I’ve said before that I like the choice and variety of US music radio stations, however I have been increasingly listening to National Public Radio (the closest we have here to Radio 4). It is on in my car much of the time and I play it at home. (Talk radio is no good for a radio alarm though – that’s set to loud rock). In any case it really is a source of interesting and thought provoking content. Its business model is unusual – it describes itself as “a privately supported, not-for-profit membership organization”. That essentially means that it is funded by donations.
Actually I couldn’t care less how it is funded MOST of the time but one week every quarter they run fundraising drives which are INCREDIBLY annoying. During that week all that great programming is greatly reduced and replaced with the DJs and reporters asking for money. For a whole week!
All those experienced radio reporters are reduced to talking about how fantastic the content is and drumming up more donations – so after every piece there’s a section along the lines of:
DJ 1: “Well I had no idea that there were so many things you could do with paper doilies/ people’s bogies/ old copies of Newsweek….that highly informative interview has completely changed my life.”
DJ 2 “Yes it is only on NPR that you get that depth of reporting into these valuable subjects. Now everyone can have friends as they have something interesting to talk about. Please give us more money or we’ll all be out of jobs.”
About as subtle as a poke in the eye and more annoying.
Now they talk about a combined audience of 26.4 million listeners across all the NPR stations. That’s a lot by my count – and many of them broken down into some useful niches. So how about a bit of advertising to reduce the pain each time around? Please?
I bet you are wondering – did I donate? Not during the fundraising drive but I like what they do so I’ll give them some cash another time. I’ll just hope they get on the advertising bandwagon pronto.