The host of This American Life was quick to respond to Mike Savage’s decision to drop his program. Glass says he sees things differently, and going on Pandora was not some cynical play for money. “We did it to reach an audience that isn’t listening to our program on WBAA or anywhere else. It worked. In three weeks on Pandora, there’ve been 2.1 million ‘listens’ to our show. That’s a lot of people hearing mission-drive public radio programming.”
Glass said he explained to Savage that going on Pandora and podcasting the show are not eroding radio’s audience. “Over the last decade, our audience on public radio stations has held relatively steady at around 2.2 million listeners a week, according to Nielsen. During that time, our podcast has grown from a few hundred thousand until – last August – it matched our radio audience: 2.2 million downloads per week. This did not erode our radio audience. Podcasting hasn’t reduced the number of people listening to us on the radio. Maybe Pandora will have a different effect on our radio listenership. I doubt it.”
Glass also addressed Savage’s question about what member stations are getting out of the show being broadcast on Pandora and other delivery mechanisms that create revenue. “My answer is: better programming. The money we’ve made from podcast advertising and from Pandora is money we’ve invested in our core product: making more ambitious, mission-driven shows. Because of that money, I’m able to fly five producers to refugee camps in Greece at the end of this month. Because of that money, we were able to send three reporters for five months into a high school that’d had over two dozen shootings in a year.
” Because of that money, I can have one producer work for over five months full-time with the Marshall Project and ProPublica on an episode about rape or Nikole Hannah-Jones’s and Chana Joffe-Walt’s three programs on the resegregation of American schools. The money we make elsewhere, we use to do more in-depth reporting. To do stories we never could’ve afforded for the first decade we were on the air. Making money from Pandora or from podcast advertisers takes nothing from WBAA and – until now – has paid off for WBAA’s listeners with original, ambitious reporting that adheres to our highest values as public broadcasters. That’s the benefit to WBAA when programmers make money outside the public radio system.”
