Weight classes of public radio newsrooms
Posted: February 8, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Radio’s local newsrooms weigh in
Published in Current, Jan. 30, 2012
Commentary by Michael V. Marcotte
As the chorus calling on public media to add more local journalists grows, let’s be mindful of the specific ways adding journalists can dramatically improve local public service.
For example, just by enlarging its newsroom to four, five or six journalists, a station will gain the human wherewithal to unleash a proper beat system. Beats cause reporters to become specialists. With a news staff of six, for example, a newsroom could have reporters well versed in the actors, history and nuances of a starter set of beats — education, health, business, law, environment and arts/culture.
These specialists are more likely to break original stories, to know when it’s important to follow up, and to extract meaningful news analysis from a week’s events.
Shifting to a beat system is a quantum leap in editorial power, but that’s just one of the thresholds in staffing at which a newsroom begins to realize strategic benefits.
Even adding a single journalist can bring disproportionately powerful results. More than half of all NPR member stations have three or fewer full-time journalists — in some cases because the station’s major interest is music, or it simply lacks the budget to hire more. Even so, adding one or two newsgatherers can make the difference between rip-and-read headlines and original reporting, gaining the ability to cover two important events at the same time, or having a spare set of eyes to edit reports before they’re broadcast.
Larger newsrooms achieve greater levels of actualization. Those big enough to staff a daily talk show are a case in point. The shows expand local service in a new dimension by giving people a virtual place to gather, discuss their views and have their questions answered. The shows can spotlight in-house reporters as experts. A local host can quickly propagate a large social-media base. And the shows can transform stations — making headlines via interviews, introducing more live production capacity and enabling the core competencies needed during crisis coverage.
(Please continue reading the article:)
via Current.org | Weight classes of public radio newsrooms, 2012.
Author note:
Thanks to Current for commissioning this overview of local public radio newsrooms and their stages of advancement.
My article goes on to describe the six “weight classes” of local newsrooms:
- Featherweight (0-1 Fulltime News Employee)
- Lightweight (2-3 FT)
- Welterweight (4-8 FT)
- Middleweight (9-19 FT)
- Cruiserweight (20-29 FT)
- Heavyweight (30+ FT)
I finish the article with an observation that the push underway to ramp up local news on public radio is catching on… and that it is remarkable what qualitative improvements can take place as staff sizes increase.
– M. Marcotte
2011 in review
Posted: January 3, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,800 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.
Click here to see the complete report.
Public Media Third Leg of Knight Funded News Project in Georgia
Posted: December 15, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Unique, Joint Newsroom will Help Increase Local Journalism in Macon
Knight Foundation invests $4.6 million to expand local public radio, bring new journalism education model to Georgia and engage residents in critical issues
MACON, Ga. — A new effort will increase and strengthen local reporting by bringing professional journalists to work together with university students in a unique, joint newsroom in Macon’s College Hill Corridor.
The Center for Collaborative Journalism at Mercer University will bring the medical school model to the university’s journalism program. Professionals from The (Macon) Telegraph and Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB Media) will work alongside Mercer students to learn and employ digital-age storytelling skills to meet Central Georgia’s information needs.
In coming years, the joint newsroom also will launch community engagement projects that will involve Macon residents in choosing important issues to cover, reporting the facts, debating the choices facing them and ultimately creating solutions.
In addition, GPB Macon Radio will expand its staff in Central Georgia over several years and greatly increase the station’s coverage of news, business, arts, sports and culture.
The effort is being supported by $4.6 million in grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Mercer, GPB Media, The Telegraph and Knight Foundation announced the project today at the site of the new center in Mercer Village.
via News.
In Other Words
Posted: April 19, 2011 Filed under: PRNDI/MVM Consulting Survey Leave a comment »Take all the verbatim comments from the 2010 PRNDI/MVM local news survey and run them through IBM’s visualization machine and you get a pretty mosaic of the terminology used.
