Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

The KUSP Spring Membership Drive met its goal at 3:00 PM today, at the end of “Two Steps From the Blues” with Charlie Lange. We extended the drive about half a day to reach our goal.

During this campaign, we focused on the number of contributors who made a pledge, rather than the dollar amount. Based on recent past drives, we believed that if we recorded 1,000 pledges (a nice round number), we would meet our budgetary projections for this drive.

Drives always pick up close to the end… and this morning, we saw a rapid increase in the number of pledges (which we expected) and a even more dramatic increase in the amount of the average contribution (which was an unexpected, and very welcome, development). So, by the time we reached mid-afternoon, we were already 2% over our budgetary goal for the drive, even though we were still about 75 pledges short of our announced target of 1,000 contributions. Since we always want to keep our pledge drives as short as possible, we felt that was a good place to declare victory!

Overall, KUSP has fewer days of on-air fundraising than do most public radio stations… in 2007, we were fundraising for a total of eighteen days (spring, fall, and a special 1 1/2 day drive to finish our digital conversion project last June). We expect about the same, or less, for 2008. Some public radio stations in California had more than fifty days of fundraising last year. At KUSP we thank our lucky stars that our listeners respond to our call for support so enthusiastically… and quickly!

Sincerest thanks go out from me to all our listener-contributors, to our very dedicated volunteers (the KUSP volunteer ranks just about double during a pledge drive — something like 150 people came in to help during the 8 1/2 days), and to my very hard-working colleagues on the station’s professional staff, who are on the job almost around the clock while the drive is on the air.

And of course… if you haven’t made a gift yet, you still can… just go here!

Steve Gillmor hosts a wide-ranging podcast called NewsGang Live; last Friday’s show is (mostly) about the evolution of public radio in an on-line world. NPR Interim CEO Dennis Haarsager is a guest, along with Doc Searls and Stephen Hill, who created “Hearts of Space” (an on-line music service and associated public radio program).

The podcast MP3 is linked here. This is a really long program (1 hour, 25 minutes; about 78 megabytes) and not easy to listen to if you’re accustomed to public radio production values (think 4 guys on a telephone conference call with occasional technical problems). But the content is killer… they discuss the principal issues public radio organizations in general, and NPR in particular, have to come to grips with right away.

KUSP included, of course.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

KUSP Chief Engineer Brant Herrett just let me know that the KUSP translator in Big Sur (105.9 FM) is finally back to full power. Our equipment was damaged in the big storm the weekend of January 26-27, when the tower that supports our antennas (and other communications users) collapsed in high winds. We returned to the air at low power about three weeks later, once the property owner was able to rebuild their tower. It took some additional time to repair all of our damaged equipment. The final piece came back from repair yesterday, so Brant headed to Big Sur this morning to get everything back in service.

Thanks to everyone in Big Sur who stuck with us during this long disruption. Please let me know if we experience any further problems… sometimes, after a repair project, unexpected technical glitches crop up.

KUSP has dedicated the reconstruction of our Big Sur translator to the memory of Bob Nash, a long-time Big Sur resident and very loyal KUSP listener and supporter, who passed away on February 10. If you Google “Bob Nash Big Sur” you’ll uncover a wealth of links about this wonderful man.

In the second-ever post to this blog, I extolled the virtues of Technology 360, Dennis Haarsager’s blog about public media and media technology. NPR announced this afternoon that Dennis has been appointed their interim Chief Executive Officer, succeeding Ken Stern, who will be leaving the network. Dennis had been NPR’s board chair since last fall.

NPR will launch a national search for a permanent CEO.

Kevin Klose, who has joined us for several KUSP events over the years, will continue as the President of NPR.

(edited to add: for a useful insider perspective on the environment at NPR at the moment, go see Rob Paterson’s blog entry on the subject, and the subsequent comments)

This morning, KUSP launched a project that will define what our public radio service will look like in the years to come.

Through our work over the past year that we did in anticipation of possibly coming together with KAZU, we learned a lot about how Central Coast residents feel about news and information programming. In the next hundred days or so, we intend to find some answers to questions that research presented. We also want to complement what we’ve learned about news and information with a better understanding of listeners’ feelings about the other pillars of KUSP’s service over the past 35 years — music programming, and programming about the arts and cultural activities that make this place so special.

Finally, we need to understand how best to bring all those threads together. In 2005, following an extensive strategic planning process, KUSP’s Board of Directors reaffirmed that our mission was to bring California’s Central Coast “a distinctive and thoughtful mix of news, public affairs, arts and music programming.”

Since the effort to bring KAZU and KUSP together did not succeed, it’s time for KUSP to move ahead independently, serving the public radio audience at the highest possible level. We intend to do that with you, in the most open, transparent, and collaborative way we can.

We’re starting with an on-line survey that is linked here (and from our home page; follow the “Take the survey” icon). Then, on “Talk of the Bay” this Friday, March 7, we’ll share the early survey results and invite a discussion about the different programming strategies that are open to us.

As we go along through the spring, we have a number of different ideas for engaging the communities we serve in this planning project. We’ll let you know what’s rolling out as we finalize our plans.

At the end of the process, we’ll have a road map for our programming, on the radio and at kusp.org, that is as responsive to community interests and concerns as we can possibly make it. And that’s what we’ll put on the air.

I’m looking forward to collaborating with you on this! Please share your opinions on the survey, and join us on Talk of the Bay this Friday…

On 2/28/2008 the Foundation of CSUMB decided to continue operating their public radio station, KAZU, independently. This wound up a planning process that in some sense had been going on for over a year and a half, and intensively so since February 2007.

I’m really disappointed in this outcome, because I genuinely believe that we can serve the people of the Central Coast better if the two stations can fully collaborate on programming. And the economics of local public radio are such that full collaboration would have to translate to a shared management team, and a financial structure that would let us pool our resources and share the risks of trying new things.

There’s been a lot of media coverage about the end of this process. I think the most careful reporting was by Jennifer Squires at the Santa Cruz Sentinel; you can see her stories here (before the decision by CSUMB) and here (after the decision).

KUSP did a “Talk of the Bay” on February 26 about how the proposal to put KAZU and KUSP together fits into the larger context of changes in the media landscape. I was a guest, but I think the most interesting and important insights came from Tom Honig, former editor of the Santa Cruz Sentinel. The mp3 of the show is here.

A quick word about “editorial firewalls” – host Deanna Zachary and KUSP Talk/Information Producer J.D. Hillard put that show together without oversight from the rest of station management. They asked me to be a guest and I agreed. Though I think the show reflects positively on the idea of bringing the stations together, it wasn’t designed with that in mind. Part of the difficulty Deanna and J.D. faced, as Deanna says in the show, is that CSUMB and KAZU declined to make anyone available to appear.

One of the hardest things for any reporter is presenting a balanced story when some people involved in the story are willing to cooperate with you, and the “other side” isn’t (and that’s as if all stories had two sides, when they usually have many more). We run into this problem at KUSP constantly.

Now we at KUSP will begin developing plans to improve our service, independently of KAZU. Much, much more about this in the weeks ahead…

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Observant readers will see the first post to this blog is dated almost a month ago, but it’s only going “live” now. There’s several reasons for this. The most significant was that our New Media Director, whose help is crucial to me for this kind of thing, came down with pneumonia. He’s better now, thank goodness. Then, just as he was getting better, things came to a head with CSUMB about our effort to bring KUSP and KAZU together… and as a rookie blogger I couldn’t manage to launch this and manage that situation simultaneously.

Now that the university has made its decision, we’re moving to get KUSP on track… a project of which this blog is a (small) part.