Tom Krueger / WPR
WPR director Sarah Ashworth.
Sarah Ashworth: ‘The way people are listening over the air is changing.’
At a recent listening session hosted by Wisconsin Public Radio at the Madison Central Library, most attendees, as one person pointed out, appeared to be over 50. Allen Irvine was an exception and toward the end of the question and answer period he offered his support for WPR’s recently announced restructuring plan for its soon-to-be 39 stations across the state.
Irvine said that when he moved to Madison four years ago he found WPR programming hard to navigate. “Learning the schedules and what’s on, where, was very confusing,” he said. “I think [separate news and music stations] greatly simplify the learning curve for people who are moving to Madison, which I know is a large group,” he added. “And makes it easier to choose a given thing at a given time of day. So I really appreciate those changes.”
Sarah Ashworth, who led the session and has been director of WPR since 2023, thanked Irvine for his comments. “That is reassuring to hear,” she said.
In early April WPR, the nation’s oldest public radio station, dropped some big news: the two current networks —The Ideas Network and NPR News & Music Network — would be renamed and restructured. There will no longer be a combined news and music station and The Ideas Network, which featured regional and statewide talk shows and BBC programming, will also cease to exist. Come May 20, all news programming will be on WPR News and all music will be on WPR Music.
For one woman at the listening session, a longtime public radio devotee and volunteer, the changes left her “deeply dismayed and saddened.”
“For the last 20 years I’ve had one station on my car radio and one on my home radio, connected to speakers all over the house. That is WERN [FM-88.7],” she said. The woman, when approached later, declined to give her age beyond “senior” or her name. One of the things she values about the current system is how it allows for chance encounters — like when she stumbled onto the BBC Newshour, which currently airs weekday afternoons at 3 p.m. “I discovered it because it was there,” she says. Once news and music is separated on different stations, she adds, “You lose discovery, serendipity.”
The sense of loss for her, she says, “is huge.”
In her presentation Ashworth emphasized that the restructuring, a product of a two-year planning process, is to “make sure that public radio is around for the long haul.” The changes, she added, do not alter the mission of the public radio station, which is still to “inform and inspire and to build communities throughout Wisconsin and the world.”
The audience reacted audibly when Ashworth displayed a bar graph showing a sharp decline in the weekly broadcast audience for NPR, which produces Morning Edition (airing 5-9 a.m. weekdays on WPR) and All Things Considered (airing 4-6:30 p.m. weekdays). According to Pew Research polling, 30 million people were tuning in to NPR in 2017; by 2022, the audience had shrunk to about 23.5 million.
“We have seen a decline in our broadcast audiences,” Ashworth said. “The way people are listening over the air is changing,” she added. “There is more demand for digital content and streaming audio. The competitive landscape in digital is so much bigger.”
While earnest planning for the changes began in recent years, she said, there have been “years of discussions and thoughtful conversations” about the format of the station. Added Ashworth with a laugh: “It was not a rash decision, I will say.”
Jack Mitchell can attest to the years of discussion around having separate talk and music stations.
“It was something I first proposed when I was working at NPR in 1974,” Mitchell says in an interview. Mitchell was NPR’s first employee in 1970 and the first producer and newscaster of All Things Considered. He was also director of Wisconsin Public Radio from 1976-1997.
Mitchell says WPR likely would have created separate news and music stations back in the 1970s if the network at the time had more than one FM and one AM station. “We couldn’t put classical music on an AM station,” Mitchell says. AM typically has lower sound quality than FM.
Mitchell is not opposed to the restructuring — “It’s not a new idea and it’s not a bad idea” — but he regrets the loss of some state and regional programming.
Central Time (which was broadcast live weekdays for 1.5 hours and then immediately repeated), and The Morning Show (which ran weekdays for two hours) aired on The Ideas Network and are being eliminated in favor of a one-hour news show, Wisconsin Today, 9 a.m. on WPR News. Former hosts Rob Ferrett and Kate Archer Kent will co-host the new weekday show, which will be rebroadcast every night at 7 p.m. Several regional programs, including Route 51 in Wausau, Simply Superior in Superior, and Newsmakers in La Crosse, are also being discontinued.
On the plus side, the popular The Larry Meiller Show will expand to two hours.
In Milwaukee, where WPR has just one station that was part of The Ideas Network, the station will now offer music only. “That’s about one-third of the state that won’t get WPR talk programming which, in my opinion, is the main purpose of public broadcasting,” says Mitchell.
WUWM, owned and operated by University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, does offer such NPR programs as Morning Edition and All Things Considered. And, as Jeffrey Potter, director of marketing and communications for WPR, points out, all of WPR’s content can be accessed digitally. “For those who are willing to go beyond broadcast and listen online, use their mobile phone or laptop, they are going to be able to get all of this content.
“Public radio has been able to sustain an audience and a business model through the digital age for a long time,” he adds. “But I think we’ve also missed the opportunity of reaching and servicing more people through streaming and I think this is going to do that for us. But it’s a shift.”
Ashworth says Wisconsin Today will be a mix of stories and interviews on topical issues, as well as cultural stories. She says the hosts from the canceled regional programs will continue to produce content, which will be packaged as segments into Morning Edition, probably starting this summer. For classical music lovers, the switch is a boon. WPR Music will offer 13 hours of classical music each weekday, up from six hours, with jazz, world and folk music on the weekends. WPR’s 39th station, a music station, will launch in Rice Lake in June.
Bill Davis is executive director of Station Resource Group, a membership organization with a big charge: “helping local public radio stations thrive in an era of radical change.”
“We have seen audiences flat to declining,” he says. “Membership is also flat to declining. Corporate support has been declining and, at times, declining precipitously.”
As people have moved to other platforms, including podcasts, video and social media, Davis says it’s become increasingly important for traditional broadcasters to figure out ways to meet audiences where they are. That requires investing in newer mediums, including local and statewide podcasts.
But chasing audiences costs money and the efforts don’t always generate significant listenership.
“It’s a process of trial and error, often an expensive and painful process of trial and error,” says Davis. But, he adds, “That is what needs to be done if you’re going to maintain the service…to the community.”
He says research conducted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, dating back to the 1980s, finds that mixed format stations were “not nearly as effective at serving their audiences and communities as stations that had one unified programming stream.” Most public radio stations went in that direction 30 years ago or so, he adds.
“I don’t think there is any question that this will strengthen and enhance what WPR is trying to do.”
