If Soterios Johnson leaves WNYC, does that mean the world is coming to an end?

Plus: Dilbert's CEO on "Making the world a better place"

Soterios abandoning his WNYC mic? Is this really allowed?

by Ken

Yeah, sure, the world is going to hell in a handbasket -- Trump, Hillary, Nice, Istanbul, Munich, blah blah blah. Normally I would be happy to solve those problems, but this week we've got a real problem. When I got around to opening the latest issue of the recently instituted member newsletter of WNYC, our public-radio station, I was promptly assailed by this bombshell:

We're Going To Miss You, Soterios!

We're starting this month's newsletter with some news you may have already heard: Soterios Johnson is moving on from WNYC and is headed to sunny, warm California at the end of August. He's accepted a position as Director of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Partnerships at the University of California, Davis. We’re happy for Soterios, but we’re having a hard time imagining waking up without his dulcet voice to start the day.

During his time with us, Soterios has become an important part of our morning routines, and we're all going to miss him. So, we wanted to give our members the opportunity to help send Soterios off. We've created a form for you to share your thoughts and memories of Soterios's time at WNYC, and we'll share what you write with him before he heads out west. And be sure to listen to your radio in August—we have some special plans of our own for seeing Soterios off!

Say what? Soterios Johnson leaving WNYC?

Now this sounds lovely for Soterios. And what WNYC listener doesn't wish the station's much-loved morning guy well? That is, as long as it doesn't involve depriving us of this uniquely welcomed, welcoming, and trusted voice. Hey, consider the thousands of hours of station pledge drives I've listened through largely because there on-air was Soterios. It just didn't seem right not to listen.

Who the heck, you may be wondering, is Soterios Johnson? Here's the website answer:

Soterios Johnson

Before you ask... it's Greek. And, so is Johnson (via translation). It's a long story... Soterios Johnson seemed strangely drawn to the news, even as a young child.

As a kid he would lull himself to sleep listening to WCBS NewsRadio 88. "As a kid, I always wanted to be in the know... and to spread the word," he says. In high school, Soterios worked at a small FM station in his hometown in New Jersey, followed by a four-year stint as an undergraduate at Columbia on WKCR, New York. He was an Associate Producer at Newsweek On Air and worked in the field of science journalism for several years. He earned his master's degree at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.

I suppose I ought to try to explain for the benefit of unfortunate folks who aren't in the habit of waking up to Soterios just why he's so uniquely "welcomed, welcoming, and trusted." And it's not just because you've come to understand that "Soterios" is really a name and "Soterios Johnson" is a real person. It's because . . . nah, if you have to ask, you have to be there.


BUT IF YOU WANT TO HEAR WHAT HE SOUNDS LIKE --


In this November 2015 interview, WNYC's Soterios talks about the legendary obstacles to building a Second Avenue subway with Hobart and William Smith Colleges history professor Clifton Hood, author of 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York, who says: "The problem with New York City from 1920 to today is that we've never been able to come up with a formula that would provide the subways with the money they need to maintain good shape."

Well, okay then, good luck in California, Soterios, dammit.


SUNDAY SPECIAL: DILBERT'S CEO HAS A PLAN
FOR "MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE"

[Click to enlarge.]

This is so perfect that I really can't think of anything to add to it.

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Good News For Public Radio

An alternative to this

Many people-- other than folks in rural areas and hipsters in a few big cities-- think of "public broadcasting" as "college radio." That started changing in the 1940s and the whole genre took a great leap forward with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and the subsequent founding of National Public Radio (NPR) in 1970. The bill passed the House 266-91 (with 51 "present" votes), conservatives already opposed. 55 Republicans and 35 Democrats (primarily right-wing Dixiecrats who hadn't yet migrated to the GOP) voted against it. (The only 2 current Members who voted back then, John Dingell and John Conyers, both of Michigan, both voted "Present.") At the time I was a student volunteer for NYC Congressman Bill Ryan, who voted yes. So did Houston Congressman George H.W. Bush.