Verbatim Comments from 2010 PRNDI/MVM Local Public Media News Survey
Partnering with Others
Posted: April 14, 2011 Filed under: News Partnerships, PRNDI/MVM Consulting Survey, public radio 1 Comment »A survey of U.S. public radio stations shows modest levels of editorial partnering with outside organizations.
A notable finding is the prominence of partnerships between local stations and local newspapers (30%).
The data also reveal the involvement of stations with non-profit news organizations (22%) such as ProPublica.
Not surprisingly, the most common news partnerships were between a station and a regional network (40%).
A quarter of public radio stations were frequently involved with a consortium of stations (26%), such as the new “Local Journalism Centers.”
Also found were partnerships with local websites (18%), local radio stations (16%) and local TV stations (14%).
The least common partnership type was that between a station and a local blogger (7%).
Why Partner Up?
Partnerships are widely seen as a low-cost method of expanding a public radio station’s service commitment by enjoining like-minded, complementary organizations to accomplish shared goals, such as
- engaging the public
- deepening news coverage
- distributing coverage more widely
- combining core competencies
- creating cross-promotion opportunities
- cost-sharing
How the Question Was Asked
A 2010 invitation-only survey (to CPB-qualified public broadcasters) contained the following question:
How frequently does your local news and public affairs commitment involve sharing with an outside entity you could call a “partner”?
The rating options were:
None Infrequently Frequently Very Frequently
The 10 partner-types listed were:
- A Local News Website
- A Local Radio Station
- A Local Newspaper
- A Nonprofit News Org
- A Regional Network
- A Local Blogger
- A Consortium of Partners
- A Local TV Station
- NPR Bureau Chief
- NPR News Desk
The partnerships with NPR were reported earlier here. Below are the individual charts for the remaining eight partnership types, presented in order from most frequent to least frequent.
Partnering with Regional Networks
Regional radio networks are quite common and have been round a long time, so it is not surprising to see them as the most frequent form of partnering.
Regional networks can take many forms. Some are loose networks for story swaps. Some are hub and spoke models in which a central operator provides content out to multiple stations (e.g., The California Report). Some are variations on the news cooperative idea in which stations co-create stories for common usage (e.g., The Northwest News Network).
The chart below shows 40% of public radio stations partner with regional networks “frequently” or “very frequently.” Another 22% partner with regional networks on an “infrequent” basis.
Source: PRNDI/MVM Consulting 2010
Partnering with Local Newspapers
Almost a third of public radio newsrooms partner with a local newspaper “frequently” or “very frequently.”
The survey does not reveal the exact nature of these partnerships, but these are known to range from collaborative reporting projects, to featuring newspaper reporters on the air, to content-sharing arrangements. Newspapers, who have suffered steep losses in advertising, and thus staffing, have been pushing new forms of collaboration — which makes this form of partnering a fairly rich opportunity for both parties.
Note that when you consider another 32% of stations are partnering on an “infrequent” basis, you are left with the lowest “None” percentage of any of the partnership types (36%).
Source: PRNDI/MVM Consulting 2010
Partnering with a Consortium of News Providers
Partnerships built upon a consortium of stations may also take many forms. One of the emerging models in 2010 was the “Local Journalism Centers” sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. These “LJC’s” consist of 3 to 5 stations working in collaboration to concentrate multi-platform reporting on a specialty topic of regional interest.
The chart below shows the consortium model to be used “frequently” or “very frequently” by 26% of U.S. public radio stations.
Source: PRNDI/MVM Consulting, 2010
Partnering with a Non-Profit News Organization
Public radio stations are non-profit news organizations and thus may readily align with the mission of other non-profit news organizations — especially if those organizations are able to provide specialty coverage or investigative coverage to augment local coverage. Examples of non-profit news organizations include ProPublica, and the members of the Investigative News Network.
About one fifth of public radio stations partner with a non-profit news organization “frequently” or “very frequently.” Another fifth do so “infrequently.”
Source: PRNDI/MVM Consulting, 2010
Partnering with a Local News Website
Working with a local news website would seem to be an emerging form of partnering. An example might be the way KPBS in San Diego draws upon the coverage by Voice of San Diego (and vice-versa).
