First off, we do contribute to our local NPR station. I haven’t done so this year, but I probably will within the next month or so. So, yeah, we do pay for it.
Second, our local station apparently approaches pledge week as irritation marketing at its finest. This damn pledge week will go on for as long as it’s scheduled. Sometimes, if it’s been particularly successful, they’ll end the drive a few hours early, but no more than that. But to the best of my knowledge, they’ve rarely offered an opportunity to skip the on-air drive in favor of online pledging. Otherwise, it’s ten minutes of begging at a stretch. I find myself reaching for an NPR podcast on my Zune.
That’s pretty much what the local NPR stations do in my area. They now have one day of fundraising every four to six months rather than a pledge week (which sometimes lasted three weeks).
On a side note, on Saturday I donated some money to a college radio station I used to work for, and on Sunday I won a prize on a local college radio station worth more than my pledge. I can’t guarantee that this will happen if you pledge, but I’m guessing it will.
Well, with that said, i so hate the pledge drives too, but they are really motivated by dollars.
i accept it as a part of some of the best radio and news around. I mean car talk, who does that. Or, wait wait dont tell me. or BBC newshour, or morning edition, or all things considered.
I respect your position, but NPR and public radio is the last bastion of real journalism and radio entertainment that exists. Every thing else is focused around what sells.
I respect the rant now, because it is an expression of frustration not a lack of care for good content radio.
Yea, it works really well. That said, we’re in VT, which I imagine must have some of the most donators-per-capita in the country, so a long pledge drives would be kind of superfluous anyways. More tight-fisted markets probably need more direct prodding.
It happens. But I find that nine times out of ten, when someone from outside a business, after putting a minute or less of thought into a problem, is super-sure that all the people who have made careers out of that business, and no doubt spent hundreds of hours figuring out the best way to do things, must be idiots, they usually aren’t as super-intelligent as they think they are.
And really, in most cases, they’re basically just trying to rationalize why something they find personally annoying must be wrong in some broader sense. NPR fundraising drives are annoying to the OP, therefore they must also be a bad idea for NPR. That an optimal universe isn’t one which minimizes things that annoy him personally seems impossible, therefore the people that cause annoyances must be idiots.
Thee was a time when I drove my daughters to high school en route to the office. May car had my 5 radio stations, all public, but also provided another 5 for my daughters. One morning, during the 8 minute drive, they had some DC station on. Three, ahem, gentlemen talking heads and one lady. They created numerous teas out of dried and crushed animal penises and they had the lady do taste tests. It does not take much imagination to know what intellectual discussion ensued. I was relieved to note that no music was played during the drive and therefore could not have been damaged during that broadcast! I happily contribute to my local stations and thoroughly enjoy their programming on the regular broadcast and through extensive podcasts.
Buy a smartphone, get a cheap data plan, get a car stereo with an aux and get whatever radio you want for the rest of your life. The upfront cost is a bit much but it’s worth it to free yourself of shitty NPR.
Morning Edition: Steve Inskeep’s 20 minute long questions broken up by 10 minutes of ‘cool’ music the hipster interns found.
I have donated in the past, before we got pledge drives for Valentine’s Day, Day of Giving, Spring, Fall, We Just Feel Like Begging For Money Today Day, and all the others. Like I said, I can remember when it was twice a year. Now it’s seemingly once a month. When they cut it back to twice a year again I’ll start paying again.
(As an aside, can you believe it’s been almost 12 years?)