Full service radio

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:37:38 -0400, Shawn Mamros <mamros@mit.edu> said:

> Question is, do the NPR listeners stay tuned in for both the talk
> and the music shows, or do they only tune in to the shows of their
> choosing?  If it's the latter, then I doubt there are many commercial
> stations that would choose to go that way.

Most of the NPR listeners I know listen to nothing else.  They might
turn the radio off (or to the "other" station) when Diane Rehm comes
on, but if they're using radio, it's NPR.  However, few NPR stations
interleave talk and music any more -- and the ones that do are mostly
old-line classical stations that break format for ME and ATC.  Once
you've paid those NPR and PRI membership fees, there's no cheaper way
to run the station than to simply take as much of the network as will
fit.

In many parts of the country, the same NPR-member operation owns two
stations, as in Boston or Las Vegas (or even two networks, as in
Vermont and Wisconsin -- or three, in Minnesota), allowing them to
fully segregate music and talk listening rather than dayparting.  In a
sense that's little different from the way commercial operators will
program formats in a large cluster to different audiences.

-GAWollman