Here’s the third and final part of my interview with Jesse Thorn, host of public radio’s The Sound of Young America. (Here’s my intro post, Part 1, and Part 2.)

In this excerpt we talk about MaxFunCon, his upcoming weekend convention of fans of his radio show and a mix of former guests and other interesting folks. It sold out in a matter of days.

I think this is actually a big potential area for some media operations; while the Internet has reduced people’s willingness to pay for content, it’s terrific at forging a connection with between the producers and consumers of that content. And, in person, people are a lot more willing to pay for some iteration of that experience.

Think of the music business: Selling the actual music to listeners is much more problematic than it used to be, but many musicians are doing just fine by refocusing their energies more on touring, house parties, personalization, and other ideas that play off the audience’s connection.

Jesse also talks a bit about an interview John Hodgman gave to Wired last year (I wrote about it at the time) that played off that issue of small and passionate audiences vs. big and unengaged ones. I wish I could tattoo what Jesse says about that backwards on the foreheads of news execs, so they’d see it every morning in the mirror.

You can listen to the interview by pressing play in the audio player below, or by downloading the MP3 directly here.

[See post to listen to audio]

There’s also a full transcript below. Also, there’s a little bonus coverage at the end. Oh, and a little swearing.

Josh: You announced some months ago that you were having — I forget the exact terminology you used, but what sort of is a weekend Maximum Fun/Sound of Young America experience, Maximum Fun Con.

Jesse: I like to compare if to the Wayman Tisdale smooth-jazz cruise.

Josh: Yes, exactly! I’ve always associated you with Wayman Tisdale and I’ve never quite understood why. I thought it was your basketball career.

Jesse: You thought it was because I was so good at boxing out.

Josh: That’s right! Exactly. That’s your real strength as a host. Tell me a little bit about what that is, what the idea and the impetus was and how — it hasn’t happened yet, but how the sales and how the build-up has gone so far.

Jesse: There were sort of a couple of imputuses behind it. One was that I had a wedding and my aunt and uncle didn’t go because they had already booked a trip on the Dave Koz smooth-jazz cruise. There are multiple smooth-jazz cruises, if you’re wondering. That kind of annoyed me, but then I thought: “Man, I should have a sweet cruise.”

Then I had gone to this conference that happened to be in Seattle at the same time as or — I was at Bumbershoot in Seattle, and it was at the same time as this thing called PAX, which is the Penny Arcade Expo. It is a video game conference that is both the fan conference for video games and the industry conference for video games.

And it’s run by these guys who make a web comic about video games. It’s a very popular web comic — but they also get 50,000 people coming to this conference that they put on.

And it was originally like: “Hey, our web comic is kind of about video games, we like video games — let’s have a video game weekend.” And then when another conference went out of business, it became the video game industry conference, and I’m sure it’s how they make all their money and etc., etc.

So I thought: “Man, I wonder if I could do something like that.” Because there isn’t anything like that for the kind of stuff that I’m interested in, like comedy and certain kinds of nerd stuff that aren’t comic books or sci-fi. And so I thought: “Well, maybe I’ll have a con, like a Comic-Con.” Because I had gone to Comic-Con and frankly thought it was really smelly. So I was not into going back. I just didn’t want to wait in line for four hours to see a panel on, I don’t even know, Y: The Last Man, or something like that.

And so I thought: “Maybe I could put on a con.” So I looked into putting on cons, and it was just more complicated and annoying than I wanted to get involved with, frankly. And really expensive — I couldn’t figure out how to make it cool enough to be worth the money for people.

So then I was like: “Well, what’s another alternate thing?” I was on a website for UCLA because we were thinking about holding this conference that we were thinking about putting together at UCLA. And they have this retreat center in the mountains east of Los Angeles, and it’s only for educational events. Which — I’m a public radio show, so I get to qualify as an education event.

It’s sort of like an ecosystem. They set it up so they have staff there that handles everything. All you have to pay is a flat fee per person. I thought: “You know what? I bet I could set up like the coolest sort of theme-cruise-in-a-summer-camp context.” And I could bring together all these cool people, and I bet I could get enough people to come that it would pay for people that I like and are my friends that I know through the show or elsewhere to come and present whatever cool thing it is that they do.

And so I was like, “Do I think I could do this?” So I got in touch with a few friends, like John Hodgman, who’s a contributor on The Daily Show, and his best pal and one of my favorite dudes, Jonathan Coulton, who is a very funny singer/songwriter. And some comedians I know. And I was like: “Hey, would you guys be interested in coming to the woods for a weekend and having a thing for like a hundred people?” And they were all like, “Yeah! That sounds fun!”

And so I started making spreadsheets and stuff. And eventually what ended up happening is, I booked all these people that I thought were amazing, and then I put tickets on sale. I charged people the amount of money that it would cost to go to a cool all-inclusive resort, or something like that. So it’s sort of like a cool vacation thing. We sold all the tickets right away. Like, in two weeks — a week and a half.

And I was like, “Oh, yeah! This is f**kin’ great!” Like, all my favorite things in this place. All these people who really love them and want to meet each other and hang out. And, you know, drink — there’s this guy called Dr. Cocktail who’s going to be there. He is a cocktail historian. And he is making this punch that was originally created for the Columbian Exposition in, I guess it would be what, 1892? And so we’re going to drink huge volumes of Columbian Exposition punch, which is probably made with some like bitter green liqueur or something like that. And…

Josh: And the blood of the colonies, or something as well.

