Three Things for July 22, 2021
From the Public Impact Group
This is Three Things for public media leaders for July 22, 2021.
Here’s what’s up this week:
The Public Radio App Saga
Community Listening as part of the Local Media Association’s Lab for Journalism Funding
Nielsen’s latest COVID consumer tracking study: Leaning Toward Back to Normal
THING ONE: Pocket Casts and the Public Radio App Saga
The news last week of the sale of Pocket Casts by NPR, New York Public Radio, Chicago Public Media, and BBC Studios Americas to Automattic, the parent company of Tumblr and WordPress.com, signals the end of a three-year experiment to operate a podcast distribution platform owned by public media entities. The app was initially acquired to “[further] public radio’s leading role as an innovator in audio discovery and distribution while ensuring the continued support and growth of one of the most popular listening platforms on the market.”
This news comes on the heels earlier this year of the sale of RadioPublic, the app spun out of PRX in 2016. Described in its roll-out as a product designed to reimagine audio for mobile devices, RadioPublic was sold to Acast, the international podcast hosting platform and advertising marketplace, back in February.
The Pocket Casts sale was finalized after Current broke the news in January that it was on the block after a review of NPR’s latest financial statement that revealed that the owners “met and agreed to sell Pocket Casts, the sole asset of Podcast Media” in December.
Tyler Falk from Current reported that NPR’s share in the net loss of Pocket Casts in its 2020 fiscal year was more than $800,000. According to the report, NPR (and NYPR) had a 34.6% share of ownership of the app company known as Podcast Media LLC.
The saga of these two apps, along with the lack of audience growth for the NPR One, are somewhat worrisome developments at a time when the competitive environment in on-demand audio is growing more intense, as is our dependence on third-party distribution platforms.
The beauty of owning a platform is that you own the usage data to deepen the relationship with your audience and better serve them. Unfortunately, we’ve just not been able to muster the collective strength as an industry to embrace a single product across the system to effectively co-brand with local stations in a way that PBS has been able to achieve with its app and with PBS Passport.
And that brings me to another observation about public radio’s mobile apps. I love listening to different stations across the country, and downloading a station app is a great way to see how well the station’s brand is reflected in the product that lives on your phone. Public Media Apps has a sizeable share of the market for stations, and it’s a reasonable solution1 for many, particularly for joint licensees along with stations in smaller or medium markets. But I do find that many stations seem to “get it and forget it” as its interface and features have basically remained unchanged for years.
Last week Elizabeth Hussey wrote a piece on the JacApps blog discussing “Six Common Mistakes Companies Make with Mobile Apps,” and it’s worth checking to see how your station app stacks up.
Not Aligning Your Mobile App With Your Strategy. Hussey writes, “If your app isn’t aligned with your overall strategy, you will almost certainly fail. What you’re doing inside your business, on your website, and in your app should all support your overall goal and strategy in the same way.”
Too Much Stuff. If you check the analytics of your app usage, you’ll probably find that nearly all of the time spent on your app is listening to your streams or perhaps something on-demand. The best station apps focus on the listening experience. Keep it simple.
Not Promoting the Mobile App. This seems to be hit or miss with a lot of stations. Think about all of your channels on- and off-air to reach potential users. In her post, Hussey also cautions on the overuse use of push messaging.
Poor or Confusing Branding. For joint licensees, this can sometimes be a problem in how the brands for each service are displayed in the app.
Poor Usability. After the overuse of push messaging, the next reason that a user would uninstall the app is if the streams don’t function well. As Hussey states, “Test, test, test!”
Not Having the Right Support. This can be a big dilemma for many home-grown apps from a smaller shops.
THING TWO: Lessons from LMA’s Lab for Journalism Funding
The Local Media Association has just released “Pathways to Philanthropy,” a white paper that takes the learnings from its first group of publishers2 taking part in the Google News Initiative-funded Lab for Journalism Funding project.
Sixteen local publishers took part in this effort that focuses on individual strategies for these news organizations to fund journalism through philanthropy. The results from this work were positive as the 16 participating newsrooms collectively raised $4.5 million to support their journalism over the nine months from October 2020 through June 2021.
The takeaway that I found most interesting from the effort centers around a strategy of community listening to frame the work ahead for these news organizations. The white paper goes into detail on the process, but a couple of things really caught my attention.
First is the network mapping exercise led by public media veteran Joaquin Alvarado.
Putting a community listening process at the very beginning of the fundraising journey was a key lesson for publishers in LMA’s Lab for Journalism Funding. “Listening tours are essential for establishing open channels of communication between the newsroom and the communities it seeks to serve through the community-funded model for local journalism,” said Alvarado.
The goal of the listening tour is to “go both deep and broad to surface as many perspectives and experiences as possible from the diverse audiences a publisher serves.”
A strategic approach to community listening involves six key outcome goals. In combination, the insights gained from these six aspects of community listening form the foundation for all of a newsroom’s future fundraising efforts.
