Vermont Public Radio shakes up programming, adds more reporting

Vermont Public Radio is shaking up its lineup in an effort to put more resources into reporting.

VPR is dropping three programs from its lineup: VPR Cafe, a weekly program about food; Dorothy’s List, a book club for children; and a regular four-day-a-week commentary series, which drew from a roster of 50 people. The goal is to free up staff to report on more areas of the state geographically and demographically, said the station’s president, Scott Finn.

Finn said those changes and others arise from a long-term planning process that involved radio station staff and VPR’s community advisory board.

“One of the things we heard over and over was the need for more reporting and more storytelling from the different, diverse communities in Vermont, not just geographically but also communities that don’t always receive attention,” Finn said.

VPR has 54 full-time and 19 part-time employees and a budget of $8.4 million for fiscal year 2019, which ends this fall. The station is based in Colchester, with studios in Montpelier, Norwich, Rutland and Brattleboro.

The changes, announced this month, result from a strategic vision process that started before Finn joined the station last year.

Finn said they’re also a response to a decline in local reporting regionally and nationwide. In general, consumption of traditional news sources such as radio, television and newspapers has diminished and also changed in the last decade.

Four in 10 Americans report they often get their news online, according to a report on digital news by the Pew Research Center. Television is still the most popular platform for news consumption, followed by news websites, radio, social media sites and print newspapers, the nonprofit research group says. Only about 25% of adults report that they often get their news from the radio, according to Pew.

Younger adults are particularly likely to get their news online, while older adults are still the heaviest newspaper readers, Pew said. According to Pew, the largest group of radio listeners is people ages 49 to 64.

As consumption of news has changed, the means of paying for it — which used to be traditional advertising — has nearly vanished, and that has had an impact on the journalism workforce. VPR says on its website that the number of journalists in Vermont has shrunk by half in the last 20 years.

“It’s a crisis,” Finn said.

But it’s also an opportunity. As the traditional newspaper reporting staff in Vermont has dwindled, VPR has grown, blooming from just three journalists two decades ago to 21 now, the station’s website says. The Burlington-based Seven Days for-profit alternative weekly newspaper and website, founded in 1995, and the statewide nonprofit VtDigger website, founded in 2009, have also grown substantially to fill the void.

The changes underway at VPR are a bid to continue that growth. In dropping the producer responsibilities for the commentaries and shows, “the goal is to free up more resources,” Finn said.

For example, former commentary producer Betty Smith Mastaler will do more reporting, especially from the Upper Valley, he said. The reporter who was producing Dorothy’s List, Amy Noyes, recently received a fellowship from Education Writers Association to report on the future of small colleges in Vermont, he added.

Support from listeners is critical to VPR’s survival. More than 90% of the station’s operating income comes from listener contributions and local business underwriting, the station says; less than 10% comes from the federal government through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and none comes from the state. About 28,000 members contributed last year to VPR, and 223,900 people listened every week to its broadcast stations last year.

VPR reported that it had 1.9 million unique visitors to its website, VPR.org, in 2018, a number that has been stable over the past three years, said Michelle Owens, manager of marketing and communications for the station. She noted that doesn’t include visitors who listen to livestreams or use VPR apps through Apple or a smart speaker. That puts it on par with NPR member stations nationally, which saw little to no audience growth last year, according to Pew.

But VPR has a greater reach than most other NPR member stations. VPR’s per capita listenership is 31%, more than twice the national average of 12%, according to NPR spokeswoman Isabel Lara. She said the fall 2018 Nielsen National Regional database shows that its average listenership (defined by Nielsen as the average number of people listening to a station for at least five minutes during a 15-minute period) is 2.3%, more than four times the national average of 0.5%.

Finn said many other NPR member stations around the country are also increasing their reporting staff. Other, newer nonprofit news organizations are growing rapidly too; according to the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, the nonprofit news sector has about $350 million in total annual revenue, with about 200 nonprofit news organizations in the country.

“It’s a trend,” Finn said. “It’s not just public radio. People are realizing that the old model isn’t working anymore as well as it used to. If democracy is to thrive, we need to have robust journalism and nonprofit media, and public radio is one of the examples of that.”