Jesse: Yeah, exactly. And have a really great time. And this feels like such a — like I was so surprised when I sold all the tickets to it. Like, I didn’t have any idea what it was going to be, you know? I had to put the conference deposits on credit cards. I only had one credit card, so I got a bunch of new credit cards with, like, one year of no interest. And I just put all the whole — I put $20,000 on credit cards. And luckily I had very good credit going in. I don’t think I do anymore.

And it really worked out. And I was like, “Oh! Really, what I’m offering people is this thing that they really care about. And only a couple hundred people have to really care about it in order to make it completely financially viable. Like, if they really actually care about it. And that’s basically the thing that I’m selling. You know, Hodgman was in — there was this article in Wired. They interviewed John Hodgman about his previous career as a literary agent. And what’s this woman — who was the woman who was the star of Grace Under Fire?

Josh: Brett Butler.

Jesse: Brett Butler.

Josh: I remember that interview, yeah.

Jesse: Yeah, so he was the literary agent and he wrote a letter to Bruce Campbell because he loved the Evil Dead so much. And said, “Hey, you should write a book. Can I be your literary agent?” And when I say that he was a literary agent, I believe he was working as a receptionist at a literary agency.

So he wrote a letter to his hero Bruce Campbell. And Bruce Campbell said yes and they went out and pitched it all around town and it was the same time as Brett Butler was pitching his — was pitching her thing. (In my mind for a second Brett Butler turned into the former San Francisco Giants center fielder Brett Butler.)

Josh: Right.

Jesse: So Brett Butler was pitching her thing. And she got like a quadrillion-dollar advance because two million people watch her on TV every week. Bruce Campbell got like a $3,000 advance because no one in publishing knew who he was. But Bruce Campbell has, you know, 30,000 people that live and die for Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead and The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr.

And Brett Butler, even though millions of people watch her every week, none of them really give a s**t. You know — it’s just something that they watch. Every time something like this happens, I realize the extent to which the media economy is moving towards people who give a s**t over people who are willing to tolerate something. You know, it’s no longer something that’s just good enough so people don’t change the channel — now it’s something that people pick.

Josh: In the news business there’s been this big blow up the last month or so you may have seen the idea of micropayments, and the idea that what we need to do is to get everybody to pay a fraction of a penny to read every news article and therefore will recreate this mass audience and recreate this business model. What I always want to say is: The answer is not micropayments, it’s macropayments. It’s finding a few people who love you so much that they are willing to spend a significant amount of money. They feel that connection and they’re willing to express it in dollar terms. You create something for them to have.

Jesse: I talked to Doc Searls a little bit about sort of — he hates micropayments. He has a sort of pseudo-micropayments. The basic idea is you would basically budget a certain amount of money for supporting media that you like. Then it would sort of invisibly track what media you consume and apportion the money on that basis. And — if it happened, if somehow something happened to achieve critical mass like that — then great, that’s fine by me. But I’m not going to put any effort into it.! You know what I mean? Like I’ll take your money. But right now what I’m working on is trying to get people to like my thing enough that they’ll give me $2, $5, $10, or $20 a month.

Josh: Yeah. And how many people do that?

Jesse: Hundreds.

Josh: Hundreds?

Jesse: Hundreds. I think it’s maybe five percent of my total listenership.

Josh: That’s not bad.

Jesse: That’s not bad at all. I’m happy with it. I can always have more, and I was really surprised at how many I added with my last pledge drive last year. You realize real quick, when you’re doing something listener supported, why public radio stations have pledge drives. It’s because they really, really work. And hopefully, my next one will be as pleasantly surprising. But it’s kind of humming along.

Josh: Well, I’ve got to say, I’m a fan of the show. I think you do great work and I think you’re a really interesting model for where I think a lot of our businesses are going. So thanks for talking with me. I appreciate it.

BONUS COVERAGE:

Jesse: Do I get to join in the Harvard social clubs? I guess what I’m trying to ask is, having done this interview, does that gain me access into any wood-paneled secret rooms?

Josh: Absolutely!

Jesse: Yes!

Josh: There’s a library card that you’re issued, but it’s actually not a library card.

Jesse: Oh f**k yeah!

Josh: Yeah, so you get that, and there’s a retina scan. It’s all upgraded to the latest technology.

Jesse: Oh my God! That sounds fantastic! I can’t wait to throw away this old pipe and get a new Harvard pipe!

Josh: That’s right! We actually only sell them in pairs with cardigans now.

Jesse: I went to the University of California at Santa Cruz, so needless to say, my old pipe is made of artisanal blown glass.

Josh: Is that the banana slug campus?

Jesse: Yeah, you got it!

Josh: Yeah. So I always confuse them and the Anteaters at Irvine!

Jesse: What you’re really looking at either way is I’m just happy I got into a UC.

Josh: Didn’t get stuck with Cal State.

Jesse: Yeah, exactly.

In this part of our conversation, we talk about the state of the radio business — both commercial and public — and its unwillingness to imagine a truly new model for how it could succeed. It’s a problem he sees in many creative professions whose business models are being wrecked by the Internet:

…everyone [in the music industry seems] to be working so hard to try and make it the ’70s again. And all their new ideas were driven towards: How can we get it back to the ’70s? Rather than: What’s the best thing that we can do given reality? They’re trying to figure out, as [Jesse's friend Merlin Mann] put it, how to get Led Zeppelin to back that limousine full of money from Led Zeppelin III up to their door again.

A lot of the media world is like that right now. It’s people trying to — to the extent that people are being creative, it’s them being creative in an attempt to find creative ways to get back to where they were before, when they were sitting pretty.

