NPR (vs.) Podcasting

Full disclosure: this article is about public radio. I make my living working the margins of that field, eating the crumbs that fall from the CPB high table and maybe occasionally stealing a morsel from an inattentive diner's plate. This article focuses quite a bit on Ira Glass. As the article probably makes clear, I have a unrequited love/hate relationship with Ira Glass. I am, though, perfectly comfortable living in the world where Ira Glass is a topic upon which I expend my mental energy and Ira Glass has much better things to think about than me. Anyone who has heard me on air knows that Glass is an important figure on my radio horizon (I came to him a bit late for me to call him a formative influence--Harry Shearer, Malachy McCormack, Steve Post, Randall Grass, Terri Gross, Marty Moss-Cowane and Max Gilbert can plead guilty on that score). . . . Anyhow . . .


A public radio manager I am acquainted with through Facebook recently posted an article that got me thinking pretty seriously about what we do here and what we will one day do.

Here is the article.

The ironic thing about this is that while the article inspired some serious thinking, I don't think very much of it went into the article itself. I used to joke that I am by nature an intellectual counter-puncher. Nothing inspires me to think like other people's thoughtlessness and fecklessness. The flip-side of this bit of self-ego-massage is that I'm just not very creative or original . . . I leave that to others!

If you don't want to waste your time on thoughtfecklessnes, I'll summarize the article for you:

Jarl Mohn is the relatively new CEO at NPR. He came on board after several embarrassing fiascoes led to a bunch of NPR executives getting fired. He also came on board at a time of great change in media and after two other big media institutions--the music industry and newspapers--had been decimated by those media changes.

It was widely perceived that radio, and public radio, were next on the chopping block of technological change.

But, just then, there's another crucial development: the resurgence of podcasts (some folks may not remember the first podcast craze, but rest assured, there was one), with an NPR production, Serial, at the forefront of that resurgence. Suddenly it looked as if, maybe, NPR could be part of the digital future rather than another casualty of it.

The scene which opens this article has Mohn visiting WNYC, home of one of NPR's other very successful podcasts, Planet Money.

The article takes as its starting point the anger and frustration of the Planet Money team at the lack of enthusiasm Mohn and NPR have shown for the wave of the future. Why wasn't NPR taking advantage of "this new era?"

And the whole article is more or less an elaboration of this basic premise: NPR is doomed, just like newspapers and big record companies! Why can't they just join the future?!

The premise is bullshit.

Planet Money is a really good and very successful podcast. Not as successful as Serial, but in many ways it laid the table for it. Every month there are 1.4 million downloads of Planet Money podcasts. Every afternoon drive-time, five days a week, 52 weeks a year, about 1.8 million people are listening to All Things Considered at any given time.

In other words the scale of the two phenomena are quite different.

And is podcasting the wave of the future? Or is it just another temporary craze, like podcasting craze mark I? No one really knows the answer to that question.

A lot of analysts say podcasting is the DVR of radio, and certainly from a technological standpoint the metaphor holds--DVR (and the many on demand services that perform the same function) allows you to timeshift and watch TV shows on your own schedule; podcasts allow you to do the same with radio.

Insofar as radio listening is about catching particular shows and listening to them all the way through, podcasting will probably have a significant impact on radio's future.

But how much radio listening is really driven by the need to catch each and every episode and listen to them pillar-to-post?

If TV is the metaphor, then we have to note that the vast majority of the episodes that viewers are time-shifting are either explicitly or functionally, fiction. They are authored stories.

While NPR can certainly deliver some great stories of this type--sticking, of course, a lot closer to the facts than the typical reality show, and delivering stories of a lot more import, I have to say that the DVR metaphor misses a fundamental truth about radio: authored stories have not been that important to it for a long, long time.

When TV emerged, everyone seemed to realize immediately that that was the medium where all the authored stories belonged. Radio serials pretty much went away or became television serials. Radio, rather than dying, began to emphasize a different role for itself. Radio became the home for music, news, commentary, audience participation. Radio was mostly live and immediate. Television was, mostly, not. Radio was nearly always mediated by particular people--DJs and news hosts. Television was not.

This is not to say that Serial or serials aren't a significant part of radio's future, or a significant indicator about its future. It is to say that anyone who thinks that authored serials are the whole of radio's future doesn't understand the function radio performs now.

Part of the background behind this article is the longstanding tension between Ira Glass and the folks behind This American Life and the rest of NPR. Not coincidentally, both Planet Money and Serial are spinoffs of This American Life. For years there has been a tension between seemingly enforced stodginess of an NPR dominated by its (TRUSTED!) news division, and the open, quirky, offbeat sometime precious approach taken by NPR's storytellers, by far the most prominent of whom is Ira Glass.

