staffers, more than 20 percent of its staff, Current reported this month. Eliminating funding for WVPB would save the state $4.5 million. (It has a budget deficit of $500 million.)

2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the Public Broadcasting Act, the legislation signed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 that established CPB and the modern American public broadcasting system.

The groundwork for the act was the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, whose report established the foundation for the legislation and explained the importance of public broadcasting:

Public Television programming can deepen a sense of community in local life. It should show us our community as it really is. It should be a forum for debate and controversy. It should bring into the home meetings, now generally untelevised, where major public decisions are hammered out, and occasions where people of the community express their hopes, their protests, their enthusiasms, and their will. It should provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard.

Public Television programs can help us see America whole, in all its diversity. To a degree unequaled by any other medium, Public Television should be a mirror of the American Style. It should remind us of our heritage and enliven our traditions. Its programs should draw on the full range of emotion and mood, from the comic to the tragic, that we know in American life. It should help us look at our achievements and difficulties, at our conflicts and agreements, at our problems, and at the far reach of our possibilities. Public Television programs should help us know what it is to be many in one, to have growing maturity in our sense of ourselves as a people.

The authors of the report, however, knew that funding would be an issue and took steps to try and protect the corporation from political maneuvers like Trump’s plan. The Carnegie Commission proposed creating a tax on every new television set purchase that would fund the corporation and keep it out of the annual budgetary process.

“ We felt that the problem here was a problem of principle: how one insulated this — a corporation for public television — from the annual budgetary review both on the part of the Congress and on the part of the executive branch,” commission chair James R. Killian Jr. said in a 1967 interview. “And it seemed to us that a trust fund into which funds would flow from a fixed tax, such as the excise tax, was the best way of giving this protection and insulation. If someone comes up with an invention that does this thing, that meets this requirement equally well, other than the excise tax, I think we would all be very happy about it.”

Kurwa’s hiring suggests a formalization of those efforts across the board. What that will mean, specifically, remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if it involves a consolidation of partnerships, infrastructures, and branding. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that’s necessary.

Midroll announces the second edition of Now Hear This, its live podcast festival, which will take place on September 8-10. This year sees the company shift the festivities from Los Angeles to New York, which I’m told is largely a function of customer experience.

“[New York City] is an easy city for locals to commute in for the event and for out-of-towners to come for the weekend and easily get around. While our fans and performers loved Anaheim, it’s not always the easiest place to get to from the LA area. The fan experience continues to be our top priority,” Lex Friedman, Midroll’s chief revenue officer, told me. He also added that it was an opportunity to mitigate impressions of the festival as a West Coast event. (And, I imagine, impressions of Midroll as a West Coast company.)

Details on venues and performers will be released over the coming weeks. In the meantime, interested folk can reach out to the team over email, or get email alerts from the festival website, which also features peculiar videos of gently laughing people.

What lies ahead for APM’s on-demand strategy? Last month, I briefly mentioned APM’s hiring of Nathan Tobey as the organization’s newest director of on-demand and national cultural programming, which involves running the organization’s podcast division and two of its more successful cultural programs: The Dinner Party Download and The Splendid Table. Tobey’s recruitment fills a six-month gap left by Steve Nelson, who left APM to become NPR’s director of programming last summer. It was notable development, particularly for a network that wrapped 2016 with a hit podcast under its belt (In The Dark) and a bundle of new launches (The Hilarious World of Depression; Terrible, Thanks for Asking; Make Me Smart).

I traded emails with Tobey recently to ask about his new gig. Here are three things to know from the exchange:

Tobey’s role and immediate priorities:

The title is a mouthful. But it really consists of equal parts creativity facilitator, entrepreneur, and audience-development strategist.

He phrases his two immediate priorities as follows: the first is to invest in the future of the organization’s current podcast roster, and the second is to lay the foundation for APM’s on-demand future, including content development, business planning, and team building.

What defines an APM show?

The basic traits are similar to some of our big public media peers — production craft and editorial standards you can count on, creative ambition to spare, plus a steady focus on addressing unmet needs, from making science fun for kids (Brains On!) to de-stigmatizing depression (The Hilarious World of Depression). But really, the new shows we’ll be making will define what we stand for more than any slogan ever could – so I think the answer to your question will be a lot clearer in a year or two.

Potential collaborators are encouraged to pitch, regardless of where you are:

Hot Pod readers: send me your pitches and ideas, and reach out anytime – with a collaborative possibility, or just to say hi. I’ll be in New York a lot in the coming years, and we’ve got an office in L.A. too, so don’t think you need to be out here in the Twin Cities (though you should totally come visit). We’ll be looking for podcast-focused talent of all kinds in the years to come — from producing to sponsorship to marketing — so be sure to check our job listings.

I dunno, man. Minneapolis and St. Paul are pretty great.

NPR’s Embedded returns with a three-episode mini-season. Dubbed a “special assignment,” all three episodes will all focus on a single topic: police encounters caught on video, investigated from all sides. Two things to note:

• Embedded will enjoy some formal cross-channel promotion between podcast and broadcast. Shortened versions of the show’s reporting will be aired as segments on All Things Considered, and NPR is also partnering with WBUR’s morning talk program On Point with Tom Ashbrook to produce on-air discussions of the episodes.
• NPR seems to be building live event pushes for the show: Host Kelly McEvers presented an excerpt from the upcoming mini-season at a Pop-Up Magazine showing in Los Angeles last week, and she’s due to present a full episode at a live show on March 30, which will be held under the NPR Presents banner. Investigative journalism-as-live show, folks. I suppose it’s officially a thing.

I’m super excited about this — I thought the first season of Embedded was wonderful, and I’m in awe at McEvers’ capacity to lead the podcast in addition to her work as the cohost of NPR’s flagship news program, All Things Considered. (Personally, I can barely write a newsletter without passing out from exhaustion.)

Episodes of the mini-season will drop on March 9, 16, and 23.

Related: “NPR, WNYC, and Slate Explain Why They Are Betting on Live Events” (Mediafile)

RadioPublic formally pushes its playlist feature, which serves as one of its fundamental theses on how to improve the ecosystem’s problems with discovery. The company’s playlist gambit is largely editorially driven and built on collaborations with publishers, with those collaborators serving as the primary manufacturers of playlists. A blog post notes that the company has been “working with industry leaders like The New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post and PRX’s Radiotopia network.” (RadioPublic CEO Jake Shapiro was formerly the CEO of PRX.)

We’ll see if the feature ends up being a meaningful driver of discovery on the platform — provided the platform is able to accrue a critical mass of users, of course — but I do find the discovery-by-playlist idea is intriguing. The moment immediately after an episode ends is a sphere of user experience that’s ripe for reconstruction, and I suspect that a playlist approach, which takes the search and choice burden off the listener to some extent, could serve that really well. Again, it all depends on RadioPublic’s ability to siphon users into that mode of consumption, so I reckon it’s the only real way the playlist approach is able to be properly tested.

Following up last week’s item on Barstool Sports. So it looks like the company’s podcast portfolio is being hosted on PodcastOne’s infrastructure, which isn’t measured by Podtrac. As such, it’s hard to accessibly contextualize the company’s claims of 22 million monthly downloads against how other networks — particularly those measured by Podtrac, like NPR, This American Life, and HowStuffWorks — and therefore how it fares in comparison. Nonetheless, it’s a useful piece of information to have in your back pocket.

Related: After last week’s implosion of Milo Yiannopoulos, the now-former Breitbart editor and ostensibly conservative provocateur, PodcastOne appears to have terminated his podcast — which the network produced in partnership with Breitbart — and scrubbed any trace of it from iTunes and the network’s website.

DGital Media announces a partnership with Bill Bennett, the conservative pundit and Trump advisor, in the form of a weekly interview podcast that promises to take listeners “inside the Trump administration and explain what’s really going in Washington, D.C. without the hysteria or the fake news in the mainstream media.” (Oy.) The first episode, which features Vice President Mike Pence, dropped last Thursday.

Interestingly enough, Bennett now shares a podcast production partner with Recode and, perhaps most notably, Crooked Media, the decidedly progressive political media startup helmed by former Obama staffers Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, and Jon Lovett.

Related: Crooked Media continues to expand its podcast portfolio with its third show, With Friends Like These, an interview-driven podcast by political columnist Ana Marie Cox.

Bites:

• Hmm: “As it defines relationship with stations, NPR gains board approval for price hike.” Consider this a gradual shift in system incentives, one that anticipates potential decreases in federal support and further shifts in power relations between the public radio mothership and the vast, structurally diverse universe of member stations. (Current)
• And sticking with NPR for a second: Their experiments with social audio off Facebook doesn’t seem to have yielded very much. (Curios)
• This is interesting: “Progressive legislators turn to podcasts to spread message.” (The Missouri Times) It does seem to speak directly to the stuff I highlighted in my column about the ideological spread of podcasts from last summer, along with my piece for Vulture about the future of political podcasts.

1. Initial, that is, if you don’t count Clarify, the tentative first English-language original podcast that the company produced with Mic.com and Headcount.org back in 2013.

But even with that seemingly broad consensus that things have changed, many newsroom leaders are dealing with some old questions in some old ways — even as they position themselves as having evolved past those earlier norms.

