Three Things Datebook for the Week of 3/21/2022
The Datebook this week asks if radio has a hardware problem. Also, making journalism hiring practices better and how to make decision-making more inclusive and effective.
THING ONE: Does Radio Have a Hardware Problem?
One of my favorite annual research studies is unveiled this week with Edison Research’s The Infinite Dial 2022 presentation this Wednesday, March 23, 2022, at 2:00 pm (Eastern).
This year Wondery1 CEO Jen Sargent will join Edison Research’s SVP Tom Webster to share the latest data from the longest-running survey of digital media consumer behavior in the U.S. live from Podcast Movement Evolutions in Los Angeles as well as via webinar.
The Infinite Dial goes back to 1998, and the study itself serves as a history lesson on the adoption of digital technology over the past two decades. Here’s a quick look back2:
1999: More than half the U.S. population has a computer in their home
2001: 53% of Americans have Internet access at home
2002: Cell phone ownership exceeds 50%
2006: Podcasting debuts; 22% of Americans are familiar with the term
2008: The iPhone is first tracked with 2% of the population owning one
2011: Facebook is used by over half the population (51%)
2013: Smartphone ownership exceeds 50%
2017: Smart speaker tracking introduced with 7% of Americans 12+ owning one
2019: Over half the population say they have ever listened to a podcast
2021: 33% of Americans 12+ own a smart speaker
In a sneak preview of results, Edison released two slides that should reinforce a trend that I first started paying attention to around fifteen years ago with Jacobs Media and The Bedroom Project3.
Unless you’re older than dirt like me, you may not be familiar with this research project from 2007 that tracked how people aged 17–284 related to the many technologies and media options that were available to them at the time.
Remember, this was a moment following the first release of the iPhone. Nonetheless, one of the big “ah-ha” moments from this study was when the researchers asked the participants whether or not they had a radio in their living space (home, apartment, dorm, room in their parent’s house).
RadioWorld did a story on the research and spoke with Fred Jacobs about the study.
What was missing, conspicuously, was any use of radio at all outside the car. Audience members cringed visibly as Jacobs screened a series of responses in which Bedroomers were asked whether they had radios in their homes, with answers ranging from “a broken clock radio” to “my grandma has one in her room upstairs.”
That was nearly fifteen years ago.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise to find what’s happening in 2022 when a similar question is part of The Infinite Dial study.
In 2008, right on the heels of The Bedroom Study, just four percent of the U.S. population did not have a radio in their household. Fast forward to this year, and that number has grown nearly ten-fold, with 39% of Americans lacking a radio at home.
As the chart above notes, in just the last two years, the number of Americans without a radio in their home is up more than 20%.
What makes this number even more stunning when you think about it is that we’ve all been spending much more time at home than we had been in our pre-pandemic life for the last two years.
Further, the number of no-radio households among younger people is particularly unwelcome but not surprising news for radio stations.
Fully 57% of respondents aged 12 to 34 reported having no radios at home.
“Of course, nearly all cars have AM/FM radios easily available, and people can listen to the content of radio stations on their phones or smart speakers,” says Edison Research President Larry Rosin. “However the elimination of the standard, single-use radio from so many households makes the challenge that much harder in the location that most people spend the most hours.”
As we noted in one of the bullets earlier, last year’s study was very bullish on the growth of smart speaker ownership in 2021. This year’s study will reveal new data that will include information on how many no-radio households own smart speakers, which should be an interesting finding. I’m confident though that Edison’s research will also note the slowdown in growth in smart speaker adoption that we mentioned in last week’s Three Things newsletter.
Another trend to watch will be the increase in weekly podcast listening. This chart from last year’s research tracked the growth over nine years.
I expect that in 2022 weekly podcast listeners will eclipse 30% of the U.S. population.
Finally, one other trend to watch tracks the use of different audio sources in the car. In 2021, AM/FM radio dropped below 80% for the first time as more Americans chose to listen to podcasts and online music while driving or riding in a car.
Given the in-home radio problem facing broadcasters, a decrease in the share of listening in the car spells even more challenges for radio.
To register for the free live stream of The Infinite Dial 2022 presentation, visit this link, and I will “see” you there.
