With Talk of the Nation winding up its run on NPR at the end of June, the public radio system is all abuzz with theories of what will replace it. NPR has chosen WBUR’s Here and Now as the official replacement, but PRI is touting WNYC’s The Takeaway and there are other programs that are marketing themselves as the ideal substitute for TOTN.

At a webinar entitled “Deciding What Programs to Carry,” Michigan Radio Program Director Tamar Charney advised that programmers think less about programs, to start with, and more about the station’s overall style or “stationality.” She posed these questions:

1. What is the station’s style? What image does it project?
2. Does the station want to maintain it or change it?
3. What audience is it trying to attract?

Then she said, add to these considerations: What is the listener’s lifestyle at the particular time of day being considered? Who are you trying to please with your decision (audience, your boss, your Board, your PD peers?) And, what is the program’s fit with the rest of your schedule?

Charney even went so far as to suggest that shows that draw audience and shows that are right for your station’s schedule … may not be the same! Believe it or not, the very popular signature program This American Life used to be one of these. It was known as a “home wrecker” because it attracted an audience totally different than the rest of the station’s schedule did and thus, did not help build the station’s total audience. People literally seemed to tune in for TAL and then tune out afterward! Now, of course, it has plenty of compatible programs such as Snap Judgment and The Moth.

To hear the audio of the entire webinar, go to the PRNDI site. If you are a member of the Public Radio Program Directors, the entire webinar including slides is available on the PRPD site.

With budgets as tight as they are these days, hardly any organization or individual can afford to “go it alone” when it comes to creating and launching new programs. This means that like it or not, groups and individuals need to reach out — beyond their comfort zones — to partner with others. While I think this introduces a large number of new opportunities, managing such relationships also creates new challenges. Here is a “baker’s dozen” (13) thoughts about what such partnering requires. Ideally, these principles are dealt with in a “memo of understanding” that the two organizations sign.

Elements of Successful Editorial Partnerships

1. Want to Partner? Do the organizations really want to work together? What is the impetus for collaboration?

2. Respect: Beyond the desires of management and the perception of strategic advantage, do the staffs respect each other and would they value the creative opportunity to collaborate?

3. Importance: Is the project “important” to each organization?

4. Values and Rules: Have the values of each organization been made explicit? Have the fundamental “rules of play” been articulated and agreed upon?

5. Ability/Temperment: Do the partners have the ability to organize and run a project — one made more difficult by working in a partnership. Do they know how to motivate individuals they “don’t own?”

6. Equal Treatment: Are the organizations each going to receive equal treatment in a partnership? If not, it is clear from the outset that an imbalance exists and is acceptable?

7. Good fit: Are the organizations a good fit – do their strengths and weaknesses mesh and complement each other?

8. Resources: Will each staff have comparable resources, so that a “second class citizenship” is avoided? Will resources be shared fairly?

9. Credit: Will on-the-air credit and promotion/publicity be inclusive and comparable? Has boilerplate language been agreed to regarding the partnership and each organization’s role in it?

10. Participation: Will each staff participate equally in the conception and implementation of the programming?

11. Expectations: Are the expectations of each organization realistic?

12. Mediation: Is there a plan to mediate and resolve disagreements?

13. Residual: What is the lasting value of the collaboration, after the project ends? What does this collaboration make possible in the future?

Every manager I know … hates consultants. Managers often believe consultants are at best, unnecessary luxuries — like training and travel — that are easy to cut out of tight budgets. Managers often focus on the cost per-hour of a consultant (like they would with a lawyer.) My hourly rate is $275/hour. Managers may multiply that rate by the 2080 hours in a year (52 weeks x 40 hours/week) and get the astronomic figure of $572,000 per year!!! See, I knew consultants were bloodsuckers!

Well, wait a minute. At the risk of sounding self-serving (this is my web site, after all). let’s debunk some myths about consultants.

1.  No consultant I know works 2080 hours a year or even close. No consultant I know is able to bill even 40 hours a week. No consultant I know is able to find employment 52 or 50 or 48 weeks a year.
2.  A lot of our time isn’t billable at all, like that spent seeking clients (marketing).
3.  People like me, who work as consultants, first have to work as freelancers or employees in the field for decades. I have 42 years of such experience under my belt. Like most college educations, this is one heck of a major investment I have made before earning the right to hang up my own shingle and do consulting.
4.  But, here’s the real myth. Managers often think employees are much cheaper than consultants. The truth is that consultants deliver expertise in an efficient package compared to most employees. Consultants perform a specific set of tasks, with a start and finish to each project and without any benefits and taxes being paid or ongoing obligation.

As we used to say at Marketplace, let’s do the numbers:

Let’s say you hire me for to do a project for you. My typical fee is $7,500 to audition, analyze, critique, lead a 2½ day Intensive and write you a comprehensive plan for a program.

In my opinion, if you had an employee on staff who was actually qualified to do this for you, and allowing for vacations, holidays, sick leave, etc., it might cost you:

 4 weeks x $100,000/year + 30% benefits and taxes = $11,440

… and this doesn’t count office space, telephone, and all of the other “overhead” you pay for an employee.

You can do your own math, but the point remains: When you hire a consultant, you get highly-experienced temporary service with no ongoing cost. For certain kinds of work, the consultant is appropriate. For short-term but high-level tasks like planning new programs, the cost of a consultant is a bargain. Not to mention how it frees you from elaborate and expensive recruiting efforts, relocation costs, training and ramp-up time, and the risk you take that every new employee may not be the right hire.

In a terrific decade-old Harvard Business Review article, screenwriting coach Robert McKee made some wonderful observations about storytelling and its importance in business. He could also have included its value to reporting, where storytelling has been retitled “narrative journalism” as practiced by This American Life, Snap Judgment, The Moth and others. McKee says that stories “fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living – not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.”

