Three Things for November 18, 2021
This week we look at how AI can help public radio's journalism efforts. Plus, radio and the connected car, and a different take on the Great Demographic Disruption.
THING ONE: Artificial Intelligence & the Local News Challenge
Back in May, the Knight Foundation announced a $3 million initiative designed to help local news organizations capitalize on the untapped potential of artificial intelligence.
The two-year project seeks to ensure local organizations can develop customized strategic plans to enhance their business sustainability through AI/machine learning, assess their internal AI readiness across various editorial and business lines, and collaborate with trusted AI experts and partners on product innovations.
The initial funding from Knight went to four projects:
The Associated Press is collaborating with the Knight Lab at Northwestern to create an industry-wide benchmark for AI readiness that includes the editorial and business side of the operation. AP is also working to develop a training and development program for at least 50 local news organizations around the potentially transformative impact that AI could have within their organization.
As part of this process, AP is distributing AI readiness scorecards to leaders of local newsrooms in the form of short surveys that can be completed online through this month. The survey is open to both AP member news organizations and non-members. Each participating newsroom will receive a response detailing their scorecard. Based on their score they will be invited to learn more or help teach other newsrooms what they know.
The scorecard seeks information about current technologies and applications and how automation and AI might streamline news and business functions.
The findings will help inform a free, online curriculum that AP will build next year.
The Brown Institute at the Columbia Journalism School will work to devise and deploy experiments to test new data- and AI-informed approaches to enhance reader revenue. It will accelerate the development and distribution of open-source software projects that automate time-sensitive decisions on managing premium content and optimize recommendations for quality engagement that drives subscriptions and memberships. The Institute will help build community by convening working groups, documenting the team’s findings, and establishing a platform where news organizations can share and build on each other’s experiences testing business strategies.
The Partnership on Artificial Intelligence1 will research the major ethical challenges journalists and platforms identify for AI’s use across the news lifecycle (from source to audience). In addition, PAI will work with the other grantees and a cohort of local newsrooms to help address critical knowledge and skills gaps in the industry and assist newsrooms in deploying AI tools ethnically and responsibly. If you’re not familiar with PAI, take a look at some of the fascinating work they are doing around AI and Media Integrity.
And the NYC Media Lab rounds out the grantees and will develop and manage a digital platform on AI in journalism that offers resources, information, and new knowledge in the field. The Lab will also launch an AI prototyping challenge to convene leaders and practitioners across disciplines to explore new approaches to applying AI for local news organizations.
As with the AP, the NYC Media Lab is moving forward quickly with its project and is currently accepting applications for its AI & Local News Challenge. This may not be a fit for most public radio organizations as they are looking to choose five start-up and/or university teams to develop and advance projects that use AI to address the needs of news organizations. However, University-licensees with close ties to journalism programs at their institution might want to think about applying. There is an information session on the challenge this Monday, November 22 at 1:00 pm (Eastern) You can sign up to attend through this link.
These projects funded by Knight are important because of the recognition that local, smaller news organizations lag behind major national and international newsrooms in applying AI to create efficiencies and improve their business and news operations.
And smaller stations are the ones that, most likely, lack the resources and could probably gain the most benefit from experimenting with AI. Here are a few AI use cases that smaller station newsrooms could incorporate with some help2:
Reporting tools such as transcription services, entity extraction from documents, claim/fact identification, social media event detection
Engagement helpers, such as the KPCC / LAist Covid-19 question sorting system
Predictive algorithms related to membership CRMs
Recommendation engines
Event calendars and other community-driven content
Photo searching and tagging systems
Homepage curation systems
Self-critique systems, monitoring gender and racial bias in stories
Collaboration is a constant buzzword, but this is a space where a collaborative approach truly could bring huge results for both the largest and smallest stations across public radio. As more stations migrate from Core Publisher and other homegrown CMS products to NPR’s Grove3, one collaborative hurdle can be lowered considerably by having a uniform CMS across the system.
Finally, Artificial Intelligence is not something that station leaders can hand off to IT or engineering folks to execute. PWC has a great quick read on how CEOs can tap AI’s full potential.