In recent years, public broadcasting hasn't quite lived up to the expectations set for it when LBJ signed it into law. After a good start, it's endured some real body blows from conservatives, starting with Newt Gingrich's "Contract on America." Due primarily to a campaign to undermine the entire concept by conservatives, there have been some very discouraging reports lately. But this week the Tom Taylor Now newsletter has some positive news, at least for the news/talk sector of public radio (as opposed to classical, jazz adult alternative and variety formats).

News/talk listenership keeps growing, says Arbitron-- for public radio stations.

About a third of all public radio stations are news/talk/information, but Arbitron’s new edition of Public Radio Today says that "for the first time, that format accounts for more than half [51.7%] of all public radio listening." That’s up 2.7% from the previous year. It says news/talk is "most popular in the PPM markets" (basically, the top 50). But it’s also "the #1 format in diary markets, as well." Not only that, there’s strong qualitative for public radio stations marketers to work with-- "Listeners to this format are better educated and live in a greater number of higher-income households than the listeners to any other public or"-- get this part-- "commercial radio format." That’s a high-value audience. The second-most popular public radio format is classical. Arbitron says "as public classical stations assume the mantle from commercial stations, the format’s popularity continues to grow in PPM markets." While adult alternative (AAA) and hybrid news/AAA stations "capture nearly 10% of all public radio listening."

Public radio is doing a better job reaching younger listeners.

Arbitron finds that public radio "reached record numbers of 18-24 men and 25-34 men, in Spring 2012." Public radio program directors spend a lot of time thinking about how to expand into younger demos, while keeping their core of baby boomers and Gen-Xers. The Public Radio Today study finds that "time spent listening has held steady in recent years," and you’re welcome to compare that to commercial radio. In that realm, commercial radio’s reach/cume have held steady or grown, but TSL has eroded somewhat. Arbitron says compared to 2011, time spent listening to public radio in 2012 "either remained the same or improved, in 11 of 14 key age/gender categories." As for reach, public radio’s total weekly audience stayed around 32 million. But as Current.org observes, "the number of weekly listeners grew by 7.5%, or 1.2 million, to a total of 18 million." Cume for AAA stations jumped 8.7%, to 3.4 million.

Let's Not Let John Boehner And Paul Ryan Kill Sesame Street

But not the Republican one

I'm a member of KCRW, my local public radio affiliate. I listen whenever I'm in the car and every year I send them a check for $365. This week they sent all their members this email:

The bill HR1 is being debated in Congress this week. In this large bill is the total elimination of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that supports public media. For KCRW, that would be a whopping loss of $1 million a year. KCRW and all of public broadcasting needs you now.  

Here's what you can do:

• Connect with 170MillionAmericans.org on Facebook and Twitter

• Call your Representative in the House with your views at 202-225-3121 or 202-224-3121, and ask for your Representative by name. Tell him or her not to cut public broadcasting funding in the Continuing Resolution H.R. 1

• Blumenauer Letter: Ask your Representative to sign on to the Blumenauer letter supporting funding for public broadcasting

To learn more, follow the debate with KCRW's Warren Olney on To The Point. And thank you for believing in public radio.

Largely because Democratic electeds had disappointed the voters who propelled the party to massive wins in 2006 and 2008-- with overwhelming majorities in Congress and with the presidency-- Democratic voters stayed home in 2010, allowing an energized GOP/teabagger base to win huge victories across the country. Now Republicans are grotesquely overplaying their hand. Wisconsin's ultra-right wing Governor Scott Walker's threat to call out the National Guard to prevent protests of his draconian attempt at union busting is just the most flashy over-reaches by power-mad GOP ideologues who managed to slip into power while lame Insider Democrats tried to define themselves too broadly to mean anything.

In New Hampshire, the GOP-dominated legislature wants to take away the right of students to vote. In South Dakota the GOP-dominated legislature wants to pass a law declaring the murder of an abortion doctor "justifiable homicide." In South Carolina the GOP-dominated legislature wants to start issuing its own currency, a precursor to secession. If they go, there's little question Arizona would follow.

