Ugh, I hate these! Isn’t there a better way than the endless beg-a-thons that seem to spring up every other month?
- They can be bought out by corporations.
- They can die out.
- You can give them money.
Do you give them money?
Or you can work very hard, get very rich, and give them an endowment of a zillion dollars, enough so that they can operate off the interest forever.
Or, like in the old days, the government gives them enough money to survive without begging.
It could be worse. I remember pledge drive by the Pacifica station in NY, part of which Steve Post playing “Mr. Bojangles” over and over until enough people donated to meet their hourly goal.
- We could provide adequate public funding so they don’t have to have the equivalent of a school bake sale twice a year.
I know, I know…if public radio has to suck on the government teat, it will never produce quality programming that anyone will want. It should look around at commercial radio and produce its own shock jock drive time programming so it can compete. Nobody needs NPR or jazz, and anyone who does should just fuck right off because they’re living in the past. All hail President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho! Brawndo has electrolytes! It’s what plants crave!
Stranger
Yes, just like I do at church where there’s been a lot of discussion about how to handle offerings. Before Covid, there was a good discussion about eliminating the stewardship month weekly lectures about giving since they interrupted the flow of the service.
To be honest, though, the larger public radio stations aren’t exactly poor. For example, I assume that Minnesota Public Radio made a bunch of money from Prairie Home Companion and the Boston station made money from Car Talk. And NPR received $200 million or so from the estate of Joan Kroc.
Yes. My gf has an automatic recurring pledge thing. Doesn’t stop the beg-a-thon, though.
Have you considered giving them enough money to totally fund the station? That may sound silly, but so is the idea that your individual contribution is anything more than a drop in the bucket when it comes to running a radio station.
Ira Glass told you to say that, fess up.
Public radio pledge drives will go away when a better method of fund-raising is found. Pledge drives are the price you pay for the absence of advertising (mostly).
My local news public radio station, KQED, used to have 2+ week pledge drives as regularly as clockwork, three times a year. Always with the same semi-fake “dollar-for-dollar challenges” and premiums, to drum up interest and get people to donate at 1:30 in the afternoon. In recent years they have been experimenting with shorter pledge drives and even shorter intersticial pledge drives when the regular ones didn’t meet the goal. But it’s still the same old spiel, taking 30 minutes out of every hour to flog the station and its popular programs.
They are also having more and more “non”-commercial announcements for their corporate supporters, where they not only mention their names but what they sell and how to find them online. I’d rather have longer pledge drives and less of the commercial stuff, but apparently it’s not up to me. I signed up as a recurring supporter years ago, and after that I stopped thinking about it. I gave up listening to the news in 2016 because it gave me indigestion, and I have no interest in going back now.
Many things about NPR news programs I dislike, such as how they highlight one instance of some problem as part of an in-depth report, and use that instance to prove that whatever it is is a real problem that we must worry about. But they still get my money, because I can’t imagine a news landscape without NPR. Yes, they could be better, but they could be a lot worse.
Move past them? Just wait until we have them here!
The Joan Kroc endowment was set up as a long-term thing, designed to last forever. It wasn’t $200 mil all in a wad. Public radio shows, especially news, are not cheap to put on the air. Nobody’s making Ferrari money in the NPR biz. The reason their websites end in .org is because they’re non-profit.
I donate annually to our local classical station, WCLV. The pledge drives are down to twice a year, and I can stand that. But I wish there were a way to eliminated them for those of us who’ve already pledged.
Prior to the station going public, I remember being sick of all the same commercials, ad nauseum. It’s much better now.
Some NPR stations, including WBEZ, offer a “pledge free” stream for members who qualify.