WBUR lashes out at WGBH

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Sun, 17 Apr 2011 10:38:14 -0700 (PDT), Martin Waters <martinjwaters@yahoo.com> said:

> averaged together, give WBUR a 3.6 share and WGBH, a 1.5. Anyway, as
> the Globe article notes, without other research, there's no way to
> tell how many individual listeners have switched from one station to
> the other.

It's hard to imagine why many listeners would switch, since when WGBH
revised its format, WBUR immediately changed its schedule to ensure
that the shows they had in common would air at the same time.  Within
the Boston metro, the two signals are roughly equivalent (both are
about equally bad where where I live, in the shadow of the Natick
hills).  So to the extent that WGBH has taken any audience from WBUR,
it must have been as a result of the unique programming that WGBH
added since the format flip.  (And we should recall that 'GBH's
requirements for the new format were quite minimal: all they wanted
was a listener base that wasn't dropping out of the market due to
death and/or emigration to the Sun Belt.)

That said, there is a strong feeling in some quarters that for
publicly-supported institutions to be in competition with each other
is wasteful[1]: the public would benefit more if each institution did
something that did not compete with anyone else.  (If I want to
support the programs that are uniquely on each of WGBH and WBUR, I
can't do that without paying for ME and ATC, which I don't listen to
at all, twice!)

-GAWollman

[1] It of course being part of the civic religion of our parents
and/or grandparents that any waste was sinful.