Partnering with a local news website is more common than working with a local broadcaster but less common than working with a local newspaper.
The chart below shows 18% of U.S. public radio stations have working relationships with local news websites. They aren’t “very frequent” in scope as much as they are just “frequent.”
Still, 82% of stations have infrequent or no relationship at all with news websites.
Source: PRNDI/MVM Consulting 2010
Partnering with a Local Radio Station
Working in tandem with another radio station is not very common. (FYI — The other station’s status as commercial or non-commercial was not specified.) Some 16% of public radio stations were found to partner “frequently” or “very frequently” with other radio stations.
Source: PRNDI/MVM Consulting 2010
Partnering with a Local TV Station
Only 14% of public radio stations say they strike up frequent partnerships with local TV stations. Over a fourth have infrequent relationships with local TV.
(The status of the TV station as commercial or non-commercial was not specified. It’s also possible that joint-licensee radio stations consider their joint-licensed TV station as partners in these results.)
Source: PRNDI/MVM Consulting 2010
Partnering with a Local Blogger
Local bloggers are the least common partnership type among local public radio news providers in the United States.
The “None” percentage of 72% is the highest of all the partnership types measured.
Source: PRNDI/MVM Consulting 2010
All Partnerships Compared
Below then is a final graph showing how all ten partnership options stack up among all U.S. public radio stations. The scale is based on the following values:
4=Very Frequent, 3=Frequent, 2=Infrequent, 1=None
Source: PRNDI/MVM Consulting, 2010
About the Survey
A direct-invitation survey was conducted between July 26 and August 15, 2010 by Michael Marcotte of MVM Consulting with help from Steve Martin of SFM Consulting and Ken Mills of the Ken Mills Agency. This survey was conducted as a supplement to a CPB/PRNDI census of local public broadcasting journalists. (Download a copy of the survey.) Ninty-two percent of all CPB-qualified public broadcast organizations took part in the main survey, and about 80% of those went on to complete the supplemental (or about 380 stations). The section reported here combines the radio and joint licensees, and leaves out the TV respondents.
Mapping NPR News Partners
Posted: April 11, 2011 Filed under: News Partnerships, PRNDI/MVM Consulting Survey, public radio 1 Comment »Earlier we reported that it is generally rare for local public radio stations to be involved with NPR as a news producing partner. The exceptions tend to be the “highly resourced” newsrooms — especially when it comes to partnering with NPR Regional Bureau Chiefs on feature reports.
Many more stations found partnering opportunities with NPR when it came to filing spot news reports with the News Desk in Washington DC.
The following maps show how this phenomena is distributed geographically.
Local Station Involvement with NPR Regional Bureau Chiefs
Local Station Involvement with NPR Regional Bureau Chiefs (Source: MVM Consulting, 2010)
Local Station Involvement with NPR News Desk in Washington
Local Station Involvement with NPR News Desk (Source: MVM Consulting, 2010)
Partnering with NPR
Posted: April 10, 2011 Filed under: PRNDI/MVM Consulting Survey, public radio | Tags: News Partnerships, NPR Bureau Chiefs, NPR News Desk 2 Comments »Very few local public radio station newsrooms consider themselves frequent editorial partners with NPR.
New survey data reveal that more than 75% of local stations have infrequent or no involvement with NPR as a news producing partner.
Of the nearly 250 U.S. public radio stations responding, less than 6% claimed “very frequent” involvement with NPR editors.
The survey looked for — and found — a notable distinction between NPR’s two main points of contact with local station newsrooms. One point of contact is an NPR regional bureau chief. The other is NPR’s 24-hour news desk in Washington. The distinction is that editors in Washington have established more editorial partnering with stations than have NPR bureau chiefs in the regions.
Survey data also show the fewest NPR partnerships are with low budget newsrooms. However, even among the upper-budget newsrooms, at least half report infrequent editorial partnering with NPR.
You can see a map of the distribution of stations according to their NPR editorial involvement here.
