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KPLU Intent to sell to KUOW

AQH said:
It's in NPR's best interests to have two stations in a market. NPR would gladly give exclusivity in a market to anyone, but at a price. The annual fee for NPR is in the seven figures, and UW likely figures it would be cheaper in the long run to buy the other NPR station, terminate the NPR deal and put on a product that doesn't cost much and won't attract many listeners in jazz. Takes two to tango, and PLU selling KPLU makes business sense for them and for KUOW it makes sense to get rid of the competition.
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Wrong. The way NPR is set up it can not give "exclusivity" to one station in a market. Further stations control NPR, not the other way around.

Stations pay a fee to be members of NPR. They pay additional fees for any programs from NPR they carry. Many "members" are music stations and don't carry NPR programs. They still get some services from NPR and still get a vote in membership meetings. The current chair of NPR's board represents one such station.
 
Oscar Madison said:
Wrong. The way NPR is set up it can not give "exclusivity" to one station in a market. Further stations control NPR, not the other way around.

Stations pay a fee to be members of NPR. They pay additional fees for any programs from NPR they carry. Many "members" are music stations and don't carry NPR programs. They still get some services from NPR and still get a vote in membership meetings. The current chair of NPR's board represents one such station.
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It wouldn't come cheap, but make no mistake in how everything is available for a price.
 
TheBigA said:
Interesting comments. Personally I think listeners benefit from having alternatives, even if the alternative runs the same programming. Because there are many ways to do the same thing. That's what you see with these two stations. Two ways to approach public radio news. From what I've read, a lot of it comes from the differing cultures at the two stations. So to put both of them under the same culture eliminates that choice.

There are several markets I'm familiar with that have two stations with two cultures that run NPR news, often at the same time, and both stations get great ratings. The famous one is Boston, where you have WGBH and WBUR. One is college owned (WBUR) and the other is owned by a community group that also owns the PBS TV station and another FM classical station. The people of Boston love having the choice, and both stations are successful. No reason why that couldn't happen in Seattle.
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Thanks for this comment, TheBigA, as well as IndigoCoyote's comment on the different newsroom approaches.

I've pointed this out, time and again, over the years on this board. KUOW and KPLU take totally different approaches to what news their covering and how they are covering it. KPLU does a much better job covering more stories with their smaller newsroom. KUOW has a ton of a news staff (reporters, editors, producers) but yet their coverage is often lacking. It is not unusual to hear them pick up a regional piece and run it during the first newsblock of Morning Edition. While hearing a story from Anna King about water resource fights in the Tri-Cities is moderately interesting, isn't there anything more local and more relevant that KUOW can cover?

Meanwhile, KPLU, with a newsroom thirty miles south of Seattle does a much better job covering both Seattle news and politics, as well as what's happening in Olympia. It's not even close. Add to that their continued use of Metro Traffic during drive time, in my car, on my old commute, KPLU always was preferred to KUOW.

I know I'm not the only one that has listened to both products and made this conscious choice. And that's why KPLU's newsroom fading away would be such a disaster. Long time curmudgeon Knute Berger had a piece on Crosscut about a week ago about the shrinking venues for real journalism in the city. The Seattle Times is a shell. The three big TV stations have cut back. KPLU's newsroom is endangered. The Seattle Weekly is best used to line your rabbit cage because there is very little original content. It's a real problem. And the simplest one to save, and keep going, might be KPLU.
 
AQH said:
It wouldn't come cheap, but make no mistake in how everything is available for a price.
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The folks who run WGBH in Boston have no shortage of money, but they couldn't stop WBUR from running All Things Considered at the same time they run it. There was a similar situation in Washington DC with WAMU and WETA. A few years ago, WETA just gave up and focused 100% on classical music. But it was a long hard fight. So I don't think you're right about this.
 
No, AQH is not right about this. He/she apparently is unwilling to recognize this is public radio and the rules and the culture are different. But let's say, for the sake of discussion, that the big time public radio station in town decided it wanted exclusive rights to ME and ATC and offered a big piece of change to take those shows away from the "other" public radio station. And some suit at NPR went along. How many station A-Reps do you think would besiege NPR within 24 hours. There are a lot of markets with two (or more) stations taking those shows and they don't want to lose them. There are a lot more stations who don't want to see the prices paid for NPR shows based on a bidding war.

And before we get even more carried away with the idea of the big, evil University gobbling up a small station operated by a small college, let's keep in mind the small college wanted to sell. I don't know why they wanted out of the public radio game but they did. And let's also keep in mind that nobody else stepped up to buy the station, for example an independent "KPLU foundation" established to take over the station (as happened for example when the city of New York wanted to sell off WNYC).
 
Oscar Madison said:
And let's also keep in mind that nobody else stepped up to buy the station, for example an independent "KPLU foundation" established to take over the station.
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If you do a little research, you'll find that a lot of the negotiations were kept private, so even the KPLU Board didn't know their own station was being sold. In fact if you go to the first few pages of this very long thread, you'll see exactly what happened.
 
TheBigA said:
If you do a little research, you'll find that a lot of the negotiations were kept private, so even the KPLU Board didn't know their own station was being sold. In fact if you go to the first few pages of this very long thread, you'll see exactly what happened.
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Negotiations are almost always private. The early pages discuss what happened (the station got sold) but not anything about the decision making process. It was known that the school was short of cash and the idea of selling the station was discussed but not confirmed. Against this background, there was no serious move to acquire the station and it keep it independent, as was done with WNYC. Nor is there any indication, the school looked for competing offers (like from Northwest Public Radio - Washington State University, or either public television organization in Seattle).

