Otterblog

A small group of WFDD executives—including Jay Banks (general manager) and Denise Franklin (news director)—came through our newsroom yesterday to discuss the radio station and its plans. WFDD—as they are quick to remind you during pledge drives—is a public radio station, but it’s not a hippie, dippy place. They take the balance sheet seriously, and are as active in the solicitation of revenues as most other media organizations, for profit or not-for-profit. I listen to the station, but less than I used to. A function of time and my dislike of talk radio across the political spectrum.

The public radio model is an interesting one that on occasion newspaper types look on with envy. Radio is a simple, yet very flexible type of medium. It’s portable. It can exist in the background or the foreground (i.e., you don’t have to pay attention to the radio while you use it), and its distribution model doesn’t rely on geography as much as newspapers. Like the Web, radio quickly gets down to communities of interest, scattered here and there. Physically, they are hard to stitch together. Virtually, they are not.

Radio, like newspapers, is old media, and like newspapers, it’s trying to become new media. And the challenge is that the content we provide is expensive and that somebody has to pay the freight for it.  There’s so much content that is hopping around the planet that is free. May not be as good or as relevant, but the price is right.

This is the hamburger, spamburger analogy. Imagine you like hamburgers, but they cost $3. The spamburger isn’t as good, but it’s free. So you eat spamburgers. At first, you miss the hamburger. At some later date, they become a habit and you have forgotten what a hamburger tastes like. So the decision for media companies is one of two paths: either improve the hamburger so that the differences between that and the spamburger is clear and worthwhile, or start selling spamburgers…