http://www.timeout.com/chicago/Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://TOCWebArticles2/76/features/making_waves.xml
The people at Chicago Public Radio want to put you on the air. Their radical plan to reinvent radio could fail—or it just might revolutionize broadcast media. By Margaret Lyons The potent elixir of enthusiasm and naïveté consumes a tiny room in the corner of what staffers call the “shadow office.” If you’ve been in on the ground floor of a start-up business, that’s the atmosphere here exactly. The staff members are passionate, their cubicles are decorated with company paraphernalia, and they speak in munchy sound bites about “the mission,” the great change that’s about to come, how revolutionary their idea is and how it’s going to Bring the People Together. But this isn’t Silicon Valley or a dorm lounge at the U of C. This is Chicago Public Radio. WAIT WAIT, DON’T BORE ME! Justin Kaufmann, from left, Kedar Coleman and Josh Andrews are part of the team aiming to amp up Chicago Public Radio. Like what you're reading? A handful of staff gathers twice weekly to plan the revolution. (Well, it’s not exactly a revolution if your boss asked you to plan it, but still.) A few months ago, Torey Malatia, president and general manager of CPR, came upon an opportunity: The noncommercial station, which broadcasts on 91.5 FM WBEZ, and simulcasts on 89.5 FM WBEW and 90.7 FM WBEQ, had asked for an FCC permit to boost WBEW’s wattage. The FCC granted the change, increasing the station’s output from 7,000 watts to 50,000 watts. CPR could continue to simulcast 91.5 FM, on the beefed-up 89.5 FM, or Malatia could try to get the ears of a different audience, a new audience—people who don’t listen to or have any interest in WBEZ. Specifically, the young, non-white listenership the station has failed to attract (See “Fine tuning,” page 24). Malatia decided the only way to lure the audience that usually tunes the station out was to do everything differently. “What if we had no shows? With no packaged components?” Malatia asks, describing how he came up with the strategy. He and vice president for programming Ron Jones hammered out some more ideas about ways to radically change the sound, content and essential qualities of public radio. He tapped a small group of CPR employees—producers, marketers, a fund-raiser—to get the ball rolling. “It seemed kind of unworkable when I handed it off,” Malatia says. But his group is now in the final process of making this unworkable plan a website, a radio station and a community. “You won’t hear typical hour-long programs,” says Josh Andrews, a producer for CPR and team captain of what’s about to happen to 89.5 FM. As far as Andrews is concerned, we won’t hear typical anything. No one really knows what you’ll hear on 89.5 FM come April 2007 (if everything goes according to schedule, which is a big if). Here’s their plan: Hosts will be in charge of two-hour blocks of radio time, and they’ll be free to play whatever strikes their fancy that day. Maybe a host is still thinking about last night’s episode of America’s Next Top Model, so he cues up a field report from a recent casting call for the show. Next might come a slam poet’s musings on commercial beauty, then three of the fiercest songs off of a local band’s new LP, followed by a spoof remix of James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful,” then an interview with a fashion photographer. Or maybe a bunch of music, or a lot of commentary. The point is, pretty much anything goes. But—and here’s the major innovation—there’s a communal element, too. 89.5 FM will also rely on content listeners create and upload themselves to the station’s website, YouTube-style: a track off their band’s new EP, a poem, a story, a mash-up, a skit, a dog barking, a ridiculous phone message or anything else . Hosts will weave their own content with the best and most relevant user-generated segments. This pre-supposes one crucial fact: That people will upload content onto the website. But producer Justin Kaufmann believes the success of audiosharing sites, such as odeo.com, is proof that people will be willing to share audio. “Why do I put my video on YouTube? ’Cause I want people to see it,” he says. And the new station will one-up these sites by filtering out boring content. “If it’s good, it’ll get on the radio,” Kaufmann explains. “That’s what differentiates us from any Web audio service—what differentiates us from everything.” Indeed, the 89.5 FM pep squad seems undaunted by every potential stumbling point that gets thrown its way. Take the issue of the digital divide: That is, the station is supposed to play content from across cultures, races and generations. But plenty of Chicagoans don’t have access to equipment to record content, or a computer to edit and upload it. This won’t be a problem, Andrews insists. For starters, the station will have new satellite offices in neighborhoods throughout the city. There will also be several mobile recording stations—at record stores, libraries and street fairs—to accumulate diverse content from uploaders and from its own street teams. Outreach efforts will be an essential part of the new station’s image, says Colleen Jungbluth, marketing director for CPR. “[89.5 FM will sound] like the entire city, not just the North Shore,” she says. Shawn Campbell, program director at WLUW, says that user-generated or man-on-the-street content can be “really real.” But in the past, her station—which operates under a management agreement between Loyola University and CPR—found that crummy sound quality was a deal breaker. “On the one hand,” she says, “[amateur content can be] really great, exciting radio. On the other hand, if your listeners can’t understand what people are saying—whether it’s background noise or just overall sound quality—then a great story doesn’t matter.” Again, the CPR team dismisses this question. Roman Mars, a producer for the station’s Third Coast Audio Festival (CPR’s annual audio-documentary festival), says hosts can use clips of low-fidelity audio in remixes or edit them down to their most audible portions. “We make radio,” Mars says. “We’re not afraid of production. That’s why we’re here.” As for WBEZ, “91.5 FM will be what it is, except enhanced and expanded,” Malatia says. But not everyone is jazzed about the change. What