KUSP To Swap Midday Music for More News
'Grand experiment' to involve partnership with SF station
by Traci Hukill
Some fans of Santa Cruz's oldest public radio station wept salty tears at the news that KUSP is giving the boot to four hours’ worth of midday music programming during the week to make room for more news. The thought of the venerable station following in the tracks of CSUMB station KAZU and going all talk all day when it unveils its new programming on Sept. 1 was, to some listeners, not a welcome one.
Susan Goldstein, president of KUSP’s board of directors, hastens to explain that KUSP is most assuredly not becoming another NPR yackfest. “We’ll still keep music in the evenings, locally hosted classical and jazz, five days a week,” she says, adding that KUSP will be “strengthening the music on the weekends.”
But listening habits are changing, she says. In seven surveys over the past 18 months, listeners said they wanted news in the middle of the day, so they can catch up when they’re just driving across town on an errand. “It’s a different kind of culture now,” Goldstein says. “It’s not like everyone’s in their car at 8:30 and then again at 5:30. People work for themselves, they’re driving at different times of the day.”
Station manager Terry Green adds that KUSP’s new midday information shows will be different from the typical NPR fare. “What people want out of public radio is something more than the intravenous drip of news,” he says, “which is how KAZU kind of comes across sometimes.”
Instead, Green says, KUSP will be going for depth—ways to connect the local to the regional, national and global. Key to this enterprise is a partnership with San Francisco public radio station KALW. The two plan to collaborate on an hour-long daily call-in show.
In typical Santa Cruz fashion, KUSP is going about its new initiative in an innovative, wave-of-the-future kind of way: by working directly with other public radio stations, such as KALW, rather than just taking what NPR and PRI hand down to them. One show KUSP is considering picking up is “The Diane Rehm Show,” independently produced in Washington, D.C. by public station WAMU. Green says such partnerships are a hot topic around public radio stations.
“It will certainly qualify as a grand experiment,” he says.
