The New York Times

November 11, 2001

Public Radio's Private Guru

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

DURING the final days of October, as the public radio station WAMU-FM in
Washington launched an on-air fund drive, one particular group of former
listeners
began calling in to donate only their complaints. They were fans of a
bluegrass show that had been dropped without warning four months earlier
from its
coveted slot during drive- time on weekday afternoons. Refusing to
contribute money, demanding refunds of previous gifts, the protesters
meant to deny
WAMU its goal of raising $1 million. And this was only their latest piece
of political theater.

In the preceding weeks, bluegrass loyalists had picketed two fund-raising
events, one man carrying a sign declaring "WAMU = Fraud, Stupidity and
Heartache."
"Save Bluegrass" Web sites and e-mail lists had sprung up. Back before
the terror attacks of Sept. 11 had consumed Congressional attention,
Representative
Howard Coble of North Carolina had taken to the floor of the House to
declare, "Perhaps the WAMU management team needs to be introduced to the
woodshed."

This sort of strife was not limited to Washington, either. Seven months
earlier and 2,000 miles away, to the strains of Haydn's "Farewell"
symphony, the
public station KUER-FM in Salt Lake City ended 40 years of broadcasting
classical music, bringing condemnation from the Utah legislature and the
state's
major newspapers. Meanwhile, in Maine, town meetings were being held to
assail the state public radio system for dropping live broadcasts of the
Metropolitan
Opera. (They were ultimately restored.) And in Roanoke, Va., the United
States District Court prepared to hear the case of the NPR station WVTF's
former
manager. He was suing university and state officials for $2 million for
having fired him shortly after he dropped the Met broadcasts, which were
restored
over his objections.

All these controversies, seemingly so disparate, traced back to a common
source. His name is David Giovannoni. A brilliant analyst of public
radio's audience
- who it is, how much it listens, when it listens, what it listens to,
when and why it donates money - he is quite possibly the most influential
figure
in shaping the sound of National Public Radio today, the sound heard by
upward of 20 million Americans weekly.

Mr. Giovannoni's company in suburban Washington, Audience Research
Analysis, holds contracts with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
National Public
Radio, Public Radio International and almost every major NPR member
station in the country. He essentially invented the language of public
radio today,
terms like "affinity," "loyalty," "power" and "public service." The
phrase most public stations intone in their hourly ID's -
"listener-supported" - grew
out of Mr. Giovannoni's research. What might be considered the standard
public- radio schedule, with its daylong emphasis on news and talk,
largely subscribes
to his findings. And during the years NPR has applied Mr. Giovannoni's
findings, it has more than doubled listenership and gone from near
bankruptcy to
financial stability.

Every one of the radio stations involved in these recent battles acted
largely on Mr. Giovannoni's research. His analysis showed them that,
however vociferous
the audience for bluegrass in Washington or symphonies in Salt Lake City
or the Met in Virginia and Maine, those programs drove away a vast
majority of
the most loyal listeners and donors. The way to bring them and their
checkbooks back was to schedule more of the news and information programs
they craved.

As such, Mr. Giovannoni is the lightning rod for the intense, often
bitter debate about what course NPR and its member stations should take
in their evolution
from a hodgepodge of "educational broadcasting" outlets dependent on the
largess of universities and the federal government to a media powerhouse
increasingly
independent of the public sector. Depending on whom you ask, Mr.
Giovannoni either helped save NPR by pointing the path to financial
self-sufficiency or
helped undermine the kind of programming that made it worth saving in the
first place. "A visionary," says Richard Madden, the vice president of
radio
at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. "A numbers Nazi," the
independent producer Larry Josephson labeled him several years ago.

For all the heated language, the conflict shaking public radio is not the
stereotypical struggle between aesthetes and philistines. When Mr.
Giovannoni's
clients dropped country and classical music, or consigned them to
weekends and the after-midnight abyss, they didn't plug in Rush Limbaugh
or Howard Stern
or easy listening; they put on the news and discussion programs that have
earned NPR its accolades: "Fresh Air," "Talk of the Nation," "All Things
Considered."
NPR's superb coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks, starting with
round-the-clock reporting the first week, may have served as the ultimate
confirmation of
Mr. Giovannoni's thesis that news-information forms the most integral,
essential, irreplaceable element of public radio.