And on the national stage, the far right extremists in the GOP-dominated House are talking about shutting down the government by defunding it. More "mainstream" conservatives like Speaker John Boehner and Wall Street's very own Budget Chair Paul Ryan have their sites set on starting the process of taking down Medicare and Social Security, the most popular social programs in America, long-hated by the wealthy classes represented by the Republican Party. Another long-cherished GOP dream that Boehner and Ryan intend to deliver on: dismantling public broadcasting. Ryan's budget proposal zeroes out funding for both NPR and PBS. Why do Republicans, especially Randians like Ryan, hate public broadcasting? They always attack it for "liberal bias"-- it's liberal in the sense that it stands for things such as scientific inquiry and equal access and "the arts," which by their nature are provocative-- and they certainly disdain the independent perspectives being broadcast in a media environment saturated by lowest common-denominator and simplistic formulations by Hate Talk Radio and Fox propagandists like Glenn Beck, Hannity and O'Reilly.

On Tuesday the L.A. Times called the mean-spirited proposals to defund public broadcasting "political, not practical... The money such cuts would save is not meaningful in terms of balancing the budget, and what it would spare any individual taxpayer is literally small change."

It's your small change, fair enough, and you may feel that nothing that PBS or NPR or their affiliates provide is anything you'd miss. We could go back and forth on that all day and never get anywhere. And, admittedly, I'm one who thinks that paying taxes is indeed "patriotic"-- it's the people acting as a body, not just out of highly localized self-interest-- even as I don't support every use toward which they're turned. As it is, public broadcasting is already supported largely by viewer and listener donations and corporate grants, and will not disappear from the face of the nation if Washington turns off the already trickling tap-- at least not in money-rich, big cities like ours, though less well-heeled communities may suffer real losses. Which is just the sort of market inequality that government funding is meant to allay.

New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman spoke up against the GOP efforts to strike out at public broadcasting. "I think unfortunately this is an issue that has more of an ideological bent to it than it does a fiscal conservatism bent to it. I think some particularly here in the Congress on the Republican side feel the CPB is too liberal in its programming and doesn't adequately reflect the more conservative right wing views that they favor and accordingly it has always been a target for them in spending proposals."

Wednesday, the distinctly non-partisan Variety posted a warning: Keep Your Government Hands Off My PBS:

Republicans-- having long since bought into the notion public television is a steaming bastion of left-wing propaganda-- have targeted the Corp. for Public Broadcasting among the entities to be eliminated in their quest to streamline government.

If that sounds familiar, it should, since this same threat has arisen with sporadic regularity over the last 20 years, the thought being that anything more moderate than Rush Limbaugh is unworthy of government funding. And while Republicans have insisted the issue isn't about ideology-- in 2005, Ohio Rep. Ralph Regula characterized funding of public broadcasting as "somewhere between a 'need-to-do' and a 'nice-to-do'" priority-- there's no denying politics has played a part. Newt Gingrich sought to "zero out" PBS in the mid-1990s, and Bush appointee Ken Tomlinson became chairman of CPB in 2003, creating a chill by seeking to ferret out "liberal bias."

PBS and National Public Radio may finally fall victim to the executioner's ax, but don't be so certain of that. Because despite the right's drumbeat, older people who wield inordinate power in elections by voting in disproportionate numbers-- the ones who keep Social Security and Medicare cuts at bay-- are also overrepresented in the public broadcasting audience.
It's not twentysomethings watching Masterpiece and Frontline but their parents and grandparents. A stellar production like the recent early-20th-century miniseries Downton Abbey connects directly with them.

Granted, the need for public TV has appeared to ebb in a digital world of proliferating channels. Commercial alternatives-- from Discovery to BBC America-- offer ambitious documentary programming and British dramas that were once PBS' exclusive province.

Public TV officials have long acknowledged they perform best at the demographic poles-- reaching the very young, who watch Sesame Street and its ilk, and the old, drawn to Ken Burns' documentaries, Nature" or Antiques Roadshow. Efforts to broaden that reach-- including initiatives former CEO Pat Mitchell pushed -- have yielded at best mixed results.

Americans are funny, politically speaking. It seems the only thing they hate as much as higher taxes is reduced government services-- without recognizing the contradiction. As the New York Times' Paul Krugman put it, "They only want to cut spending on other people."

