This is the sixth in a series of essays on the use of Arbitron ratings as a tool for Pacifica programming decision-making. While the information is specific to station KPFA in Berkeley, Pacifica's general trend of dealing with their audiences in the same manner as commercial audiences is clear in these reports.

SUBJECT: CORE AND FRINGE

Onward to the AudiGraphics concepts of core and fringe audiences, with the related concept of loyalty. Recall that core listeners are those who average more hours with KPFA per week than with any other station; Walrus interprets this to mean that KPFA is "their favorite, first choice station." Fringe listeners are those who do listen to KPFA but average more hours per week with at least one other station (which of course is then interpreted as their "favorite" station).

This is rather a strange concept if you think about it. If I spend more hours per week reading the daily newspaper than reading The Nation, does that automatically mean that I regard the newspaper as my "favorite" (or most important) source of information? Walrus goes much farther with these concepts, and this is an important influence on the thinking of current KPFA paid staff in planning the program changes:

"Core listeners are much more likely to become members, because the station is personally important to them. Note: we said *the*station* is important, not necessarily a particular program. If you think about it, a station which plays a lot of different programs aimed at different kinds of listeners just about guarantees that the station itself becomes less important."

Well, I could devote an entire essay to comments on those few sentences, but I'll let them pass. I just suggest strongly that you think about the implications and how this compares with your own experience about what makes you pledge (or what brings in pledges if you've done plugging for the station).

Loyalty

Walrus goes on to say that 22% of KPFA's listeners are core and 78% are fringe. On average, a core listener has a TSL of 13 hours 46 minutes per week (almost two hours per day). Because of this large TSL, core listeners contribute 57% of the listening to the station. "Whenever you open the mike, over half the listeners out there at that time are core." (Average TSL for fringe listeners is 2h51m per week.) KPFA's core listeners average 23 hours per week of total radio use, whereas fringe listeners average 27. AudiGraphics then uses the concept of "loyalty"-- the percentage of total listening time devoted to KPFA. KPFA's core listeners are 60% loyal, but fringe listeners are 11% loyal.

Walrus draws the following conclusions: "On average, KPFA listeners are 20% loyal. That means 80% of their radio listening goes to competing stations! The average KPFA listener uses the station 5:12 per week but uses radio over 20 hours per week. So loyalty to KPFA is only 20%. The typical NPR station with an all news format or dual news and music format achieves 33% loyalty. In our research for NFCB we have confirmed that community radio stations like KPFA uniformly achieve low loyalty. It's not the quality of your programs, rather the inconsistency of the program schedule. Listeners do not know what program they will hear if they punch the KPFA button. Then it changes anyway."

So, the directions KPFA is going based on advice from Walrus should be clear--the more we can be like NPR, the greater our audience loyalty will be, and thus the more listening and pledges we should generate.

What is ignored in all this is a very important fact about the KPFA audience. The percentage of listeners (as determined by Arbitron) who subscribe is much higher for KPFA than for the typical NPR station (so much for this concept of "loyalty"). The percentage of pledges that are paid at KPFA is much higher than for most noncommercial stations and particularly NPR stations.

My next (and final) essay will deal with "competing" stations, but it is instructive to note that among people who listen to both KPFA and KQED (our main "competitor"), loyalty is 25% to KQED and 20% to KPFA. Walrus concludes that "you may think of them as KPFA listeners--your listeners--but on average they give more TSL, occasions of tune in and loyalty to the competition. So they really belong to the competing stations primarily, and only sometimes come over to KPFA. And this explains, finally, why on air fund raising is so difficult on KFPA. If you'd like to increase listener support, you need to win loyal listeners--become their primary, favorite radio station." It would certainly be interesting to know how pledge statistics compare for the two stations with these crossover listeners, but of course such data is not provided by Arbitron or AudiGraphics, and Walrus is simply guessing. I would just note that KQED has three times as many listeners as KPFA, but among those who do listen to both stations, KQED gets only slightly more listening time than KPFA does. What this suggests to me is that KPFA might vastly increase its audience if it just found a way to get all those KQED listeners to sample KPFA--in other words, more emphasis on public relations rather than program changes.

I won't go on much longer, but I'd just note that the Walrus analysis is based upon assumptions that guarantee the desired conclusions. Only a formatted station with very little variety can attract highly loyal listeners (people who rarely listen to other stations), so KPFA must inevitably be losing this "competition" with KQED. It's also worth noting that KJAZ, a station with a uniform format very popular with a small group of loyal listeners, was unable to survive as a commercial broadcast station. It also failed to survive on cable as a partially listener-supported station. The reasons for this are complicated (few people have cable hooked to their radios, and it is hard to get contributions to a station that carries advertising), but it certainly is possible that KPFA could end up in worse shape if the shift to a more uniform format doesn't bring in a very large increase in listeners to compensate for the drop-off in the percentage of subscribers (although Walrus would expect an increase, in defiance of all known statistics about subscribership at noncommercial stations).

(signed) A fringe (disloyal?) KPFA listener

MORE ON ARBITRON

We believe decisions about our stations should be made by the representatives of all the communities that have a stake in Pacifica, and should occur in an open, accountable, community-oriented process . . . something now lacking at Pacifica.