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Public Radio's Private Guru

November 11, 2001

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN


DURING the final days of October 2001, as the public radio
station WAMU-FM in Washington launched an on-air fund
drive, one particular group of former listeners began
calling in to donate only their complaints. They were fans
of a bluegrass show that had been dropped without warning
four months earlier from its coveted slot during drive-
time on weekday afternoons. Refusing to contribute money,
demanding refunds of previous gifts, the protesters meant
to deny WAMU its goal of raising $1 million. And this was
only their latest piece of political theater.

In the preceding weeks, bluegrass loyalists had picketed
two fund-raising events, one man carrying a sign declaring
"WAMU = Fraud, Stupidity and Heartache." "Save Bluegrass"
Web sites and e-mail lists had sprung up. Back before the
terror attacks of Sept. 11 had consumed Congressional
attention, Representative Howard Coble of North Carolina
had taken to the floor of the House to declare, "Perhaps
the WAMU management team needs to be introduced to the
woodshed."

This sort of strife was not limited to Washington, either.
Seven months earlier and 2,000 miles away, to the strains
of Haydn's "Farewell" symphony, the public station KUER-FM
in Salt Lake City ended 40 years of broadcasting classical
music, bringing condemnation from the Utah legislature and
the state's major newspapers. Meanwhile, in Maine, town
meetings were being held to assail the state public radio
system for dropping live broadcasts of the Metropolitan
Opera. (They were ultimately restored.) And in Roanoke,
Va., the United States District Court prepared to hear the
case of the NPR station WVTF's former manager. He was suing
university and state officials for $2 million for having
fired him shortly after he dropped the Met broadcasts,
which were restored over his objections.

All these controversies, seemingly so disparate, traced
back to a common source. His name is David Giovannoni. A
brilliant analyst of public radio's audience - who it is,
how much it listens, when it listens, what it listens to,
when and why it donates money - he is quite possibly the
most influential figure in shaping the sound of National
Public Radio today, the sound heard by upward of 20 million
Americans weekly.

Mr. Giovannoni's company in suburban Washington, Audience
Research Analysis, holds contracts with the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, Public Radio
International and almost every major NPR member station in
the country. He essentially invented the language of public
radio today, terms like "affinity," "loyalty," "power" and
"public service." The phrase most public stations intone in
their hourly ID's - "listener-supported" - grew out of Mr.>
standard public- radio schedule, with its daylong emphasis
on news and talk, largely subscribes to his findings. And
during the years NPR has applied Mr. Giovannoni's findings,
it has more than doubled listenership and gone from near
bankruptcy to financial stability.

Every one of the radio stations involved in these recent
battles acted largely on Mr. Giovannoni's research. His
analysis showed them that, however vociferous the audience
for bluegrass in Washington or symphonies in Salt Lake City
or the Met in Virginia and Maine, those programs drove away
a vast majority of the most loyal listeners and donors. The
way to bring them and their checkbooks back was to schedule
more of the news and information programs they craved.

As such, Mr. Giovannoni is the lightning rod for the
intense, often bitter debate about what course NPR and its
member stations should take in their evolution from a
hodgepodge of "educational broadcasting" outlets dependent
on the largess of universities and the federal government
to a media powerhouse increasingly independent of the
public sector. Depending on whom you ask, Mr. Giovannoni
either helped save NPR by pointing the path to financial
self-sufficiency or helped undermine the kind of
programming that made it worth saving in the first place.
"A visionary," says Richard Madden, the vice president of
radio at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. "A
numbers Nazi," the independent producer Larry Josephson
labeled him several years ago.

For all the heated language, the conflict shaking public
radio is not the stereotypical struggle between aesthetes
and philistines. When Mr. Giovannoni's clients dropped
country and classical music, or consigned them to weekends
and the after-midnight abyss, they didn't plug in Rush
Limbaugh or Howard Stern or easy listening; they put on the
news and discussion programs that have earned NPR its
accolades: "Fresh Air," "Talk of the Nation," "All Things
Considered." NPR's superb coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks,
starting with round-the-clock reporting the first week, may
have served as the ultimate confirmation of Mr.
Giovannoni's thesis that news-information forms the most
integral, essential, irreplaceable element of public radio.