One example: The public radio program Marketplace. This week, reporter Lewis Wallace wrote that Marketplace had fired him “for publishing a post on my personal blog about being a transgender journalist exploring what it means to do truthful, ethical journalism with a moral compass in this very complex time.” Here’s an extended excerpt from Wallace’s original post, “Objectivity is dead, and I’m okay with it“:

Neutrality isn’t real: Neutrality is impossible for me, and you should admit that it is for you, too. As a member of a marginalized community (I am transgender), I’ve never had the opportunity to pretend I can be “neutral.” After years of silence/denial about our existence, the media has finally picked up trans stories, but the nature of the debate is over whether or not we should be allowed to live and participate in society, use public facilities and expect not to be harassed, fired or even killed. Obviously, I can’t be neutral or centrist in a debate over my own humanity. The idea that I don’t have a right to exist is not an opinion, it is a falsehood. On that note, can people of color be expected to give credence to “both sides” of a dispute with a white supremacist, a person who holds unscientific and morally reprehensible views on the very nature of being human? Should any of us do that? Final note here, the “center” that is viewed as neutral can and does shift; studying the history of journalism is a great help in understanding how centrism is more a marketing tactic to reach broad audiences than actual neutrality. Many of the journalists who’ve told the truth in key historical moments have been outliers and members of an opposition, here and in other countries. And right now, as norms of government shift toward a “post-fact” framework, I’d argue that any journalist invested in factual reporting can no longer remain neutral.

It matters who is making editorial decisions: I think marginalized people, more than ever now, need to be at the table shaping the stories the fact-based news media puts out. I think people crave the honesty, the uniqueness, the depth that comes out of bringing an actual perspective to our work. My experience is that audiences want us to be truthful and fair, but they don’t want us to be robots. And they don’t want us to all be white and male, a situation which creates its own sort of bias toward the status quo, male power and white racism.

“I wanted to hear what other journalists might think about it, and start a conversation about how media organizations need to adapt when freedom of information and the press are under attack,” Wallace — who says he was “the only out transgender reporter at Marketplace or, that I know of, at any national radio outlet” — wrote in a follow-up Medium post, “I was fired from my journalism job ten days into Trump.“

“I was asked, when I started there, to occasionally blog for Marketplace on Medium, as well as set up a Medium blog where I would write and talk about some of my own stuff,” Wallace, 32, told me. “I thought that was awesome. The idea that we were going to do digital experimentation, and that there would be more of a voice to our work — it was one of the reasons I wanted to work at Marketplace, one of the things I really liked about working there, and one of the big reasons I didn’t think that what I wrote would be controversial per Marketplace’s policies.”

He added: “I thought it might be controversial in terms of conversations with other journalists, and was hoping to have that conversation publicly. I thought that might be a great thing for Marketplace, in terms of developing the public trust and showing that we’re real people, thinking about things and trying to figure things out.”

Last week, Wallace was told that his post was in violation of Marketplace’s ethics code, and that he would be suspended from air and should not come into work for the rest of the week. He took down the post at Marketplace’s request; later, he republished it. On Monday, Deborah Clark, the executive producer and VP of Marketplace, fired him.

“She said that she felt I had made it clear what kind of journalism I want to do, and that that’s not the kind of journalism we do at Marketplace,” Wallace told me. “I said I thought this decision to fire me was a mistake. I said that I thought I had done great work at Marketplace, and that there was a lot more I could bring. I said the thing I wrote [in the Medium post] about the line between journalism and activism being, to me, not as clear as maybe she feels like it is — especially in this time when we have to stand up for truth, and for our work as journalists, more urgently. Those were the things that I said.”

To be clear, none of the work that Wallace had already done for Marketplace was being criticized. “The journalism that I did at Marketplace was never called into question,” he said. “I really did think that I wanted to do the kind of journalism that Marketplace wanted to do.”

Publications should recognize that trust with Big Media is down, and instead listen to staffers with mouthpieces, in the field.

— Annemarie Dooling (@TravelingAnna) January 31, 2017

My take is extremism is considered acceptable in public broadcasting as long as the cause is neutrality. @Marketplace https://t.co/umWW3KHqQY

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) January 31, 2017

What made this incident more remarkable is that, coincidentally, I’d interviewed Clark and other Marketplace staffers — Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood — for a piece I wrote about Marketplace’s renewed efforts to reach beyond the traditional public radio audience recently. And one of the things that we talked about — which I didn’t include in my final piece, but which is in my notes — was how Marketplace thinks about objectivity and neutrality, framed in part through an internal debate over using the word “lie.” Clark told me:

Marketplace has always been different than other news programs on public radio, and we don’t, as a shop, believe in the view from nowhere. I think that has its real limitations. I think that you see, you can see and hear that in the voice that we have on air, which is different, and you can also see it in social media.

For those who don’t follow the lingo in media studies debates, the “view from nowhere,” in a journalism context at least, is an idea Jay Rosen has been using for years to explain how many newsrooms think about objectivity.

In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position “impartial.” Second, it’s a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.

When I spoke with Clark, she spoke favorably of Ryssdal’s Twitter account, where he is often clearly critical of Trump (though he passes it off in a somewhat impersonal, “just observing the news!” way more than Wallace did) and of the “different audience” that Ryssdal and Wood have built on social media. (Wallace told me it was “expected that we would tweet and kind of develop our own presence and our own voice in that”; when I asked him if he felt that the standard for him was different than it was for more senior Marketplace employees, he said, “I guess I would leave that to others to judge, just based on what I wrote and what they see that’s out there in the public.”)

@reblavoie @kairyssdal @Marketplace @LewisPants How is this remaining objective? Double standard? pic.twitter.com/vFYprpHSlf

— Andrew Ramsammy (@ramsammy) January 31, 2017

Ryssdal also said to me when we spoke: “It’s really challenging right now to figure out how…to be as factual and neutral as possible when the whole playbook has changed and the landscape is different.” And he and Clark clearly disagreed on use of the word “lie” on air (“that’s very charged and I can tell you we don’t agree on it,” Ryssdal said. Clark: “We do not all agree on this; I have an issue with ‘lie’ because I think it implies an understanding of intent that is not always apparent. I think there’s that, and then I think ‘lie’ can be polarizing to somebody who might potentially agree with what you’re saying if what you’re doing is disagreeing, whereas if you use charged language, you’re driving them away”).

It’s odd to see the same news organization, on one hand, brag about how it has moved beyond the viewlessness of old norms and given its senior journalists room to express their opinions, while on the other firing a junior staffer who had expressed thoughts that would barely be considered controversial in a Media Studies 101 class.

I asked Marketplace for a comment on Wallace’s piece, specifically in light of Clark’s comments during my previous interview with her. I received the following statement from Clark:

The Marketplace voice is something that makes us unique, it’s that balance of wit and the seriousness of the news that we try to strike. Anyone who listens to the shows we produce knows that’s what makes us special. When I talk about not being part of the ‘view from nowhere,’ that doesn’t mean we do advocacy or biased journalism. We do independent, objective reporting that brings forward a balanced point of view on the news we cover. We put real people on air — our interview subjects — and their real life experience is what helps shape that view, not the personal point of view of our journalists.

Marketplace also offered a company statement:

The broader issue around journalistic ethics is an ongoing one for the industry, with each media entity needing to define what it means for how they report. For Marketplace, it’s very clear. We are committed to raising the economic intelligence of all Americans. We accomplish that with independent and objective reporting that is based on facts, pursues the truth, and covers what’s happening in a fair and neutral way. Our journalists’ mission is to be honest, impartial, nonpartisan and independent in their work. Our team is a diverse group of professionals who have committed to that code of ethics. We don’t discuss personnel matters about current or former employees.

It’s hypocrisy for journo organizations to not ask, who and what we are, and what are we doing? While we examine everyone else. @LewisPants

— Al Letson (@Al_Letson) January 31, 2017

In a recent post arguing why reporters should be able to join the Women’s March — something forbidden by many newsrooms including the San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and NPR — Iranian-American journalist Shaya Tayefe Mohajer wrote:

This era promises to bring more challenges for diverse journalists, who have been harassed and targeted by Trump himself and by the rabid internet trolls who often back him…Newsrooms can’t selectively pretend away the diversity within their ranks when they feel it doesn’t serve them, only clinging to it when it produces better access and more richly reported stories from within minority communities. I fear the message such a rule really sends is: Welcome into our newsrooms, all you wonderfully diverse reporters and editors. Could you please leave your pesky identities and demands for fairness at the door?

If, through reporting, journalists see that the administration’s actions will change people’s lives for the worse, newsrooms must recognize that those people can include their own reporters. If we agree that increasing diversity within newsrooms is not only the right thing to do but imperative for the future of our industry, then newsroom leaders should acknowledge that straight white men have had the easiest time seeing the merits of — and have benefited most from — dictionary definitions of objectivity. Or, as Wallace put it in his second post:

I hope people understand my messages here: that we cannot have token diversity without making actual space for the realities of being a marginalized or oppressed person doing journalism; that we cannot look to the same old tools to defend truth in reporting; that we must work harder and do more to truly represent the communities we report on and on behalf of in order to build trust and remain relevant. I have always believed these things, but didn’t expect that these beliefs would be put so harshly to the test, so soon after Donald Trump came into power.

“I would like it very much if you would ask the Massachusetts Government to give some money to Channel Two,” she wrote, referring to WGBH, Boston’s non-commercial television station. “It does not get enough money because it doesn’t have advertisements. Channel Two might like to get some money from the government as long as the government will not tell Channel Two what to say.”

WGBH was one of the most well-funded stations in the country, producing hours of original programming. While there were a handful of other stations similar to WGBH, most areas of the country weren’t served by such robust non-commercial broadcasters.

Kennedy wrote back, saying that WGBH was already receiving some federal funding and promising that “the Federal government is able to assist the educational television facilities across the country without limiting or restricting their programming.” What he didn’t mention was that there was already a major effort underway to totally overhaul the country’s public television network.