He tells CEO’s that story-telling is much more persuasive than Powerpoints and standard rhetoric. He describes storytelling as “ultimately a much more powerful way … (because it engages in) uniting an idea with an emotion.”

Other points:

• “Essentially, a story expresses how and why life changes.”

• Negative aspects of a story are also valuable. “The great irony of existence is that what makes life worth living does not come from the rosy side. We would all rather be lotus-eaters, but life will not allow it. The energy to live comes from the dark site. It comes from everything that makes us suffer. As we struggle against those negatyive powers, we’re forced to live more deeply, more fully.”

There’s so much more in this article, including precise instructions for storytellers to unearth and tell the stories they want to tell. Check it out at Storytelling that Moves People on the Harvard Business Review site. You will have to join (trial or one-story memberships are available. And in the case of this outstanding article, well worth it!

The quote comes from Thomas Edison, according to former AOL co-founder Steve Case. He was interviewed in the New York Times “Corner Office” column and when asked what some of his early leadership issues were, he replied:

“The core one is a Thomas Edison quote that summarizes my perspective on things, which is, ‘Vision without execution is hallucination.’ I do believe in vision. I do believe in big ideas. I do believe in tackling problems that are complex and fighting battles that are worth fighting, and also trying to, in my case, create companies or back companies. That can change the world. The vision thing is really important — but the execution thing is really important, too. Having a good idea is not enough. You’ve got to figure out some way to balance that and complement that with great execution, which ultimately is people and priorities and things like that. You have to strike the right balance. If you have those together, I think anything is possible. If you don’t have both of them working together in a complementary, cohesive way, you’re not going to be successful.”

See the full interview in the New York Times.

Distinguished Poynter Institute faculty member Roy Peter Clark has written quite an obit for Gannett’s former CEO and USA Today creator Al Neuharth who died in April.

Clark says Newharth’s “high-flyin,’ limousine-ridin’ approach to news-media leadership helped create an oligarchy atop Gannett that seemed to place more value on self-promotion and executive salaries than on a common good grounded in excellent news coverage. The result was a hegemony of mediocrity that remains Neuharth’s unfortunate legacy.” Clark blames Newharth’s focus on profit at any cost and viewing editors as “interchangeable parts” who were moved around and never got to know the communities they worked in. To this day, every time I see USA Today, I am reminded of its nickname: MacPaper. Like McDonald’s hamburgers, it tastes the same everywhere but belongs to nowhere. And, like McDonald’s version of the American classic, the hamburger, it reduces everything to the lowest common denominator. And, I am saddened that many children may never know what a real hamburger tastes like. Or a great newspaper reads like. Thanks to “visionaries” like Al Neuharth.

A new study shows that a substantial number (38%) of public radio stations around the country are planning to increase the size of their news staffs and even more (45%) say they will increase the amount of airtime devoted to local news.  The survey is by my colleague, former San Diego news director Mike Marcotte. See Mike’s research and pretty graphs. Of course, Jim Russell Productions is ready to help stations design their new local news programming.

Lots of companies want to acquire (or regain) creativity. The trouble is that often, creativity and good business practices may be at odds with each other. In a blog at the Harvard Business Review, Professor Bruce Nussbaum points out the dilemma they find themselves in:

“Most corporations with decades of building a culture of efficiency can’t organically transform themselves into a den of creativity. They shouldn’t try. The odds of success are pretty low. IBM did it. P&G is still trying. GE may make it. But most others won’t. Established companies can, however, be a platform for creativity. They can learn to go outside their own walls to identify creativity they can leverage, buy and then scale.”

And Nussbaum concludes “Creative competence is like a sport. You can train for it and increase the capacities of yourself and your organization. If you get good at it, you can also transform it into real economic value on a massive scale.”

I agree that risk aversion and a corporate lack of commitment to innovation are significantly responsible for the absence of great creativity. Nussbaum is not wrong when he says that established companies “can learn to go outside their own walls to identify creativity they can leverage, buy and then scale.” But, to do so, they have to understand and value creativity in the first place. Many of the ones I have worked for do part of the work — they admire and acquire the innovators — but fail to apply the lessons of that creativity to the larger company.

In our broadcasting world, there are some sure-shot ways of acquiring creativity and injecting it into your organization. Go outside. Consider working with freelancers or independent producers. They bring fresh ideas and no corporate baggage to the table. They have the freedom to think without the limitations of the corporate culture. They bring at least two specific values to your organization:

1. Creative ideas and programming at a very reasonable price, on a contract basis without the need to hire them as staff.

2. They can help you model creative thinking and behavior that you can adopt inside your company.

In public broadcasting, there is an organization called AIR (Association of Independents in Radio) that has more than 1,000 radio producer members. They maintain a directory of their members along with their skill sets. Lots of useful information is on their web site at Airmedia.org.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Bruce Nussbaum is the author of Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect and Inspire (Harper Business, 2013). A former assistant managing editor for Business Week, he is also a professor of innovation and design at Parsons The New School for Design.

You have got to spend money to make money. Such a simple concept, yet one so often ignored these days.

Valerie Geller is one smart lady, an international radio consultant who has managed some of the top radio stations in the country and works all over the world advising international broadcasters.

In her latest article, she urged radio people to define the term “radio” very broadly as “Content in combination, delivering across multiple platforms.” She says: “As a broadcaster, if you want to thrive in today’s digital world, you need to go where the audience is.

But Valerie’s central theme is “Creating quality content costs money. Invest money in talent and producers. Hire good people. It takes vision and it takes risk. You’ve got to spend it to make it.” She admits this is the message that no manager or owner wants to hear!

Take a look at the entirety of her smart article.