Three Things for May 14, 2021

This week: A look at TechSurvey 2021 from JacobsMedia. Plus, uncovering the hidden talents of staff for innovations and habits are the heart of our digital future.

Welcome to the May 14th edition of the Three Things newsletter for public media leaders from the Public Impact Group. This week we’ll dive into the JacobsMedia Techsurvey 2021, offer a snapshot of newsroom innovations happening across the journalism ecosystem, and share a book recommendation that applies to some thinking about how we can best serve our audiences across digital platforms.

THING ONE: The Story is Streaming & Subscriptions in TechSurvey 2021

The Public Radio Tech Survey¹ from JacobsMedia is usually released in late summer every year. However, this past week, the annual Techsurvey 2021 for commercial radio was released. It provides some valuable information on the health of the platform and other media usage and lifestyle data. The first point that’s important to make about this survey is that the respondents are generally the most loyal (P1) listeners to the stations participating in the survey.

As we highlight some of the results, please remember these are commercial radio listeners. Their habits, however, can tell us a lot about the state of radio that impacts public radio in a big way. Here are a few key points:

• To no one’s surprise, AM/FM Radio listening is down since people are spending less time in a car. But, AM/FM Radio is still the Leader for In-Car Audio Usage, although listening falls to less than 50% for those with “Connected Cars.”

  For public radio, this goes back to the platform of radio. With more listening options available, our broadcast service becomes less valuable to listeners unless we distinguish ourselves as a unique place for live and local content. Our challenge going forward is that we lose our “findability” to grow our cume audience when the use of radio as a platform goes down. Public radio must look at new approaches in reaching potential audiences that have not been in our Core, particularly for news stations when the news cycle has lessened the urgency of finding news outlets.

• Further reinforcement of this trend is detailed in the chart below, showing that P1 listeners are increasingly moving to digital streams vs. traditional platforms.

This is a strong indicator that the relationship a station has with its most loyal listeners transcends our broadcast service (a good thing), but we need to capitalize on that loyalty to bring new listeners to our service. Public radio is in a great position to take advantage of this opportunity as it has the second highest Net Promoter Score² among radio formats.

There’s a wealth of information in this year’s Techsurvey, and the folks at JacobsMedia have it thoroughly covered, from the subscription economy to smart speakers to podcasting and consumer trends. For me, if there’s any takeaway to reinforce, it’s how important talent and the emotional attachment that radio can have with its listeners. When stations are sloppy with voice-tracking and automation, when we aren’t focused on the basics of Stationality³, when we don’t use every opportunity to connect with our listeners, our relationship grows more distant from them. At this moment in time, we can’t afford to do that.

This is a good reminder about the PRPD’s Spring Training webinars that cover a lot of the basics that we need to be reminded of regularly. Please check it out.

THING TWO: Uncovering the Hidden Talents of Staff for Innovations

Earlier this week, Editor & Publisher published a great post highlighting several creative ways that news organizations engage their audiences. The piece included several examples from public and non-profit media, including Michigan Radio’s Minutes audio podcast series that provides audio from city council meetings from 42 cities around the state.

The article also told of the evolution of the NPR’s Coronavirus Daily podcast into its afternoon daily podcast Consider This, including the effort to localize the program for audiences.

Beyond those two public radio innovations, the idea that struck me for public radio to pursue centered around the creative use of video to reach local immigrant populations with COVID-19 information that the Sahan Journal created in Minneapolis.

These short videos (around five minutes in length) are fairly basic productions but can significantly impact communities looking for trusted information. A local health insurer also sponsored them. Many stations may have the talent inside their operation to produce unique content like this, and we need to find ways to give our staff the time to experiment on projects similar to this one.

A good way to start is to do a quick inventory of the skills and interests within the staff to uncover who might be able to take something like this on as a project.

THING THREE: Habits are the Heart of our Digital Future

NPR’s podcast strategy of creating a daily habit for audiences has been a key driver to reaching podcast listeners and generating revenue for the company. From morning news to science to politics and pop culture, by creating a behavior of frequency where the audience is deeply engaged (i.e. loyalty) with the content, you’re creating a routine with a product that can be described as the “brass ring of consumer technology.”

That’s the premise of a 2014 book that I’ve recently discovered titled Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products.

I love this book because it can serve as a helpful guide in our approach from moving audiences who have been willing to support our broadcast service to engage our digital products where that loyalty has been lacking.

We know through decades of research that personal importance is a driving factor for giving to public radio. That’s why we’ve been so successful in converting Core Listeners to become donors. But, for the most part, we’ve not had this kind of loyalty with our digital products — particularly with our websites.

For most stations, the number of users visiting a station site more than five times in a month is, quite frankly, embarrassingly low. But this isn’t just a public radio problem as it’s fairly consistent across most news organizations’ websites.

The engagement efforts at KPCC | LAist have been used as a good example of building loyalty via a newsletter strategy that turned into increased membership. Still, we need more case studies to help build best practice models across the industry.

And that’s why adapting the process detailed in Hooked is something to consider.

Nir Eyal, a Stanford MBA graduate and author of Hooked, writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business calling it “behavioral design.” In Hooked, he suggests writing down the answers to these questions as you build a habit-forming product:

1. What habit does your business model require?

2. What problem are users turning to your product to solve?

3. How do users currently solve that problem, and why does it need a solution?

4. How frequently do you expect users to engage with your product?

5. What user behavior do you want to make into a habit?

You can see how this plays out when you examine NPR’s strategy around its daily podcasts. It’s also how we’ve succeeded in building loyalty for our broadcast service.

For stations, we need to explore our various digital products (website, podcasts, newsletters, social media presence, video platforms, Et al.) and define who we want to reach, and be intentional in every facet of our actions to serve that audience. Two examples of media startups working on this idea are:

• City Cast - the daily morning podcast and newsletter founded by David Plotz, the former CEO of Atlas Obscura and host of the Slate Political Gabfest. Former WAMU Content head Andi McDaniel is the Chief Creative Officer behind City Cast with Chicago and Denver as its first markets for this idea.

• 6 AM - With the tagline “your source for everything local,” 6 AM delivers a daily newsletter mostly around culture and lifestyle into email boxes every morning at 6am. 6 AM started in several markets in the southeast and announced last week that it’s moving into Kansas City and Louisville this summer.

This is only scratching the service of the ideas found in Hooked to build habit-forming loyalty for our service, so it’s well worth the read.

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1. Registration is now open for Public Radio Techsurvey 2021.

2. Net Promoter Score is a widely used market research metric that typically takes the form of a single survey question asking respondents to rate the likelihood that they would recommend a company, product, or service to a friend or colleague.

3. A station’s overall style, feel, and attitude.