Go refigure 

It's even creepier than it appears 

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They sell brokered airtime. They call for donations. They have fund-raisers for various ministries. Almost all of the time these fund-raisers include a commission (aka, the heavenly kickback), or a percentage of the earnings. In some cases these commissions are based on a Lehman Scale, as various stations, chains, networks, or ad-hoc blocs can generate some huge monies.

Some of the networks may be part of station ownership groups, or work as a network created by virtue (strange choice of word, eh?) of having bought up oodles of brokered slots on pay-for-pray religious outlets.

Further, even if the operators of these stations were, indeed, in favor of accomplishing social or political influence, they would be hard-pressed to have any impact of note.

First of all, they are preaching to the choir. Or, to be specific, to the pockets of the choir. Their listeners already get the, er, message. Second, religious stations, with the exception of some gospel stations playing a mostly music format (found in the Carolinas, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and thereabouts in the South, in markets with significantly high Black populations) are barelay listened-to. Their audiences are very small. The problem, the very reason for such low incidence of audience base, is, in fact, the programming itself (and, in some cases, dial position, or signal strength). There are far more listeners for crafted programming products designed for mass audiences.

If anything, the most interesting statistic about religious stations is the very number of competitive stations comprising their high shared-listenership returns. Religious stations, while usually appealing to an older listening audience (particularly among stations of primary appeal to White listeners) show that they will share audience with all sorts of formatted stations. In this manner they defy stereotype. Rock Stations, Classic Rock, Top 40, Adult Contemporary, Oldies, Talk Radio, Sports Radio, News Radio, you-name-it -- listeners to religious-format radio come (and return to) all stations of all sorts of other formats.

But most important of all, and this may seem like pouring water on the discussion, or pulling the proverbial (har har) plug, is this: the audience estimates for religious stations are so low as to not even worry about in terms of significance, influence or impact on the public at large. Those who tune in, or who are the regluar listenership, are already buying the hype.

Religious radio is not making any converts, to political or spiritual thinkers. Their audiences have already bought into the messsage.

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Family Radio, despite having licensed some prime FM dial-position real estate through the years (I was actively involved in a few efforts to wrest their Sacramento property away from them for humongous sums of money, which never tempted them enough to prompt a sale), is really just the broadcast arm of an ongoing campaign to enlist contributors and their constant contributions. Their constant campaign in both on-air pleas, supported by pitch letters and pamphlet-style magazines, make it clear that the contributor is all but laying a binder on some heavenly real estate by keeping the Family broadcast going.

I am not familiar with K-Love.

I know about Landover and Crawford. Again, these are broadcasters preaching to their choir for continued support. And they do quite well at the task of retaining support. They do not, however, attract significant audiences. There is surely a listenership segment for them in their markets, however minimal a percentage of the overall group that may be. In its own way, this is one of the finer aspects of these smaller audience-attracting groups: they do not abandon the format for lack of "pairs of ears and eyeballs."

I spent some time with a friend (former Sales Manager at one of my Urban-format client stations) working with him on a gratis basis on how to make his station both competitive in the ratings and successful with the listeners. He was a believer in my theory about the "Three Constituencies of Radio" (the listeners, the ratings system, and the advertisers -- one must have a product properly tuned to serve all three in order to be successful), having seen it take a lower-middle ranked station with fair billing to a consistent #1 or #2 ratings position and billing that astounded and far surpassed the imagination of the station owner and this fellow's predecessor as Sales Manager.

In our discussions we spoke about making sure the station had a perceived identity, and being aware of and programming with the ratings methodology in mind. He understood that despite the emotional loyalty his audience would have, particularly with no competitor with a signal to match his, it would still be necessary to be able to present a viable ratings story in order to get agency business and national money.

He's been remarkably successful. His share of market advertising revenue is always in the top ten, which is much better than most Gospel stations fare.

There is no political agenda on his station. The only brokered time is during the standard "God Squad" Sunday morning hours. He runs a Gospel-formatted station and it does the job. He also sought help (from me, and others) in how to do it respectfully, with proper business ethics and a plan that would see a return on his investment -- of everything he had to his name.

The little teeny AM stations one can hear on a cross country drive might give the uninformed the impression that this is a political or programming force with which to contend. Not so, in reality. In fact, little teeny low-power AM stations might just find their financial, er, salvation in being a part of the religious radio movement.

Your point about the FM translators popping up like mad, and being constantly applied for and granted [by the FCC] shows that the operators of these stations seek to broaden their reach. Even if it is a small speck of the available audience, it is usually a speck they would not have been available to had they not put the translators in place to extend their signal.

The fact that Public Radio does squat is part of a greater, and very different problem. Much of what happened to commercial radio in the 80's and 90's (and drove me out of the business, fwiw) began to take place with Public Radio come the end of the 90's and throughout this decade.

Bear in mind that this is being written by one who made a living as a consultant for over 20 years. You once wrote something very kind about my firm's approach: we took the listeners seriously, we respected them. They were not just a tonnage of ears to us or our clients.

I was also a proponent of being interactive with the audience, and when the Net came along, I spent countless hours trying to convince station managers that a station website was a natural extension of the station, and could bring much added value to both the listeners and the advertisers. And that it would also help in the ratings, by continued visual and interactive impressions and reinforcement of the station's identity (some call that "brand") and as a part of the listeners' overall media usage. Further it would add increased positive feelings about the station by offering visual/data services that would complement the station.

Here in 2004 this seems obvious. Ten years ago I heard the same tune, over and over, as though it was in high rotation, from station managers: "How will a website make us any money? And why should I allocate any budget for something only some people can ever see?!"