To Mr. Giovannoni's critics, however, the reliance on
widely lauded programs typifies the problem. Ratings
increasingly rule. Every NPR station is sounding more like
every other NPR station, with the same "news stream" during
the weekday, the same lineup of "Weekend Edition," "Car
Talk" and the quiz show "Whad'ya Know?" on Saturday
mornings. In both Washington and Salt Lake City, music
devotees pointed out that nearby NPR stations already
broadcast the same news and information shows that WAMU and
KUER were adding. Even as NPR basks in the National Medal
of the Arts it was awarded last year by President Clinton
for its cultural programming, the very genres of jazz and
classical music that the system was created in part to
support are shrinking on the dial. Inventive new shows, Mr.
Giovannoni's foes contend, will not survive statistical
scrutiny long enough to build an audience. Jay Allison, an
award-winning producer and station manager, likens the
reliance on audience research to "a deal with the devil."

For his part, Mr. Giovannoni says he abhors sameness,
formats, consultants, all the plagues of commercial radio.
He insists he never tells any station what to do or not to
do. He merely provides information of unimpeached accuracy
to executives who used to act on intuition, personal taste
and informal feedback from listeners. He merely asks the
pregnant, provocative question. "I'm constantly saying the
emperor has no clothes," he puts it. "I'm shining the ligh
on reality."

Now 47, David Giovannoni has been disseminating his
findings and propounding his views through essays, speeches
and workshops for a quarter-century. While his research
instruments have grown more sophisticated - from a pocket
calculator to interactive Web sites - his essential message
has remained consistent. Public radio cannot serve every
interest. It does not exist for the benefit of its
producers but for the benefit of its audience. Attention
must be paid to what that audience wants. Which, he
invariably adds, does not mean selling out.

"Let me be very clear on this point," Mr. Giovannoni said
in a keynote address last July in Phoenix to a convention
of public- radio marketing and development specialists. "I
am not saying that program directors should make
programming decisions based on how much money they're
likely to raise. That would undermine the values at the
very heart of our service, making it unworthy of support. I
am saying, however, that program directors should make the
difficult decisions that give the public the highest level
of service. That means replacing lower-performance
programming with higher-performance programming."
A workshop that Mr. Giovannoni conducted last May for WNYC
in New York typified his approach, and the tensions it can
create. WNYC had been deeply influenced by Mr. Giovannoni
for several years as it transformed itself from a station
almost entirely dependent on municipal funding to one
supporting itself, buying its AM and FM licenses from the
city for $20 million. Since 1995, the station had doubled
its budget to $16 million and almost tripled its income
from members and corporate underwriters to $12 million. Yet
WNYC also prided itself on a being a "dual-format" station,
equally emphasizing information and classical music, an
approach that defied his principles.

At one point in the workshop, Mr. Giovannoni projected a
chart showing the weekday listenership for WNYC-FM. The
graph consisted of an undulating series of bars, one for
each half-hour interval, peaking between 7 and 9 in the
morning, dropping into a midday trough, rising again from 4
to 7 p.m. The high points, as everyone in the room knew,
corresponded to "Morning Edition" and "All Things
Considered," NPR's "tent poles," in public-radio parlance.
As for the lulls, as everyone in the room knew, they were
classical music shows.

Mr. Giovannoni indicated another chart, showing how much
radio WNYC's audience tuned into, regardless of station.
Those bars remained relatively stable between 9 a.m. and 4
p.m. "These are your listeners," he said, tapping the wall.
"And they're not listening to you."

Someone asked, "Does that make the programming from 9 to 4
bad?" Before Mr. Giovannoni could respond, another staff
member offered, "People come to us for news and
information." Then is it a mistake, a third wanted to know,
for the same station to have two kinds of listeners?

"That makes it harder," Mr. Giovannoni said. "A radio
station should be something for the same person all the
time. You become less and you become better."

By Giovannoni standards, this was an elementary tutorial
and a gentle one. Without dictating what WNYC should do, he
was delineating the consequences of what WNYC had done.
Within its mathematical neutrality, his data was advocating
a certain model of public radio, one that made no apologies
for tailoring programming to the audience's proven taste.
Although the terror attack several months later would leave
WNYC with more fundamental problems to solve - its FM
transmitter destroyed, its replacement signal unable to
reach half the normal audience - the broader issue of
programming resonated throughout public radio.

"Your challenge," Mr. Giovannoni said as the session
concluded, "is to mine the existing audience. You want to
support programming, right? It's hard to do that when
nobody's listening. Or when nobody values what you do. The
way to get more audience? The way to serve your public
better? Lose what's on the periphery. Focus on a single
audience and serve that audience extremely, insanely well
all the time."