In tough economic times-- with concerns about federal debt and states contemplating bankruptcy-- the argument for sustaining PBS would appear highly vulnerable amid proposed cuts to areas like the Environmental Protection Agency and aid to low-income families.

Nearly a decade ago, Mitchell said to be "vital and viable, (PBS is) going to have to embrace some changes." Toward that end, underwriting promos are now so elaborate that the term "commercial-free" is no longer quite accurate.

PBS has weathered assaults going back to the Nixon administration, as American U. School of Communication professor Patricia Aufderheide told American Prospect in 2005, for a simple reason: "What has saved public television … has been the broad support of American viewers, many of whom are conservative but who like 'quality television,' or don't want 'Masterpiece Theater' taken away, or like 'Nova,' or like 'Big Bird.'"

Echoing this point, The Writers Guild of America East-- citing the 21,000 jobs public broadcasting creates-- issued a "Save PBS" statement saying, "No one wants to read the headline, 'Congress to Big Bird: "Drop Dead."' And Burns insisted the issue is nonpartisan, calling public media more critical than ever "when traditional journalism institutions are collapsing and electronic news divisions are increasingly all talk or all entertainment."

The bottom line is many older people (and a few less consequential young ones) like PBS, and there isn't much on TV aimed at them. If public broadcasting can inspire them to vocalize those sentiments, then it just might survive the latest GOP "death panel" determined to pull the plug on some of grandma's favorite programs.

Tucson Democrat Raúl Grijalva, co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, summed up the GOP initiative best: "PBS and NPR aren’t luxury items or disposable toys to be thrown in the garbage. They’re a fundamental and very permanent reminder of what makes free speech and independent media so valuable. I can’t help but wonder why Republicans are so eagerly cutting jobs and locking up company doors even as they talk about an economic recovery. [If Republicans] “are really willing to end Sesame Street, they’re no more committed to education than they are to job creation. They support continued subsidies for oil and mining companies with record profits but think children’s and public affairs programming deserve to be eliminated.”

Bill McKibben on innovative public radio

This American Life's Ira Glass

by Ken

Given a long enough weekend, I hold out the possibility, at least, that a person's (meaning "my") mind may slowly resume functioning. Over the weekend, facing a medium-length subway ride, I armed myself with a New York Review of Books issue that -- like most of them for me these days -- was incompletely read, and stumbled across an interesting piece (in the Nov. 11 issue) by Bill McKibben on interesting doings in public radio.

McKibben begins:

Radio receives little critical attention. Of the various methods for communicating ideas and emotions—books, newspapers, visual art, music, film, television, the Web—radio may be the least discussed, debated, understood. This is likely because it serves largely as a transmission device, a way to take other art forms (songs, sermons) and spread them out into the world. Its other uses can be fairly pedestrian too: ball games and repetitive, if remarkably effective, right-wing commercial talk radio. Rush Limbaugh is the radio ratings champ; according to the industry’s trade journal he reaches 14.25 million listeners in an average week. Sean Hannity, working the same turf, trails him slightly.

But then he confounds me at least with some surprising numbers about public radio listenership:

[A]n equally large audience turns to the part of the dial where public radio in its various forms can be found. Public radio claims at least 5 percent of the radio market. National Public Radio’s flagship news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, featuring news and commentary alongside in-depth reports and stories that can stretch over twenty minutes -- are the second- and third-most-popular radio programs in the country, each drawing about 13 million unique listeners in the course of the week. These NPR shows have far larger audiences than the news on cable television; indeed, all four television broadcast networks combined only draw twice as large an audience for their evening newscasts. Morning Edition and All Things Considered are supplemented by well-regarded programs like The World, a BBC coproduction with Boston’s WGBH, and the business broadcast Marketplace -- programming produced outside of NPR itself but within the larger world of public radio. In polls, public radio is rated as the most trusted source of news in the nation. The audience for most of its programs dwarfs the number of subscribers to the The New York Times or The New Yorker, or the number of people who read even the biggest best sellers.

