Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

At noon today the 91.7 MHz public radio facility that serves the Highway 101 corridor from King City south to Paso Robles (and communities west of there) passed from KUSP’s ownership to our colleagues to the south, at KCBX. KCBX now has three major transmitters: KSBX 89.5 in the Santa Barbara area; KCBX 90.1 for northern Santa Barbara County and most of San Luis Obispo County; and what will be (after the FCC approves a change in call letters) KNBX 91.7 north of that.

This change in ownership furthers the strategic plans of KUSP and KCBX, and has been under study by our stations for almost a year. For KCBX, the acquisition of the 91.7 frequency fills in areas of poor coverage in the northern part of their home county, San Luis Obispo, and adds coverage in more rural parts of southern Monterey County — a place that, culturally, has more in common with San Luis Obispo County than it does with the communities ringing Monterey Bay and the urbanized areas along 101 (from Salinas north to Silicon Valley), where almost all of KUSP’s audience lives and works.

For KUSP, this transition is a strategic move that accomplishes three important and interrelated goals.

First, it strengthens us in financial terms. That in turn makes it possible to keep moving forward in two critical programming areas — building a team to bring you the news and issues in our area that you care about, and building the capacity at kusp.org to get all our programming to our audience how they want, when they want, wherever they are.

In the past year KUSP has invigorated our news and information service, and you have responded. Our audience research indicates the station’s core audience — the number of people who depend on us more than any other station — is about 30% bigger than it was in early 2008, and as big or bigger than at any time in KUSP history. More people are tuning in more often, and stay with us longer. Audience size is not the only measure of how a public radio station serves its audience, but it’s significant.

And in the past year we have worked very hard to build kusp.org into a public media center that can carry our station and our values far into the future. The RadioEngage project, developed with our partners at Quiddities and supported by a generous grant from the Knight Foundation, is just about ready to go. We know that the choice and interactivity the Internet brings our community of listeners has changed, and will continue to change, our public radio world — profoundly and irreversibly.

Thirty-eight years ago, the people who started our station didn’t sit around and just pine for their own AM radio station — they went out and got an FM license, even though FM listening was only a tiny fraction of AM listening in 1971. They saw what the medium was capable of and moved to secure that capability for their community. We reap the rewards of their foresight around the clock, every day.

Now, we must do something nearly as bold. We need to strengthen the over-the-air service built on our founders’ foresight, and move — quickly — to build a great on-line service. If the world of public media moved more slowly, we might have chosen to wait until the economy had recovered, before charging ahead into the world of on-line listening and connectivity though mobile devices like the iPhone. But I think all of the professional and volunteer leaders at KUSP agree that it’s necessary for us to move assertively. This arrangement with KCBX is one step towards securing the substantial financial resources we need to go forward.

When KUSP put KBDH San Ardo on the air in 2001, we filled in one of the largest geographic gaps in public radio coverage in California. The transaction completed today maintains public radio service for everyone in or passing through the 91.7 signal area, something we felt was vital. And, having finished this particular transaction, we hope to explore future collaborations with KCBX in other ways that strengthen public radio in central California overall.

I wouldn’t leave this subject without thanking the hundreds of KUSP supporters in southern Monterey and northern SLO County who have listened and contributed to our station these past eight years. As Internet and mobile device technology improves (and this is happening at lightning speed) we’ll still be a listening option for many of you.

We hope that these changes benefit everyone in the long run. Indeed, we’re confident they will.

NPR has launched a top-to-bottom revision of the network’s web site. The new approach has a lot in common with what we’ve developed as part of our RadioEngage project, which is in the final tuning stages.

I’d be interested in learning feedback about what you like and don’t like about the new npr.org; I’ll share it with the team that’s putting the finishing touches on the new kusp.org.

Tonight is the first night of a BarCamp event called “public media camp,” sponsored by Quiddities Dev. Inc. — our collaborators in the RadioEngage project. Follow the above links to find out more about what we’ll all be doing. If you’re in the Santa Cruz area, you can register on site Saturday morning between 9 and 10 AM.

And, it’s free!

Look for reports on the goings-on this weekend.

Todd Mundt tipped his blog readers (myself included) to a post by Diane Mermigas that discusses different ways public media might be able to gain the financial support it needs to function in the future. There are some interesting intersections between the ideas she writes about and things we are working on right now at KUSP… particularly in the context of our RadioEngage project. She also mentions Nonprofit Finance Fund, a very forward-thinking organization that has been a primary capital resource for KUSP for many years.

I’d love to know what you think about Diane’s ideas…

Today the Knight News Challenge, a program of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, announced a $327,000 grant to Quiddities Dev Inc. a web solutions organization based here in Santa Cruz. With KUSP’s collaboration, Quiddities will develop RadioEngage, an open source publishing platform optimized for the needs of public radio stations.

KUSP will pilot the project here at kusp.org and our content team, led by New Media Director Steve Laufer, will work closely with Quiddities’ designers as they explore this new territory for public media.

As an open source project based on the Drupal software platform, RadioEngage will be available for all public media organizations to freely implement and improve upon as soon as it is released. Our objective is deeper community participation and engagement by allowing the creators, contributors, and listeners of news, information and music to communicate and collaborate directly and easily.

A year ago, at the time the first Knight News Challenge grants were awarded, Knight recognized Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism project with its Knight News Innovation EPpy Award. We are incredibly honored that Knight chose our collaboration with Quiddities to further advance their commitment to community-service-focused, participatory public radio.

The full press release for the grant (as a pdf file) is linked here. We’re very excited about this opportunity and I am grateful to Margaret Rosas and her team at Quiddities, KUSP Development Director Virginia Wright, the aforementioned Steve Laufer, and all of the staff and volunteers in KUSP New Media who worked hard to create the proposal… and to the fine people of the Knight Foundation who saw it as worthy of such generous support!

Watch this space!