On the Media: Public radio is enjoying boom times

While its TV counterpart struggles, National Public Radio listenership is up and there are plans to greatly expand its reporting.

James Rainey
LA Times
October 20, 2010

Southern California's biggest public television station threatens to pull out of the PBS network and the public television world trembles. An older audience is slowly fading to black. Replacement viewers aren't on the near horizon. And the rest of cable TV has filled so many niches — art, science, nature, film, the outdoors and more — that it's not so clear these days whether public television has a perch for the long run.

The precarious position of stations such as L.A.'s KCET stands in high relief when compared with the relative health and dynamism emanating from National Public Radio and its affiliates these days. More listeners continue to find public radio and, as evidenced by a couple of developments in recent days, the network and some of its executives want to make the footprint even larger.

The expansive news came from NPR Chief Executive Vivian Schiller and public radio's most aggressive entrepreneur, Bill Kling of American Public Media and Minnesota Public Radio. Both discussed plans to improve public radio's local coverage by putting more reporting boots on the ground.

NPR plans to do it, in part, with its "Impact of Government" initiative, designed to add 100 or more journalists to cover the ways that state government affects people and communities. Kling pushes a plan to help public radio stations in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and his own Minneapolis-St. Paul build newsrooms of 100 or more.

(More here.)