About one in ten Americans tune in to public radio each week; if you landed in a spaceship someplace in America searching for thoughtful and nonpartisan culture, your first stop would be the public radio stations that usually show up below 92 on the FM dial. You'd find not just the big news shows but also a variety of call-in shows: national ones, like On Point, The Diane Rehm Show, or Talk of the Nation, with its much-loved Science Friday edition, but also a number of superb local talk programs, with hosts like Leonard Lopate and Brian Lehrer in New York, Michael Krasny in San Francisco, Steve Scher in Seattle, Larry Mantle in L.A. -- the list is very long.

These differ from the commercial right-wing shows in that they daily feature guests from a wide spectrum of American political and cultural life: on the morning I'm writing this, for instance, Tom Ashbrook of On Point in Boston spent an hour discussing the rise of social gaming on Facebook, Krasny covered "the troubled construction industry," and The Leonard Lopate Show examined the current state of the company Google. The sine qua non of these efforts is Terry Gross's relentlessly intelligent interview show Fresh Air, which is based in Philadelphia, has been running for thirty-five years, is syndicated to more than 450 stations, and claims nearly 4.5 million listeners.

"And yet," McKibben notes, "very little gets written about public radio." Nor is there any "well-known radio equivalent of the Emmys or the Grammys or the Oscars (or even the Tonys)," which he suggests "reflects public radio's smooth professionalism -- it's gotten so good at its basic task that it's taken for granted, a kind of information utility."

I've mentioned before that I'm a rather reluctant daily Morning Edition listener. Since the loss of Rachel Maddow's Air America morning show (and before that the amazing Morning Sedition) I haven't found anything better on TV or radio to help me get out of the house in the morning. I find ME kind of stodgy and limited in its purview. Still, the information it does present isn't hopeless and is somewhat useful.

As a matter of fact, McKibben isn't here to defend what he describes as the public radio "flagship" broadcasts like Morning Edition and All Things Considered, which he suggests have undergone something of the ossifying process observable in much more complete form in the standard infotainment newsmedia. He quotes All Things Considered veteran Brooke Gladstone:

As they become the primary news source for more and more Americans, public radio newsmagazines are restricting their own ability to move listeners. Like physicians in medieval times they seek to balance the four humors (so as not be too choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, or melancholy) by blood-letting. Public radio newsmagazines are looking a little pallid these days, because the passion has been drained off.

Later, McKibben writes:

It seems churlish to criticize even mildly the flagship public radio news shows -- their reliable excellence deserves lavish praise. In recent years, though, it's started becoming clearer that, for all their polish, the big shows like All Things Considered suffer from some of the same constraints that plague other parts of elite American journalism. They aim for a careful political balance -- one academic study found their list of guests slightly to the right of The Washington Post and "approximately equal to those of Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report." That's not a particularly interesting place to be, and it may explain why, especially in the Bush years, many left-of-center listeners defected to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, a highly professional but ideologically engaged daily hour on the Pacifica network. Others -- particularly young listeners -- are listening to The Takeaway, a morning news show that pairs veteran public radio voice John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee. It takes stories one after another, and gives each a few serious but fast-paced minutes. It feels electric, alive -- Web-paced journalism, purposely not as polished as Morning Edition but every bit as intelligent. "There ought to be something in the public radio idiom that delivers information live," says Hockenberry.

Now throughout the piece I'm not confident that I'm hearing the same thing as McKibben. I should probably listen to more of the shows he recommends, but the ones I've sampled haven't done much for me. Notably, in a few weeks of listening to The Takeaway, I didn't get it at all. I couldn't even figure out what the show thought it was doing which represented an upgrade over Morning Edition. Of course, it may just be that I'm too old and/or hidebound to represent the "particularly young" audience thirsting for the kind of innovation he's so excited about.

For McKibben the fountainhead for the new wave of information-based radio programming is Ira Glass's This American Life, from Chicago Public Radio. (I can't say I've given the show a fair chance, but it's never held my attention. Again, though, that may just be me.)

Those who restrict their listening to Morning Edition and All Things Considered are well informed -- there's no better news operation in English-language broadcasting. But they are missing a quite different world, one that's never been richer or, thanks to the Internet, easier to access.