I should mention that a healthy part of this conversation centers around Adam Carolla, the radio host who has transformed himself into the world’s most popular podcaster. Carolla is best known to many as a Howard Stern type — a producer of brash, scatological comedy aimed at the most reptilian, walnut-sized part of the 14-year-old male brain. And it’s true that much of his work is less than sophisticated. Actually, a lot less than sophisticated. But I agree with Jesse that Carolla is also a smart, talented guy (as is Stern) who breaks the mold of traditional commercial radio in interesting ways. What I’m saying is don’t let your (justified!) disdain for much of what Carolla’s done color your opinions about what he has to say.

You can listen to it by pressing play in the audio player below, or by downloading the MP3 directly here.

[See post to listen to audio]

There’s also a full transcript below. Also, for our more delicate readers: There’s a little swearing in the audio.

Josh: I want to ask you about two posts that you’ve written on your blog over the past few months. One, I think just last night, about Adam Carolla, and one from back in December about public radio programs.

The post last night had a long excerpt from, I guess, Adam Corolla’s first podcast after he was fired from his radio station in Los Angeles, talking about the way that — he had this wonderful metaphor about radio people as beavers who, if they were stuck on the top of the Sears Tower, they’d start looking for wood to build a dam, because that’s all they know how to do. And that he wanted to do something a little bit different.

What made you think that that was — what in Adam’s, in that post connected with you, in terms of his vision for radio, since you seemed to agree with it pretty strongly?

Jesse: Yeah, I mean, there were sort of these two parts of it that really connected for me. One was Adam Carolla was — and if anybody doesn’t know, he was a very, very popular radio host, sort of, that heir apparent to Howard Stern, a really, really smart, funny guy — you know, he was talking specifically about this experience he had in commercial radio, and my limited experience with commercial radio really matched that.

There’s this guy — there’s a guy who blogs about radio, who’s a big consultant in the industry, named Mark Ramsey. And on his blog, he’s always posting stuff — I mean, he’s a sharp tack. But he’s always posting stuff that seems so profoundly self-evident to me. And I think it feels the same way to him. But you can hear in the tone of his posts that, you know, some big radio guy paid him $25,000 or $50,000 to come in for a couple weeks and do a study, and he came out with this conclusion, and they thought it was insane.

You know — I mean, commercial radio people still think people are going to listen to HD Radio. Like, that is like the single most failed thing in history, and they’re still clinging to it as though it has any meaning at all. I mean, they just spent like, you know, they just used $5 million worth of air time — or $50 million worth of air time or some crazy, many million dollars worth of airtime — promoting this technology that obviously no one wants. And, you know, the reason is, there’s really no other industry that is more desperate and pathetic than commercial radio.

Like really, not that there aren’t brilliant people working in the field. I mean, Adam Carolla is a great example. But just, the idea that like, you know, there’s this whole part of the media world that is basically, completely composed of, you know — the only content-generation they do is on these morning shows, and the only thing they do on these morning shows is steal bits from other morning shows or read jokes from the Internet. It’s really amazing, the lack of creativity that goes into this.

And I’m not putting these people down, because they have unfathomably difficult jobs. Being a morning show host: So hard! I couldn’t do it. It’s unfathomably hard. But rather than respond to it by doing a really great job of creating content, they just respond to it by having two people working for them doing it. So it’s this specific-to-commercial-radio issue.

But there’s this broader issue which is that beaver metaphor. And that beaver metaphor was like — wow, that really kicked my butt. One of the amazing things about that post I put up is it reads like it’s an essay but it was actually just Adam Carolla speaking extemporaneously.

And you know, that beaver metaphor is a really intense one, because what it means to me is there are so many people who — radio’s an industry that has been being refined over the past 30 years, since FM radio really became something. There’s been very little creativity outside of, I would say probably, Howard Stern. Or in public radio, there’s been, I think This American Life is a big change since the Morning Edition/All Things Considered train got rolling in the ’70s.

But there’s been very few changes and a lot of refinement. And what you get is just a lot of people who have made their business by looking around and copying everyone else. And trying to build up this skill set that’s based on what everyone else is doing, rather than on thinking of a new thing. And that’s what he was talking about with beavers. You have this world of people who are great at doing this one particular, very narrow thing and now that the ground is shifting underneath them they don’t have any means to respond. And that’s really terrifying for them.

I did this session the other with my buddy Merlin Mann, who’s a super celebrity blogger whose blog you should certainly read at 43folders.com. And he said that one of the things that he was so shocked by in the music industry was that everyone seemed to be working so hard to try and make it the ’70s again. And all their new ideas were driven towards: How can we get it back to the ’70s? Rather than: What’s the best thing that we can do given reality? They’re trying to figure out, as he put it, how to get Led Zeppelin to back that limousine full of money from Led Zeppelin III up to their door again.

A lot of the media world is like that right now. It’s people trying to — to the extent that people are being creative, it’s them being creative in an attempt to find creative ways to get back to where they were before, when they were sitting pretty.

Josh: That’s an exact mirror image of a complaint so many people have about the news industry. That newspapers, for example, want to get back to the period of time when they had a functional monopoly over news gathering and news distribution in a city, and their focus is just trying to reclaim that past glory, not figure out what works now.

Jesse: Yeah, and you know if you’re in newspaper, you’ve got to remember that it was — historically speaking, it wasn’t like there was a really long period of time where every city had one newspaper and that one newspaper got all the classified advertisements. You know what I mean? Things change. That’s only been the case since, like, the ’60s. You know what I mean?

Josh: When you talk about people being creative within the industry, podcasting is certainly — has a much greater potential for letting a million flowers bloom than the limited structure of traditional public radio.

