The Sound of Quality

By Richard Stengel

American Public Radio's popularity is quietly growing

Just listen. The jaunty fiddling of a Celtic folk song. The stammering voice of Melville's Billy Budd protesting his innocence. The Los Angeles Philharmonic's rousing rendition of Beethoven's Fifth. And the husky, down-home inflections of Garrison Keillor inviting one and all to drop in on the imaginary hamlet of Lake Wobegon, "the little town that time forgot and that decades cannot improve."

Sound tantalizing? Well, it is all within earshot if your radio is tuned to one of the 277 American Public Radio affiliates across the country, any one of which might feature just such an eclectic sampling. These stations air not only Keillor's whimsically witty Prairie Home Companion but a diverse medley of classical music programs including High Performance, a kind of Great Performances of jazz, classical and folk music, and highlights of music festivals from Bayreuth to Spoleto. APR takes its culture-vulturing seriously: with 70% of its programming consisting of classical music, it is the arty counterpart to its older and bigger Washington cousin, the public-affairs-oriented National Public Radio, APR'S bread-and-butter is broadcasting local cultural programming across the country via satellite. Indeed, through its Los Angeles affiliate, the network broadcast 20 events of the Olympic Arts Festival in full, including three Royal Opera performances. And they have done it all on a shoe-string budget of $775,000, with a full-time staff of ten hardy souls at their modest St. Paul headquarters.

At the moment, APR's main problem is that people confuse it with National Public Radio. As APR Manager Rhoda Marx notes, "NPR was the only game in town for so long that the press and the public are locked into thinking of it as a generic rather than a brand name." Created in January 1982 by five major public radio stations (WNYC of New York, WGUC of Cincinnati, KQED of San Francisco, KUSC of Los Angeles and Minnesota Public Radio), APR has never produced its own shows, like NPR, but has acquired, distributed and marketed cultural programming to public radio stations nationwide. Approximately half of APR's programs are produced by the "founding five." Supported 45% by grants, APR charges affiliates a pittance, a mere $1,500 a year for stations in the top 30 markets.

The reasons for APR'S quietly spreading popularity are obvious: quality, price and originality. William Kling, APR'S president, sees the network's role as a distinctive one. Says he: "Our incentive is different; we can go for quality instead of profit." For APR'S chairman of the board, Kenneth Dayton, the reports of radio's demise are greatly exaggerated. "When TV came along, people thought radio was a medium of the past. Now we realize how much radio can do that TV can't." And won't.

--By Richard Stengel.

Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York

With reporting by Elaine Dutka