Is public radio fading into irrelevance?

It feels broadly as if public radio in the U.S. is undergoing some degree of paradigm shift. Whether it's ultimately for better or worse is hard to gauge, but I'm now wondering how much it really matters.

Chicago is ground zero for this issue because Chicago Public Radio recently pulled the plug on the music half of its longtime split personality. They reached that step in two stages in a fairly bumbling way, but ultimately arrived at a mission-driven decision.

As a longtime jazz fan and musician who'd listened to WBEZ's jazz and blues regularly for decades, my initial reaction to that decision was instinctively unhappy. But...when I voiced that gripe to a foundation colleague, she responded by pointing out that a large fraction of the station's music programming ranged from inept to overtly annoying. I had to admit the truth of that (my son still calls the most-annoying of the station's jazz DJs "Mumbly Man", and I am actually convinced that public-radio DJs in general deserve a piece of the blame for how many Americans today see jazz as dull and pedantic).

My colleague then praised WBEZ's new all-current-affairs-talk format thusly: "I sometimes have insomnia, and at 3 a.m. listening to music just wakes me up further. But if I tune in WBEZ now, they have me nodding back off in no time." Well that may not be what they want to put in the annual fund-drive letter. It's actually more positive than anything I would have said, though.

It may be that others besides me are finding NPR and its local imitators to be less than compelling, too. I notice that some folks are now developing a direct competitor for NPR's "Morning Edition". National Public Radio itself has noticed that its current listenership is overwhelmingly gray-haired and hence is launching "NPR-Zack: A New Space for Younger Listeners". (Cringe-inducing quote: "We thought Zack is exactly the kind of name NPR staffers would give their male children.")

Anyway in the era of podcasting and iPods, how much does any of this really matter anymore? I can't help wondering if public radio is just another piece of the old-fashioned one-to-many media that only still stands because not everybody has yet gotten used to the new and better ways to access things like discussion about current events, and for that matter jazz and blues. Are current-affairs discussions as routinely witless as NPR's still listened to at all for any reason other than simple habit? Certainly no one will ever miss those cloying, obnoxious pledge drives either.