Michigan Radio recently finished its fall fundraiser. It raised $41,000 more than its $850,000 goal. This might come as a surprise to some, as popular perception is news radio is nearing its demise.
Steve Schram, director of Michigan Radio, said the station is flourishing:
“I would say that overall, the station is enjoying its best listenership ever. We have 495,000 people that listen to us every week. We also have a very good-sized audience that additionally listens to us online, normally in the range of about 40,000 in addition to our audience on the air.”
Schram explained a major part of the station’s initiative to continue its growth was its development of an online interface. This has been especially useful in keeping the younger demographic of its audience tuned in.
“It’s probably fair to say that when you look at the more contemporary technology, such as streaming and online news, that a younger demographic is more inclined to be early adapters to those technologies,” Schram said. “It is also fair to portray the fact that those audiences have been growing very handsomely for us. We have a representative demographic in the younger skew.
“For public radio, a younger skew is certainly under the age of 45, because the median age of public radio listenership is over 50. But in terms of students, talking about 18- to 30-year-old individuals, we have a fairly good representation of that demographic.”
Clark Smith, program and news director at WEMU, also said radio audiences are growing.
“We don’t have reduced audience,” he said. “That’s the fallacy. A lot of people think
that over-the-air radio is on the brink of death and ready to disappear. It’s not. Audience continues to increase – especially the public radio audience. People are turning to it.”
However, Smith expressed more concern than Schram for the younger demographic of radio audiences. He cited developments like news websites and blogs, as well as “The Daily Show,” as being utilized by college students more than news radio.
“I don’t think that college students really get most of their news from regular old-school radio or television,” he said. “There are still a lot of college students that do tune in to NPR or other public radio sources. But that younger age group doesn’t do it as much as their older counterparts.”
Upon asking students around Eastern Michigan University’s campus if they value news at all and what medium they rely on most, it does start to seem Smith is correct.
From the sample, the majority of students don’t listen to radio for news. Instead, they tend to use the Internet.
Doug Spry, a junior at EMU majoring in physics research, has a deep appreciation for news radio and expressed concern for how common it is becoming for his peers to exclusively rely on the Internet for news.
“Most of my friends get most of their news from blogs,” he said. “As a result, they tend to have a somewhat slanted view of news. It’s often up to me to present another point of view. I think blogs tend to be extremely biased. They only cover the stories that are of interest to their listeners. It’s very easy for them to twist the story to cater to those readers. Overall, I think blogs are just not a very good source, or at least not a good primary source.”
Nathan Mentley, a senior majoring in computer science, recognizes the caution required in navigating news online, but said he finds Internet sources to be tremendously useful in ways that other media can’t compete.
“I like online news, even though it’s not the most credible,” he said. “You are given many different viewpoints of the same thing. From that point on, you can definitely do more credible research.”
Mentley continued to express the importance of Internet sources like blogs, saying oftentimes mainstream media is driven by sales. Networks run the news most likely to attract the largest viewership and thereby generate the most money through advertising. Mentley argued unconventional Internet-based sources are less susceptible to this and therefore are sometimes capable of providing a more rounded perspective of current events than traditional sources could provide.
“The mainstream media likes to dramatize things,” he said. “The Internet is typically not a credible source, but in certain circumstances, people have a better idea of what’s going on and they want to share it. What I think is most interesting is what the mainstream media reports isn’t necessarily the most credible news or the most relevant. To get a full picture of uncensored news, you really need to go read a bunch of different blog posts. You just need to take everything with a grain of salt.”
In order to compete with the rise of blogs and other web-based sources, popular news radio stations, as well as newspapers, have developed websites for their users to navigate at their leisure. Some of these sites are quite sophisticated. They not only provide listeners with program schedules but often feature mp3 files of programs and features, text transcripts of those files, and some sort of plug-in allowing listeners to stream the station’s broadcast over the Internet in order to listen to it from a computer.
Schram seemed quite proud of the ways Michigan Radio has adapted to the modern market.
“We have been working hand-in-glove with NPR on this project for over a year and a half,” he said. “There is a lot of research and development that has gone into the way that our news is displayed and what kind of ongoing coverage you have. We have easy links to get to. You can obviously read the text of what we’re reporting and many of the stories have audio with them. They have related posts. You can comment on them. There are a lot of ways that it gives listeners many more extensions.”
Perhaps it is possible, or even probable, the future of news will be a marriage of new and old. If Smith and Schram are correct, then it is clear traditional news is still appreciated and won’t be disappearing anytime soon. However, the Internet is becoming a heavily utilized medium in the dispersion of news.
Schram argued it is not only prudent for radio stations to develop an online presence, but also something that ought be considered a duty.
“The research that we’ve done tells us that we need to be there,” he said. “From the standpoint of listener interest and growing future audience, you must be there. If you’re not going to have a presence there, you’re not going to have a future. So that’s why we made the type of investments we have. It goes in line with our mission, ‘to produce and distribute trusted content which informs, educates, and entertains people who care about the state of Michigan and the world around them.’”