Going to an all music format, regardless of the ownership issue, does make sense. Block programming and the tent pole or hybrid format is obsolete in all but small markets. The U of Washington operates two news and information public radio services already plus there are a couple of very good commercial radio news operations in the market.
 
Oscar Madison said:
Against this background, there was no serious move to acquire the station and it keep it independent, as was done with WNYC. Nor is there any indication, the school looked for competing offers (like from Northwest Public Radio - Washington State University, or either public television organization in Seattle).
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The school DIDN'T look for competitive offers. They got one from KUOW and they accepted. That was told in one of the articles early in this thread. That's why the KPLU board was upset. The board found out when it was already a done deal. They were upset that no other options had been considered. That's why they pushed for this alternative.

The WNYC situation was very different because the station was owned by the city, and the city WANTED to hand it off to a community group. The community foundation was allowed to operate the station for a period from the city-owned studios in the Municipal Building across from City Hall. There were Foundation employees (specifically management) who were paid by the Foundation, and civil service employees, paid by the city. This system was in place for a number of years before the Foundation took over full control from the city. None of this had anything to do with NPR programming, because at the time there were several NPR stations in the NY market. There are lots of other similar stories in public radio. But this example in Seattle is pretty unique.
 
So how does this work? Does each donor become a shareholder, or is there just some stand-alone entity with no real ownership? Wondering what happens if this all goes sideways in a year or two...UW may step up with the original $7M check. Who gets to deposit it?
 
LITTLEBOYBLUE said:
So how does this work? Does each donor become a shareholder, or is there just some stand-alone entity with no real ownership? Wondering what happens if this all goes sideways in a year or two...UW may step up with the original $7M check. Who gets to deposit it?
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This is a pretty common situation in public radio. People who pledge become MEMBERS. No ownership rights, no shares of stock, no rights beyond being able to say you gave blood. The Friends group has hopefully incorporated itself for tax purposes. They will become the licensee. They will have a Board of Trustees who oversee the license and its policies. And the first order of business is to build an endowment, fund a new studio location, and raise enough to cover operating expenses, which apparently are another few million a year beyond this $7 million purchase price. They should be able to get a loan based on ownership of the license.

But the real sticky wicket is UW. They're being very nice about this. They really don't have to be. But this is also a publicity problem for them. They can't be seen as being too heavy-handed. It would be very unpopular. But obviously they aren't happy, and they're in a far better financial position than the Friends group. Money can solve a lot of problems.
 
Scratch relocation off that list - they have to stay in their existing studios for a few more years because a grant funded the construction. But that's peanuts compared to raising the cash to keep the station running...
 
Rob Piotrowski said:
Scratch relocation off that list - they have to stay in their existing studios for a few more years because a grant funded the construction. But that's peanuts compared to raising the cash to keep the station running...
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How is that different than the pledges they use to cover the operating expenses now?
 
TheBigA said:
It will be minus the $1.7 million they used to receive from PLU, and it's in addition to the $7 million they just raised to buy the station.
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So... on every future pledge drive, they need to raise an additional $1.7 million. That's not a horrifically large amount of money. But it does mean the KPLU supporters will literally have to put their money where their mouth is.
 
I don't know their current budget, but I imagine they'll seek to replace the PLU money with some grants from the State? Assuming they haven't already maxed that source out already.
 
According to the article they're estimating getting the keys in early fall. By fall 2017 the new car smell will wear off and the harsh economic realities will be setting in.

I really do hope they make it, but emotionally-driven initiatives don't always work out.
 
AQH said:
I really do hope they make it, but emotionally-driven initiatives don't always work out.
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That is very true. What is the most important to the future of a public station sold by a college is how quick the school wants it out of their life. As academia is very political, all it takes is a new president looking to trim the fat no matter what the cost is in goodwill.

A great example is WXEL-FM in West Palm Beach. Owned by Barry University, they wanted to quickly unload the NPR station. They did not want to go through the year or more of transitional costs and negative media to float the station off as a "community" licensee. They unloaded the station to MN Public Radio who promptly turned it into a repeater of its Miami classical outlet -- two years later, they unload the stations to a religious outfit at fire sale prices to show a bit of fiscal restraint for its mostly non-Floridian contributor base.

The only the Friends of 88.5 have going for them is that PLU will make it quite easy on them to separate from the school. They'll get to slowly transition out of the on-campus digs...most, if not all of the 88.5 staff will end up with the "new" 88.5 with some sort of amicable separation from PLU's benefits system.

The KUNC-FM signal out in Northern Colorado is commonly used as a model for how 88.5 was to be "saved" by the community. University of N Colorado wasn't chomping at the bit to get the station out of their hair. When the friends purchased it, things slowly transitioned to KUNC being an independent station. Betcha the university ate a few costs to transition the station off their hands!

It can be argued KUNC is at its strongest these days...and recently took the keys to a Denver rimshot that now runs a AAA format.

If Pacific Lutheran wanted KPLU off their backs quickly, they would have quickly sold the license to UW without offering it to a community group. Some Wallingford basement dwellers would complain and threaten to go to the FCC with improprieties, and SHOCKER! The FCC looks at them, laughs, and nothing happens.

Right now, we'd probably be in the second month of Planet Jazz from UW on 88.5 KPJZ! The basement dwellers would have moved on to some other social issue to protest, and KPLU would be a distant memory!

I'm curious what the folks in Grays Harbor think about all this...after all, KPLU's translators are really the only NPR station that can be received in most of the area!

Radio-X
 
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