Meetings & Discussions | How Did We Get Here? |
What Options Are You Considering?
New options being considered: Pine | Maple | Plum | Fig | Walnut | Elm
| Spruce | Cedar | Poplar | Chestnut
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Programming
- Music format; eclectic music mix, with a professionally-staffed weekday morning program that plays music. Outside of the morning program volunteers would host music shows and more specialized programs. The sound of the station and the appeal of the programming would be consistent all the time.
- KUSP would stay affiliated with NPR so we could offer top-of-the-hour short news updates, special coverage of breaking news when world events warranted. We might also air music programs distributed by NPR that fit the format.
- More partnerships like KUSP’s long standing relationship with the Monterey Jazz Festival would bring more local music to the airwaves. KUSP invested a lot of its available resources in this kind of programming in the late 1970’s and 1980’s.
- We would seek to build partnerships that would make it possible to access music performances recorded by stations with similar formats elsewhere in the U.S. The number of public radio stations with this kind of programming is growing, and there are lots of vibrant music scenes around the country.
- With news programming significantly reduced, emphasis of kusp.org would be on music and music programming.
Signal
- The 88.9 signal footprint (plus translators) would not change.
Personnel:
- Based on how other community stations in the U.S. with this format work, this approach would probably require about 10 full-time equivalent employees, more than KUSP has now; roles for programming employees would change considerably.
- This plan would involve community volunteers in programming, but probably fewer than now.
Important questions/concerns
- Under this plan, revenue would need to be significantly more than operating expenses, so funds would be available to pay down KUSP’s debt.
- Would substantially scaling back KUSP’s role in news and information programming be acceptable to the community?
- Would talk/information programs like Ask Dr. Dawn, Geek Speak, The Agony Column Literary Magazine, The 7th Avenue Project fit on a music station?
- The station would be in more direct competition with music stations such as KPIG, KRML, and KZSC. Would KUSP be able to compete for listeners successfully given the number of competing stations and listener loyalty to those stations?
- Music stations have lost more listeners to services like Pandora and Spotify than stations with a news emphasis. What would KUSP have to do to attract listeners who now listen to a lot of online music?
- Would listener support be adequate for this kind of station? While data is sketchy, some indications are that fewer listeners to music stations contribute compared with those listening to stations with news formats.
- The costs to acquire programming would go down significantly compared to KUSP now, but the format requires higher payroll expenses to make the overall format work smoothly.
June 1st, 2015 at 12:20 pm
Like Pine, unless large donors ($50K and above) are identified now the debt will not get paid off.
June 2nd, 2015 at 11:02 pm
There are so many ways to listen to music today, will this be unique and attractive? I would miss the news and information. Santa Cruz has stories to tell in addition to music.
June 8th, 2015 at 5:02 pm
In this scenario: why stay affiliated with NPR? It seems awfully expensive for something that’s not really necessary when presumably KAZU is already going to have the newscasts and other special news coverage.
No disrespect to my colleagues and friends at NPR, but it seems you could get a lot of that by dropping NPR and just keeping a membership with APM to get the BBC World Service. The only major downside would be losing access to World Cafe, which is an excellent Triple-A music & interview show out of WXPN/NPR that would be good to have on your lineup (assuming nobody else in town is airing it). But there’s always Undercurrents, an excellent five-hour daily Triple-A show. (IIRC, you don’t have to air all five hours if you don’t want to) And Echoes, too. (although they’d require membership with PRI)
Not that I’m necessarily saying you should have more network music programming at the expense of local programming. But I am saying that if your goal is to have GOOD programming and not all your local stuff is really up to snuff (that’s an entirely different and, I’d imagine, SENSITIVE, conversation) then there are ample sources of quality network shows to fill the gaps.
For this plan to succeed, however, you’d have to take pages out of a lot of the successful Triple-A stations and find ways to make the music programming you deliver be more relevant to your local audience than Spotify or Pandora is. Part of that is live events/concerts; KUSP would have to spend a lot of time and man-hours marketing itself with every popular concert, festival, music show, etc that comes through the town.
But a lot of it is having top-notch local DJ’s that are very much in-tune with what a majority of the local populace cares about, and that your listeners can have a longstanding relationship with. Some of your volunteer crew probably has this to a limited degree now, and by “limited” I mean it’s hard to really do this well if you’re only on the air two or three hours a week. You might want to hire those people full-time to do daily shifts.
FWIW, it’s perfectly okay to have talk segments on a music station, but you do have to careful how you schedule them. You can’t force-feed an audience “talk” at times they want “music”. Depends on the show, too. Some of them just aren’t going to work. If there’s one truism in radio today, it’s that with limited exceptions**, you can’t be all things to all people. You gotta pick one audience big enough to sustain you and then super-serve it.
** Typically meaning really, really big markets where the law of averages guarantees you’ll get enough listeners who like what you’re doing…or really, really tiny markets where you are the only game in town…like middle-of-nowhere Texas or Alaska. Santz Cruz does not meet either of those criteria, fortunately or unfortunately.
June 12th, 2015 at 10:15 am
Eclectic music mix is not a format. If this is to work it has to carve out a music niche that is not filled by KPIG, so Triple A will not be an option. Some research might yield what format wold work, but it would need to be flexible enough to include lots of visits by live artists, as was once the case. People could also watch in studio concerts on concert window, expanding both the audience and the income from such performances. I am not totally opposed to paid dj’s but they should be very local and tuned in to what is happening in the music scene both here and in SF and LA, because we are on the tour route for many fine acts. KUSP was once much more relevant to the music scene in the central coast. WE could be again. There is still room for talk programming in that mix, and for short features that celebrate the rich culture of our area. Sonic ID’s, short one minute profiles of fascinating local characters, are used very well at several stations and they help distinguish a station from the rest. I am happy to help produce these with my broadcast writing students for KUSP. They can be musicians, artists, writers, scientists, fisherfolk, or politicos or just plain folk. Just keep the license.
June 13th, 2015 at 6:31 pm
Just music wouldn’t cut it for me. I much prefer adding local talk, news, information programming into the mix. We need a local station that covers local interests!
June 16th, 2015 at 6:42 pm
We were told last night at the Board of Directors’ meeting at Louden Nelson Center that this and all the other proposals on the Participate blog are no longer being considered. There are new options being considered and there was an anonymous donation of $100,000 yesterday that will fund the station for approximately another 90 days with some staff cuts that the Board considered in executive session last night. I have no news on what happened. The Board should direct the staff to update the web site so we all know what’s going on.
You can send a message to the Board of Directors by using this link:
http://kusp.org/board-contact.shtml