The Question of Partnering
The invitation-only survey (to CPB-qualified public broadcasters) contained the following question:
How frequently does your local news and public affairs commitment involve sharing with an outside entity you could call a “partner”?
The rating options were:
None Infrequently Frequently Very Frequently
Among the 10 partner-types listed (others will be reported in a subsequent report) were:
- NPR Bureau Chief
- NPR News Desk
NPR Regional Bureau Chiefs as Partners
Since the late 1990′s, NPR has positioned editors around the United States to be closer to the news and the journalists in those regions. The regions are the Northeast, the South, the Midwest and the West. NPR bureau chiefs typically commission and edit the feature length reports on NPR magazines.
The chart below aggregates the responses of 244 stations on the question of their involvement with their regional NPR bureau chief. Eighty-one percent of the stations say their bureau chief partnering is infrequent or non-existent. Nineteen percent have partnership involvement frequently or very frequently.
The same results aggregated above were then sorted into the following three charts — according to the size of the local station’s self-reported news budget.
The chart below is comprised of the 68 stations with the highest budgets (from $250-thousand to $5-million). This chart shows the difference a more well-resourced newsroom makes when it comes to working with NPR. Some 44% of the stations in this budget bracket report having frequent or very frequent involvement with NPR bureau chiefs.
The middle budget bracket below, shows far fewer station reporting frequent (9%) or very frequent (2%) involvement with NPR bureau chiefs as partners.
The smallest local news budget bracket, below, shows the least partnering activity with NPR bureau chiefs.
NPR News Desk in Washington as Partner
NPR News staffs a 24-hour news desk at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. This desk is responsible for the hourly newscasts on NPR and thus relies on frequent spot news reports from both NPR staff journalists and member station journalists (who file as paid freelancers).
Not surprisingly, because of this high demand for short reports, the DC News Desk is considered a partner more frequently by local U.S. public radio newsrooms.
The chart below shows 23% of all local stations having frequent or very frequent involvement with the DC desk editors.
Again, we sort the 244 respondents into three budget categories to compare the difference news spending makes on partnership involvement.
The chart below shows a majority (52%) of stations in the large budget bracket have frequent or very frequent involvement with the NPR news desk in Washington.
Again, the partnering drops off significantly among the lower budget newsrooms. Fourteen percent of the middle bracket has frequent or very frequent partnering opportunities with the NPR news desk.
While the lowest newsroom budget bracket shows little partnering with NPR, still the numbers are higher here (due to spot news opportunities) than we saw with the bureau chiefs (who tend to seek more sophisticated features from their local partners).
Comment
The fact that stations don’t have frequent partnerships with NPR is not an indictment of either NPR or the stations, but it indicates the level of separation between the two. The factors affecting level of partnership include a) shared mission, b) commitment to making local stories national, c) availability of stories worth partnering over, and d) availability of network-ready reporters. These appear in varying levels around the system.. and generally tend toward sharing in the large metro stations. While it seems generally true that members stations should be partners with NPR — to help NPR cover the nation — many exigencies conspire to thwart that ideal.
What may be more important in terms of partnerships with local stations are those partners who help augment local reporting resources. As the next report will show, even those partnerships are in short supply.
About the Survey
A direct-invitation survey was conducted between July 26 and August 15, 2010 by Michael Marcotte of MVM Consulting with help from Steve Martin of SFM Consulting and Ken Mills of the Ken Mills Agency. This survey was conducted as a supplement to a CPB/PRNDI census of local public broadcasting journalists. (Download a copy of the survey.) Ninty-two percent of all CPB-qualified public broadcast organizations took part in the main survey, and about 80% of those went on to complete the supplemental (or about 380 stations). The section reported here combines the radio and joint licensees, and leaves out the TV respondents.
Public Radio Time Devoted to Local News
Posted: March 5, 2011 Filed under: news programming, newsroom spending, PRNDI/MVM Consulting Survey, public radio 2 Comments »The survey we’ve been unpacking here for the past few weeks still has more to offer!
In this series, we reveal what we found about the amount of airtime that was devoted to local news and public affairs in an average week during 2010 on public radio stations in the United States. At the bottom of the page, we offer an educated guess on what this adds up to per year.
