Remembering Listener Sponsored Radio

The basis of Lew Hill theory for listener sponsored radio is for the station to have programming that attracts enough listeners to support the station.

He describes in detail how such programming come about.

The problem that Pacifica currently face is that some stations do not have programming to support the station.

Stations should remember what Lew Hill prescribes regarding programming.

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THE THEORY OF LISTENER-SPONSORED RADIO

“I have already examined the problem of getting the creative product on radio before we worry about how it is to be evaluated. It must have occurred to you that such a principle could easily revert to the fabled ivory tower. Some self-determining group of broadcasters might find that no one, not the least minority of the minority audiences, gave a hang for their product, morally responsible or not. What then? Then, you will say, there would be no radio station—or not for long—and the various individualists involved could go scratch for a living. But it is the reverse possibility that explains what is most important about listener sponsorship. When we imagine the opposite situation, we are compelled to account for some conscious flow of influences, some creative tension between broadcaster and audience that constantly reaffirms their mutual relevance.

[Listener sponsorship will require this mutual stimulus if it is to exist at all.]

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KPFA’s present air schedule is a modest example. It embraces four main categories—music, drama and literature, public affairs, and children’s programs. The schedule has two sources in almost equal balance as to their importance and influence. On the one hand, these happen to be subjects of primary interest to people working at KPFA. On the other hand, they happen also to represent the articulate interests of well-defined minorities in the audience of the San Francisco Bay Area. The correspondence is not accidental. A constant exchange between the staff and the audience enriches the schedule with fresh judgment and new ideas, materials, and issues. Thus members of the staff work out their own ideas and, if you like, categorical imperatives, with some of the undistracted certitude one feels in deciding what he will have for dinner, subject to the menu.

[Listener sponsorship makes possible this extremely productive balance of interests and initiatives.]

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The fact that the subscription is voluntary merely enlarges the same point. We make a considerable step forward, it seems to me, when we use a system of broadcasting which promises that the mediocre will not survive. But the significance of what does survive increases in ways of the profoundest import to our times when it proceeds from voluntary action. Anyone can listen to a listener-sponsored station.

[Anyone can understand the rationale of listener sponsorship—that unless the station is supported by those who value it, no one can listen to it including those who value it. This is common sense.]

But beyond this, actually sending in the subscription, which one does not have to send in unless one particularly wants to, implies the kind of cultural engagement, as some French philosophers call it, that is surely indispensable for the sake of the whole culture.

[When we have a radio station fully supported by subscribers who have not responded to a special gift offer, who are not participating in a lottery, who have not ventured an investment at 3 per cent, but who use this means of supporting values that seem to them of basic and lasting importance—then we will have more than a subscription roster. It will amount, I think, to a new focus of action or a new shaping influence that can hardly fail to strengthen all of us.]”

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https://www.hourwolf.com/listenersponsored.html

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