The most important name in that other world is Ira Glass, the inventor of the show This American Life. He learned his craft at the big NPR news shows and slowly developed a powerful style that centered on storytelling. There was a group of others -- like Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva (known as the Kitchen Sisters), David Isay, and Jay Allison -- who had long been producing remarkable programs, including segments for the flagship news shows, extended features, ranging from quirky accounts of family kitchen rituals to politically minded portraits of juvenile prisoners. The best ones came to be called "driveway moments," because listeners were so hooked that they would linger in their cars to hear the end of a piece even once they'd gotten home. In fact, NPR now packages CD collections of these beloved pieces.

But Glass figured out that he could make a weekly hour entirely of this kind of radio, dispensing with traditional news and talk; and since 1995, under the wing of Chicago station WBEZ, that's what he's done in This American Life.

Glass and the people who have come to work with him, and the people who have been inspired by his example, have in common "a commitment to covering the 330 degrees of life that didn't show up on the newscasts," to covering "life the way most of us experience it, where heartbreak or lunch is as important as stock prices or distant revolutions."

"A FEW OF THE BROADCASTS WORTH LISTENING TO"

In the print version of his article, Bill McKibben promises a list in the on-line version of radio shows he considers worth listening to. As he points out in the article, via streaming and free-download podcast, virtually every show he mentions can be heard by anyone who owns a computer "free of charge and without the slightest hassle." Here's the list. Note that in the on-line version each listing is a live link.

• This American Life
• Sound Opinions
• Planet Money
• Re:sound
• Too Much Information
• Radiolab
• Studio 360
• Fresh Air
• 360documentaries, with the best from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
• Wiretap, from the CBC
• Transom podcast
• On the Media
• BBC Radio 4
• The Sound of Young America
• Q podcast
• Vocalo
• The Takeaway
• To the Best of Our Knowledge

McKibben has a lot to say about Glass's approach, and about shows like Studio 360 and Hearing Voices and Radio Diaries and To the Best of Our Knowledge and especially Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad's Radiolab. "In one sense," he writes, "this is the perfect moment to be a young radiohead. It's like 1960s and 1970s cinema, with auteurs rewriting the rules." However,

there's one problem, and that's the economics of this new world. Radio is now cheap to make, true, but the people who make it still need to live. And it's very hard to get paid anything at all; in the early weeks of the fiscal downturn two years ago, NPR canceled two of the shows -- Weekend America and Day to Day -- that were consistently airing the work of new independent producers. Up-and-coming broadcasters are increasingly left to make their own way. Consider, say, Benjamen Walker, whose show Too Much Information airs weekly on New York's independent radio station WFMU. It absolutely crackles -- an hour-long mix of "interviews with real people, stories about fake people, monologue, radio drama." It's good enough that 240,000 people have downloaded some of the twenty episodes he's made so far. That's a lot of people, but it's zero money, since podcasts, like most websites, are by custom given away for free. Walker's previous show, a similar effort called Theory of Everything, was widely promoted on the Public Radio Exchange, and six public radio stations across the country actually paid for and ran it. "I think I made $80," he says. "If I thought about it too hard, I would just quit. It's much better not to think about it."

McKibben lays a good share of the problem at the doorstep of public radio station program directors. In the following excerpt he's quoting Greg Kot, cohost of the pop-music discussion show Sound Opinions, which he thinks is the bee's knees.

They are the gatekeepers for what gets on the air -- and their default mode is clearly to say no. "I'm not a radio veteran," says Kot, "but in my experience, program directors are conservative, afraid to rock the boat." They depend on their listeners to ante up about half a station's budget at pledge time, and local underwriters such as restaurants and bookstores to provide most of the rest, so they don't want to do anything that might offend them.

But the result is all too often flaccid radio, and listeners who have no idea what else is out there that they might enjoy. There are public radio stations so hidebound that they run the not-that-hilarious Car Talk twice each week.

Well, um, actually I think Car Talk is that hilarious -- and a lot else besides. I get a much better sense of the way people are living life in the America of today from a single broadcast of Car Talk than I got from all those weeks of trying to figure out what the Takeaway people thought they were up to, besides being "innovative," of course.

Nevertheless, as McKibben points out, we have hardly any serious discussion of what's happening on the radio, and I think anyone who cares should check out what he has to say.

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