The eldest child of farmers in California's Central Valley,
David Giovannoni stood mesmerized as a toddler by the
revolution of records on the family turntable. In his
teens, he began trawling barn sales for junked phonographs
and joined several friends in an "Obsolete Audio Oddities
Club." Then, one day when he was 16 or 17, he dialed the
radio to the far left end of the FM band and heard a man
urgently incanting what sounded like his life story. The
station, Mr. Giovannoni later learned, was KPFA in
Berkeley, beacon of the iconoclastic Pacifica network, and
the voice was Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl." A whole world
had revealed itself.

High school valedictorian and student- body president, Mr.
Giovannoni chose the University of the Pacific in nearby
Stockton partly for its public radio station, KUOP. There
he first heard "All Things Considered" and logged 1,500
hours in four years. Graduate study in communications took
him to the University of Wisconsin and put him under the
sway of Lawrence Lichty, a young professor intent on
wrenching the statewide public-radio network out of its
stodgy, pedantic style. "Brilliant and innovative," in Mr.
Lichty's estimation, Mr. Giovannoni was harvesting raw
Arbitron data on public-radio listenership and devising
means of analyzing it. "Back then, anything we found out
was new," Mr. Giovannoni recalled. "There was no context
about the audience. You turned on the mike and sometimes
the phone rang in the studio to ask for a request or to
yell at you."

When NPR hired Mr. Lichty in the late 1970's to work on the
development of "Morning Edition," he brought his protégé to
Washington. There, along with the audience researchers Tom
Church and George Bailey - once ridiculed by Garrison
Keillor as "guys in suits with charts" - they first stepped
into the conflicts that would recur through Mr.
Giovannoni's career. " `We don't do what people want,' "
Jack Mitchell, a former producer and board chairman of NPR,
recalled reporters and editors saying. " `It's killed by
research.' "

What ultimately made Mr. Giovannoni a fixture in public
radio, however, were events far outside his control. The
efforts by Ronald Reagan in 1981 and Newt Gingrich in 1995
to "zero out" the Corporation for Public Broadcasting sent
NPR and its member stations hunting for more secure
financial support. Mr. Giovannoni's research held the clues
to how to reach the listeners themselves. "It was a
terrible thing but it was a good thing," Mr. Giovannoni
said of the threatened cessations of federal aid. "Those
two hits forced us to become self- sufficient. And the way
we were able to do that was by shifting away from a
subsidized economy and focusing on the listener."

OVER the last 16 years, Mr. Giovannoni and various
collaborators have released a series of reports defining
the public-radio audience in ever finer detail, augmenting
computer models based on Arbitron data with follow- up
interviews and focus groups. These studies started by
disabusing NPR of its pride in its weekly listenership,
known in the trade as its "cume." Ninety percent of those
listeners - dubbed the "Cheap 90" by Mr. Giovannoni - never
donated to stations. Sixty percent listened only
sporadically. The remaining 40 percent, the "core" in the
Giovannoni lexicon, accounted for almost 80 percent of the
hours listeners spent tuned to public radio. Over time, Mr.
Giovannoni has refined his picture of who they are (middle-
aged, college-educated, interested in social issues), what
they listen to most ("All Things Considered," "Morning
Edition"), what other NPR shows hold their interest ("Car
Talk," "Prairie Home Companion"), what generally causes
them to turn the dial (radio theater, children's shows,
music except on stations with all-music formats), and even
what encourages them to donate money at the highest rate
("Marketplace," "Car Talk," "All Things Considered").

The divide between culture and information appeared
prominently in a 1993 study establishing the affinity -
that is, the demographic similarity - of the audience for
"All Things Considered" with the listenership for NPR's 71
nationally syndicated shows. Of the 27 shows that performed
worst - that, by Mr. Giovannoni's research, actively
alienated core listeners - a vast majority featured jazz,
classical music and opera. In a 1998 study, Mr. Giovannoni
found that music programming brought stations far less
income per broadcast hour than did news, talk or
entertainment. Popular music appealed to listeners a
generation younger than NPR's core audience; classical
music and opera appealed to listeners a decade to a
generation older.