THING TWO: A Collaborative Workshop For People Who Want to Make Journalism Hiring Practices Better
The Public Media Staff Vacancy Survey that the Public Impact Group conducted last month revealed several areas that many organizations were struggling to fill, including content, development, and tech jobs with a specific need to recruit more broadcast engineers.
There are different reasons within these job categories why stations are having difficulty recruiting and hiring staff. Our report touched on the industry-wide challenge of filling broadcast engineering positions as the opportunities for individuals with this skillset have vast options for employment.
On the development side, this seems to be a more significant challenge at smaller stations where low pay is a substantial issue for recruiting and retaining fundraising staff.
On the content side, there’s a lot more competition for journalists, with many finding new opportunities in podcasting and with digital start-ups. Others are also seeing the potential to strike on their own through newsletters like Substack and other cooperative ventures.
And all of this effort to fill these jobs is happening with the focus of bringing more diversity into public media organizations, large and small.
One of the unspoken concerns - actually, this might be better described as a myth - across public media is whether the industry might have a “pipeline problem.”
This theory that diversity initiatives are failing because there simply aren’t enough skilled members of underrepresented groups—women, people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, disabled talent, veterans—out there. In other words, an inability to diversify is not a failure of a company’s culture or its hiring process; it’s a failure on the part of women and underrepresented groups to achieve the appropriate skills for those open roles.
Let me repeat, this is a myth.
The industry is working to improve its diversity at stations and networks. Still, part of this issue for stations probably rests more in the processes and procedures at organizations.
Gem is a start-up that provides a recruiting platform for businesses and wrote about the “pipeline problem” myth in a blog post. The piece noted several factors that might come into play if organizations have trouble recruiting diverse talent for their job searches.
They suggest a good place to start evaluating your efforts is to review how inclusive your job descriptions are, and the look of the career page on your website and social media feeds.
Socioeconomic bias is often unintentionally at play in job descriptions that emphasize the need for advanced degrees from a set of high-profile universities or having studied a certain curriculum—neither of which may have been available to underrepresented talent. Qualified individuals who possess the relevant skills and professional experience but couldn’t afford a college education simply won’t apply—and you’ll be missing out on a much more vital recruitment pipeline.
Another place to evaluate is your hiring process itself and take a good look at your organization’s culture.
To help look into the mirror and examine the hiring practices at journalism organizations, the Online News Association is sponsoring a free online workshop on Tuesday, March 22, 2022, at 2:00 pm (Eastern). This collaborative 90-minute conversation will help newsroom leaders, recruiters, and staff make hiring practices more equitable and effective with an open discussion looking through the lens of inclusivity, diversity, and belonging.
The session will be presented by Hannan Wise and John Davidow5 of Media Bridge Partners. Here’s a preview of the session:
Together, we will build a toolkit to help you and your organization name these imaginary obstacles and come up with simple steps to overcome them. Lastly, we’ll harness the collective wisdom of session attendees to come up with an anti-racist "hiring dos and don'ts" list to bring back to our newsrooms.
This event will be participatory — not a webinar — so expect to have the chance to contribute to the conversation throughout the time we’re together.
This is an essential conversation for all journalism outlets, especially public media organizations.
I also want to remind readers of the Zoom session that the Public Impact Group is hosting on Thursday, March 31, 2022, at 4:00 pm (Eastern) on Public Media and “The Great Resignation.”
Please join your public media colleagues for a 60-minute dialogue about ideas and potential solutions to help public media organizations surmount this challenge and thrive in the months and years ahead.
You can register at this link, and you'll be receiving an email with details about participating in this Zoom session on March 31. Thanks.
THING THREE: Making More Inclusive and More Effective Decisions
One of the crucial aspects of the cycle of events that we’ve experienced over the past two years through remote work and the reckoning over racial and social justice issues is a different expectation from staff in how decisions are made with our organizations.
The Bridgespan Group, a strategic consulting firm for the nonprofit sector, has been exploring efforts emphasizing inclusion to make decision-making processes more effective and a means to an end of achieving more equitable outcomes for many nonprofits.
Bridgespan notes a growing body of research also shows that more diverse perspectives can result in better decisions. It brings relevant information to the table and better guards against the biases that can lead decision-makers astray. But it hasn’t always been a priority for nonprofits.