Beginning in late 1965, the 15-member Carnegie Commission on Educational Television had been working began work to assemble a report that studied the state of noncommercial television and proposed mechanisms to improve the system with increased funding, improved technology, and revamped programming.

There was an “urgent need to project the requirements for the future if we are to meet educational, social and cultural demands. This will call for recommendations on not only the facilities and finances of educational television, but also the manpower and organization,” President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote in November 1965 in a letter to the board’s chair, former MIT president James R. Killian Jr.

Their work culminated in a report, “Public Television: A Program For Action,” which addressed the challenges Johnson raised. Released 50 years ago this week, the document became the foundation for what would become the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which was signed into law that November. That legislation established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which led to the creation of both PBS and NPR. (The Carnegie Commission was solely focused on TV; financing for public radio was a last-minute addition to the legislation.)

It is no small irony that, exactly 50 years later, the Trump administration is reportedly planning to eliminate public funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The commission’s report had called for a ongoing funding mechanism — a tax on the purchase of every new TV set — that would protect public broadcasters from political battles in Washington. That recommendation didn’t make it into the final legislation, and CPB, PBS, and NPR have over the years become frequent political targets, primarily for Republicans. It’s a long way from Johnson’s Great Society to the Trump administration — but it’s worth looking back half a century at the forces that animated and informed the rise of today’s public media system.

The Boston philanthropist Ralph Lowell, considered the founding father of WGBH, initially proposed the idea for a commission in 1964 and was instrumental in organizing it. It was only three years after Federal Communications Commission chairman Newt Minow had given his famous “vast wasteland” speech, which summed up some of the anxiety surrounding the still relatively new medium:

When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

The commission — which included then-current or former presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Cal Tech; business and union leaders; and artists such as the author Ralph Ellison and concert pianist Rudolf Serkin — met for its first meetings on December 17, 1965, and it began to grapple with how it could grow a non-commercial television system that until then was mostly an exchange of pre-recorded educational programming.

Lowell — of the Boston Brahmin Lowells — addressed that first meeting of the Carnegie Commission and starkly described what confronted the assembled group.

“We have in this country right now, two systems for using television,” Lowell said. “One the commercial, is huge, powerful, enormously well financed. It has vast technical capacity, superb equipment, endless energy. The other, the educational is relatively puny, ineffectual, and financially undernourished. It is all too often lacking in people, in leadership and in drive.”

Throughout 1966, the commission conducted surveys, commissioned studies, and received feedback from more than 225 individuals and groups. Its members traveled to 92 stations in 35 states as well as broadcasters in seven foreign countries, including Japan, Germany, and the U.K.

The work of the commission, which was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, established much of the public-broadcasting ethos that still underpins the programming and journalism PBS, NPR, and other public broadcasters produce today. It even came up with the phrase “public television” itself. (Other ideas considered: General Television Service, TV One, and Standard TV.)

By developing a centralized corporation, the commission was able to support the creation of standardized national programming as well as local stations across the country to better cover their communities while creating programs to educate and inform their local viewership:

Public Television programming can deepen a sense of community in local life. It should show us our community as it really is. It should be a forum for debate and controversy. It should bring into the home meetings, now generally untelevised, where major public decisions are hammered out, and occasions where people of the community express their hopes, their protests, their enthusiasms, and their will. It should provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard.

Public Television programs can help us see America whole, in all its diversity. To a degree unequaled by any other medium, Public Television should be a mirror of of the American Style. It should remind us of our heritage and enliven our traditions. Its programs should draw on the full range of emotion and mood, from the comic to the tragic, that we know in American life. It should help us look at our achievements and difficulties, at our conflicts and agreements, at our problems, and at the far reach of our possibilities. Public Television programs should help us know what it is to be many in one, to have growing maturity in our sense of ourselves as a people.

In the end, the commission called for the creation of a Corporation for Public Television, a publicly funded nonprofit that could support local stations and fund programming. It advocated investments in technology to enable nationwide live broadcasts and connect the distant stations into a coherent system.

Educational origins

Those stations that became the system’s building blocks mostly traced their roots back to educational broadcasters based at universities and other educational institutions.

“Here in Wisconsin, where I am, public broadcasting in radio and later television had existed for 50 years. It was part of university extension. That’s where educational radio began, with extension services at universities,” University of Wisconsin professor Jack Mitchell told me. Mitchell was NPR’s first employee, a producer for All Things Considered.

“It wasn’t everywhere, but throughout the midwest — Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Ohio State — that’s where the center of educational broadcasting had been, and it was really a university-based thing from the early 1920s through 1967,” Mitchell said. “Part of the point of the Carnegie Commission was to pull it out of a strictly educational background and make it more of a public service.”

By the 1960s, financial support for educational broadcasting was haphazard. Foundations — particularly the Ford Foundation — supported broadcasting, and stations also received a mix of funding from various levels of government, institutional license holders, individual donations, and underwriting.

Along with more uniform funding mechanisms, the Carnegie Commission also sought to redefine the type of programming on public TV. Until then, programming varied widely from station to station. While stations such as Boston’s WGBH did broadcast local news and performances by the Boston Pops and Boston Symphony Orchestra, many stations only aired instructional programming, for only a few hours a day.

Much of the content came from the National Educational Television, a nonprofit underwritten by the Ford Foundation, which produced 10 hours of programming each week. There was also the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, which advocated on behalf of non-commercial broadcasters.

“It was a very unstable proposition…There was no funding. The programming remained inconsistent, even though there were set-aside frequencies,” Catholic University professor Joshua Shepperd, who also leads the Library of Congress’ Radio Preservation Task Force, told me. “It required a certain amount of centralization because universities in Idaho, for example, weren’t as good as in Boston with WGBH.”

The Carnegie Commission didn’t want to produce programs that were aimed only at classroom viewing or purely instructional purposes, which had been NET’s primary focus. Instead, it wanted to support more cultural and public affairs programming — including journalism — that viewers of all ages and backgrounds would want to watch.

“The challenge is not in the direction of ‘anything you can do, I can do better,’ but rather in doing it as well as the best of journalism, and then fostering the ingenuity to challenge every item for its genuine significance…[and] to relate seemingly different areas in the news to display patters of human behavior, e.g. crime-to-psychology-to-economics-to-politics-to education; or athletics-to-medicine-to-longeviity-to-family responsibility,” commission member Robert Saudek said in a November 1966 memo. “If we are going to strike at the king we had better kill him, or he will strike back.”

In its final report, the commission detailed its vision for high-quality local and national content. It envisioned a system of funding, facilities, and editorial flexibility that could support the creation of “first-rate programming”:

The major innovation in Public Television will arise out of the environment it will provide to attract talented people and release their skills and creativity in a medium of great service to the American public. This environment with its freedom, its scope, and its adequate facilities, should enable Public Television to develop a broad range of quality programs beyond anything now available.

Finding funding

The Corporation for Public Television was the central component of the commission’s plan for public television. It said it would “be reluctant to recommend the other parts of its plan unless the corporate entity is brought into being.”

The commission envisioned the corporation as an independent nonprofit that would receive federal and private funds and distribute them to support local stations and programming.

That’s generally the way the Corporation for Public Broadcasting works today, except for the private-money part — donations are generally directed at individual programs, stations, or networks. In the 2014 fiscal year, CPB’s operating budget was $445.5 million, and 95 percent of that money goes toward directly support the public broadcasting system.

The source of that federal money was originally proposed to be that excise tax on all new television set purchases. “We felt that the problem here was a problem of principle,” Killian said in an interview on ABC shortly after the report was published. “How one insulated this — a corporation for public television — from the annual budgetary review both on the part of the Congress and on the part of the executive branch. And it seemed to us that a trust fund into which funds would flow from a fixed tax, such as the excise tax, was the best way of giving this protection and insulation. If someone comes up with an invention that does this thing, that meets this requirement equally well, other than the excise tax, I think we would all be very happy about it.”

That, however, wasn’t politically feasible. Though Killian and other board members testified before Congress and lobbied senators and representatives, the bill wouldn’t have gotten through Congress if there had been a fixed funding mechanism attached to it, according to Mitchell, the Wisconsin professor.

Instead, the Johnson administration requested $9 million in general funding for CPB in its first fiscal year, 1969. The corporation ended up with a $5 million appropriation.

In its report, the commission calculated that an excise tax would’ve provided the corporation with $40 million — just in its first year, plus whatever private funds it would have raised.

“The idea had been that not only would the excise tax go into funding the corporation, but other people would donate,” Mitchell said. “All the funding then would be centralized in this one place and they would be able to create a unified service that would make sense. That didn’t happen either, so what it turned out to be was that every program had to scramble for its own funding. That has crippled public television tremendously. If you wanted to do a program series on whatever, you had to go out and get five or six funders who would come up with the money for you to do it. That would take two or three years sometimes to pull together the funding. It was never dynamic and it was never flexible. Whereas, if you had one big pot of money, and they said let’s go out and do this series, and then bang you’re doing it. That crippled public television especially and radio too to some extent, but that was the fatal flaw: No money.”

CPB’s appropriation has been stagnant at around $445 million since the 2012 fiscal year. Its appropriations are passed through Congress two years at a time, which it says helps shield it from some political pressures, and President Obama’s final budget proposed maintaining funding levels at current levels through the 2019 fiscal year.

The Trump administration hasn’t announced a formal proposal on CPB funding, but a report in The Hill says officials were planning to follow a Heritage Foundation budget proposal that would reduce federal funding to zero at CPB, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. PBS and NPR “could make up the lost money by increasing revenue from corporate sponsors, foundations and members,” the Heritage plan argues.