To Mr. Giovannoni's critics, however, the reliance on widely lauded
programs typifies the problem. Ratings increasingly rule. Every NPR
station is sounding
more like every other NPR station, with the same "news stream" during the
weekday, the same lineup of "Weekend Edition," "Car Talk" and the quiz
show "Whad'ya
Know?" on Saturday mornings. In both Washington and Salt Lake City, music
devotees pointed out that nearby NPR stations already broadcast the same
news
and information shows that WAMU and KUER were adding. Even as NPR basks
in the National Medal of the Arts it was awarded last year by President
Clinton
for its cultural programming, the very genres of jazz and classical music
that the system was created in part to support are shrinking on the dial.
Inventive
new shows, Mr. Giovannoni's foes contend, will not survive statistical
scrutiny long enough to build an audience. Jay Allison, an award-winning
producer
and station manager, likens the reliance on audience research to "a deal
with the devil."

For his part, Mr. Giovannoni says he abhors sameness, formats,
consultants, all the plagues of commercial radio. He insists he never
tells any station what
to do or not to do. He merely provides information of unimpeached
accuracy to executives who used to act on intuition, personal taste and
informal feedback
from listeners. He merely asks the pregnant, provocative question. "I'm
constantly saying the emperor has no clothes," he puts it. "I'm shining
the light
on reality."

Now 47, David Giovannoni has been disseminating his findings and
propounding his views through essays, speeches and workshops for a
quarter-century. While
his research instruments have grown more sophisticated - from a pocket
calculator to interactive Web sites - his essential message has remained
consistent.
Public radio cannot serve every interest. It does not exist for the
benefit of its producers but for the benefit of its audience. Attention
must be paid
to what that audience wants. Which, he invariably adds, does not mean
selling out.

"Let me be very clear on this point," Mr. Giovannoni said in a keynote
address last July in Phoenix to a convention of public- radio marketing
and development
specialists. "I am not saying that program directors should make
programming decisions based on how much money they're likely to raise.
That would undermine
the values at the very heart of our service, making it unworthy of
support. I am saying, however, that program directors should make the
difficult decisions
that give the public the highest level of service. That means replacing
lower-performance programming with higher-performance programming."

A workshop that Mr. Giovannoni conducted last May for WNYC in New York
typified his approach, and the tensions it can create. WNYC had been
deeply influenced
by Mr. Giovannoni for several years as it transformed itself from a
station almost entirely dependent on municipal funding to one supporting
itself, buying
its AM and FM licenses from the city for $20 million. Since 1995, the
station had doubled its budget to $16 million and almost tripled its
income from
members and corporate underwriters to $12 million. Yet WNYC also prided
itself on a being a "dual-format" station, equally emphasizing
information and
classical music, an approach that defied his principles.

At one point in the workshop, Mr. Giovannoni projected a chart showing
the weekday listenership for WNYC-FM. The graph consisted of an
undulating series
of bars, one for each half-hour interval, peaking between 7 and 9 in the
morning, dropping into a midday trough, rising again from 4 to 7 p.m. The
high
points, as everyone in the room knew, corresponded to "Morning Edition"
and "All Things Considered," NPR's "tent poles," in public-radio
parlance. As for
the lulls, as everyone in the room knew, they were classical music shows.

Mr. Giovannoni indicated another chart, showing how much radio WNYC's
audience tuned into, regardless of station. Those bars remained
relatively stable
between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. "These are your listeners," he said, tapping
the wall. "And they're not listening to you."

Someone asked, "Does that make the programming from 9 to 4 bad?" Before
Mr. Giovannoni could respond, another staff member offered, "People come
to us for
news and information." Then is it a mistake, a third wanted to know, for
the same station to have two kinds of listeners?

"That makes it harder," Mr. Giovannoni said. "A radio station should be
something for the same person all the time. You become less and you
become better."

By Giovannoni standards, this was an elementary tutorial and a gentle
one. Without dictating what WNYC should do, he was delineating the
consequences of
what WNYC had done. Within its mathematical neutrality, his data was
advocating a certain model of public radio, one that made no apologies
for tailoring
programming to the audience's proven taste. Although the terror attack
several months later would leave WNYC with more fundamental problems to
solve -
its FM transmitter destroyed, its replacement signal unable to reach half
the normal audience - the broader issue of programming resonated
throughout public
radio.

