When recently asked for comment about this audience description, President & Executive Director of the Public Radio Programming Directors Association (PRPD) Abby Goldstein remarked, ”These same descriptors could be used to describe an elite private school.”
She contrasts the notion of “distinct attitude” with a mandate of public service. “Public radio chose this audience,” Goldstein points out. “If the target audience was different, then the programming would sound different.” She also flags that part of the working premise of Audience 88 was to figure out how public radio could better serve its own needs. She asks if that should really be part of the goal and suggests that, while unintentional, it “smacks of white supremacy culture.”
Audience 88 did propose two solutions to improve diversity in public radio. It recommended hiring more people of color into existing public radio stations and creating and supporting ‘minority-owned’ stations. When asked if minority-owned stations were an example of ‘separate but equal’ for this article, Thomas said that they were not, because “ownership is power.”
However, no people of color were part of the team that conducted Audience 88 or made the recommendations for solutions to improve diversity in public media. After reviewing the Audience 88 materials, Maxie Jackson, Chief Content Officer at New England Public Media, said that minority-ownership is key, but only if there’s a supportive ecosystem with a national network for content development and distribution. Something like that has not yet been created. He says that diversifying the staff of stations matters, but only if those staff “are included in editorial and decision-making positions.” Otherwise when new staff of color are hired, they will be left without agency or support to navigate the culture and structure of public media organizations. As an example, he quotes Martin Luther King Jr., “I’ve come to believe we’re integrating into a burning house.”
Jackson also points out that the result of Audience 88 has proven to be “a strategy to super-serve a core audience that is overwhelmingly white, as opposed to creating services for emerging and underserved demographics. The investment in this approach of audience development is fundamentally at odds with the basic diversity recommendations of Audience 88” and undermines any other more meaningful solutions that people of color have made over many decades.
That is why more than 30 years after the publication of Audience 88, public radio’s audiences remain overwhelmingly higher educated, higher income and white, despite a total weekly cume that has tripled over that same period to reach more than 30 million.
While Audience 88 is clearly a product of its time, and we cannot rewrite the past, there’s much to learn from how this initiative shaped public radio. We can recognize that our current state of hyper-serving a homogeneous core audience is not a fixed state or an accident, but the culmination of many decisions that were made, and actions taken. Then, excitingly, if the current state is something we constructed, that means we have the power to build something even better.
Goldstein suggests that it may be time to bring in a qualitative approach to augment our audience research. She points out that we are only experts at cultivating the audiences we’ve had and not future audiences. This means we need to step back from being experts with a dominating spirit and step into a place of openness and curiosity: “What does service look like to them, not to you?” Goldstein is promoting evolving the adage of ‘programming leads to audience, which then leads to revenue’ to a new audience-first strategy of ‘audience drives programming, which then leads to engagement and support.’
Jackson suggests that “CPB as the major funder of our system might consider funding projects that adapt the commercial media playbook of creating complimentary niche networks targeting the diversity within the various BIPOC communities.” He points out that our society is more fractured than ever and will remain so for some time. Meanwhile, old broadcast models that were created to serve white people are not sustainable. He proposes that new digital ecosystems could serve a new, more diverse generation of audiences by looking for nexuses where the values and interests of different, diverse communities intersect. As part of his Maynard 200 National Journalism Fellowship, Jackson developed the Emergence Project, which advocates for a Digital, Multimedia, Pan-African public media service emphasizing content, community engagement, affinity marketing, and Black philanthropy. He cites The Takeaway as an example of this community-centered approach to content development. While public media has decades of research about the values of its highly educated, wealthy, white audience, for Jackson the opportunity lies in learning what non-traditional audiences value.
However, before we could engage new audiences enough to even conduct such research, we would need to lay down a foundation of trust, particularly with communities of color. This would mean taking accountability for how we built the current state, and truly apologizing for decades of neglect, underservice, and occasionally outright harm, intentional and unintentional. Several public media organizations and commercial news outlets have demonstrated what this radical, wholehearted and deeply human process can look like, notably “An examination of The Times’ failures on race, our apology and a path forward.” While such a humbling acknowledgement can be scary, it is exactly the kind of courageous vulnerability public media needs to demonstrate in order to repair our relationship with the communities we’ve intentionally underserved for decades. To move forward, we must do better.
The constraints that led to the Audience 88 initiative, like the limited number of broadcast signals in any given market, are gone. There are new digital tools for audience analysis, better data, and a deeper understanding of how to ensure such research is done in a way that promotes diversity, equity and inclusion. The future is wide open. Public media once again seems on the brink of audience stagnation and even donor decline. What would it look like to do an Audience 23 initiative next year? How could we evolve this approach to set the next 30 years of audience development in public media on a sustainable path that truly meets our mission and serves everyone?
Public media is finally at the crux of trends that have been advancing on our industry for some time and have reached a tipping point sooner than predicted due to the pandemic. Digital adoption, particularly video streaming, has increased at record rates. The gap between the richest and poorest in our country has widened further, causing philanthropic giving to polarize between major gifts and mutual aid microdonations. We need comprehensive audience research to inform a critical vault forward to a new state of audience engagement, service and support in order for public media to survive and even thrive for decades to come.