Politicians threatening public broadcasting is nothing new — from President Richard Nixon seeking budget cuts (an effort derailed in part by the testimony of a young Mister Rogers) and later seeking to ban public affairs programming, to Mitt Romney’s declaration in a 2012 presidential debate that he would cut funding even though he said “I like PBS. I love Big Bird.” A CPB spokeswoman said CPB had yet to be contacted by the Trump administration and pointed to a statement the corporation issued after The Hill’s report:

From time to time, some argue the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and funding for public media are no longer needed. This thinking and proposals like the one being reported in the mainstream media and elsewhere today have been circulating around Washington for years and have been soundly rejected on a bipartisan basis — most recently by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in 2015.

Despite the funding challenges, CPB says it remains committed to the values described in the Carnegie Commission report. Terrestrial broadcasting remains an important way for public broadcasters to reach underserved and rural communities, but as Internet usage has grown, CPB has funded digital programs to increase the reach of public broadcasters online. The corporation, for instance, funded the development of a streaming video player for PBS.

“What we had done was really look at that as another platform for our full experience of content,” CPB senior vice president, education and children’s content operations Debra Tica Sanchez told me. “In the commercial space, what was happening was that commercial providers were looking for ways to produce small bites of the content to be consumed by kids. Where you might get a two-minute segment online as a non-cable subscriber, for example, coming to PBS.org you would get the entire episode online. Our mandate and our mission is universal reach and access for all. We want to make sure our content has that broad reach.”

When the report was published, there were 124 educational television stations in the United States. NPR launched in 1970 with 90 charter stations. Today, there are 366 public TV stations and 1,123 public radio stations in the United States.

That growth has been possible despite the limitations of the system and its creation. Public radio, a last-minute addition to the Public Broadcasting Act, has become a key cog in local and national news, with NPR and its member stations producing the most prominent radio journalism in the United States.

A second Carnegie Commission on public broadcasting was convened in 1977, but its report proposing on how to expand the system didn’t gain much traction. Even to this day, CPB, PBS, NPR, and the local stations still have differences that they confront from time to time.

Regardless, public broadcasting, which assumed its modern form as a result of the initial Carnegie Commission report, has become an indelible part of the American fabric.

After the commission’s work was concluded, Killian, the former MIT president, joined CPB’s board, eventually becoming its chairman. In a 1981 interview for an oral history project on the history of public broadcasting, he insisted that public broadcasting was here to stay.

“I have the feeling that the American people want public television,” he said. “And when they’re faced with the possibility of losing it — unless cable comes in and does things that I don’t see them yet doing — there will be a welling up of public support for the continuation of public broadcasting.”

Public radio wants to do its part to help bridge those divides. With Indivisible, a new nightly call-in show that premieres Monday night at 8 p.m. ET, WNYC, Minnesota Public Radio, and The Economist will cover the first 100 days of the Trump administration, tracing the major issues that divide Americans, and hopes to help bring some of them together.

To that end, Indivisible will rotate its four hosts, each of whom will cover different topics and, ideally, bring in new groups of listeners. WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, for example, will cover politics’ “new normal.” Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative radio host, will focus on ideological divides in the country. WNYC’s Kai Wright along with The Economist’s John Prideaux and Anne McElvoy will take the global view on topics, and Minnesota Public Radio’s Kerri Miller will cover the changing picture of American identity. The program will air Monday through Thursday until April, and will be published as a podcast as well.

“Public radio is truly unique in the sense that it has deep roots in thousands of communities around the country, at the same time it’s also a national force,” said Laura Walker, president and CEO of WNYC, which is spearheading the project. “And it’s also live and about the power of the voice. I don’t think anyone else can do this the way public radio can.”

I spoke to Walker about media coverage of the election, media’s role in creating common ground for public discourse, and radio’s unique ability to humanize people with different viewpoints.

The next day was the start of NPR’s Serendipity Days — a few days each quarter when NPR digital employees can take a step back from their daily work to focus on something else. Bawcombe and Kaytee Nesmith, a senior product designer, had decided to spend their serendipity time creating a podcast for kids.

So that night Bawcombe decided to ask for feedback from one of their potential future listeners: her then-five-year-old daughter.

“As a parent, I am not an expert on children — except maybe on one child on the planet,” said Bawcombe. It’s hard to say whether what appeals to one child will appeal to another. “There’s a lot of room for experimentation.”

While there’s growing interest around children’s audio — there’s even a community group, Kids Listen, with a dedicated Slack — and many public radio stations throughout the United States already offer programming or podcasts aimed at younger audiences, NPR didn’t have anything specifically targeting a younger crowd. “we wanted to find out more about what NPR could offer for kids,” Bawcombe said — specifically for 4- to 8-year-olds.

This fall, after subsequent Serendipity Days and going through a two-week program in NPR’s editorial incubator Story Lab, the pair released two sample episodes of the podcast, which they named Raydiddy.

One episode was about bees, and the other was about sick days. The episodes begin with Bawcombe and Nesmith interviewing kids and talking with experts. For the bee episode, they spoke with an elementary school science teacher and a beekeeper.

Bawcombe and Nesmith spent their initial time figuring out the structure of the podcast and producing an initial proof of concept. They had to decide which topics to focus on, how to balance adult and kids’ voices, and how to make sure the episodes were engaging for young listeners.

Next, as they participated in Story Lab, Bawcome and Nesmith were able to take two weeks off from their day jobs to focus exclusively on the podcast. As designers, Nesmith said working during the two-week sprint came naturally to them.

“Since Libby and I come form this digital design background, we’re used to having two weeks to focus on one specific chunk of work with the express goal of a release,” Nesmith said. “Going into Story Lab was an easy transition. It followed very much the workflow and path that we knew.” The two worked with Story Lab’s Michael May to determine what they could accomplish in the two-week sprint. May encouraged them to think critically about the stories they were trying to tell and what their roles would be on the show.

They planned a day-by-day schedule and plotted out how they would plan out the stories, conduct interviews, write scripts, and edit the tape.

They found that interviewing kids is more challenging than interviewing adults. “[Even if] the kid is very outspoken in regular life, when you put the headphones on and give them the microphone, they clam up,” Bawcombe said. “There are some ways to draw them out, but there’s not a way you can push a child to talk, the way you can when you’re interviewing another adult and you can push them to give you more.”

Bawcombe and Nesmith also had to learn how to use NPR’s audio recording equipment. As digital designers, the pair had little experience producing podcasts, but they said they relished the opportunity to try their hands at audio while exploring a potential area of growth for NPR.

“The one thing I found to be really challenging was figuring out the levels of volume and voices and evening those out,” Nesmith said. “You don’t want to randomly start shouting at your listener.”

Bawcombe and Nesmith posted the episodes on Medium and asked for feedback. As of now, they have no concrete plans to move forward with the project permanently. They did say, however, that they might use future Serendipity time to work on Raydiddy.

No matter what ultimately happens with the podcast, they both said that working on Raydiddy helped give them a better appreciation for what goes on in other departments at NPR.

“It was nice immersing ourselves in that world,” Bawcombe said.

“We want to be strategic about program development and make sure people across content divisions are in conversation with each other,” Anya Grundmann, NPR’s VP of programming and audience, told me. “We’ve gotten pretty good at thinking across the organization. Shankar Vedantam started as a segment on Morning Edition, which is now also a podcast. Our politics podcast has changed how our politics news sounds. We are trying to be very conscious that pulling a lever in one place has an impact elsewhere.”

To better create an environment where that sort of cross-pollination happens, NPR today announced an expansion and restructuring of what it calls its Story Lab — a multi-part initiative that includes teams from programming, NPR’s internal News Lab, NPR Training, and the listening app NPR One. Grundmann, together with VP for news programming and operations Chris Turpin, heads it up.

Testing and incubating new ideas has been happening at NPR, of course, but spread across a number of different units and in a number of distinct ways. NPR One has served as its own lab for testing (and getting listener data from) pilots, such as an environmental podcast. Last year, what was then called the Storytelling Lab (led by Turpin and Michael May) launched to formalize processes by which NPR staffers can pursue and pitch longstanding passion projects outside of the standard news cycle, then figure out how to bring those ideas on air. The newly reframed Story Lab aims to bring those and other efforts under a common structure.

“We’ve been trying to unleash new voices from within NPR and partner stations, and Story Lab plays a big role in that,” Steve Nelson, NPR’s newly appointed director of programming, said. “The idea is to take a successful innovation hub and broaden it across the entire organization.”

“The new Story Lab group is designed so that I can say, ‘OK, I made this thing, now I’ll hand it over to this bigger group to do what I’d been trying to do alone,'” May said. “I’m still going to be an advocate for my projects on my side, but when it comes to show creation, things have been streamlined.”

One output from NPR’s recent innovation efforts was announced today: In June, in partnership with AIR, NPR hosted a storytelling workshop at its headquarters for 12 teams chosen through an open application process to hone specific projects. NPR today announced the three podcast ideas it’s chosen to fund pilot episodes for. (The other nine teams from the workshop are also still plugging away at their projects.)

The new and improved Story Lab is trying to open up more ways for ideas to surface from people who might otherwise have no obvious outlet. NPR Training and AIR will hold another training program next March for at least 10 teams (applications opened Wednesday, and independent producers are welcome).