"Your challenge," Mr. Giovannoni said as the session concluded, "is to
mine the existing audience. You want to support programming, right? It's
hard to
do that when nobody's listening. Or when nobody values what you do. The
way to get more audience? The way to serve your public better? Lose
what's on the
periphery. Focus on a single audience and serve that audience extremely,
insanely well all the time."

The eldest child of farmers in California's Central Valley, David
Giovannoni stood mesmerized as a toddler by the revolution of records on
the family turntable.
In his teens, he began trawling barn sales for junked phonographs and
joined several friends in an "Obsolete Audio Oddities Club." Then, one
day when he
was 16 or 17, he dialed the radio to the far left end of the FM band and
heard a man urgently incanting what sounded like his life story. The
station,
Mr. Giovannoni later learned, was KPFA in Berkeley, beacon of the
iconoclastic Pacifica network, and the voice was Allen Ginsberg reading
"Howl." A whole
world had revealed itself.

High school valedictorian and student- body president, Mr. Giovannoni
chose the University of the Pacific in nearby Stockton partly for its
public radio
station, KUOP. There he first heard "All Things Considered" and logged
1,500 hours in four years. Graduate study in communications took him to
the University
of Wisconsin and put him under the sway of Lawrence Lichty, a young
professor intent on wrenching the statewide public-radio network out of
its stodgy,
pedantic style. "Brilliant and innovative," in Mr. Lichty's estimation,
Mr. Giovannoni was harvesting raw Arbitron data on public-radio
listenership and
devising means of analyzing it. "Back then, anything we found out was
new," Mr. Giovannoni recalled. "There was no context about the audience.
You turned
on the mike and sometimes the phone rang in the studio to ask for a
request or to yell at you."

When NPR hired Mr. Lichty in the late 1970's to work on the development
of "Morning Edition," he brought his protégé to Washington. There, along
with the
audience researchers Tom Church and George Bailey - once ridiculed by
Garrison Keillor as "guys in suits with charts" - they first stepped into
the conflicts
that would recur through Mr. Giovannoni's career. " `We don't do what
people want,' " Jack Mitchell, a former producer and board chairman of
NPR, recalled
reporters and editors saying. " `It's killed by research.' "

What ultimately made Mr. Giovannoni a fixture in public radio, however,
were events far outside his control. The efforts by Ronald Reagan in 1981
and Newt
Gingrich in 1995 to "zero out" the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
sent NPR and its member stations hunting for more secure financial
support. Mr.
Giovannoni's research held the clues to how to reach the listeners
themselves. "It was a terrible thing but it was a good thing," Mr.
Giovannoni said of
the threatened cessations of federal aid. "Those two hits forced us to
become self- sufficient. And the way we were able to do that was by
shifting away
from a subsidized economy and focusing on the listener."

OVER the last 16 years, Mr. Giovannoni and various collaborators have
released a series of reports defining the public-radio audience in ever
finer detail,
augmenting computer models based on Arbitron data with follow- up
interviews and focus groups. These studies started by disabusing NPR of
its pride in
its weekly listenership, known in the trade as its "cume." Ninety percent
of those listeners - dubbed the "Cheap 90" by Mr. Giovannoni - never
donated
to stations. Sixty percent listened only sporadically. The remaining 40
percent, the "core" in the Giovannoni lexicon, accounted for almost 80
percent
of the hours listeners spent tuned to public radio. Over time, Mr.
Giovannoni has refined his picture of who they are (middle- aged,
college-educated,
interested in social issues), what they listen to most ("All Things
Considered," "Morning Edition"), what other NPR shows hold their interest
("Car Talk,"
"Prairie Home Companion"), what generally causes them to turn the dial
(radio theater, children's shows, music except on stations with all-music
formats),
and even what encourages them to donate money at the highest rate
("Marketplace," "Car Talk," "All Things Considered").