The chart below shows the distribution of our sample per airtime category.
It is quickly apparent that the bulk of stations (72%) are devoting between 1 to 10 hours per week on-air to local news. The largest single share is in the 1-3 hours per week category. Followed by the 4-6 hours per week group.
Another 22% of public radio stations go further, committing well in excess of 11 hours per week to local news programming.
Only 6% offer less than an hour per week of local news.
We didn’t separate weekday programming from weekends, but we can say from observation and experience that the vast majority of the local news time reported here would be during the five day work week. This means the bulk of local public radio stations are offering roughly 30 to 120 minutes of local news per day. And some heavy hitters are providing around 4 hours per day.
Local News Still A Modest Commitment by Most
The next chart shows the same data but in real numbers rather than percentages. It also separates out those stations that are radio only from those that are shared with a television station (the joint licensees).
This chart shows the predominance of stand alone radio stations in providing the bulk of local news minutes, especially in comparison to the joint licensees. However, it also shows that joint licensees (with their larger service missions of both radio and television platforms) tend to make up a larger share of those columns toward the right side of the graph — the stations devoting greater airtime to local news and public affairs.
More News Spending Yields More News Programming
To slice things a bit further, we did a cross-tab by annual news budget size. The news budgets were reported earlier but now we can see how they may relate to the amount of airtime committed to local news.
The following chart takes all the respondents and sorts them into 8 budget categories — the eight colorful columns. The smallest budgeted newsrooms are in the column on the left. The largest budgeted newsrooms are on the right. For each column, there are color coded segments that correspond to the legend — sorting the stations by average weekly airtime allotted to local news. The number inside each color segment shows the actual number of stations.
This allows you to find your station according to news budget size… and then see where you compare in terms of weekly news time.
[Editor's note: this graph was corrected after this post was first published. The original graph did not exclude TV only stations. This one does.]
Columns are sets of public radio stations by news budget size. Each column shows relative distribution of stations by “average news time per week.”
Granted this chart got a little squished in the translation (click on it to see it more clearly). But essentially what it shows is that as the stations invest more money in news, they report greater amounts of airtime devoted to news. This can be seen easily in the color progression from left to right. The blue, orange and green segments generally diminish while the red, purple, brown, lavender and gray segments generally increase. Of course, the numbers of stations are still largely concentrated in the lesser budget columns and in the more modest airtime segments.
While this tells us nothing of the quality of the programming, the correlation between budget resources and programming time indicates a quality connection. The good news is that stations seem to be striving for quality relative to staffing and budgeting — thus you should see less quantity among those stations on the left of the graph… and those on the left airing many hours per day raise some suspicion about their quality.
Bottom Line: Over 100,000 Hours Per Year!
Since we didn’t ask for exact numbers (we only asked stations to choose a category), we can’t say definitively how many hours of local news are produced each day in public radio. However, we can approximate. Using the midpoints of our category ranges, we multiplied that mark by the number of stations in each category. (For the 21+ category, we used 24 as the multiplier.)
For our sample, then, we arrive at just under 2000 hours per week of original local news programming on U.S. public radio. Or about 400 hours per day. That scales to roughly 100,000 hours per year based on 50-weeks of output. This seems to be a handy number and rather conservative too — considering the sample is roughly 80% of the actual public radio universe in the United States.
FYI — earlier we reported on the news programming trends showing a third of stations plan to increase their news time commitment this year.
About the Survey
A direct-invitation survey was conducted between July 26 and August 15, 2010 by Michael Marcotte of MVM Consulting with help from Steve Martin of SFM Consulting and Ken Mills of the Ken Mills Agency. This survey was conducted as a supplement to a CPB/PRNDI census of local public broadcasting journalists. (Download a copy of the survey.) Ninty-two percent of all CPB-qualified public broadcast organizations took part in the main survey, and about 80% of those went on to complete the supplemental (or about 380 stations). The section reported here combines the radio and joint licensees, and leaves out the TV respondents.