Have you seen any impact from the last few years of podcasting rising in prominence on the way that NPR and PRI and other shows work? Has that feedback loop reached back to its origin yet?

Jesse: Well, obviously public radio has been really aggressive, especially relative to commercial radio, in the podcasting field. I think because we were uniquely set up to take advantage of it, in that our first responsibility is to the public good. I think that because of that responsibility, public radio people quite reasonably decided to do, “Let’s podcast first and figure out how we’re going to pay for it later, because it’s obviously in the public good.” So they had that advantage going in.

The big problem for public radio, specifically, is that NPR is a member organization. PRI and American Public Media are not, but even they still rely on stations for their money. The way that the money has worked in public radio for the last 35 years is that these national organizations like NPR and PRI make or distribute programming, but the stations are the ones who pick the programming that goes on the radio — and also the ones who pool the money and redistribute it up the chain.

Now if you listen to On the Media from WNYC — a really really wonderful show; that’s an NPR show as well: it’s distributed by NPR and produces by WNYC in New York — on their podcast they pitch, they have fundraising pitches for WNYC. And other stations that carry On the Media can’t be crazy about the fact that they’re being bypassed. It’s not that dissimilar from network television.

And there has not been a resolution of this issue, specifically because the big gorilla is NPR. In the commercial television world, for example, ultimately what will happen is the networks are just going to tell the affiliates love it or leave it. Because NPR is a member organization, every time somebody at NPR says or even vaguely implies, “Well, we’re the ones with the really strong brand, we’re should really be the ones collecting the money, that’s just how it’s going to be” — then all of the stations get really upset and have a vote and fire the CEO. So as far as I can tell, everyone at NPR is trying to figure out how to work towards this goal without upsetting the stations. So they just have to kind of do it semi-secretly.

For people like me, I think I may be the future of it. My situation is that if I had to choose between losing my stations and losing my direct podcast fundraising, I’d pick the one that would allow me to continue to pay my rent and I would lose the stations.

In the long-term, how will it shake out? It’s tough to tell. My feeling is that probably stations are just going to end up paying less for the content. And people who produce it are going to see it sort of the way that I see it, which is added value as a way to connect to people. As far as I’m concerned, it’s great that I get money from these stations, but it’s also really cool that there’s a commercial for my content that’s an hour long once a week on some of the biggest radio stations in the country.

Josh: That’s an interesting way to look at it there. That actually leads nicely into your post back in December. I think one of the difficulties that the news industry is facing and that public radio is facing is the shift from being a mass medium where you have one program that is blasted out to everyone who listens to your radio station at one particular time — so you feel like you have to appeal to a mass audience — or there’s one newspaper and what’s in that newspaper has to appeal to the mythical middle 60 percent of your community, to something that can be more targeted, where there are lots of people who don’t care about rappers and comedians and they can just not listen to your show.

You mentioned in this post back in December the recent failures or disappointments of a variety of efforts by public radio to try and expand into niche audiences — young people, or minorities for News & Notes, or other groups who aren’t listening to public radio in large numbers — and the failure thus far.

What do you attribute that to? Is there a solution? You mentioned at the end of this post that you were thinking about the implications of these difficulties for The Sound of Young America and you’ll be back later to expand this post and that didn’t quite happen.

Jesse: Then I went on Christmas vacation. It’s sort of like this: Public radio has just kicked the — am I allowed to swear?

Josh: Uh…sure.

Jesse: Kicked the s**t out of the demographic that it serves. Public radio has, over the past 30 years, has gone from a nothing to basically everyone who is old, white, and highly educated listening to it. You know, the median age for public radio is 53 or something like that. So, if you’re middle-aged or above, and highly educated, and white, you almost certainly listen to public radio. They have knocked that out of the park.

So then they started thinking: Well, if we want to continue to grow our audience — and that has happened through research that was dedicated to building that audience, which was anathema to public radio 30 years ago, but over the course of the last 30 years has become more and more accepted, to the point where audience building is seen as really viable and they sort of doubled down on that demographic.

So, once that demographic was saturated, they’re like: Oh, crap — we have to continue to grow our audience in order to continue to, you know, grow our industry. And they said, well, here are the people we can target better. It’s college-educated — they said the essential part of the public-radio demographic is people who are highly educated. And the people who are highly educated who aren’t listening to public radio are younger college-educated people and college-educated people of color.

So they made all these different shows for those demographics, three or four years ago. Day to Day on NPR was targeted towards younger people, News & Notes on NPR was targeted towards people of color, especially African Americans. The Bryant Park Project was for, you know, the kind of — seriously, I just went to this conference, the young demographic is under 52 in public radio. I swear to God, they put it up on the board: “Younger listeners.” And it was 35 to 52.

Josh: I guess I’m still an infant — we’re still infants under that category.

Jesse: Yeah, exactly — God, I’m 27. But it makes you feel young and vibrant. So Bryant Park Project was a NPR morning show that was targeted toward listeners who were younger and especially on stations in places where there are two stations that carry Morning Edition at exactly the same time. You know, San Francisco for example, or here in Los Angeles — KPCC and KCRW both carry Morning Edition and All Things Considered and they both carry them at exactly the same time, which of course has no public benefit.

So, anyway, they did all these projects, and they kind of did them the way they do their other programs for the most part. I mean, they did a lot of neat stuff — like Bryant Park Project, for example, was very focused on its podcast. NPR has been piloting shows through podcasting, which I think is a good idea. Bryant Park Project had a great website. Fair Game, which was the PRI afternoon show that was sort of All Things Considered meets The Daily Show, or whatever — they did a lot of online stuff and everything.

