QUALITY VERSUS QUANTITY
posted by James Reel
Only now have I caught up with an article from last February in Current, public broadcasting’s trade journal. It tells us that “weak audience and income [are] blamed in classical fade” from public radio. As I’ve pointed out before, if we want to attract lots of listeners and make lots of money, we ought to give up this whole silly notion of public broadcasting and switch to mass-market formats and sell commercial time. But if we actually want to provide a good service, not just a popular and lucrative one, we need to focus on the quality of what we’re doing, not the quantity of listeners. Here are some intelligent comments from one of the article’s sources:
"I’m very concerned that a generation moving into public radio management and staffing is tossing away something of durable value—I wouldn’t say casually, but a little bit more cold-heartedly than I think is justified," says John Montanari, music director at WFCR-FM in Amherst, Mass. "I might in my darker moments even refer to it as baby-boomer triumphalism at work." …Here’s the rest of the article, of which Montanari’s remarks are not particularly representative.
WFCR’s Montanari recommends that faltering classical stations review their musical selections. When he surveys other stations’ playlists online, he says, "I’m sometimes puzzled as to why I see programming that’s filled with sort of inconsequential and second-rank performances—not timely, not fresh, not focusing on … what’s happening in their market."
"Before a station should depart from the format, it should consider improving what they do," he says.