News Programming
Posted: February 28, 2011 Filed under: news programming, PRNDI/MVM Consulting Survey, public radio Leave a comment »One of the longstanding questions among public radio programmers is what kind of news should we produce?
Journalists debate trade-offs between spot news and in-depth features. Producers love what the magazine format lets them do. Many stations have launched local talk/interview programs as an economical way to achieve news impact. And so on and so forth.
It looks to us like daily news is coming on strong. Stand-alone shows are less prevalent.
A supplemental local news survey taken last summer by consultants Mike Marcotte, Steve Martin and Ken Mills (as a piggy-back study to the CPB/PRNDI Census of Journalists) asked all public radio and TV stations in America to provide some detail on what they are producing as local news and public affairs.
The charts below show the share of stations providing various news program types. The TV-only stations have been excluded, leaving a sample of 289 radio-only, or radio-TV joint licensees.
These charts are stacked in order of the most common to the least common news program types.
Daily Newscasts
It can now be said with absolute authority that a major majority (72%) of public radio stations are in the business of providing daily local news.
Daily Features
While we did not define all the program types here, the labels are part of the common parlance in local public radio news programming. In the category of “Daily Features” we might have simply said “Features” and it would have implied the same thing. These are in-depth stories that are programmed within the daily news format clock — which 49% of stations are providing.
Breaking News
This is a very interesting finding — again because the system has debated over the years about what its journalism stands for. No one has argued against depth and context, but more and more feel the responsibility to grow their ability to respond to fast-breaking events. While the majority of stations (55%) do not provide breaking news, those who do (45%) puts this category among the leading news program types at local stations.
Specialty Programs
Ranking as common is the specialty program which would be recurring coverage under an umbrella theme such as arts… or business… or health. Forty-two percent of stations provide specialty programs of some sort.
Special Reports
It would seem to be a good measure of local news sophistication that 41% of stations produce occasional news specials as a way of spotlighting an important issue or topic.
News Series
Similar to special reports, good local newsrooms put together occasional news series as a way of delving more deeply into high priority issues. Thirty-eight percent of stations do this.
Weekly Public Affairs Programs
We discover it is more common for stations to produce weekly affairs programs (38%) than daily or monthly.
Weekly Talk/Interview Programs
Here we see that 27% of U.S. public radio stations produce weekly talk/interview shows. This is slightly more common than the daily talk/interview program that we’ll see in the next chart.
Daily Talk/Interview Programs
Despite the rising popularity of this format staple, only 25% of stations are producing daily talk/interview programs.
Documentaries
That 25% of stations report producing documentaries is rather striking. This typically long-form production style has been on the decline for years.
Weekly News Magazines
News magazines are rather labor intensive productions and have been less prevalent over the years. Still, we see a fifth of stations are still producing them on a weekly basis.
Daily News Magazines
Again, the resource-intensive daily magazine is found on few stations these days (12%).
Monthly News Programs
We’ll just group the last three charts here under “Monthly News Programs.” The most prevalent of these are the monthly public affairs programs (9%) and the monthly talk/interview programs (9%).
Last, and certainly least, is the monthly magazine found at very few stations.
A Third of Stations Hoping to Expand Local News
Posted: February 18, 2011 Filed under: newsroom trends, PRNDI/MVM Consulting Survey, public radio 2 Comments »In a survey taken before the current debate over federal funding of public broadcasting, stations were relatively optimistic about expanding the time they devote on-air to their locally produced news and public affairs. More than a third planned to do so.
The stations were also asked if they had expanded their news time in the previous year. More than a fourth said they had.
The chart above shows that the bulk of US public radio stations maintained a consistent level of air time devoted to local news and public affairs in FY 2010. But, despite the economic downturn, more than a quarter of stations actually expanded their local news. A small segment (7%) cut back on news time in FY 2010.
The chart below shows the bulk of stations, in FY 2011, expected to maintain their 2010 levels of airtime for local news and public affairs programming. But a full third anticipated or planned to expand their local news offerings. Eight percent of respondents were not sure but only 1% expect to decrease local news.