“We’re looking for a mix of ideas from a mix of places and backgrounds, in a mix of formats — not just podcasts, but radio series, investigative projects. The goal is to bring a variety of ideas into the building of the workshop,” Eric Athas, a member of the NPR Training team, said. (NPR Training also runs public workshops online and does a range of internal work, from helping a new podcast hone workflow to assisting another team with technical audio skills.)

“We’re looking for shows and podcasts that are going to reach a younger audience and be more diverse,” Nelson said. “Internally, we’ve been reaching out to different shows and different talent who can make shows, though we’re not ready to talk about [those projects] yet.”

Congratulations to “The Stoop,” “Do Over” and “Drugged” on getting @NPR funding for their pilots https://t.co/SBStlMvWIu pic.twitter.com/HPzM34vR9B

— NPR Training (@nprtraining) October 19, 2016

May’s Storytelling Lab lives on, but morphed into what is now called the NPR News Lab, which is part of the new Story Lab. (We speak from experience here: There are too many things in journalism named “Lab.”) It will continue to serve as an internal incubator for early-stage ideas, which can move on to a pitch and pilot review process. May holds callouts for ideas (which don’t need to strictly adhere to hard news — the last theme was “humor”), embeds with interested people on the news side who have specific ideas, and runs “mashup” days where people from different desks take two days off the daily grind to get to know each other’s work and share ideas. “Ideas” aren’t full-blown podcasts or new on-air shows, May stresses; they can be a series of pieces that run on one of the newsmagazines, or a segment from a producer who has a story idea but has never voiced a piece before.

“People are still excited about putting things on the radio. We’re not just going to be launching a new podcast every month,” May said. “We take a lot of care figuring out what we’re putting out in the podcast space, and if you really want to get what you’re working on through our story lab sprints, a podcast is going to be much more scrutinized. [But] we still have an incredible opportunity to bring some of that podcasting spirit onto our shows.”

NPR is launching an online portal to handle pitches from both within NPR and outside it and to make the process more systematic and transparent.

“Previously, if you had an idea internally, you’d go to Michael May and apply for the internal Story Lab. But there are people across the organization who have tremendous ideas, so how do we make sure all the ideas go through one place to be evaluated?” said N’Jeri Eaton, senior manager of programming acquisitions and Nelson’s partner-in-crime focused on looking outside of NPR for new contributors and podcasts. “Once the portal is up, [you’ll be able to] go pitch your idea, and it’ll be reviewed on several points.”

Eaton is making no prescriptions for the types of shows NPR wants to acquire. Rather, she said, NPR is evaluating shows based on the strength of the overall proposal, the potential audience, and the feasibility of the project — what it would take to get it up and running, whether it has a business model, how much it would cost to produce episodes on a regular basis.

“I think there’s maybe this perception that we have one central show we’re comparing all these other potential new projects to,” she said. “But we’re really evaluating each one independently for what it’s bringing to the table that we don’t currently have. There’s no single set of metrics we’re looking at.”

If you missed #DebateNight, get caught up with our fact check from the @nprpolitics team. https://t.co/YpjTXNKnhS pic.twitter.com/o8DgbBxIpx

— NPR (@NPR) September 27, 2016

NPR used a transcription service that provides closed captioning via its API and fed the transcript into a single Google Doc where staffers cleaned up the transcription as it came in. Reporters, editors, the visuals team, copyeditors, researchers — ultimately more than 50 people had access to the Google Doc — scrambled to add their annotations, which were individually approved, edited, and then published. A researcher was also backreading the transcript and annotations as they were published to correct typos. 90 NPR member stations embedded NPR.org’s live annotations on their own sites, according to a spokesperson.

transcription service ←→ google app script → google doc (+18 factcheckers) ←→ server → s3 → embedded widgethttps://t.co/Dzt3a0O4rL

— David Eads (@eads) September 27, 2016

“We already have pretty strong experience using Google Docs in this way, but what we’ve never done, and what was a big experiment for us this time, was having an external document feeding a Google Doc,” David Eads of the NPR Visuals Team said. (From the candidates’ mouths to the full transcription online, there was a one- to two-minute lag.) “On the technical side, we leaned heavily on Google Docs’ suggestion mode, which allowed reporters to just start typing an annotation straight into the document — a candidate’s record on childcare, or whatever it was — and gave us a chance to reformat and edit.”

“This is the first time we’ve done something of this scale. There’ve been predecessors, of course, and factchecking is something we hold dear at NPR, and we’ve done live annotation of speeches — but this had the biggest reach and required the biggest effort to process, partly because of the live transcript,” Amita Kelly, a digital editor on NPR’s Washington desk, said, pointing out that for other events such as the conventions, news outlets typically have access to prepared remarks ahead of time, and only have to deal with one speaker at a time on stage. They hoped to answer a few specific questions around what an audience might want from realtime fact-checking, including how much annotation was too much, and whether people even wanted to see a full transcript and would stay through the end, Kelly and Eads said.

NPR.org saw 7,413,000 pageviews from 6,011,000 users, and 22 percent of visitors to the page stayed all the way to the end, according to a spokesperson. Monday was NPR.org’s highest traffic day ever, with over 5 million visits. The annotated live transcript also saw 70 percent of its traffic coming from mobile devices, and people coming from mobile actually stayed four minutes longer than people coming from desktop, according to Eads.

“We think that might speak to the second screen, as well as to people who are in transit, who might want to be able to check this, people without access to sound — there could be a lot of reasons for that,” he said. “So this might be something we’d want to double down on — how to enhance that mobile experience.”

HRC: "I hope the fact-checkers are turning up the volume and really working hard."

FACT CHECK: WE ARE

— Sarah McCammon NPR (@sarahmccammon) September 27, 2016

.@NPR taking fact-checking the #PresidentialDebate to the next level. #nostoneleftunturned https://t.co/k1nKyv1k0g

— Ros Atkins (@BBCRosAtkins) September 27, 2016

Hands down, the evening's best fact-check: https://t.co/o290nez61d pic.twitter.com/QknmyYnjH5

— chris a smith (@chrisasmith) September 27, 2016

The NPR live transcript and fact checking was very useful and well played https://t.co/qL7FuIYikY

— Miguel Paz (@miguelpaz) September 27, 2016

Now there’s one more new audio service on the horizon, co-founded by former NPR Planet Money reporter Steve Henn along with John Ciancutti and Steve McLendon, both with long histories at — wait for it — Netflix. 60dB, named for the volume at which a (calm) human speaks, is being teased as a “service for high-quality, short-form stories,” though the co-founders were more reticent about sharing too many details of its inner workings when I spoke to them prior to the announcement of the service Thursday morning (Ciancutti, Henn, and McLendon’s company is called Tiny Garage Labs).

60dB will start off as an iOS app, and then move into a broader universe of devices. A working version of the product exists and has been tested within a tiny group, but isn’t being released to the broader public just yet, though you can sign up to get notified when it is available. (I haven’t played with it either, and the team isn’t releasing screenshots or other materials at the moment).

But in broad strokes: Users open the app, and it take signals from what subjects and types of stories and even people they’ve indicated they like, and 60dB will refine that feed of stories over time. The stories available on the platform will be easily searchable and contain familiar content aggregated from elsewhere, but also plenty of shortform content is new for the platform — emphasis on short.

There are “incredible stories people aren’t getting to hear,” Henn told me, whether because the length of many of the available podcasts “don’t fit into people’s lives,” or because it’s too difficult to discover shorter programming in single place.

I left @planetmoney to build this: @the60dB. If you tell stories I think we have something you will want to try.https://t.co/LW2trhJF0x

— Stephen Henn (@HennsEggs) September 22, 2016

I immediately thought of Acast’s attempts to emphasize diverse creators and niche interests, and of the constantly personalizing feed that NPR One offers. Henn and Ciancutti said that NPR One was a reasonable comparison: “But we wouldn’t be building this if we didn’t genuinely believe there wasn’t a good option already out there.” (I also immediately jumped to other conclusions, but 60dB is apparently not where NPR One lead Sara Sarasohn, who is leaving NPR, is headed)

60dB also intends to offer data to the people creating for the platform, and not just barebones metrics. One of Henn’s last stories for Planet Money was about A/B testing, for which the team actually tested the effectiveness of the Planet Money episode lede on NPR One.

“One of the things we realized when we can see this type of data is that people can tune out of a story skip or tune out very early, first few seconds, first minute or two of a longer podcast. If you’re going to lose a chunk of your audience, that’s the point at which you lose them,” Henn said. “So just knowing that allows you to think really carefully about what’s the best way to reduce this. That’s tremendously powerful. This is something I really want to share this with everyone else who might be doing this for a living. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. This is late in my career, and now I’m going ‘ah ha!'”

The team declined to say more when I asked about who was paying for Tiny Garage Labs’ work and what the revenue model going forward would be, but Ciancutti dropped a small hint at the direction the team might prefer to go.

“We are not telling our funding story right now. We’ve got plenty of thoughts on monetization, but no one point of view on that at this point,” he said. “But you can see there’s three co-founders, and two of us spent twelve years at Netflix. Looking at our backgrounds you could imagine some of the biases that we have.”

“Netflix was a powerful example of how you can build a company to change consumer behavior in an industry like television, but also create a business model that really has lead to a golden age for high quality television,” Henn added. “The way the industry works now supports more great stuff than ever before. And that’s not a given when a media institution makes the transition into the digital world. That’s what I left Planet Money to work on.”

1. I am extremely guilty of this.

“Exercise is good for every organ, it lowers the risk of every disease,” Goldberg told me, and she thought that she could encourage listeners to work out by helping them understand the benefits of exercise. Still, the podcast “got kind of yellow-lighted. We produced a pilot series of four, and it seemed promising, but we hadn’t quite figured out whether to go forward with it and what we should do with it.”