THING TWO: Study Says Broadcast Radios Remain an Important Feature to Car Buyers
Over the past few weeks, there have been several noteworthy items published around the connected car and where radio is on the dashboard that’s worth sharing in this newsletter.
The first was a study released last week by Edison Research4 commissioned by WorldDAB, indicating that broadcast radios remain an essential feature to car buyers.
According to Edison, one of the big surprises from the study is that this desire to keep radios as standard equipment in the car was consistent across age groups.
“Eighty-one percent of prospective car buyers in the U.S. say they would be less likely to buy or lease a vehicle that is not equipped with a built-in radio tuner.”
A few other takeaways:
Among “important” standard audio features in a new car, having a broadcast radio tuner ranked highest for prospective buyers, ahead of USB ports, and the availability of Bluetooth and smartphone mirroring.
More than half said they listen to broadcast radio in the car “frequently” versus 29% for online streaming music services and 19% for CDs.
Ninety-one percent said it was “important” that radio should remain free. “The importance of free-to-air radio was highlighted by motorists’ concerns about data charges for streamed content: a clear majority (71%) of those who currently listening to audio via their mobile device say they are concerned about how much data they are using.”
While this is good news for AM/FM radio, we shouldn’t rest too easy as the connected car market grows. Earlier this year, eMarketer projected that licensed drivers in the US driving a connected vehicle would increase from 60.3% in 2021 to 70.1% by 20255.
While it’s great that consumers still want radio as an essential feature in the car, we also need to be aware of the dashboard experience a listener receives when they are tuning to our stations.
This is true whether it’s analog listening combined with RDS, HD Radio, or via our webstream from the station app or a third-party provider like Tune-In or iHeart.
JacobsMedia conducted some new research this fall looking at consumer responses to determine best practices for how radio can optimize its appearance in connected cars. The study, commissioned by Quu6, was shared in a recent video presentation via the NAB.
For music stations, the minimum expectation is that the song title and artist need to be displayed on the dashboard, similar to what a listener may get when listening to Spotify or satellite radio7.
For all of radio, two recommended best practices are pretty straightforward:
Stations need to ensure that metadata standards are consistently applied. For example, for public radio stations importing metadata via the Public Radio Satellite System’s Metapub, the information can be inconsistent depending on the content and the producer inputting the data into the system.
The folks at Jacobs also suggest that, just as you listen to your station to make sure everything sounds as it should, the same is true with the metadata you’re delivering to your audience on the dashboard.
One of the very nice features of MetaPub is that it can import the story title and the reporter during the NPR newsmagazines into the metadata. The only problem with this occurs when the local station is covering the national feed with a feature, the listener is still “reading” the national story on the car dashboard.
The Jacobs research also looked at how advertisers could be presented for optimum impact with a similar approach for public radio underwriters. To public radio’s credit, many stations are using their pledge drive phone number in the metadata delivered to cars during on-air pledge week.
Over the summer, the NAB released an updated Best Practices Report for radio on the digital dashboard. It’s worth a download to read and share with your programming, marketing, sales, and engineering team.
THING THREE: A Different Take on the Great Demographic Disruption
Despite the likelihood that the 2020 Census undercounted people of color at higher rates than those of the previous once-a-decade tally, the results of the census show a nation becoming more diverse by race and ethnicity with the expectation that persons of color in the United States will become the majority sometime between 2041 and 2046.
This is a fact that public radio is fully aware of as we seek to expand our service to reflect what America will look and sound like in the coming years8. Accordingly, our focus has been to, rightly so, seek to reach audiences beyond the white baby boomers that have been public radio’s core audience since our inception.
But something is shifting in marketing conversations that might be worth thinking about as public radio strives to expand its service to younger audiences.
This chart is from U.S. Census Bureau from 2017 (Pre-COVID times) and, while the pandemic has resulted in more deaths of older Americans, the trend of the growing aging of the population has not shifted all that much over these past four years.
This week, Phil Rowley, the Head of Futures9 at Omnicom Media Group, wrote a post in Adweek titled Marketers Should Prepare for the Great Demographic Disruption. While Rowley is based in the U.K., much of what he writes can apply to the U.S.
In his post, he opens with the sentence:
We are a society with more older people than ever before, a world where there will soon be more grandparents than grandchildren. And it’s going to intensify.
