Should public radio and TV be better at admitting and learning from mistakes?

[Michael Arnold]

Everybody in public radio and TV loves mistakes... when they are somebody else's.

In the September 15th edition of CURRENT, PRI tries to take a step forward by admitting to two of our own mistakes and talk about what we learned from them. We also advocate the notion of public radio and television being more open about mistakes so we can learn from them and innovate.

Do you think public media would be better served by admitting mistakes more often?

Do you have any mistakes that taught you a valuable lesson that helped you move forward?

Are there mistakes being made in public media right now that need to be acknowledged?

Or do you think its a mistake to talk about mistakes?

It would be a mistake for you to not weigh in on this subject. Join the discussion!

[Aaron Read]

Mike - you admit your first mistake was that you programmed to age instead of attitude. Then you turn right around by the end of the same article and make the same mistake when you say "Hearing that public radio attracts primarily a white, well-educated audience may not shock anybody, but hearing that public radio fails to serve well-educated people of color should."

Programming to race or gender is no different than programming to age. And it's equally doomed to fail. Always program to attitude. Or, at the very least, program to a major subset of attitude: politics.

The reason why programming to race always fails is that race is such an all-encompassing dynamic that it cannot help but define attitude. Not always, of course...but in most situations. And if you program to the attitudes that are defined within a race, you will almost certainly alienate the attitudes defined within other races.

I'm not going to pretend I have an answer here. If I did, I'd probably have the answer for solving racial tensions across landscapes a lot bigger than public radio. But I find this repeated bashing of public radio's collective head against this particular wall exceptionally disconcerting...especially when it's not like we don't have other priorities that are at least, if not more, pressing. For example, the soon-to-be total erosion of radio's dominance for listening in the car.

[Randy Kinkel]

The Answer is: Yes!

the problem comes when you mis-identify what the mistake was and/or what the right path to take next is. That's not always readily apparent and it's not always easy to figure out.

In a way, Pubradio is a victim of it's own successes. successes that are so great that local stations are loath to change much of anything for fear of losing audience. If it ain't broke, Don't fix it. If is IS broken, fix it in a way that does no harm to, but enhances what you've already got. Sometimes that's impossible.

[Michael Arnold]

Thanks for replying to this.

In response to Aaron: I'm not forgetting the attitude lesson when I talk about public radio's service to people of color. In my article, I mention some quantitative research PRI and its partners conducted last year that showed three different attitudes to public radio listeners: one serious, one not serious at all, and one who likes a little bit of both. This research and other research by WNYC and PRI suggest that targeting that third attitude has potential to not only expand public radio's audience, but to appeal to a more diverse audience as well.

I make the point of our weaker service to college-educated African Americans and Hispanics to show how much public radio needs to strengthen its service to people of color. We have assumed for many years that the issues regarding use of public radio by people of color had more to do with education than race or ethnicity. The data tell a different story... and suggest public radio is in need of a slight attitude adjustment.

[John Sutton]

I think we need to be extremely careful in over-simplifying this. First, public radio listening is not driven by age, sex, ethnicity, or even education. We use those measurements to try to understand who listens but none of them cause listening.

Level of formal education level is a decent, but not great, proxy for the underlying values that cause public radio listening. College-educated Blacks are more than twice as likely to listen to public radio as Blacks with no college degree. Same with Hispanics. But the fact is that the majority of college-educated Americans of any race do not listen to public radio.

Mike, the question PRI seems to be addressing is "what underlying values cause these listeners to not listen?" Am I right that your answer, largely, is "seriousness." The implication is that being less serious on our current stations will bring in more listeners who will also be more demographically diverse?

[Michael Arnold]

Hi John,

You're right. We do have to avoid over-simplifying with this. "Seriousness" is only part of what we're finding. People want a range of perspectives, a slightly different tone and context. They want topics to be relevant to their lives. We may never have all the answers but the first step is asking these questions and bringing in more people to help us find the answers.

[Randy Kinkel]

I'd be interested in hearing more about the data you cite when you said, "The data tell a different story... and suggest public radio is in need of a slight attitude adjustment.". That would be interesting.

[Michael Arnold]

Probably the best source for this would be a recent Station Resource Group "Grow the Audience" report on public radio's service to Black and Hispanic listeners. Here's the link to that:

http://www.srg.org/GTA/GTA%20Black%20Hispanic%20Report.pdf

[Randy Kinkel]

Cool, thanks!