Mr. Giovannoni's conclusion, indeed his belief system, came
down to one mantra: "Programming causes audience." People
didn't listen to public radio because they appreciated the
concept of smart, commercial-free programming; they
listened for the same reason people listened to classic
rock or adult urban contemporary or Dr. Laura - because
they liked what happened to be on. Putting more of it on,
then, meant more listeners and more donations and more
freedom from the caprice of Washington. (There are anomalies,
numerically small but demonstrably generous
niche audiences like WAMU's bluegrass fans.
Following Mr. Giovannoni's precepts, NPR built its weekly
cume from 9 million in 1985 to the current 22 million. It
now raises more than half of its $500 million budget from
individual listeners or private-sector underwriters. The
number of paid-up members doubled to 2 million between 1990
and 2000. Over the same period, federal support fell from
16 cents per dollar to less than 11.

That dramatic growth has only encouraged NPR to become more
cautious, which has turned Mr. Giovannoni into a convenient
target. "To some extent, NPR is a prisoner of its success,"
said Alan Stavitsky, a University of Oregon professor who
has studied public-radio consultants. "This once obscure

and quirky alternative programmer is now part of the media
elite. There's less room for the kind of offbeat
experimenting with the medium that characterized NPR's
early days."

"There's nothing fundamentally wrong with research," said
Torey Malatia, the president and general manager of WBEZ in
Chicago, the station that originated "This American Life,"
the acclaimed documentary series featuring Ira Glass. "But
what happened in the commercial marketplace began to happen
in the public-radio marketplace. There was this
unarticulated but passionately held belief that there was a
perfect formula and that if we used that formula in our
community, we could be as successful as other communities
that used it.

"But after believing that myself for a long time, I'd argue
that public radio is at its most successful when it doesn't
follow formula. Data is just one tool for ascertaining what
works. And it's a shame that public radio is scared away
from what doesn't show well in the Arbitron book or hasn't
proven itself somewhere else or isn't understandable on
first hearing."

Mr. Giovannoni's style also has wounded and alienated. He
and his frequent partner George Bailey often led workshops
wearing doctor's whites and Groucho glasses. A report Mr.
Giovannoni released in the late 1980's, which calibrated
how much or little of their audiences various NPR shows
shared, branded those with the least congruence, especially
opera, with frowning-face logos.

"Though I've been pilloried for it," Mr. Giovannoni says,
"I don't see what I do as cynical. My role is to help
people in radio understand their listeners. Public radio
isn't just you in the studio. Something happens on the
other side of the mike. And if people aren't listening,
there's no public service." He pauses. "The thing a lot of
people in public radio don't get is that I'm on their
side."

Keenly aware of criticism, Mr. Giovannoni has in the past>
several years increasingly emphasized the importance of
"taking risks" and "budgeting for failure." His own tastes
in music run from Bach to New Orleans jazz to the
alternative rock of They Might Be Giants. His research
shows that certain stations can hold a loyal audience with
programming built around music, whether classical at WQED
in Pittsburgh or jazz at WBGO in Newark. What NPR listeners
seek, he maintains, is not a narrow format but a
"sensibility," a pattern of "interests, values, and
beliefs," which explains why the audience for "All Things
Considered" also responds well to the quiz show "Whad'ya
Know."

Still, when the rebukes come, they do not noticeably bother
him. Such equanimity owes less to patience, perhaps, than
to an unshakable belief that while his critics have
sentimentality, he has the facts. "Everything I've done has
caused carping," Mr. Giovannoni says. "It's the allegorical
loss of innocence. That's what research is. Every time you
pluck somebody out of the garden, they get bent out of
shape."


Samuel G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia
University. And he is an author.

Index

More on the issue of music and public radio below.

> Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

Change on the dial
National Public Radio is reconsidering its cultural programming. Will music pay the price??BY DAN GILGOFF Last year, the National Public Radio member station WKMS in Murray, Ky., snagged 11,000 new weekly listeners, increasing its audience by more than half. The key, says Program Director Mark Welch: replacing Performance Today, (musical perfomances recorded all across the U.S.) the 15-year-old NPR classical music program, with The World, a news show distributed by Public Radio International, in the afternoon slot. Performance Today now airs at night, when it still draws few listeners, and Welch says he would ax it completely were it not for "the mission issue."

