As the pedantic outlier i like to be, KSKO has a local morning show thats chocked full of local info, same for our lunch time and afternoon show. we have 7 hours a day of local programming.
KSKO doesnt do local news like you think of most public radio stations doing. We read local events/psas/local news snippets at 45 after every h ur we have local programming.
As you said, it's an outlier. Most public radio stations aren't like that. What you appear to have is a small-town radio station that just happens to be run by a nonprofit rather than as a business. Considering the isolation and very small size of the community, that makes sense. But little of it relates to the situation in Colorado that this thread is about.
Your point about CPR not carrying that many local shows applys nationwide to public radio stations as a whole. For example, Phoenix's KJZZ will give you brief information on road closures and other things to watch out for
Colorado Public Radio runs no traffic reports at all. If you want traffic reports in Denver, you have to tune to one of the commercial AM stations.
Going back to KJZZ, that station does carry an hour-long show on local issues at 9AM local time on weekdays plus news during Morning Edition and All Things Considered. And, most of the stories and interviews during the local 9am show run between 5 and 10 minutes allowing for a few more stories than CPR is able to cover during its local morning show. Then again, there are many NPR affiliates, especially in smaller markets, that do not *have* a local morning show like CPR does in Denver or KJZZ does in Phoenix.
This brings up another way in which public radio doesn't serve well as a substitute for a locally-oriented commercial news operation. The morning and afternoon drive times, when local content matters the most, is mostly taken up with national programming. Yes, there are local cut-ins available. The quality of those cut-in varies a lot among stations, dependent largely upon the ability of the individual station (or regional network) to devote resources to quotidian news coverage.
But let's bring this back to the Denver situation. CPR's main local showcase is "Colorado Matters" at 9 am daily. It's mostly features, often long, and seems to have an allergy to coverage of Denver outside of East Colfax and Sherman. CPR can reasonably argue that, if you want its Denver coverage, you can go to its Denverite website, which it bought in 2019. But Denverite is not integrated with CPR's website or apps (when I mentioned this, a CPR staffer said this was because Denverite uses an entirely different content management system, one inherited in 2019, from the one that CPR uses. Seven years later, they still haven't integrated the systems.) and doesn't do much with audio. Yes, there are local cut-ins in NPR news programming but it feels like there's more Colorado Springs content than Denver content. It's kind of strange to downplay coverage of the largest and third-largest cities in the state (Denver and Aurora respectively), but that's what seems to happen. From the northern part of the Front Range, KUNC's local daily show (except Mondays) is "In the NoCo", which replaces about a quarter-hour of Morning Edition. It's a little more focused, since KUNC's main coverage area is around Fort Collins and Greeley. KUNC can be received in Denver and has a translator on Lookout Mountain.
So, let's say you want to hear from Denver's mayor or council members about license-plate readers, which is an ongoing controversy right now. Or from Aurora's mayor about reform in their police department. You're very unlikely to get that from CPR or KUNC...CPR because it tries to be so state-wide that it ignores non-state-government stories out of Denver...KUNC because Denver is not its main area of focus.
The relatively low audience share numbers of CPR compared to public radio stations in other markets is something CPR hasn't done much about.
Hopefully these thoughts don't come across as being too scattered...I'll conclude by saying that the end, essentially, of Colorado's Morning News on KOA left a void in the marketplace, one that the other commercial operators are very unlikely to try to fill. Maybe there's some hope in the prospect of a merger between Rocky Mountain PBS and KUNC. Maybe.
but for the most part you all seem to get the gist. Happy to answer questions more specifically if you are interested or maybe those that weren't addressed or asked in the interview (Jason and CTR did a very good job at representing my thoughts and position; I wouldn't have expected anything less from them).