Listen for reputation
Listen for discovery
Listen for alignment
Listen to learn from experts
Listen to iterate
Listen for unexpected opportunities
“Through listening tours, we learn from the community, gather insights, and demonstrate a commitment to openness that makes new relationships possible, including with funders,” Alvarado said.
The report also includes a number of questions3 to utilize in the community listening sessions that can help news organizations better understand how they can address the crucial issues in the community.
This approach is very similar in many ways to the early stages of a major capital or capacity-building campaign in helping an organization develop the case in advance of a feasibility study. The Lab for Journalism Funding project found the sweet spot in successful funding proposals sat in the cross-section of three core elements through this process.
There’s a wealth of valuable ideas in the report that public media news organizations can incorporate into their fundraising efforts, plus some suggestions on things NOT include in a fundraising appeal. Spoiler alert: “Saving journalism jobs” was at the top of the list. Instead of focusing internally, always focus externally on how a newsroom can address community issues through journalism.
The Pathways to Philanthropy white paper is a clear indicator that many publishers outside of public media will be including philanthropic proposals as part of their revenue plans for the future. While this adds a new competitor in the community for philanthropy gifts, we should also welcome that it will increase the awareness with potential funders of the importance that journalism will play in addressing issues in a community.
THING THREE: Radio is “Leaning Toward Back to Normal”
Last week, Nielsen revealed its latest findings in its ongoing COVID consumer tracking study since the pandemic. The results of the June 2021 survey provide some interesting insights into where radio fits into the lifestyle and consumer behaviors as the U.S. looks to come out of the pandemic.
The details of the findings were shared in a recent post by Pierre Bouvard, the Chief Insights Officer at CUMULUS MEDIA | Westwood One.
The headline from the research is that 90% of those surveyed are “ready to go” and feel that life is becoming more normal.
It should be noted that this research was done before the latest surge in increased COVID cases so we have no way of knowing how that is impacting the attitudes of consumers at this exact moment in time.
One of the stronger indicators of a lifestyle return that will benefit radio listening is that those working from home fell to only 14% in June 2021 as two-thirds of workers are now commuting to work. At the peak of shutdowns in April 2020, only 39% of those surveyed were working outside the home.
While I’m personally a fan of public transportation, we know that buses and trains are not friendly to radio listening. The survey notes that commuters are still cautious about public transit.
32% of consumers say they will spend less time on public transport versus 17% who will spend more time.
An additional consumer tracking study4 recently released supports the idea of getting out of the house. This research found 34% of Americans plan to spend more time outside, and 21% plan to spend less time online during 2021. That should also bump up radio listening.
Another clear sign of radio’s recovery was detailed this week in a posting by the Radio Research Consortium taking PPM data from the June 2021 Nielsen Audio ratings. The chart below of hour-by-hour listening for weekdays shows that 3 pm is again the peak of listening.
All of this data points in a positive direction for radio overall. Unfortunately, the top-line results for NPR news stations in June were less than stellar. For 20 out of the 21 public radio news stations in the Top 15 markets, overall market shares were either flat or down compared to May.
The news cycle obviously presents some unique challenges for NPR news stations. This is particularly true during the summer months where listeners may be traveling more and interests tend to lean more towards avoiding the news than embracing it. I don’t believe that this is a case where our most loyal core listeners are turning away from us. But I do have some concerns that the lifestyle changes and news events of the past 18 months have resulted in reduced time-spent listening to public radio news content.
Ongoing research will be the only accurate way we can find out. Perhaps the Public Radio Tech Survey from Jacobs Media and PRPD currently out in the field will help us learn more about the current state of listening when we receive the results this fall.
I always love hearing from you and really appreciate that you’ve made it this far. Thanks for reading.
I, personally, would like to have the streaming function be more prevalent with the app.
Participants in the lab spanned the country, from the Anchorage Daily News in Alaska to the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., to Nogales International on the U.S.-Mexico border. The cohort included a range of publishers, from two-year-old digital startups like Detour Detroit to major-market dailies like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and multigeneration family-owned publishers like AFRO-American Newspapers and Record -Journal. The 16 publishers in the LMA Lab for Journalism Funding included: AFRO American Newspapers, AL DÍA, Anchorage Daily News, The Aspen Times (Swift Communications), The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Cox Enterprises), Block Club Chicago, Bozeman Daily Chronicle (Adams Publishing Group), Detour Detroit, Nogales International (Wick Communications), Record-Journal, The Sacramento Observer, Tampa Bay Times (Times Publishing Company), The Post and Courier, Sun Herald (McClatchy), The Times-Picayune/The Advocate, and the Washington City Paper.
Questions to kickstart community listening:
What are the most important issues affecting this community? What’s not being covered enough? What’s important for us to know about this community?
Where do people in these communities get information now?
What would be an outcome for this community that would be meaningful?
What are we doing well? What can we improve on? Where could we have the most impact?
The tracking study, GroupM’s Mindshare’s “Coronavirus: U.S. Insights," reflected the sentiment of U.S. consumers polled May 28 as part of the agency's "Pool" panel of American consumers.