The divide between culture and information appeared prominently in a 1993
study establishing the affinity - that is, the demographic similarity -
of the
audience for "All Things Considered" with the listenership for NPR's 71
nationally syndicated shows. Of the 27 shows that performed worst - that,
by Mr.
Giovannoni's research, actively alienated core listeners - a vast
majority featured jazz, classical music and opera. In a 1998 study, Mr.
Giovannoni found
that music programming brought stations far less income per broadcast
hour than did news, talk or entertainment. Popular music appealed to
listeners a
generation younger than NPR's core audience; classical music and opera
appealed to listeners a decade to a generation older.

Mr. Giovannoni's conclusion, indeed his belief system, came down to one
mantra: "Programming causes audience." People didn't listen to public
radio because
they appreciated the concept of smart, commercial-free programming; they
listened for the same reason people listened to classic rock or adult
urban contemporary
or Dr. Laura - because they liked what happened to be on. Putting more of
it on, then, meant more listeners and more donations and more freedom
from the
caprice of Washington. (There are anomalies, numerically small but
demonstrably generous niche audiences like WAMU's bluegrass fans.)

Following Mr. Giovannoni's precepts, NPR built its weekly cume from 9
million in 1985 to the current 22 million. It now raises more than half
of its $500
million budget from individual listeners or private-sector underwriters.
The number of paid-up members doubled to 2 million between 1990 and 2000.
Over
the same period, federal support fell from 16 cents per dollar to less
than 11.

That dramatic growth has only encouraged NPR to become more cautious,
which has turned Mr. Giovannoni into a convenient target. "To some
extent, NPR is
a prisoner of its success," said Alan Stavitsky, a University of Oregon
professor who has studied public-radio consultants. "This once obscure
and quirky
alternative programmer is now part of the media elite. There's less room
for the kind of offbeat experimenting with the medium that characterized
NPR's
early days."

"There's nothing fundamentally wrong with research," said Torey Malatia,
the president and general manager of WBEZ in Chicago, the station that
originated
"This American Life," the acclaimed documentary series featuring Ira
Glass. "But what happened in the commercial marketplace began to happen
in the public-radio
marketplace. There was this unarticulated but passionately held belief
that there was a perfect formula and that if we used that formula in our
community,
we could be as successful as other communities that used it.

"But after believing that myself for a long time, I'd argue that public
radio is at its most successful when it doesn't follow formula. Data is
just one
tool for ascertaining what works. And it's a shame that public radio is
scared away from what doesn't show well in the Arbitron book or hasn't
proven itself
somewhere else or isn't understandable on first hearing."

Mr. Giovannoni's style also has wounded and alienated. He and his
frequent partner George Bailey often led workshops wearing doctor's
whites and Groucho
glasses. A report Mr. Giovannoni released in the late 1980's, which
calibrated how much or little of their audiences various NPR shows
shared, branded
those with the least congruence, especially opera, with frowning-face
logos.

"Though I've been pilloried for it," Mr. Giovannoni says, "I don't see
what I do as cynical. My role is to help people in radio understand their
listeners.
Public radio isn't just you in the studio. Something happens on the other
side of the mike. And if people aren't listening, there's no public
service."
He pauses. "The thing a lot of people in public radio don't get is that
I'm on their side."

Keenly aware of criticism, Mr. Giovannoni has in the past several years
increasingly emphasized the importance of "taking risks" and "budgeting
for failure."
His own tastes in music run from Bach to New Orleans jazz to the
alternative rock of They Might Be Giants. His research shows that certain
stations can
hold a loyal audience with programming built around music, whether
classical at WQED in Pittsburgh or jazz at WBGO in Newark. What NPR
listeners seek,
he maintains, is not a narrow format but a "sensibility," a pattern of
"interests, values, and beliefs," which explains why the audience for
"All Things
Considered" also responds well to the quiz show "Whad'ya Know."

Still, when the rebukes come, they do not noticeably bother him. Such
equanimity owes less to patience, perhaps, than to an unshakable belief
that while
his critics have sentimentality, he has the facts. "Everything I've done
has caused carping," Mr. Giovannoni says. "It's the allegorical loss of
innocence.
That's what research is. Every time you pluck somebody out of the garden,
they get bent out of shape."

Samuel G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is
the author most recently of ``Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of
American
Jewry.''


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