But ultimately, what they found was that not that many stations were picking up these shows. And you know — Bryant Park Project was spending $1 or $2 million a year, because public radio’s really expensive to produce the way they do it. If you are making three-minute blocks of programming, the people who are making that three-minute thing work for two weeks on that three minutes, and they have to get paid $1,000. And even if you’re public media and you can just woefully underpay people, you still have to pay them $500. And if you’re spending $500 on every 3 minutes, the money piles up real quick.

And what they found was the stations didn’t wanna take any risks, so they didn’t wanna pick them up, and they weren’t getting any money from anywhere else, because they didn’t have any audience, because they weren’t getting the station carriage that they wanted. And all these shows as far as I can tell, sort of plan their budgets based on getting picked up by all the stations — which is, you know, how All Things Considered plans its budget.

So they all got cancelled. Everybody’s out of a job. It’s horrible. NPR fired a lot of people. I should say laid off a lot of people. They laid off 10 percent or something, and they just announced at the conference that I was just at that they’re laying off more. It’s a messed up situation.

Now the difference between them and me is my gross budget is — for this past year was like $85,000 a year. And I didn’t get any grants — I’m looking into that, I’d like to get some grants — but I didn’t get any grants. I basically just supported myself by hook or crook. You know, I don’t even have a studio — I do my show in my apartment. And like that is so much more sustainable.

And so the question — I was having a conversation with a lady from WBUR in Boston at this IMA conference. And one of the things is: If you’re asking yourself the question, can we do the same things we did before in the new economic reality? Maybe the answer is no. It’s very possible that it’s no. So then the question is, what are the things that we can do? And for me, the reason my show is formatted the way that it is is because I can just do this. I don’t need to hire people to do it. I can do it.

I can generate an hour of great content every week with this format — content that I’m really proud of. And I couldn’t generate an hour of Morning Edition every week — there’s no way. I couldn’t even generate five minutes of Morning Edition every week. And does that mean Morning Edition is better than me? Well maybe it is — I mean, Morning Edition’s pretty good. But I think my show’s really good too. So, you know, ultimately the question is, you have to figure out what you can do. Are you, are you creating something big or are you creating something small? If you’re creating something big, do you — can you figure out how to make a base for it that really works? You know what I mean?

Josh: Yeah. It’s interesting — I get a lot of reporters and journalists talking to me about where are the jobs going to be now that newspapers are busy killing off all their staff? And I tell them: Well, there’s possibly you could start a blog covering a particular neighborhood, and maybe you can get advertising — there are ways out there that are being tried that seem to have some success on that very small scale. And the response they typically have is: But I don’t want to do all that. I don’t want to run a business, I don’t want to sell advertising, I don’t want to do that. I want to be a journalist, and that’s what I see as my skill. And I imagine that’s a similar sort of question for — I bet a lot of the people who were happy to work at News & Notes or The Bryant Park Project or whatever else, they love public radio and they probably love their jobs, but they may not want to be a sole proprietor in the way you’re able to be.

Jesse: You know, I interviewed Steve Albini about a year ago in Chicago. He’s a famous rock and roll producer, in case anyone is not familiar with him. And a brilliant rock and roll producer who’s well known for his very, very strong positions against major recording labels and so on and so forth — very DIY, king of the DIY ethic.

And I asked Steve Albini how he saw the future of the music industry. And he said, “Music or the music industry?” And I said, either one, both. And he said, “Well, the future of music is fantastic, because most people make music because (a) they enjoy it and (b) they want to share it with people. And it’s easier than ever to have the equipment to make enjoyable music. And (b) it’s spectacularly easy to share it with people and express yourself that way. So the future of music is fantastic. The future of the music industry is — I don’t know, maybe it’s f**ked.” But, ultimately, it’s sort of like saying — he compared it to tennis. Lots and lots of people play tennis, and the reason they play tennis isn’t because they think they’re going to become Bjorn Borg, you know what I mean? Which would be a really — if you could really become Bjorn Borg by playing tennis, that would be awesome.

Josh: Even if just for a weekend, sure.

Jesse: Yeah, exactly. But you know, the reason people play tennis is because playing tennis is fun. They like playing tennis. They get whatever they want out of playing tennis. They don’t get whatever they want out of playing tennis for money. But some people do play tennis for money, and they do great at it. So I think that is sort of like — that might be part of the future that we’re looking at: Most people who are blogging or doing these different things are doing it because they like it. And maybe they’ll make some money at it, and that’s great. And maybe they’re driven to make money at it, and they’ll make more. But generally speaking, it’s a matter of people doing it because they like it. I knew that I wanted to do it enough that I would be working full time. So I worked full time for a long time for free, because I really loved to do it and just figured out where I could bring in money. And that’s kind of the future of it.

I’m sorry, it’s s**tty news if you’re making $80,000 a year sitting at the metro desk or whatever. But the era of free money is over. It’s bad news, but you’ve just got to — it’s going to become like anything else, you can do it if you love it, and you can do it for money, but you know, nobody has handed out hundred dollar bills.

As promised yesterday, here’s Part 1 of my interview with Jesse Thorn, the host of public radio’s The Sound of Young America. (Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say “The Sound of Young America podcast,” given what Jesse says below about his interactions with both the public radio mainstream and his devoted core audience online.) Here we talk about the show’s philosophy, how his audiences guide his choices, and how he supports himself. Among the topics we cover:

— How having a show on dozens of public radio stations can still only generate about $10,000 a year;
— How showing your mistakes can build listener loyalty;
— How a truly dedicated audience can turn into a business model; and
— How an NPR voice can get you a beautiful wife.