On Wednesday, March 23, 2022, at 1:00 pm (Eastern), The Bridgespan Group will host a free webinar on “How To Make Decision Making More Inclusive and Effective” that will dive into five ways nonprofits can make decision-making more inclusive and effective.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that having more voices at the table is vital to hearing a diversity of perspectives. However, according to Bridgespan, inclusive decision-making also means redefining the power and roles being distributed for decision-making more broadly across the organization.
So what does this mean, and how do we get there? Here’s a little preview of what you’ll hear on Wednesday regarding these five approaches for decision-making that are inclusive and effective and lead to more equitable outcomes.
Map roles for key decisions and make sure you’re hearing the full range of perspectives
According to Markita Morris-Louis, the incoming CEO (and currently chief strategy officer) of Compass Working Capital6, “The idea of making decision roles explicit really matters.” The nonprofit uses a tool called RAPID® that was developed by Bain & Company and used by a wide range of nonprofits to make decisions.
RAPID is an acronym—an easy way to think about five important roles in most decision processes (Recommend, Agree, Perform, provide Input, and Decide)—but the acronym doesn’t specify the order in which things should be done. And the name “RAPID7” may imply that speed is paramount. However, the tool intends to help organizations make decisions with clarity and accountability—at the appropriate speed, not necessarily as quickly as possible.
Push the decision to the right level of the organization
This approach requires a high level of trust from an organization’s leadership because you recognize that many decisions should not rest with the CEO or leadership team.
By thinking about the different types of decisions it makes, an organization can push whole categories of decisions away from a handful of senior leaders and toward team members who know more about the subject matter or are closer to implementing those decisions.
What is important here is that distributing decision-making through an organization will develop a stronger bench of leaders. It naturally distributes decision-making power and trains future leaders for greater decision-making authority to come.
Set up new decision-makers for success
Experienced decision-makers often rely on important assets in making their decisions—access to information, a broad view of what is happening in the organization, and a culture or power structure supporting their right to make that decision. New decision-makers need those same assets—and, most importantly, the safety to actually make decisions.
This idea of redistributing decision-making can have a powerful effect on an organization. First, it can relieve many leaders of “decision fatigue8” that drains them when all questions come to a handful of leaders. In addition, it also requires those same leaders to step up differently, acting as a coach for new decision-makers. This is a terrific tool for developing future leaders.
Up your game on authentic input
It’s one thing to ask for input. It’s another entirely different thing to actually take action and change your opinion when receiving that input. Genuinely asking for input can provide vital information and new perspectives, build trust, and strengthen staff and other stakeholder support for the decision made. However, going through the motions of seeking input can have the opposite effect. People will feel that their time has been wasted and will feel less engaged with the decision.
Explicitly consider the equity implications of the decision
The Bridgespan Group makes an important distinction with this final point that while inclusion and equity often go hand in hand, an inclusive decision-making process will not automatically lead to equitable outcomes. To more intentionally advance equity, nonprofits can directly examine the potential impacts of a decision across lines of identity and other determinants of inequitable outcomes.
The recommendation here is to regularly step back to reflect on the impact of a decision on people and communities inside and outside the organization.
The session will be presented by Bridgespan’s Mike Ciccarone and Preeta Nayak. Guest speakers will include Markita Morris-Louis, CEO of Compass Working Capital; Alicia Robinson, Senior Partner, Talent, Coaching & Culture with The Equity Lab; and Mandy Taft-Pearman, Partner and Chief Strategy Officer with The Bridgespan Group.
Here’s the link to register for this webinar. Bridgespan published a White Paper on the Five Ways that Nonprofits Can Make Decision Making More Inclusive—and More Effective that you can download here.
That’s the Datebook for this week. Thanks for reading.
Wondery is a new sponsor of the study this year.
Source: Edison Research
At one point in time, much of this research could be found at http://www.thebedroomstudy.com/. Sadly that is now a dead link.
These people are now between 32-43 years old today.
Hannah Wise is a veteran of the CBC newsroom and currently the News Partnerships Lead at Brown Institute for Media Innovation. John Davidow was long-time news and digital leader with WBUR.
Compass Working Capital focuses on financial coaching for residents of public and subsidized housing.
RAPID is a registered trademark of Bain & Company.
“Decision fatigue” is a phrase coined by Ve Le of the Nonprofit AF blog.