The conflict has many facets to it. Part of it is stylistic. Ira Glass has a terrible radio voice, which he cultivates. Your typical NPR host sounds stuffy and cultivates stuffy. Ira Glass sounds unedited, and is probably elaborately edited to sound unedited. Your typical NPR hosts sounds as if they have never strayed from the script in their entire careers. NPR has a very strong notion of their "house sound" and they try to press that notion onto their producers and affiliates throughout public radio. Ira Glass clearly hates that house sound, and his presentation style is largely a defiance of it.

And that defiance was NOT merely Oedipal. Glass was making a point. He was demonstrating that whoever came up with the NPR house style had his head up his (my bet is it was a he) ass. And he was right.

As a longtime NPR listener, my impression of the talent they're got is this: there are a number of personalities at the very top whose talent clearly transcends the "house style" and who are too big in any case to have it enforced upon them. These folks have the prominent positions and they are the people you usually hear when you listen to NPR. Their styles are usually consistent with the house style, but not wholly compliant with it. These people are generally among the best radio has to offer.

After these front line folks there is a very steep decline in apparent talent, because these folks, whatever their inherent assets, don't have the institutional mojo to bend the rules to better serve those assets. So even the national B-team are mediocre at best. When the B-team graduate to the majors, we usually have a long wait until we begin to hear what the new A-team host can really do. The talent at the local level is generally pretty dismal--drones who have been sent off to some NPR-sponsored seminar to better drone in a maximally trustworthy fashion. "Such a voice could never seek to deceive me! They clearly don't have the requisite imagination!"

Part of Glass's point has always seemed to me to be that the top-heavy appeal of NPR News was a) unhealthy from a longterm viability standpoint; b) a tremendous waste of potential; c) inherently unappealing to younger listeners; and d) out-and-out boring!

Part of the Glass/NPR rift is generational. Glass is from a generation for whom the news wing's fetishization of their "TRUSTED" status is a chimera. For Glass the role of NPR ought to be to mitigate against the tendency of listeners to reflexively trust any news source. Not to exploit that tendency.

And certainly NPR ought not to trumpet its ability to exploit that tendency.

And even more certainly they ought not build their entire on-air identity around the promise of exploiting that tendency.

Glass both foresaw and was part of the trend that saw Jon Stewart become the most important news source for a few generations of viewers.

And there is one more issue that cuts across the NPR and New Technology issue: the "storytelling" wing of public radio producers, hosts, writers and reporters--people working to do explainers, in-depth coverage, newsy features on an independent or at least a relatively-free-from-NPR-News basis--this group of people has come to be increasingly dominated by leftists--young activists, refugees from the collapsing Pacifica network, people for whom radio is not about establishing trust with the middle, but about creating energizing and motivating propaganda for those who already agree with you. People for whom Fox News ("news" crucially shaped by authorial intention) might serve as a basic structural model.

Glass, to his credit, doesn't seem to have much time for propaganda. Whatever his attitude toward the "TRUSTED" fetish, he seems to value the credibility of his name and his programs. But there are plenty in the storytelling corps for whom the  truth of particular claims is a much lower priority than the higher truth of the political allegiance a claim might energize and encourage.

So, my basic theme here is that the significance of podcasting to the future of NPR, and the relationship between NPR the TRUSTED news gatherer and disseminator and NPR the storyteller, are multi-layered and therefore quite complicated.

People who tell this story using lazy metaphors with the newspaper industry or the music industry and either a) stupid or b) interested.

There is a particularity to this story. In spite of the researching and story-telling talents of all those involved in this struggle, it is ironically a particularity which, to  my knowledge, has never been researched or outlined very well in any medium.

We need to unabashedly turn our talents on ourselves. So far, we've been utter failures at it. Our self analyses would never make the cut on a story we might do about another institution, except as an illustration of the symptoms which that institution suffers. We need to change that. NOT by listening to moronic external futurists whom we ought to be skeptically kicking to the curb.

We need to know what functions we serve now. What the future prospects for those functions are. What the future expenses of performing those functions will be. How and by whom those functions ought to be performed. What the guiding spirit of the entity(ies) that oversees these functions might be. Who will be paying for it all? And how realistic are our revenue and expense expectations in every area that we see ourselves acting in the future?

We need particular and thorough answers to these issues, not information-lite futurism, not metaphors or spitballing or self-serving bullshit. We--our news gatherers, our audience researchers, our skeptics and our storytellers--need to do what we do best. Coldly. To ourselves.