You Get Who You Play For

It’s true. Programming causes minority audiences the same way it causes people of any kind to become listeners.

People who visit public radio seek the values imbued in its programming. This is every bit as true for public radio’s minority listeners – who are more like other listeners than their families and friends who don’t listen.

That’s a significant statement. Because it reminds us that listeners are best understood by what draws them to us – and not by where they come from.

Two distinct programming, distribution, and policy strategies draw them to us – the strategy to transcend distinctions of racial and ethnic heritage, and the strategy to target them.

Today the strategy to transcend serves more minority Americans than does the strategy to target. However, the success of each strategy must be assessed in its own terms.

The Strategy to Transcend

College education is the single most defining characteristic of public radio’s audience. We often forget, ignore, or misinterpret this fact when we assess our public service to minority listeners.

Do minority listeners use public radio? Yes, they do. Like American citizens in the majority, those who have been to college are far more likely than others to listen to public radio’s dominant program services.

Are minority listeners represented in the same proportions that they exist in the general population? No, they aren’t. Radio doesn’t work that way. Each radio station must serve a demographic segment of society – a niche – if it is to compete in the highly fragmented medium. So by definition, no station’s audience can or should "represent" the entire population.

Do we expect minority listeners to be under-represented? Yes we do. When gauged against the general population, minority listening to public radio reflects long-standing educational inequities that are still being overcome. But these disparities diminish significantly when minority listening is gauged against the college educated minority population.

Is this what we want? Well, it’s what we set out to do 30 years ago – to provide a beacon of public service that places character over color.

The character of this beacon is transcendent. It transcends geography with a "sense of community" engendered across vast physical distance. It transcends age and sex. And by operating in the enlightened dimension of education’s values and attitudes, it transcends color through its very indifference to it.

The Strategy to Target

Most public radio stations employ the strategy to transcend. But some of the more than 600 stations seek to serve minority listeners by opening additional doors to them.

Far from transcending racial and ethnic distinctions, these stations target them directly by defining their service, their niche, and their audience in terms of race, ethnicity, and/or languages other than English.

Do minority listeners use these stations? Yes, in great concentrations – albeit not always in great numbers.

Are minority listeners represented in the same proportions as in the general population? No, they’re over-represented, for reasons already stated.

Do we expect minority listeners to be over-represented? We would certainly hope so; they are, after all, the types of people these stations strive to serve.

Is this what we want? Well, it’s what we set out to do – to serve even more minority listeners with our programming.

– Frank Tavares
AUDIENCE 98 Associate

– David Giovannoni
AUDIENCE 98 Core Team

 

 

The more education one has, the more likely one is to listen to public radio.

But it’s more than that. Public radio’s listeners seek and reflect the values imbued in its programming. The best known system for identifying these values is VALSä2 – specifically, the Actualizer and Fulfilled personalities.

The graph below indexes public radio listeners against the U.S. population ("U.S.") to demonstrate that listeners of all types distinguish themselves from their non-listening peers. The cross-hair shows the average for all public radio listeners. Segments of the audience are shown individually.

• Asian/Pacific Islanders who listen to public radio are nearly twice as likely to have college degrees than their non-listening peers. They are also twice as likely to have Actualizer or Fulfilled personalities.

• Public radio’s Black/African American listeners are more than three times as likely as their non-listening peers to have Actualizer or Fulfilled personalities and to have earned a bachelor’s degree.

• Hispanic/Latino listeners are nearly five times as likely to have college degrees than their non-listening peers.

The levels of education, and the concentrations of Actualizer and Fulfilled VALS types in public radio’s audience, are incomparable to any other mass electronic broadcast channel in American society today. These attributes define public radio’s position on the media landscape.

 

Audience Research Analysis
Copyright © ARA and CPB.  All rights reserved.
Revised: September 01, 2000 12:38 PM.