Schiller to public radio: Don’t just sit there, take risks

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April 21, 2011, 10:30 a.m.

Schiller to public radio: Don’t just sit there, take risks

By Andrew Phelps

Vivian Schiller

Vivian Schiller has a warning to her former colleagues at NPR: “Your continued existence is not guaranteed.”

But that warning — delivered yesterday in a talk at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center — wasn’t just about the congressional fight over public funding. It was about what she sees as the imminent threat of Internet radio in cars. “The monopoly advantage of the radio tower will begin to fade,” she said, delivering her remarks in the form of an open letter to public broadcasters.

“New digital-only startups will enter the marketplace in audio, and you will find yourselves longing for the days when the competition was that public radio station that overlapped with your broadcast signal,” she said.

The Shorenstein Center has posted audio of Schiller’s hour-long talk and Q&A; you can download the MP3 or listen to it below:

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Schiller suggested member stations adjust to the threat by starting to offer additional, online-only streams. If the local NPR station is serving news when a listener wants music, Pandora is just a click away. And, as Schiller warned in our predictions-for-2011 package in December, that kind of audio flexibility is coming to cars, terrestrial radio’s strongest bastion.

She said public radio could learn a few things about competition and innovation from its commercial counterparts, having worked in for-profit media herself (CNN, Discovery, The New York Times). She urged public radio to take more risks.

“You are now competing in the big leagues and are no longer the scrappy underdog,” she said. ”You must become your own disruptors. If you don’t aggressively reach out to new audiences on new platforms, someone else will. There is no such thing as lasting media loyalty, especially in this age of media promiscuity.” She said public radio needs to “let go of the nostalgia” of the craft.

In questions afterward, Schiller said little about what’s next for her post-NPR (other than “a week on the beach”) and had little to add about the controversies that led to her departure. Schiller brushed off suggestions that NPR cut ties to member stations, which receive a vast majority of the famously fraught federal funding, saying the national-local partnership model is the network’s “special sauce.” She said the surest way for stations to survive is to deliver locally focused content, alongside NPR’s national and international reporting, on every platform possible.

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Jeff

There is a long list of public radio stations that have already started streaming on the web a long time ago. Try the Public Radio IOS (iphone) app to listen anywhere on your iphone. It even finds which stations are carrying particular shows at the current time so that you can hear your favorite shows anytime. Apparently she didn’t understand PBS or NPR at all and simply didn’t belong there.
http://annatarkov.posterous.com Anna Tarkov

Where can one contact Ms. Schiller? I would love to personally tell her how inspiring I found her talk. Thanks
Anonymous

Jeff said ::There is a long list of public radio stations that have already started streaming on the web a long time ago.::

She means more than just “stream your station on the Internetz”, Jeff – Jeez, even that Right-Wing dinosaur Murdoch knows about that! She’s talking about creating Web-only content streams that target specific interest areas (i.e., Middle Eastern News and content, LGBT-specific News and Content, Feminist News and Content) , rather than the usual “Forty minutes of classical music, ten minutes of promos and PSAs, ten minutes of US-centric news and weather” or “Forty minutes of US-centric news stories, five minutes of weather and fifteen minutes of promos and PSAs” that is NPR’s usual model.

She’s also talking about getting the word out in as many places as possible – which the IOS and Android apps are a good start for, but too general-interest and limited.
Anonymous

Jeff said ::There is a long list of public radio stations that have already started streaming on the web a long time ago.::

She means more than just “stream your station on the Internetz”, Jeff – Jeez, even that Right-Wing dinosaur Murdoch knows about that! She’s talking about creating Web-only content streams that target specific interest areas (i.e., Middle Eastern News and content, LGBT-specific News and Content, Feminist News and Content) , rather than the usual “Forty minutes of classical music, ten minutes of promos and PSAs, ten minutes of US-centric news and weather” or “Forty minutes of US-centric news stories, five minutes of weather and fifteen minutes of promos and PSAs” that is NPR’s usual model.

She’s also talking about getting the word out in as many places as possible – which the IOS and Android apps are a good start for, but too general-interest and limited.
Anonymous

Jeff said ::There is a long list of public radio stations that have already started streaming on the web a long time ago.::

She means more than just “stream your station on the Internetz”, Jeff – Jeez, even that Right-Wing dinosaur Murdoch knows about that! She’s talking about creating Web-only content streams that target specific interest areas (i.e., Middle Eastern News and content, LGBT-specific News and Content, Feminist News and Content) , rather than the usual “Forty minutes of classical music, ten minutes of promos and PSAs, ten minutes of US-centric news and weather” or “Forty minutes of US-centric news stories, five minutes of weather and fifteen minutes of promos and PSAs” that is NPR’s usual model.

She’s also talking about getting the word out in as many places as possible – which the IOS and Android apps are a good start for, but too general-interest and limited.
Anonymous

Why is anyone listening to Vivian Schiller anymore?

Hasn’t she lost all credibility?
Mary Beth Garber

If you notice, Schiller concluded by urging NPR stations to deliver locally focused content on every platform possible. The ability to do that via human voice and personal connection is what has kept and will keep radio thriving, no matter which digital platform is used to access that connection.
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http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=730080987 Grant Barrett

Jeff, Schiller understands public media perfectly well. What she means by her streaming comments is that pubmedia needs to offer *more* streaming options online, beyond what they’re already doing. You make the point for her: if I can listen to a show on dozens or hundreds of stations, then a local pubmedia outfit needs to offer a sweetener, convincer, or unique selling proposition to the consumer so that person will choose to listen locally as often as possible. If they listen locally, then they donate locally, they participate locally, they volunteer locally.

For just one example, if my local pubmedia outfit offered a whole range of music-only channels of many genres, with my local weather and a bit of local news once an hour or with a local host I could meet at local public events or with a dose of local performances and performers from local theatres and clubs (or even from the station’s studios), then that might be a better proposition for me and people like me than the placeless, no-locale Pandora.

Schiller’s ideas remind me of successful online businesses who iterate, kill what doesn’t work, iterate again, and try not to let anyone part of their business become so entrenched that it is seen as too precious to be changed.

sp113, Schiller still has plenty of credibility with anyone who matters inside pubmedia. That’s a subjective statement, of course, but a lot of changeless dinosaurs and jobsworth whiners are not included.
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Bgilliland

KCRW is leading this trend, and I feel blessed living within their broadcasting signal, and yet now, no matter where the internet is, so is KCRW
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Bluesky89212000

Vivian was a horrible fit for CEO of NPR. She doesn’t get radio and its realities. She is too focused on the delivery system and not the content being delivered.
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