Malatia calls “enhanced,” outraged fans call “the death of music on WBEZ.” That station’s highly publicized—and much bemoaned—switch to a 24/7 news-talk format (which should go into effect January 1, 2007), and the elimination of its dedicated music programming, means there’s a greater impetus for 89.5 FM to shed its traditional public-radio identity. Initially, 89.5 was going to be all-music. That idea didn’t stick, so to help the new service take off, the plan is to keep 91.5 FM and 89.5 FM as separate as possible. “We have a powerful brand out there with Chicago Public Radio, but we need to clearly send a message that this is something different,” Andrews says. “The association won’t be up-front.” So it won’t sound like WBEZ Jr. But if 89.5 FM is going to sound like much of anything, it’s going to need hosts who set a tone and standard for the station—a tone that says, “This ain’t your mama’s NPR.” Wendy Turner, membership director and part of the planning committee, says hosts for the new station will need to be more personable, more relatable for younger listeners—i.e., less stodgy than the traditional public-radio voices. “It’ll be nice to have some personality on the air,” she says. “There’s a spark you can hear.” Malatia acknowledges the stodginess factor that hampers some NPR hosts. “There’s a distance that’s imposed between the host and the audience in public radio—even in the warmest and nicest hosts, there’s a sense of presentation,” he says. In other words, typical 20-somethings hear that detached formality and flip to the next station. Who gets excited about this week’s News from the Ivory Tower? That dynamic won’t fly on 89.5 FM, Malatia says. “[89.5 FM will be] made possible and captivating by hosts who know how to talk to people about what they’re playing, and what’s going on.” But where 89.5 FM is going to find these hosts remains to be seen. The plan, Kaufmann says, is to debut with 14 full-time hosts, and he estimates about half are already employees of CPR. Malatia says he’s not certain exactly how they’ll fill the remaining positions, except that they want to look “outside” the pool of people who usually apply for jobs in public radio. “We hope that they’ll find us,” Kaufmann says. In addition to sounding welcoming—and sounding like lots of different people, rather than a lily-white retirement home—hosts are responsible for cultivating an online community. “The content will grow organically through a relationship with a [host],” Turner says. The hope is, listeners tune into a host’s show and then start uploading content they think the host will like; the host likes and broadcasts it, and the cycle continues. “That’s something other [audio-sharing] websites don’t have,” she says. Everyone on the 89.5 FM committee seems confident users will upload enough usable content. But how will users find the site in the first place? Kedar Coleman, who orchestrates outreach for CPR, is on the lookout for what the committee calls “ambassadors”—community leaders, artists and folks-about-town to help CPR get the word out about the new format. Coleman will hold the first meeting with these volunteer evangelists August 17, when these trendsetters will be encouraged to start participating in an online forum to help shape the identity of 89.5 FM. The idea is that ambassadors will be so excited about the proposed station that they tell everyone they know, and so on, and so on—like so many forwarded YouTube links. But even if these early adopters are as enthusiastic as the CPR crew hopes, one simple but significant hurdle remains: The project doesn’t have a name. When Malatia came up with it, he called it “the Street” to indicate how grassroots and citycentric it will be. In internal CPR documents, it’s called “New Service.” Then everyone settled on “Vox,” only to discover that several other companies use the name—a vodka from the Netherlands being the most recognizable. For now, the team is calling it “secret radio project”—and is telling ambassadors to spread the word about www.secretradioproject.com. The wait-and-see approach extends to fund-raising efforts as well. Public radio’s funding comes from listener donations, but Turner, who’s in charge of fund-raising strategies for the new station, says she doesn’t think typical pledge drives will work. Andrews is pursuing venture-capital funding—again, an Internet start-up tactic. Turner says it comes down to finding new sponsors and patrons, not just “the same 50 underwriters” who support CPR. Who these underwriters might be—surely companies trying to reach the desirable demographic 89.5 FM will target—remains unclear. As a noncommercial radio station, 89.5 FM can’t carry ordinary advertising, but its website can. While you’re uploading content and participating in ground-up radio production, you can also punch the monkey. But the specific plan behind Web advertising is still up in the air, and that sort of sums up what’s going on here. A small group of dedicated people are trying to change Chicago Public Radio—hell, their project could change radio in general if it takes off—but so far, it’s all talk. And while that talk is invigorating, and the staff’s zeal is contagious, they have eight months to get this station on the air. That means they have less than eight months to find 20 people with enough tech-savvy and on-air personality. And they have even less time to create a website—which is scheduled to launch in January to start stockpiling audio—that can host and sort an enormous amount of data. And they still have to come up with a name. “It’s chancy,” says WLUW’s Campbell. “[They] have to prove it can be entertaining…something people don’t just need, but something they actually want. It’s a risk, but it’s hugely ambitious, and it’s really intriguing.” The committee assembling 89.5 FM hopes that it has more than just a good idea on its hands. It’s not just looking to be a specimen of audioscience interest. It wants to form a thriving, legitimate and multifaceted station. “It’s going to be incredibly hard to get users on board, but I have faith,” Mars says. “[The new model] has to work. We’re going to push radio to stay interactive and viable. We’re going to make it happen.” -- Ken Kopp Amateur Radio: KKØHF AIM: radiojunkie785 Web: http://732u.com Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
