Maine public radio cuts back its music.

Maine public radio cuts back its music for more talk | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram

This is never easy for public radio stations. After all, we invite listeners to invest in the programs.

Major changes always result in heat and some defections in the short run. Having 4,000 members threaten defection made a lot of staff members sit up and notice when we changed formats.

My past experience with change has yielded surprises. Replacing the opera with coverage of the shuttle disaster resulted in dozens of heated complaints. Coverage of the Pope's death in place of the opera resulted in even more complaints. We temporarily changed programming to offer coverage of the 9/11 disaster. One listener was so incensed by the change he threatened to blow up the station. (We called the police.)

In one case statistics suggested almost no audience and poor loyalty for a stand-alone weekend program. It was easy to understand why. The program had nothing to do with the rest of the schedule. I took the program off the air. The response was really light. There were literally a handful of negative comments. In fact, there was hardly a ripple. Within a few weeks after leaving the station, the program was back on the air. One of the members of that small ripple was able to dangle a check from a foundation in front of senior management. They went for it.