While Goldberg’s semi-produced podcast was languishing, another effort was getting off the ground at WBUR: Public Radio BizLab, a standalone team within the station with a mandate to try and develop new models for public media to make money and reach audiences.

The BizLab team was looking for projects to begin its experiments with, and with Goldberg’s podcast going unused, they together decided to use it as an opportunity to try something new.

As a result, the podcast, called The Magic Pill, is launching today, cohosted by Goldberg and Harvard Medical School professor Eddie Phillips. WBUR launched a pilot of the podcast earlier this summer, but the saying goes that it takes 21 days for people to develop new habits, so WBUR will be releasing episodes of the podcast daily over the next three weeks to help listeners get in the practice of exercising.

“They decided to use what was at that time was this half-baked product and to bring it to fruition to experiment with some of the lines they were working on as well,” Goldberg said.

Several of BizLab’s experiments are coming together around The Magic Pill. The podcast was developed using a Learning Plan, a planning tool BizLab created to map out new projects. Each episode of the podcast will feature a song from a blockchain music library that BizLab developed in partnership with researchers at the Berklee College of Music. And WBUR is using the podcast to test out its Dynamic Growth Dashboard, a custom-built web app that highlights metrics from across the station.

The results of all of BizLab’s experiments will be shared publicly, and it plans to help other public media outlets learn from its projects, BizLab executive director Meg Siegal told me in an interview at the Public Media Development and Marketing Conference in Boston last month.

“WBUR is like a Petri dish, and the ones we think will help other people, we’ll share,” she said. “The ones didn’t go well, we’ll still report on them.”

While we’re still healthy

The station green-lit BizLab in 2014. While many news organizations have struggled with the transition to a more digital world, WBUR’s business has held relatively strong — the station had $35 million in revenue in its 2015 fiscal year and ended the year with an $3.3 million surplus. But the station recognized that it should be trying to get ahead of technological change while it still could — to work to find new ways to support itself before the situation became desperate, said general manager Charlie Kravetz.

“We decided that while we were healthy and thriving was exactly the time when we should invest in a significant effort to explore outside of our revenue models, and bring together a team of people who would look at the big questions about what will be the major business model changes that will need to be embraced in the coming years.”

WBUR received a $250,000 grant to support BizLab from the Knight Foundation. (Knight also supports Nieman Lab.) The station also kicked in $250,000 from its own budget, and it’s raised another $750,000 from other sources. In all, BizLab has raised $1.25 million so far; the station’s goal is $5 million to fund the lab for five years and bring in additional staffers to help further its work.

Meg Siegal’s background is in advertising, and she joined WBUR last year to run BizLab. She works with Lisa Williams, who is BizLab’s engagement director.

BizLab’s first goal, Siegal said, was “to just start to look at how the organization in different departments was conducting research on its listeners, and what we knew about them.” Siegal worked with the design consulting firm IDEO for a two-week project that tried to identify different listener types and opportunity areas for WBUR. They did one-on-one interviews with about 20 listeners to ascertain how they consumed the station’s coverage and what they’d like to see from WBUR.

BizLab and Ideo then created five listener types that modeled the different ways WBUR’s listenership interacts with its programming and coverage, presenting them as animals. Dolphins are obsessed with public radio as a whole; lions feel a strong connection to WBUR specifically; flamingos “hunt and peck” depending on stories they’re interested in; collies are loyal to particular programs; turtles are listeners who are in long-term relationships with WBUR and public radio.

The report that emerged from the IDEO project highlighted different ways WBUR could connect with each group, but one of the main takeaways was that listeners across groups were interested in content that would “help me decompress, help me find time for self-care,” Siegal said.

“After we had that insight from talking with people, we then went back to the station and started to look what potentially existing assets and resources are there that we can fulfill this need that the audience has,” she said.

Learning Plan

That’s how BizLab took on The Magic Pill as a project. Siegal’s team was working on a number of other efforts simultaneously, and it was then able to apply those to developing the podcast.

They built the Learning Plan, for instance, because they couldn’t find a business modeling map that was really well suited for public media, where members and user retention is at the core of everything stations do.

The Learning Plan starts with a major research question. For The Magic Pill, WBUR asked: Are listeners who take action on content in a way that changes behavior more likely to donate or become members?

Staffers then plan out the opportunities and costs for content delivery, asset usage, targeted users, participating stakeholders, the business model, the definition of the experiment, and how it will be measured. For The Magic Pill, WBUR decided to distribute each day’s podcast episode via email instead of more traditional podcast channels. (You won’t find The Magic Pill in iTunes or your favorite podcast app.) It outlined that the cost of email distribution would be $75 per month for MailChimp.

The plan then lays out which type of users the product hopes to target. In the case of The Magic Pill, WBUR wants to provide its present listenership with an interesting podcast experience, but it also wants to attract new listeners and new members. The Learning Plan estimates that it will target about 2,200 members and a new audience of 50,000 people.

The business model section of the plan then described the email as one of the ways the station hopes to attract members with The Magic Pill. Answering the question, “Why would they pay?” the plan said because Magic Pill helped them feel “more hopeful about having daily fitness as a regular component of their life, and their contribution would make future CommonHealth productions possible.” They set goals for contributions of $10 to $120 per donor.

And because email is a pillar of The Magic Pill’s distribution strategy, they can then target specific audiences for contributions. Siegal said BizLab has worked with behavioral economists from the Harvard Business School about devising strategies for the best way to ask for money.

“If you’re not local, we’re not going to ask you to be a member,” she said. “We’re going to ask you if you want to buy an ebook that we have, 50 More Magic Pills, from content that Carey already wrote on the website. Or do you want to help Season 2, or to help more stuff.”

According to the effect section of the Learning Plan, 9,325 users had visited the Magic Pill’s landing page through Aug 31, and 4,383 of those users had signed up for the email. That section also sets out the team’s hypotheses for many of the metrics: They expect 1,250 people to visit The Magic Pill’s donation page, and they think 125 of those will become one-time donors and another 125 will become monthly sustainers.

Dynamic Growth Dashboard

Another key aspect of the learning plan is the effect measurement. BizLab is trying to establish a common set of metrics so staffers across WBUR have an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve and how to measure success.

That’s the thinking behind the Dynamic Growth Dashboard, the custom metrics system BizLab developed in partnership with Johanna Brewer, a developer and inventor with a Ph.D in information and computer science.

Much of the challenge of bringing more data into organizations’ operations is coordinating employees and making sure they understand what information they need and the most useful ways for them to measure and use it. Brewer interviewed 23 upper and middle managers from across the station to do an anthropological study of sorts; that led to a 15-page ethnographic report that detailed the state of the organization, how it communicates, and how it uses data to accomplish its tasks.

The second phase of the project was what Brewer called “an operations upgrade.” WBUR has regular managers’ meetings, and Brewer and Siegel took over one of those weekly meetings for a few weeks to discuss how they used data. They came up with a list of 180 metrics from across the station that they followed. Brewer then built a prototype and did some participatory design work with the managers to try and improve the product.

The third phase was the creation of the dashboard. “I don’t like to build stuff if I don’t have to, I like to just go shop in the marketplace and pick one out. But, as I looked around and saw some of the other initiative inside public media and outside public media, there really wasn’t anything really fit to what we wanted to do,” Brewer said.

WBUR wanted a tool that was accessible to everyone throughout the organization and ensured that staffers across departments were using data that was measured in the same way. Currently, many of these metrics are measured on a desk-to-desk or department-to-department basis, and there’s no centralized place to find the information.

“If we’re going to answer ‘number of users doing X,’ we need to always measure that in the same way,” Brewer said. “If you’re in that department and I’m in this department, we need to be using the same measuring tool, and it needs to be a scientific thing where if Jane or Joe measures it, they come up with the same answer because it’s science. This notion wasn’t controversial, but it was sort of a surprise to some people in the organization. A lot of what the dashboard does is it’s a shared artifact that encodes this information.”

The dashboard includes automated metrics such as web traffic stats, but other more bespoke datasets specific to the station are often collected and input into the system manually.

A challenge for Brewer was to figure out the best way to measure all that manually entered data, because different department kept their records based on different days. That can make it difficult for managers to make cross-departmental apples-to-apples comparisons.

“I had to do some interesting math work — nothing big, but it was non-trivial — to actually come up with an algorithm to solve that, but I did. And it’s really exciting, because once I implemented being able to see one department’s data that reports on Mondays, another department’s data that reports on Fridays, and lets say the GM wants to get a complicated comparison of that every Wednesday. Can we do it? Can it be cogent? And the answer is yes.”

Each metric has an “owner” responsible for that specific piece of data and detailing how specifically it is calculated. However, other dasboard users have access to the information and can create their own reports to suit their needs.

“Let’s say that we’re going to talk about Twitter followers for On Point,” the station’s nationally syndicated morning talkshow, Brewer said. “That’s one thing that we want to pay attention to. The way that we’re going to track that is going to be determined by the producer of the program. In the dashboard, her face is next to that metric, and it says how she gets it. There’s a space for her to write in how she’s computing this information — if she’s entering it manually or if it’s being entered automatically because you set up some hook, and it’ll say what service it’s speaking to and where it’s querying that number from. But it encodes it to say one person is responsible ultimately for getting it and monitoring it, and that person needs to explain exactly how it’s done.”

The dashboard is a responsive web app, and WBUR plans to make the code public so other outlets can use it as well.

WBUR plans to roll out access to the dashboard to staffers, and also to project it on screens around the station.

