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.

Updates: Red Cross, Robertson v. Princeton, symphonies

Quick updates tonight on some subjects previously covered here:

The American Red Cross, it turns out, has to get formal permission from the U.S. Congress in order to reorganize themselves into a normal non-profit structure. That's because of the organization's special disaster-response status granted by Congress decades ago. It sounds like the legislators are receptive to the basic premise that the organization's outdated governance structure is the root of its recent troubles including losing three CEOs since 1999. The current board chair told a House committee that the proposed changes have helped lured some strong candidates for the job.

Princeton University has quietly (at least they wanted it to be quietly) reimbursed the Robertson Foundation almost $800,000 which the university can't bring itself to admit was used contrary to donor intent. (Rather, they say its because university officials failed to properly disclose the use of those funds.) This move has not taken any steam out of the huge lawsuit being pursued by the Robertson heirs; in the court of public opinion, Princeton just continues to shoot itself in the foot.

And the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has summarized its hard-earned knowledge about the state of symphony orchestras into a short "issue brief" which should be required reading for everyone involved in classical music today. They do not pull any punches, and their core messages continue to remind me of some of the existing thinking and practices in other fields such as non-profit theater and dance. "Classical music lovers are everywhere, but most of them are not in the local concert halls....Interest in the art form looks healthy. Yet orchestras are struggling to remain relevant in a rapidly-evolving cultural landscape...."

Fundraising in the buff (almost)

I bet every fundraising staff in the free world has, at some point, mused half-seriously about doing a cheesecake calendar for their charity. C'mon, admit it -- "Conservation Cuties"? "The Men of [your organization name here]"? "Taking It Off To Clothe The Homeless"? You've teased your executive director about posing for the cover shot, you've made board members giggle at a Development Committee meeting, you've gotten slightly alarmed when younger staffers start seriously discussing layout concepts. You know who you are. Cause really at some point doing another silent auction just doesn't get the blood flowing, right?

Well a young opera company in Chicago has actually done it, and earned a nice writeup with photo in today's Chicago Tribune. The artistic director was the first to pose; each month's photo is a real-live singer posed as a character from a well-known opera. Cue Aretha Franklin soundtrack: "Divas are doin' it for themselves..."

I know I speak for the entire dot-org readership base (ahem) in promising to, strictly as a gesture of non-profit solidarity, buy a copy. Or two -- a perfect stocking-stuffer for the opera fan in your life eh? Cause you've never seen Salome quite like this (well not at the Lyric anyway, which is the point OperaModa is trying to get across).

Is the cello half-full or half-empty?

ArtsJournal does an interesting thing making excellent use of this technology: they invite people working in a specific sector to participate in a focused online discussion, a short-term blog. This seems to have all the useful advantages of online discourse (like the ability to easily point readers to sources) without the disadvantages which can render open online chats pointless.

So for instance they got several knowledgeable people to discuss the state of classical music in the U.S. It makes the most sense to read if you click the "older entries first" button. I wasn't aware for instance that the New York Times recently declared this to be a golden age for classical music in America...At least some experts in the field seem to agree: "Virtually all of recorded history is at our finger tips. There are more opportunities to hear live performances than ever before. More opportunities to play music in any of the thousands and thousands of community groups that have sprung up in recent decades. The level of performance generally across the land seems higher than ever..." The chairman of a big-city chamber orchestra asserts that "no one has put forth a credible argument that there has been a real decline in the percentage of the population that appreciates the classical music art form."

However they also report serious troubles at a lot of major symphony orchestras, which are struggling to fill seats as people are less interested in subscribing and have more choices. That reminds me of the sad story of the San Jose Symphony which was well described in this report; it's quite unusual (and scary) for a non-profit institution of that size and history to actually go belly-up. One ArtsJournal commenter places those difficulties in the context of that all "producers of "popular" culture are scrambling to reinvent the ways they do business." He provides some excellent examples which, without using the term, amount to the "long tail" trend in action (which I'm now finding just keeps popping up in all sorts of disparate contexts).