Some of the big national shows originate from Boston..so maybe they are effectively working for their local station. A happy perk?
I’m sure if you ask the right way, you can get the national personalities to do local spots…it probably just isn’t that common.
I wonder if the “Wait, Wait” guys do anything for the Chicago stations.
Chicago-Dopers, any feedback?
-D/a
Nah. The national guys (specifically, as I recall, The Car Talk guys) have done KPCC (LA Public Radio) plugs. But the plugs are so generic that I imagine they were done years ago and just get pulled out during every pledge drive. No reason not to. It just seems like a generic request for supporting the station with an <insert station name here> kind of reading. I figure it takes them 20 minutes to record a ton of those for stations all over the country, and they only have to do it once.
Providing fund-raising material (live or pre-recorded) is one of the services a show provides. A show that generates a lot of donations is more likely to get renewed or picked up by the stations. Ira Glass from TAL said that a big part of their early survival was that they did really well during pledge drives. They did a lot of fun, gimmicky things that got people to call in.
For what it’s worth, I worked at my local affiliate, and they have far more money then they want you to believe. More than any other station in town by a LOT.
Which is a good thing, but holy crap did they waste money left and right.
That’s nice. I volunteered at and served on the board of my local station. It was (and is, though I no longer live in the area) dirt poor and always in danger of shutting down. (Not immanent danger, but one big disaster could wipe them out.) They also lost a huge federal grant this year for serving a minority listenership because the feds changed the rules. (The courts determined that the previous rules established a de facto illegal quota for hiring of racial and ethnic minorities on the staff.)
It would be interesting to know what states you guys are in.
The station I was talking about is KRZA, Alamosa, CO, and Taos, NM, an awesome, if occasionally dysfunctional, community radio station. I grew up listening to KUAR, though!
To answer your last question first, non-commercial stations (those below 92.1 FM) are restricted in any sponsorship relationships they have. They are not allowed to have “calls to action”, for example, and they can’t advertise prices. So you won’t hear “Come on down to Crazy Schlomo’s Discount Widgets! We’ve got a sale! Four widgets for a buck!” commercials on a non-commercial station. This applies to every non-comm station, whether it’s NPR-affiliated or the local 10-watt college station. The rather gentle nature of underwriting announcements can make them a tough sell for some businesses.
The public broadcasting model is actually upside-down from the way commercial broadcasting works. In commercial broadcasting, local stations are paid to air network programming. (These contracts are stupid complicated and take a textbook to explain, so I’ll just get into the relevant points here.) In public broadcasting, member stations pay for the programming they air, hence the regular beg-a-thons.
WABE-FM in Atlanta comes in crappy, even when I switch my Kloss 88 (a Bose clone, but I LOVE it!) to mono and use my FM antenna for stereo or wide.
However there’s a station - 91.7- out of Savannah, which “bounces” its signal off the University of West Georgia station which is 2 miles away from where I live, and their programming includes a lot of stuff which WABE doesn’t, such as American Routes.
Q