You can listen to it by pressing play in the audio player below, or by downloading the MP3 directly here.

[See post to listen to audio]

There’s also a full transcript below.

Josh: For folks who might be unfamiliar with your show, how would you describe The Sound of Young America?

Jesse: Well, the log line is a public show about things that are awesome. So basically if you imagine Fresh Air, and then take out all of the boring parts, and…no, there are no boring parts on Fresh Air, which is one of the best radio shows in the world. But if you take out all the parts about, like, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and then put in interviews with rappers and comedians and rock and roll guys — that’s pretty much The Sound of Young America.

Also, you should maybe remove like, maybe 25 percent of that kind of weird public-radio dispassionate disconnection in interviews. Like, maybe I might actually engage my guests a little bit personally.

Josh: Right.

Jesse: Or make a joke. So, yeah, it’s sort of like Fresh Air, 25 percent less dispassionate disconnection, a lot more rappers, significantly more comedians, and some rock and roll guys.

Josh: I imagine that the unique set up of your show gives you complete control over your guest list. It seems that you tend to have people who you feel a bit more of a passionate appreciation for than for a show that might be also programmed based on what’s the news of the day or what is — who’s on book tour or having to connect with the culture at large. Yours seems more self-directed.

Jesse: Yeah, I mean, part of that is — I think you’re very correct in making that assertion. Part of it is that outside of my intern Brian, who is sitting behind me right right now putting t-shirts in mailers, it’s pretty much a one-man operation and has been for quite some time.

And it’s a very personal program. I think the strength of The Sound of Young America is my personal editorial perspective. So I pick the guests that come on the program, based on my own personal taste, interest, and cultural knowledge. Sort of in the same way that Flavor Pill tells you what party to go to on Friday night, or what club night is the hot club night that night. I try to point you towards what’s a cool thing.

That’s largely just because I did the show basically for free for the first five years or so and still barely make anything. When you’re doing that, it’s a lot easier to get yourself excited about working for free, interviewing someone that’s like totally your hero or you think is totally awesome, than it is to get yourself geared up to interview someone for free about civic responsibility or something like that.

Josh: Right. I’m curious how you feel that approach changes the connection that your audience has with the show. In writing endeavors and blogging and other things, I think when people can see an identifiable personality behind a journalist writing — as opposed to the voiceless newspaper style — that they feel a stronger connection, and they feel a more of devotion to the show. Even if that personality that the writer is having might not complete the one-to-one match up with the readers, just as your sensibility might not completely match up with your audience’s. Does it increase that connection?

Jesse: Undoubtedly. It’s a self-conscious choice. When you’re doing something that’s supported by donations — you know, my livelihood is completely dependent upon people feeling, like, more than a utilitarian connection to what I’m doing. You know, if people — I think as many people as listen to like Morning Edition or something like that, or watch Dateline — is that a show? Dateline NBC?

Josh: Yes. That’s the predator show, yeah.

Jesse: Yeah, you know — they have enough connection to it to watch it, but whether they would have enough connection to it to willingly donate money to support it is an open question. So when you’re doing something that’s on the kind of scale that I’m doing it and so on, having that sort of connection — it’s why I’m on Twitter and I participate on my forums and I blog. And I do another show called Jordan Jesse Go!, which is much more sort of personally oriented.

I was just talking with somebody yesterday. I was talking with the comedian Todd Glass, who does a podcast called Comedy and Everything Else. He’s a really brilliant comedian, but when he started this podcast it was his first outing in this kind of broadcasting mode. He was saying: What do you do with your really old episodes? Do you bury them? Did it take you a long time to figure out what you were doing? And I said: Yes, frankly it did take me a long time to figure out what I was doing. But we actually podcast our old episodes, at least the ones that we have recordings of, from when we were in college seven years ago just because some of our big fans really like that and they’re like really into seeing how the show developed and stuff. So even though it’s a little bit embarrassing, anything that I can do to make a more profound connection with the audience is — I kind of see that as being my job. That’s what pays my bills.

Josh: It’s difficult to think of a newspaper city-hall reporter inspiring that kind of completist approach — like, “I want to get his early EP when he didn’t know what he was doing, that early city council meeting he covered where he screwed up the mayor’s name.”

Jesse: Yeah, but you know there are people like that. In San Francisco, there are a couple of city columnists, Matier and Ross, who would only mean something to San Franciscans, but they’ve been writing the Chronicle for many years and they also do several other multi-media endeavors on radio and TV in the Bay area. They have a very strong editorial voice, even though they’re basically doing a local news scoops dot-dot-dot column. But you know, it’s not completely incompatible.

Josh: Yeah. So tell me about your history of interactions with the public radio mainstream. Your show is on a couple dozen radio stations. It seemed from your list that they all happened to be in Vermont for some reason. But when you started this show back in college and you thought, okay, this might be something I want to do for a living — how has your dance with public radio been?

Jesse: Well, you know, I started the show before the Internet was a viable way to transmit rich media, for the most part. It was like 2000 when I started the show, so — you know, I guess I could have done something in like Shockwave or something like that. But basically, my idea when I started the show was it was really cool that you could have your own radio show! And sort of quickly became: Well, maybe someday I could have my own radio show professionally. Because of the dire landscape of commercial radio, I pretty much keyed in on public radio early on.

So the history of the show is sort of like — it started as my college radio show with my buddies Jordan [Morris] and Gene [O'Neill], and we started doing a lot of comedy and original stuff, realized that was too much work, so we started including a lot of interviews which are a much easier way to fill time when you’re a full-time student and you have to program an hour a week.

