Western States Public Radio (WSPR) President’s Report on Washington DC Activities – Nov. 8-9, 2006

Submitted by Ron Kramer , WSPR President

This was the Board’s Annual Organization meeting involving the seating of new board members following the summer voting by a-Reps.  Dave Edwards was seated to his newly-won full term and re-elected incumbents JoAnn Urofsky and Ellen Rocco.  The meeting followed a two-day Board review and planning reviewing.  Tim Eby and JoAnn Urofsky were unanimously re-elected Chair and Vice-Chair respectively.

This was the first Board meeting since major re-alignment in positions announced in September.  In his first report as NPR’s CEO, Ken Stern spoke of the past year’s New Realities effort (he had attended a truly admirable and staggering number of them!) as a year of reflection and the coming year as a year of action on those shared findings. 

Dana Davis-Rehm reported upon the results of the recent annual Station Survey which had a higher than customary response and generally drew high marks for NPR.  It was noted that stations which attended one or more of the New Realities sessions both tended to participate in the survey, and also generally gave NPR higher marks, than did stations which did not participate in New Realities.  Members of the Board discussed the results of the survey and there were some comments about how to best communicate to member stations that the Board takes the survey, and its results, very seriously.

Mike Riksen reported to the Board upon the “federal outlook” particularly in light of the major changes brought about by the November elections the day before.  Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) also visited with the Board privately.  Riksen shared the same report he gave the NPR Board with a-Reps the next day so I’m not repeating it here.

Mike Starling gave the Board a report on HD Radio deployment and it was noted that NPR Labs has so far received funding, to engage in specialized research, on every grant application it has filed.  A notable point on HD:  prices of radios are falling fast with a major development to occur the day after Thanksgiving.

Joyce McDonald reported on NPR’s use, and tuning up of data, of the Return on Investment (ROI) method of pricing programming.  Barbara Applebee, who has only been on the job for three months, spoke about the need for stronger data on how stations are doing financially and suggested that one useful step might be to encourage CPB to do an “update” to the 2004 Brody Weiser Burns study on station financial health.

Jackie Nixon reported upon various developments in the audience research area including the “people meter” and other pending changes with Arbitron and her office’s work in creating a more “omnibus study” of the total audience in the coming year.

Since it isn’t possible to attend all committee meetings (since they occur simultaneously) I generally attend Governance and Membership and, therefore, don’t often get to Distribution/Interconnection.  This time I went to D/I because of all the changes in progress with ContentDepot.  Pete Loewenstein reported on ContentDepot’s deployment (then only about 7 days old) and indicated that there had been strong response to the system ( LOT of stations logging in, establishing passwords, etc.).  There had also been brisk traffic on the Help Desk (445 calls) and, in general, that there was “an enormous amount of work going on” at NPR to handle the deployment.  Pete also acknowledged that the system faced some challenges, that there were times of day during which the system was more heavily in use and response times were slower, and that complaints had been received over the need to separately order each segment of a segmented program – which was tedious for ops people across the country.  He indicated that NPR was building a list of needed/suggested improvements which would be tackled as ContentDepot v.2 – once the full initial system was deployed and in use.

Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB):  While in town the regional presidents had the opportunity to meet with Pat Harrison, CPB President, and Vinnie Curran, CPB Chief Operating Officer.  Conversation in part covered a broad, not-very-specific landscape, but did cover, in some detail, the public awareness campaign to which Pat committed herself upon her appointment as CPB’s president.  Some of the conversation was “logistic” (i.e, what was envisioned in terms of scope, media placement, etc.) but most of the conversation covered “the message” (what types of messages best effectively spoke to both public television and public radio).  The underlying (unstated because it was self-evident) issue was that the campaign needed a message that worked well for both radio and tv and that could be somewhat challenging.  Much of the conversation, therefore, involved ways/themes which might accomplish that.  TV has had somewhat extensive discussion about this campaign because their Round Robin schedule has made that easy to do,  Harrison was clear that CPB needed to hear more from radio on this topic.   (There is a radio consultation group that is being established and I believe has met once.)  We volunteered some thoughts as well but it is clear that CPB’s “suggestion box” is wide-open and I would encourage WSPR stations to share thinking on these points directly with CPB as well.

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