Public Radio took to consultants and market research and went for the big flabby middle, thus restricting service and product to the smaller audience segments. They opted to increase programming that got higher audiences, and sold-out the smaller audience segments. Greater audiences would provide greater fundraising response, or so went the thinking.

Along with this concept came the idea that fewer ancillary costs involved with production or distribution of the less popular progams would mean a leaner, cleaner budget. Audience analysts became efficiency experts. MBA's invaded adn then occupied this Radio space.

Whereas in commercial radio when, during the Reagan years, the Yellow-Tie crowd would act smug and all-knowing . . . create business plans showing sharp uptick-to-the-right growth projections, despite having zero experience or a sense of the trends and tradewinds that blow in this business category (as they would call it). . . and then slash budgets, attempt to control costs while pummeling the management and sales staffs to meet the projected budgets. One by one the bloom on the rose of Radio stocks began to fade. Their performance rarely lived up to the projections. Stock values plummetted. But the yellow-tie-wearing smug know-it-all crowd had moved on to new groovy places. Like, maybe, the dotcom mania.

The Yellow Tie Crowd still had their bonus money from arranging all those failed deals. They simply moved on.

In Public Radio a more righteous sort of crew, more prone to Pink or Purple Ties (often, in fact, the Jerry Garcia label) sold the small potato Public Radio listener-response programming down the river.

They addressed and focused on the middle, and co-opted the many unique individual segments of the audiences for these stations. In this case it was fundraising professionals, or simply general market researchers, offering advice on marketing and positioning. But their advice was to superserve the core. Hmm, I used to make fun of that statement when I consulted commercial stations.

The problem with superserving the core is that one ends up in a looping sort of mobius strip endeavor. It becomes so self-serving as to strangle itself. 1. Determine the heavy users. 2. Research them constantly to see how they feel about things. 3. Don't research the ones who are no longer the heavy users. Only address the needs of heavy users. 4. When the heavy user group changes or dwindles, keep over researching them, as they are the target. 5. Refuse to realize that this over-researched group can no longer support a station, do not accept that ratings and billing have gone down due to this blinders-style of product development, fire the Program Director, fire the Sales Manager, fire the GM.

Heads roll. A GM usually get to go through three PDs. A GM also gets to roll through no more than four Sales Managers. The station goes from being a well-oiled machine to a thinly defined product of appeal to the few, not the many.

After a while, with sales down and a harder fight to wage, the operator gives up, and makes the decision to sell the station to Clear Channel (or one of the other conglomerates).

In Public Radio it is the new MBA-style managers and their fundraising professionals who are making the very same "super serve the core" mistakes made in Commercial radio. Fundraisers and MBA-credential managers (with no real broadcasting experience, and-or with a supercilious and intellectual sense of moral (et al) superiority lack the basic skill sets and understanding of the beast to make it work.

They don't apply for, budget for, or even think of translators. That is not related to fundrasing or making sure that the programming is geared to the flabbiest middle. It takes a radio person to think of this. The powers that be that have been taking over the Public Radio space are not radio people. They are some other sort of entity, apparently too high-fallutin' to waste their efforts on the simple and basic broadcasting facts, and the way **broadcasters** run stations.

For many years the great joy of Public Radio was that it was non commercial, it was public spirited, and it gave radio people who were not inclined to participate in the commercial side a place to ply their trade, to have an impact.

Sadly, this is not so much the case in the present day.

The religious broadcasters, those with multiple stations and networks, at least have the basic business sense to hire consulting engineers and to bring in broadcast professionals to help them further their goals.

Public Radio, once the equivalent of a demand-based/contribution-supported entity, is rapidly becoming the EZ broadcast product of appeal to best attract the largest identified general group. . ."those who might write a check." Smaller groups be damned would seem to be the subtext.

And that, or so it seems to this one-time broadcaster who cut his teeth in listener-supported radio before entering the commercial world, foretells the beginning of the end.

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Salem and the like fall into the "for profit" category. They exist to make their shareholders money. They really look at "Christian Talk", "Preaching/Teaching" or "Contemporary Christian Music" as just being another format. The CEO and Chariman of the company started the company with a dedication to a world view, but much in the same way a jazz lover might launch a jazz radio station. Salem is very politically active, as they do push a very specific agenda on a lot of their talkers, so it might be argued that they could change hearts and minds (and votes). At the end of the day, ratings, audience, and everything except for the profits are irrelevant. Crawford generally falls under this category, as well. Ratings fluctuate wildly for these kind of stations. In some markets, they do well. In others, not even a blip on the radar.

Family Radio (Camping), American Family Radio (Wildmon), and Dick Bott's network all fit under what I would call "propaganda not-for-profit". They are headed by charismatic leaders who are actively pushing a political and religious agenda that falls into a very narrow theological spectrum. They bang the drum hard for listener donations, and they camp out on the low-power freqs, translators, etc. They are self-perpetuating entities. They attract listeners who agree with them and send in money to support the station so that it can continue it's agenda. Small audiences and very little effectiveness in terms of changing hearts and minds.

The last category I'd suggest would be "not-for profit ministry", which would include KLOVE (and AirONE), Moody Broadcasting, and numerous independent stations like WRBS-FM in Baltimore, WGTS-FM in Washington, DC and others, many of whom are connected to colleges or churches. I think these outlets, some of whom have big sticks that reach big markets, genuinely are trying to minister to listeners -- believers and non-believers. Sometimes it's through preaching & teaching, but increasingly it's through music and more mainstream talk formats. They rely largely on listener support, but are hesitant to make a hard-sell. They usually run share-a-thons or other pledge drives to generate revenue. Some attract decent audiences. Many of these stations have anecdotal evidence of religious conversions, so I think they might be more effective than you might expect. Their message and their pitch use the same soft-sell approach.

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