So we did that for a long time. Eventually Jordan and Gene graduated, I started doing the show by myself and it really became an interview show then, because I was terrified of trying to host a call-in talk show, which is a very challenging endeavor.

So then after I graduated, I continued to do the show at the same college radio station I had done it before. I was driving back and forth between San Francisco where I was living and Santa Cruz where I went to college, which was like an hour and a half drive.

About three and a half years ago, or something like that, I heard from the NPR station in Santa Cruz, KUSP — apparently there was somebody on their board who listened to the college radio station sometimes and had heard my show. He told the program director, hey, there’s this really cool show on the college radio station — maybe you should think about bringing it into your schedule.

And right around that same time which was sort of the very beginning of podcasting, I started podcasting. Basically the reason I started podcasting was I figured if 80 people would listen to me, that seemed worth a couple of hours of work. It wasn’t that much work to make it into a podcast from already being a radio show. Then eventually Apple launched podcasting support in iTunes, and my audience went from 200ish to 2,000ish and then it really seemed worth it to do a podcast.

I kind of went along, deedle, deedle, doo, and eventually Public Radio International contacted me. At that point, I had a couple of affiliates, but they were like tiny college radio stations that I had contacted myself and offered the show for free. PRI contacted me because public radio was trying to have more sort of younger-person-oriented shows. We did a big dance for a really long time around it and eventually they picked up the show, right around the time that WNYC in New York picked up my show for a trial run. And after PRI picked up my show, WNYC decided to make my show permanent and I’ve added affiliates along the way.

Public radio operates like public television, on a very locally controlled basis. So, you really have to convince one program director at a time. It’s been quite a challenge. The reason I have so many stations in Vermont is because Vermont Public Radio added me. I just added a bunch of stations in New Jersey because New Jersey Public Radio just added me.

It’s really station-to-station baseball, trying to get stations to pick up your…wow, that was a really complicated mixed metaphor, radio stations, station-to-station baseball. It’s a long row to hoe, getting stations to pick up the show.

So, at this point, to be frank — I go back and forth. But at this point, I’ve almost checked out of trying to get radio stations to pick up my show. Just at this moment — this may be different tomorrow, or next week, but at this point, I’m kind of feeling like if they do, they do, and if they don’t, they don’t.

Frankly, most of my income comes from other sources besides public radio. Even if you are on 20 or 30 public radio stations, you don’t get a lot of money out of them. So, maybe my time is better spent making my show better than it is convincing a 58-year-old guy in triple-pleated khakis that my show about interviewing comedians and what not is worth their airtime.

Josh: Not to mention rappers. The rappers are probably the scariest part.

Jesse: Yes, the rappers are a big one. Frankly, rappers are so hard to get to show up. As much as I love hip hop — it’s my favorite kind of music, I love it, I always have loved it — I don’t have as many rappers on the show as I’d like to.

Josh: So, do you have a read on what percentage of your audience is listening through the podcast versus through radio?

Jesse: You know, I am on a couple of big public radio stations, God bless them. WNYC in New York and WHYY in Philadelphia, which are two of the biggest public radio stations in the country. I’m also on some mid-sized public radio — I’m in some mid-sized markets on public radio stations as well, like KUSP in Santa Cruz — the Monterey Bay area is actually a pretty big market, a couple of million people. I’m in Salt Lake City and that kind of thing. New Jersey’s no joke either.

Just by virtue of being on those stations, I think my audience is a lot bigger on the radio than it is on the podcast, frankly. I think it’s probably 75-80 percent on the radio. A lot of public radio stations run 12 repeats of Garrison Keillor every weekend. And if you throw up a repeat of just about anything on WNYC, and you have a reasonable time slot, 30,000 people are going to listen.

Josh: Yes. How many podcasts subscribers or listeners do you have?

Jesse: For The Sound of Young America, we’re hovering around a quarter-million downloads a month, which is obviously spread out over this big archive that we have. The downloads of a given show depends on the show, obviously, but if you discount the people who download on a one-time basis, sort of as best as you can, I’d guess that the actual subscriber base — like the people who are not only subscribed, but also download and check in on their podcasts a couple of times a week, and download a new show every time there is one — 12,000, 13,000, something like that right now.

Josh: I subscribe just to the RSS feed of your blog, and play things when you post them there. I don’t subscribe to the podcasts in iTunes or anything. It’s difficult to keep track of the various ways of getting to your stuff.

Jesse: The vast majority are from iTunes — about 95 percent of my podcast downloads are from iTunes. And I think it’s about 80 percent of my total downloads are from the podcasts rather then from the web. People don’t really like listening to audio on the web, frankly. So, the podcast is the most convenient way for people to listen, for the most part.

Josh: I started hearing about your show on MetaFilter, and other similar sorts of blogs a few years ago, and the conception I have of your show is as a podcast — as opposed to as a radio show, just because that’s the way that I approached it. Is your self-conception one or the other? Do you think of yourself primarily as a podcaster, as a radio host?

Jesse: It depends on the context. I mean I definitely think of myself as a podcaster much more than any other radio host I know. Whether I think of myself exclusively as a podcaster — no, I mean, I try and embody sort of the positive values of being on the radio, and especially public radio, which is a sort of, you know — a kind of high-mindedness or aspiration to quality and dedication to making something really good that is not always reflected in the world of podcasting, frankly. I mean, it is sometimes, often, but not always.

