Chicago's jazz radio gets the blues, bows to iPod

[fred flintstone]

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The iPod and a growing need for local news have done the unthinkable: They have cost Chicago, one of America's great jazz cities, its last major source for jazz programming on local radio.

WBEZ, Chicago's National Public Radio (NPR) member station and among the oldest public radio outlets in the United States, has decided to scrap scheduled music programming -- the bulk of which was nightly jazz -- and move to a 24-hour news and public affairs format.

The change -- which has sparked a backlash from loyal fans -- speaks volumes about the worries facing independent radio stations. ...
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Past experience shows many of you will respond to this article without bothering to read it. It seems the person who wrote the headline, didn't real the article very well either. WBEZ's shift to a full time news and information format comes from several factors - mostly more important than iPods:

First, public radio stations are moving to fill a void commercial broadcasters have left in news programming:

"Local news has simply been abandoned by the commercial broadcasters and sometimes even the commercial newspapers," Ken Stern, executive vice president of Washington-based National Public Radio, told Reuters.

"What you see as a trend is stations like WBEZ investing heavily in local news and information," Stern said.

Second, jazz and classical listeners are squeaky wheels - nothing more. They complain more than they listen.

Research shows that while music listeners may be vocal, they do not represent the most loyal base. Classical listeners are aging, and jazz lovers, for instance, tend to have widely divergent views on their musical genre; unlike news junkies, they tune in only sporadically.

"They tend to hop around a lot on the radio dial," said Tom Thomas, co-chief executive of the Station Resource Group, a strategic consultancy whose research helps to guide U.S. public radio stations. "The jazz audience itself is very fragmented."

A Station Research Group multiyear study from 1999 through 2004 showed that of public radio's primary formats, jazz stations had the lowest average loyalty and lowest average time spent listening. The same study showed that the most dramatic audience growth came from all-news stations.

Not only that - their rate of pledging is lower, too.