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The mission Mark Welch is referring to is NPR's original charge, which read, in part: "National Public Radio will not regard its audience as a market . . . . It will promote personal growth rather than corporate gains." Welch's dilemma­how to fulfill that mission while building an audience­is driving a national debate over the institution's direction, as NPR management considers major changes. Public-radio purists say NPR should produce high-quality jazz and classical music programs, especially for listeners who ordinarily couldn't access such fare. Critics of the traditional approach say big audiences prove the success of syndicated news programs. They don't see much worth in producing stellar arts shows if no one's listening to them.

Listen here. In the case of WKMS, Welch says that replacing NPR's weekly cultural programs with daily, locally produced shows and nationally syndicated news and talk has streamlined the station and won a loyal listenership. It's a message that NPR headquarters is getting from across the country. "Although stations recognize that cultural programming helps to set themselves apart from commercial radio and other forms of media," wrote NPR Senior Vice President for Programming Jay Kernis in a recent memo to staffers, "stations voiced concerns about the lack of program funding, as well as market forces which are leaning towards exclusive news and information programming."

That memo, which comes on the heels of a months-long survey of NPR member stations, proposes dissolving some musical programs in favor of 24-hour jazz and classical streams­satellite feeds of music programming that member stations could tap at will­and short cultural "modules" that would fit into newsmagazines like All Things Considered. Kernis calls it "the largest commitment to cultural programming in probably 20 years." But critics of the proposal worry that 24-hour feeds would spread NPR's already limited musical programming resources impossibly thin and, like existing radio stream services, rely almost exclusively on recorded music by established mainstream artists.

With the new emphasis on modules (the memo suggests that all arts reporting fit into a 51/2-minute format) some NPR cultural staffers are fretting over the prospect of whittling down performances and interviews into newsy sound bites. "We're putting aside our role as a world stage for theater and music," says Jazz from Lincoln Center Producer Steve Rathe, "for three to five minutes of culture explained by a reporter." Rathe's show, featuring concerts organized by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, may be among the first to be cut or dramatically reworked because of declining listenership and carriage by member stations.

Some cultural staffers also complain about being shut out of the decision making. "I have not had a voice" in the current programming overhaul, says newscaster and weekend Performance Today host Korva Coleman. "If others in cultural programming had a voice, I have no knowledge of it." To some extent, that's the point. The new cultural programming paradigm draws on the input of member stations, which provide a big chunk of NPR's revenue by subscribing to shows and fill more than half the seats on NPR's board of directors with station reps.

Call and response. Hourlong music programs, management found, don't fit well into the schedules of member stations and usually draw smaller audiences than syndicated news and talk. "If we're not meeting people's expectations, they don't pick up the phone to make a pledge," says Doug Myrland, general manager of KPBS in San Diego. "What a waste," Myrland adds, "to use hundreds of thousands of watts of power to broadcast to a ridiculously small number of people."

And in the NPR empire, stations are king. Since the mid-'80s, when virtually all federal funding was rechanneled through its member stations, headquarters has increasingly depended on affiliates for revenue. As programming costs have climbed and federal funds plateaued, stations have come to rely on audiences for the largest part of their revenue. At the same time, the rise of audience statistics services like Arbitron have allowed NPR and member stations to target single, core audiences willing to put their money where their ears are. "No one," says Kernis, "is sending us money to reach small audiences."

His memo, which was sent to NPR staff and member stations in February, defines successful programming as that which "finds a significant audience, has a cost/ revenue formula that supports the programming, and gains acceptance in major markets." Some public-radio advocates say that's too narrow a definition. "The aggregate cannot be the sole or primary criterion for public radio as it was originally conceived," says Ralph Engelman, author of Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History. "Otherwise, how does it distinguish itself from commercial radio?"

"When I started here, it was about bringing music to people who couldn't get it anywhere else," says Bettina Owens, a jazz programming coordinator and 11-year NPR veteran. "Now, the money has dried up and we're more like a corporation." Adds Rathe: "I think public radio is writing off part of its mission." Kernis counters that although "the mission statement is burned into our psyches here," times have changed. "Our mission is to reach the largest radio audience with the best radio programs," he says. With the recent launch of the Tavis Smiley Show (a news/talk show aimed at African-Americans) and the Motley Fool Radio Show (a humorous look at personal finance), and two NPR channels on Sirius Satellite Radio (a new digital station that gives the subscriber-only XM Radio its first competition), Kernis says that NPR is innovating and diversifying. But none of those efforts include any music. Nor does the show NPR vaunts as its most successful "cultural" venture: Car Talk.

Index