“We want to test it at WBUR, but then work with funders to help us white-label it and scale it to other organizations for free,” Siegal said. “The idea is that we can make this software so that another station can pick it up and customize it for themselves, because it would be so interesting to see if there was a way to have a view into the health of the public media system, and a view into the results from varying experiments that stations are doing.”

Blockchain

The Magic Pill podcast will also include songs from a blockchain music library that it built with a team from the Berklee College of Music. The library will allow WBUR to try out a new technology while also enabling it to bring new people into the public radio fold.

Blockchain is the same technology that the currency bitcoin is built on. Blockchain is essentially a public, uneditable, ledger that records whenever a file is accessed or transferred.

Users shouldn’t notice any difference in how they consume the music, but artists and producers will have more detailed data about how the songs are being used, said George Howard, a professor at Berklee and a music industry and technology veteran.

“Using blockchain tech, we’re able to track the usages of that music in a much more efficient way and, importantly, provide information data to all the stakeholders. To a musician, you might get a report saying: Hey, your music was used on this date, at this time, downloaded by this person at this time, etc. etc. For a listener, they might say: Hey, I like this music I would like to access it more frequently, and I’d like to pay for it. We can track that payment and fragmentally distribute that payment to WBUR, NPR, or the artist.”

BizLab worked with a company called Revelator to build the blockchain music library. The library is an early-stage prototype and includes a couple hundred songs mostly from local Boston artists.

But Howard said blockchain could ultimately make it easier for radio producers and podcasters to ensure that they have the proper rights for music they want to broadcast and allow them to use tunes from up-and-coming artists.

Blockchain could also give podcast or radio producers more detailed data about the music they’re using in their shows. For example, Howard said producers could look at the data to see whether podcasts are downloaded or shared more with a certain type of music in them. Public radio stations could also take a collection of songs and sell them to listeners as a fundraiser.

“Blockchain should be completely transparent. There’s a front end where [producers] don’t need to know that these songs are registered on an immutable ledger that’s distributed,” he said. “They don’t care. Nor should they. It’s the additional functionality [that’s important.]”

What’s next

These are still early days for BizLab. The Magic Pill and the projects currently launching around it are really the first projects to reach an audience after a year or so of research, planning, and development.

“This is a very exciting point in the growth of BizLab, in that this is really the first outward-facing, show-don’t-tell project of BizLab,” said John Davidow, WBUR’s managing director of digital. “It’s been gearing up toward this point.”

BizLab hopes to introduce a total of 10 experiments this year. This fall, Siegal said the lab is planning on working with the membership team to use the tools they’ve developed to look at new ways to engage with members.

Another tool in the works for BizLab is Bench, which would like to make it easier for producers to combine content, user engagement, and calls to action. Siegal and Williams have worked up a Learning Plan for the project, but they need more funding to get it underway.

WBUR is in the process of seeking out funding sources, including individual donors, grants, and more. Kravetz, the general manager, said BizLab would ultimately like to hire more people with background in technology, behavioral analytics, and other areas to help expand the focus of the experimentation.

“We’re very excited about the things we’re working on,” Kravetz said. “And we’re hopeful that even though this is kind of a big-ass idea, that out of it will come very few — even one — great big-ass idea that would be a breakthrough.”

The ideological spread of podcasts. It’s been…an interesting election cycle here in the United States, to say the least, one that’s caused me enough anxiety to burrow deeper into the insular, cord-cutting media cocoon I’ve built for myself — an assemblage of ye old newspapers (The New York Times and The Washington Post, mostly), cable TV (CNN, mostly), broadcast radio (public, mostly), social media (the ideologically self-reinforcing Facebook and Twitter, mostly) and, of course, podcasts — in a bid to find some assurance that everything will…be okay, I suppose, or whatever it is I’m trying to look for when I seek out election news.

Which isn’t a great way of doing things, of course, given that it’s a function of larger problems associated with media fragmentation and selective exposure (see the recent Wall Street Journal interactive feature “Red Feed, Blue Feed”) that’s believed to have exacerbated the country’s political polarization. Frankly, I buy this explanation of the present: the idea that the increasingly abundant, on-demand, and personalized nature of our news media has led to whole swathes of populations creating worlds and realities of their own that don’t have much reason to overlap and interact with each other, until they absolutely must (like, say, during a national election), in which case the result is pure combustion.

There was a Wired article by Charley Locke not too long ago that grabbed my attention — about a five-year-old conservative leaning podcast network called Ricochet — in which Locke characterized the podcast space to be disproportionately liberal. (Whether that refers to actual composition or representation is hard to establish; it’s related to all the ways we complain about the medium’s measurement difficulties.) Using the upper echelons of the iTunes charts as her principal dataset, Locke wrote: “There’s not much ideological diversity in the conversation…Podcasts have proven a viable platform to reach a liberal audience, just as radio talk shows have for conservative listeners. But what does that mean for the Americans in the middle?”

Of course, characterizing some media organization versus others as liberal is sticky business. Locke’s rubric places organizations like NPR, FiveThirtyEight, Vox.com, and Slate in the liberal bucket, a characterization that might be challenged by some of these institutions more so than others. (Indeed, NPR has had a long history of being accused of liberal bias — a charge they constantly challenge — while one imagines FiveThirtyEight and Vox would orient themselves more towards analytical impartiality.) However, given Locke’s other more unambiguous examples — former Obama staffers Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer’s Keepin’ It 1600 with The Ringer, and David Axelrod’s The Axe Files with CNN, both of which are expressions of that administration’s relative comfort with the medium , recently covered by the Times — her overarching point seems to hold: The podcast charts don’t offer very much in the way ofexplicitly conservative programming, and one could understandably draw a hypothesis about the medium’s larger ideological distribution from that.

There are a few noteworthy exceptions: The iTunes top 100 currently charts a podcast featuring Milo Yiannopoulos, the controversial writer and editor for the conservative Breitbart News Network who was recently banned by Twitter for racial harassment, and that show is distributed by PodcastOne. (That company is also home to a few other podcasts hosted by explicitly conservative personalities, like Laura Ingraham and Bill Kristol.) Earlier this year, the similarly conservative Jay Sekulow show broke into the top 3. Sekulow is an attorney and cofounder of the American Center for Law and Justice, a politically conservative activism organization that he cofounded with the often controversial Pat Robertson. But those examples are very few and far between, reinforcing Locke’s observation.

When I talked to Locke last week, she proposed a theory about the ideological spread: The medium’s liberal-lean is largely the result of its early adopters. As she thinks about it, relatively liberal media outlets (or media organizations perceived to be liberal) were among the firsts to develop content using the medium, laying down the foundation of its identity and eventually establishing themselves as the de facto “old guards” of the space. I’m partial to that theory, but I’m also tempted to wonder: Is there something about on-demand audio’s structural traits — and demographic spread, and so on — that uniquely supports liberal programming? (Conversely, do broadcast talk radio’s structural traits uniquely benefit conservative programming?)

“This whole thing ties into something I’ve been wondering about more broadly: Why aren’t there a lot more new media organizations oriented to conservative listeners?” Locke continued. I’m personally curious about where young conservative readers are, and where they look to get news.”

“They probably feel pretty isolated,” she added, wistfully.

Local spaces. This Wednesday, PRX is holding a party to launch their new Podcast Garage, a recording facility and community space for Boston podcast creators. The space is part of Zone 3, a Harvard-catalyzed initiative developed to “explore experimental programs, events, and retail” along the city’s Western Avenue, which runs alongside the Harvard Business School.

“We want to foster a maker culture, create an environment of openness, and support storytelling,” said Kerri Hoffman, PRX CEO, when we spoke yesterday. “What we’re hoping to do with the garage is to bring all of those values right down to the ground at the local level, and create a physical hub for the Boston podcast community.”

The garage is stocked with studio equipment that’ll be available to the community via paid pre-booked rental arrangements and free studio times, which will be offered at certain times of day. Events will also be organized in the garage to brings podcast makers of all skill levels together, the first of which will be held on August 8 featuring a presentation by PRX Remix curator Josh Swartz.

“We really do think seasoned, local producers will make good use of our service,” Hoffman said. “But our sights are really on people who haven’t made a podcast yet, on the next generation. That’s what I’m really excited about.”

That’s the hook that really catches my eye about this project. Hoffman’s sentiment here echoes ideas that I’ve heard from similar initiatives across the country — ones that are also physically-oriented and locally-minded, like the Chicago Podcast Cooperative, which is run out of the lovely, non-descript Cards Against Humanity offices in the Lincoln Park neighborhood and managed by a great person named Claire Friedman, and the nascent XOXO Audio Studio, which is being developed out of the XOXO Outpost in Portland, Oregon by similarly great person named Tyesha Snow. Both operations involve a sense of bringing more people into the space who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to do so.

“We want to be a place that makes it easy for anyone to grab some studio space and make some magic,” Snow told me. “We believe that creation of the studio will spur all types of connections for the people…I can’t predict exactly what will happen over the coming year but people are ready and waiting. It’s going to be amazing.”

If there’s any force that would pull us away from any possible over-concentration of the podcast industry — and maybe, the production of media, more broadly — in New York and the coasts, I believe it’s going to be made up of local, physically-oriented spaces like these that makes opportunities more accessible in more places across the country. So if you’re working on an initiative like this, do let me know.