Rowley proceeds to comment on marketers’ fascination to target campaigns at younger audiences. He cites examples of using Gen Z as a targeting proxy that seems like a blunt instrument for generalizing a younger demo; this pales in comparison to the broad strokes given to older demos.
For example, when asking the age question, how often do survey mechanisms go with this segmentation: 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65+? If the life expectancy in the U.S. still hovers around 80, these types of surveys are grouping a whole lot of people in that 65-plus group together in a single lump. And, as Rowley points out, it’s pretty tricky to make generalizations about this group because you’re talking to folks who have a wide range of needs and aspirations.
This won’t cut it in the future. We’ll have to deal with the idea that adults will work longer and retire later, but go on living with more energy and more cash, and want the best life has to offer into their 70s, 80s and 90s.
Rowley adds, “This profound shift will require us to get to grips with understanding greater nuance and specialization among older demographics. My previous generalization of the older generation as conservative and intolerant is a good place to start, and we would do well to subdivide this expanding and extended demo into more useful refined cohorts; finessing the messaging we employ, the channels we use, the need states we should be tapping into.”
We need to keep this in mind for public radio if our quest is focused exclusively on reaching younger audiences.
Much has been said that the median age of the over-the-air listener to public radio is somewhere around 58. That’s a lot older than it was 10 or 15 years ago. But I also worry if we simply abandon older audiences in favor of the young.
We really need to serve both. And it probably means finding ways to reach older audiences via our broadcast services while extending our service to younger audiences on digital platforms.
For public radio, we have to use our various channels and platforms to reach existing and new audiences and wisely use the limited resources we have available to accomplish this objective. And we have to find the models to keep serving the existing audiences while bringing in new and more diverse audiences into the tent.
I worry when I see statements hinting that it’s time to pivot from being an older radio brand to a digital podcast brand.
I worry when we’re not putting the needed resources into more aggressively growing the national-local partnership that is one of public radio’s strategic advantages.
I worry that we’re falling down a dark hole of putting our chips into a commercial business model (podcasting) while still telling ourselves that we’re maintaining our non-profit and non-commercial public service business model.
In the Adweek piece, Rowley notes that:
This demographic shift and its implications for marketing (substitute public radio here is you like) is likely to be one of the most profound disruptions in centuries. With dramatically falling global fertility rates, and a fortified older generation, we’re headed for a planet populated by old people who will remain healthier for longer by using technology to maintain their own bodies.
Thus, the days of marketing sneakers to young people and stairlifts to old people may be coming to an end. Whereas previously we may have intoned “Get with the program, Granddad,” we will be required to get with granddad’s program.
What are your thoughts on strategies to balance the growing age demographic divide?
There are implications across our entire operation, from revenue to content to programming. So what should be our three priorities for the next three years?
Here’s the link to the post by Phil Rowley. It’s worth the read.
Thanks for reading Three Things this week.
The Partnership on Artificial Intelligence is a non-profit community of academic, civil society, industry, and media organizations addressing the most important and difficult questions concerning the future of AI.
This list is courtesy of the Knight Foundation.
Last week, it was reported at the NPR Board Membership committee meeting that 73% of NPR stations using Core Publisher have migrated to Grove with 53 CP sites remaining. The next steps will be to migrate NPR and joint licensees to Grove, followed by non-Core Publisher stations. The goal is to complete this migration by October 2022.
The research was done by Edison Research for WorldDAB in partnership with Radioplayer and supported by the National Association of Broadcasters, Commercial Radio Australia, and Xperi. In September, Edison did national online surveys in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The research does point out that new vehicle growth may be impeded in the short term by the semiconductor chip shortage; many opportunities exist with cars already on the road.
I would love to hear from any station that has talked with the folks at Quu about how they might work with public radio. They seem to be working with many of the largest commercial radio groups.
Album art was an additional plus for music stations.
NPR’s 2021 - 2023 Strategic Plan states, “We must expand NPR’s audience to reflect what America will look and sound like in 2021 and beyond, attracting a more diverse audience to our journalism and cultural content, with an emphasis on Black and Hispanic audiences on all platforms.”
Every organization should have someone with that job title!