But on the other hand, if something comes down to it and I have to decide — if there was ever a sort of Sophie’s Choice, radio host or podcaster, I guess I would probably end up picking podcaster, just because, you know, that audience is my audience — you know what I mean? Those people are there to listen to my show. It’s not just somebody who happens to be going to pick up their kids and they always have their radio tuned to the public radio station. Those are people — the people who listen to my podcast are people who chose my show, and they — that audience is what sustains me financially, and that audience is — they’re the ones who send me emails and post on my forums and all that kind of stuff. So, ultimately if I had to pick it would probably, frankly, be podcaster.

Josh: I guess we’ll have to see what you put on your tax form every year.

Jesse: Well at parties I definitely tell people public radio host, because I do not want to get involved in explaining what a podcast is at parties.

Josh: Yeah, that’s how you get the action at the parties. You start saying you’re a public radio host.

Jesse: Hey, you know Andy Bowers, long-time NPR correspondent — he was the Washington correspondent, the Moscow correspondent for a really long time. Now he works for Slate. He’s a friend of mine and I found out that he met his wife — who is quite beautiful, by the way — at a party where she recognized his voice from NPR. So it can happen.

Josh: Yes. Gentlemen out there, invest in voice training.

Jesse: You got it!

Josh: Let’s talk about the financial end of things to the degree you feel comfortable doing that.

Jesse: Sure.

Josh: You mentioned the donations that you get from your audience. Is that the majority of the money you generate from the show?

Jesse: I’m trying to think if it’s literally the majority. I think it’s — I think it is. I think it’s a little more than half. I’m sort of doing the math off the top of my head right now. But yeah, it’s a little more than half, and about a quarter comes from underwriting — which is actually MetaFilter you mentioned. He, MetaFilter supports the show financially too. And then sort of like a smaller portion — let’s call it — comes from public radio stations. I think — I did my taxes recently. I think the amount I got from public radio stations was — I don’t think there’s any reason I’m not allowed to say this — it was like $10,000 dollars last year.

Josh: Wow, for being on a couple dozen radio stations?

Jesse: Yeah, right! But you know, what’s amazing about it is if I wasn’t with PRI, I wouldn’t be able to get anything. When WNYC ran my show before I was with PRI, they gave me some money, but only out of the kindness of their hearts, because they were trying to look out for me. Generally speaking, if you’re not with PRI, American Public Media, or NPR, you don’t get anything for your public radio show from stations.

Josh: Now we’re going to talk about MaxFunCon a little bit later, but have you thought any about expanding your brand into other products or projects? I mean, is there a book to come that could come out of the show, or is there something else that might make sense?

Jesse: Yeah, well, I made a television pilot this past year and was really happy with it. It didn’t end up going, basically because the network that I made it for changed the structure of their programming right before we finished, in such a way that the structure that we had used for the pilot was no longer compatible with what they were doing. But that was a really fun thing to do.

Whether I’ll write a book, I get a lot of solicitations from publishers and publishing agents. Writing a book is really complicated and hard, and at this particular second, I don’t know if I have a really compelling book to write. And I wouldn’t want to write a book that was lousy just to kind of cash in on my very very marginal marginal marginal fame. But that’s always a possibility.

I mean, there’s lots of places where — there’s lots of opportunities that are starting to come up, you know. I’ve been meeting with agents and managers lately. I think I’m gonna get me one of them. You know, people got those.

You know, the other day a listener, who’s also a famous public radio producer, dropped me a line and said: Hey, would you be interested in being the voice of X in X major major major major brand for a national radio campaign my friend is producing? I said yes, and it didn’t end up working out at the last minute, but — you know, if I had gotten it, it would have been roughly two days of work and would have represented 15 or 20 percent of my net income for the year. So, you know, there’s opportunities.

Photo by Nicole Lee used under a Creative Commons license.

While I’m a fan, I’m also interested in Jesse as a model for a new kind of media-producing lifestyle. Not so long ago, if you wanted to host an interview program on public radio and reach people beyond your local station’s 5,000-watt transmission tower, your best hope was changing your name to “Terry Gross” and hoping no one listening at home noticed. The path to an audience went through a traditional media organization. And while those organizations could provide resources and security — plus, one hopes, a degree of quality control — they also served as a chokepoint limiting talent. How many people out there could host a Fresh Air-quality show for NPR? I don’t know the answer, but I know it’s greater than one.

The Internet, of course, wrecks that old model, for good and for ill. And The Sound of Young America strikes me as one of the success stories of that transition — one that has lessons for folks interested in harder news.

The show’s broadcast on a couple dozen public radio stations, including some big ones like WNYC in New York. But those radio stations aren’t what lets the show meet its budget. It’s Jesse’s direct connection with his audience — the dedicated fanbase that listens to his show via podcast or on the web — that pays most of his bills. It’s taken a few years, but he’s established himself and his show as a brand; he’s found a way to generate revenues from his fans; and he’s looking to expand that brand into new projects.

That’s not a model that will appeal to every laid-off journalist, to be sure. But it’s evidence that there is a way to go solo online, do high quality work, and make a living.

I interviewed Jesse recently, and I’ll post excerpts from our conversation over the next three days. Part 1 focuses on the basics of his show: how he relates to his audience, his relationship with the hierarchies of public radio, how he’s thinking of expanding into new areas, and how he makes a living.

In Part 2, we talk about the future of radio (both commercial and public), how he thinks traditional media are bound by their institutional mindsets, and why public radio’s efforts to appeal to younger and minority audiences haven’t seen great success.

Then, in Part 3, I ask Jesse about MaxFunCon — a weekend-long listener convention he’s holding at UCLA in June.

But until then, go poke around the archives and listen to a show or two to get a feel for what Jesse’s doing.

Photo by Adam Lisagor used under a Creative Commons license.