French podcasts. “Mainstream podcasts almost don’t exist in France,” wrote Charlotte Pudlowski, when we traded emails about the country’s on-demand audio landscape a few weeks ago. Pudlowski is an associate editor at Slate France, the French sister company of the American digital magazine, and is the person overseeing its emerging podcast strategy. She tells me that French podcasting mostly consists of repackaged broadcasts from Radio France, the French public radio equivalent, supplemented by some independent podcasts — “mostly talks,” she wrote, referring to conversational podcasts, a lot of which you can find here — and something called Arte Radio, which is reminiscent of a Third Coast-esque documentary directory.

Pudlowski is hoping to buck that trend by introducing longer-form narrative content to the mix. In mid-June, Slate France launched two shows: Transfert and Titiou, Nadia et les sales gosses (Titiou, Nadia, and their brats). The former features first-person narratives (or “narrative stories, told by the people who experienced them,” as Pudlowski phrased it to me), while the latter is a parenting show hosted by two Slate France writers which will mix formats on each episode.

Pudlowski was able to secure Audible as a launch sponsor, and it remains Slate France’s only audio advertiser for now. “We have made a deal for one year that corresponds to a number of minutes we have to produce in one year,” she said. “We’ll also look for other advertisers. But the contract with Audible doesn’t give us any fixed number of downloads or impressions we have to achieve, which gives us an amazing freedom of trying new things, taking risks.”

Things are looking pretty good for the two shows since they’ve launched, relatively speaking. Transfert’s first episode garnered 23,000 downloads in its first four weeks, while the second episode saw about 17,000 downloads during the same period. Titiou, Nadia et les sales gosses received about 13,000 downloads for its first episode. “We had not set a precise objective because it’s so new in France we had no possible comparison, but we’re pretty happy about it,” said Pudlowski, further noting that she was pleased with the attention the shows have been getting on social. The shows are hosted on Megaphone, the new CMS by Slate’s other sister company Panoply. (Confusing, ain’t it?)

I was curious about the potential market size for on-demand audio in France — its size, and opportunity. “It’s very hard to know because it is so new,” Pudlowski explained to me, pointing out that podcast listenership in the country isn’t widely measured just yet. “But what we do know is that French people are really into radio.”

Citing a December 2015 report from MediaMetrie, a French audience measurement company, Pudlowski tells me that more than 89 percent of the population listens to the radio every week and almost 82 percent every day, with the average French person consuming about 3 hours of radio on a given weekday and more than 2.5 hours on the weekend. That’s a whole lot, and one imagines that the bet here is that a good chunk of that listenership will carry over into on-demand, which is a transition bound to happen just about anywhere in the world.

More on editors. Last week, I wrote about Planet Money’s hiring of Bryant Urstadt as the team’s new senior editor, contextualizing the hire within a larger conversation about an editing crisis not just in audio, but also in journalism more broadly. Given that editors more or less serves as the gatekeepers of curated, public information, I found the crisis absolutely fascinating, and it turned out to resonate with Hot Pod readers as well. Many wrote in to express their own thoughts on the matter, and many had the same question I had: how do you train to become an editor in the first place?

Curious, I reached out to Alison MacAdam, a senior editorial specialist with NPR’s editorial training team and the author of the Poynter column that sparked the conversation around the crisis, to explore the question. MacAdam, who was a senior editor on All Things Considered for almost 7 out of 12 years she worked on the program (and a former Nieman Fellow), obviously spend a lot of time thinking about the issue, operating from a place of having worked long hours in the trenches.

We spoke for a while, and I’ll break our conversation out in chunks here.

Clarifying the problem. “There are actually two separate challenges when we talk about the editor shortage and building a pipeline of editors,” MacAdam laid out. “The first is: How do content organizations train editors and create pathways for people to become editors? If you worked in, for example, WNYC or NPR, is there an explicit pathway if you went to your boss and asked to be an editor? Do they have an answer for you, or not?”

The second challenge has to do with the changing nature of what it takes to be an editor in this age where the fundamental structures of media are being increasingly disrupted (forgive the phrase). “What are the skills that editors need? That answer keeps changing because the industry keeps changing,” she said. “And because editing is a comparatively invisible craft, it’s that much harder to get the motivation to sit down and really think about the role: what they need to know now, and what’s timeless.”

When I asked her what, exactly, remained timeless, she replied: “Solid news judgment. Even if styles change there are some ways we distinguish good writing from bad writing. The ability to communicate is also really, really important.”

Identification. “I also think that, fundamentally, no matter what kind of editor you’re talking about, editors need a track record of making stories better. And that’s the conundrum — that’s really hard to identify,” MacAdam said. “That’s something organizations need to think about. How do you identify people you might think has potential, and what are the ways that we can give chances for them to prove themselves?”

MacAdam credits the emergence of on-demand audio with encouraging more unconventional editing approaches, many of which have increased the chances of identifying potential editors. One such approach is group-editing, a technique favored by teams like This American Life, Planet Money, and Gimlet. “It opens up the editing process so more people can take part and see what goes into shaping a story,” she said.

Independent opportunities. I was curious: if you’re not already in a newsroom, are there ways to create opportunities to learn? MacAdam seemed skeptical, but offered that the first thing to do would be to edit a friend’s work. “Though,” she was quick to add. “I think it’s worth noting that it’s really hard to qualify as an editor of stories, if you haven’t made stories yourself. I just don’t think anyone will trust that you know what’s good if you haven’t struggled to make what’s good.”

When I asked if being an editor is really something that could be self-taught, MacAdam seemed soft on that possibility as well. “Editing is about relationships,” she said. “It’s 50 percent story and journalism instincts — how is something structured? what’s the hook? — and the other 50 percent involves social skills. You can have amazing editorial, journalistic instincts, but if you can’t express your thoughts to people, there’s no real impact being made.”

But MacAdam concedes that there are things you can learn on your own, like listening (and reading and watching) closely to pick up on the micro- and macro- elements of story structure. “The macro stuff involves questions at a broad level: At what point in this story was I bored? Confused? Questions like pacing and structure,” she said. “And focusing on the micro is the ability to talk about lines and sound and the use of imagery in specific places, things like that.”

Job postings. “This might be interesting for you: It’s not like nobody is defining what an editor is. You can look at job postings to see how organizations are thinking about things,” she said.

And what are good examples of such postings? MacAdam points to an editor opening at Chicago Public Media, in particular. “I was really impressed by that posting,” she said. “It’s no surprise because that organization is run by someone who is really smart editorially, Ben Calhoun.” (Calhoun is the VP of content and programming at Chicago Public Media/WBEZ and is a former producer at This American Life.)

She also singled out the deputy managing editor for news position posted by Vox.com, pointing to a particular job requirement: “Clear, goals-based management style with proven success metrics,” it read. MacAdam expressed fascination over this. “I don’t get the sense that newsrooms prior to ten years ago had many ways of measuring success metrics. It’s a very new idea, or it’s an idea that come about because of technology,” she said. “Imagine a posting in 1985 for an investigative reporter in The Washington Post talking about success metrics. Hmm.”

• Digiday has a pretty good writeup of Atlas Obscura’s sponsored podcast, Escape Plan, along with some interesting detail on the shape of the deal between the publication and the sponsor, ZipCar. (Digiday) And be sure to read this profile on Atlas Obscura (Washingtonian) along with this column on sponsored content more broadly. (The New York Times)
• WNYC is open-sourcing its “audiogram” tool. (Medium, Nieman Lab) FWIW, I’m still pretty meh on the concept of audio clip distribution via social platforms as means of discovery, particularly after reading that 85 percent of Facebook video is consumed without sound — something I’ve understood to be reflective of more basic social media consumption habits. (Digiday) But hey, the point of these things is to break open paradigms, so my fingers are as crossed as ever.
• NPR will end production of Best of Car Talk show (also known as Zombie Car Talk) as of September 30, 2017, though the show will live on as a podcast after that date. It is reportedly NPR’s third most consumed show, with a weekly audience of 2.6 million, though its existence is somewhat controversial among public media insiders. Current has a comprehensive write-up on the development, and you should check it out.
• “Canadian podcasters are being drowned out by American offerings. Why?” (Metro Toronto)
• The BBC’s iPlayer Radio app is now available in the U.S., which lets listeners access the full range of the institution’s radio feeds along with its podcasts and curated selections of past content. (Mac Rumors)
• Al Jazeera’s Canvas Studio is launching an innovation competition called the “Future of Audio Challenge.” Audio technologists — check it out.

This version of Hot Pod has been adapted for Nieman Lab, where it appears each Tuesday. You can subscribe to the full newsletter here. You can also support Hot Pod by becoming a member, which gets you more news, deeper analysis, and exclusive interviews; more information on the website.

A series of stories in various publications in recent weeks have questioned whether NPR — and public radio as a whole — have the wherewithal to adapt to an increasingly digital world and attract the younger audience they need to survive.

But here, WDET, a Detroit-based public radio station, has seemingly managed to build a younger listenership over-the-air while also experimenting with podcasts, events, and other ways to build community.

30 percent of WDET’s broadcast audience is under the age of 35, and most are younger than 45, WDET general manager Michelle Srbinovich told me.

“We’ve been targeting 25-to-54 and we’ve succeeded in bringing a new audience to public radio, both in terms of race and age, and people who are not always public radio listeners,” she said in an interview in her office here.

The station launched its first podcast last year, and it plans to launch a second later this summer.

WDET still faces challenges though. It finished its 2015 fiscal year with a budget shortfall of nearly $900,000 and its levels of individual giving have plateaued over the past three years.

Yet Srbinovich, one of the youngest general managers in the United States, is optimistic about the station’s future. What follows is a condensed and lightly edited excerpt of our conversation, which touches on the challenges of fundraising, adding new programing, and reaching diverse audiences.